It struck me that’d it’d be useful to assemble a list of tips for running PTA pitch sessions – good questions to ask, tools for sorting out problems. I haven’t seen a thread like that before (please link me, if there is one). In the meantime, I’ve got a couple of things:

Choose your Screen Presence 3 first: Sometimes I’ve found players get intimidated with the various different combinations their SP 1,2,3 could go in. When I ask them to just focus on where they think their pivotal episode will be (beginning, middle or end), they find things fall into place much more quickly.

Draw a line with an extreme option on either end: If people are quibbling about something (what tone of genre they’re interested in, to give a real-life example), I’ve found it really useful to represent everyone’s position’s visually. For instance, we were once bogged down in a debate about what type of science-fiction show to produce – was it hard SF or space-opera. When I drew a line and asked everyone to put an ‘X’ where they felt they’d like to be, this is what I got:

Space Opera ---------------X---X-X---X---------------------------------X--- Hard SF

From there, it was pretty easy to see that we could reach a compromise where the general tone was vaguely realistic with some hand-waving about the ‘How it all works’, and we created one character who was the techno-babble explainer type.

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Who else has tips like these? I think in the TV industry they call them 'knuckleballs'.

Ask each person for one genre they absolutely will not want to play in.  Like medical dramas (General Hospital, ER), or procedural police dramas (Hill Street Blues, Law and Order come to mind), or high school dramas (Degrassi).  By establishing which Genres are right out, you can narrow in on what people are either neutral or warm towards.

I usually also ask "What show are you into right now, and why?"

Talk to the quietest person: I specifically look for the person who hasn't been contributing as much, and ask them what they think about what's going on. And I keep the attention on them until they start to open up about what they like and don't like, and any other ideas they have. Even if people start over-riding them or jamming on those ideas, I keep trying to bring it back to the quietest person.

Bring a couple of ideas to the pitch: I usually have a couple of unformed concepts that I can drop in, just to start conversations going. They don't have to be elaborate. Last session, someone said "Orwellian", which generated half an hour of discussion. Sometimes just saying something like "I'd like seeing shows with subtext" can be enough.

I just ran a pitch session last night, and we had a gigantic whiteboard that ran the entire length of the conference room.

The players sat on one side of the table, facing the whiteboard, while I prowled back and forth on the other side, writing everything down.

I believe we had a sections titled "Bad Things", "Good Things", and "Random Ideas".
When we finally hit on an idea we wanted to run with, new sections popped up like Cast, Setting, and Tone.

We also had different colored markers to highlight things that stood out, or kept coming up.

The whiteboard really helped to focus things, and prevented us from rehashing everything multiple times, or simply forgetting good ideas.

Oh yeah, whiteboards are fantastic.

What would it take to get you onboard with this?: I just saw this one over at rpg.net. It's a really neat post about a pitch session, but the crux of it is here:

One of the players isn't really on board with the concept. Something just isn't clicking. So the GM asks her "What would it take to get you onboard with this?" And she ponders for a bit and says "What if I was the Queen in disguise." And suddenly everything clicks into place ...