So I finally got the group to try PTA last weekend. The last campaign of DnD/Freeform had pretty much puttered out and died, and some of the reasons I believed it died were:

1. GM wasn't available every week
2. GM had to do too much prep work
3. Players had little input and engagement into setting
4. Scene time imbalances
5. Some scenes which NOONE present was interested in, yet we played through them anyway.

I thought PTA would help resolve these problems, so I urged us to try it. It sorta worked...

We made the setting as a group. Spent about 45 minutes-hour doing it. Process was fairly fun, everyone seemd engaged. We ended up just fusing 3 different setting ideas together (Buffy the vampire slayer: Teenage heroes; Akira: motorbikes; Madmax: Post- appocalypse desert wastelands)

We then made characters. We didn't expand too much beyond what was required by the book. We are accustumed to having longer, more complex characters made during generation. (One player commented to the effect "what, only ONE issue per character?") I wanted to stick to the book guidelines closely, and the long setting-setup time discourged me from suggesting we "cheat" and spend more time on chargen.

There was a bit of an issue of what to do with connection NPCs. It was for most people the last thing they made, and we weren't sure how much (if at all) to flesh them out in chargen. In particular we weren't sure WHO should flesh them out, the producer or the player. During play I as the producer defered to the players, but one player commented he felt that scenes involving his connection involved "roleplaying with himself" because he was making suggestions on how to roleplay his connection regularly, and I never vetoed any of his suggestions. Also, see below.

As producer I felt a little overwhelmed. We had a setting... that I was kinda ambivalent about... that we had made 30 minutes earlier... that I had to flesh out on the fly. I'm used to spending time thinking about a setting between sessions (10 minutes here, 5 minutes there over a week) and picking the setting myself (as GM) thereby developing a reasonably robust "Setting model" that I can then improvise from. In this session of PTA, I was working with almost nothing. What little I had were stereotypes, so I used them freely. Players also reported simular needs to draw upon stereotypes/standard archetypes to play their characters. One player described the experience as "flat, but in a good way, like a TV show. More action, faster paced, like a TV show" Trying to improvise the setting and npcs with almost nothing to go on was very... edgy. I would describe the experience as like going on the Space Mountain rollercoaster ride.. .without being told beforehand it was a rollercoaster. IT was kinda.. excillerating in a way, but also stressful and disorienting. And I'm not sure I'd want to do it again.

To deal with the problem I tried to punt as much as possible the setting, npcs, anything to the players. And they stepped up sometimes, and it was great. My alternative solution was the conflict system. Whenever I started to run out of ideas, I'd immediately drive to a conflict and then relax... with a conflict the players get to do the work setting stakes, bidding, and typically one of them gets narration rights. Then a player typically set the next scene. With a conflict I could get a good 10-15 minute break. I felt a huge incentive to go to conflicts. One player, M, reported that he felt we rushed to conflicts too soon, especially for the first episode (we played two two-hour episodes back to back); another, G, said it was just about right. G (who had been in our DitV experiement) compared the conflict mechanic to DITV and felt this one struck just the right balance between total freedom and structure. M, however, felt the conflict mechanic was too jarring. "Like we roleplay for a little while, then we play this stakes-setting game, then we get to roleplay again, etc. It feels too choppy."

One thing that went extremely well is the audience participation rule. We had a girlfriend of one of the players who "doesn't do roleplaying games" watching the game. We had her participate as an audience member using the special rules during the first epsisode. By the time we started the second episode she made a character and joined us.

I'd say overall we had fun, but I feel no desire to produce the game again. One of the players volunteered to produce instead if we play again. Everyone agreed that playing again would be a reasonable option for next week, but as a group we were leaning toward trying Ars Magica instead.

During the second episode we had set out scene presence. We sorta accidently (in retrospect) gave the least assertive and outgoing player a scene presense of three. He didn't do so well. He struggled, we all struggled, trying to focus the game on him and his character. Before playing the game I must admit I was apprehensive that this sort of game would kinda depend on the "lowest common denominator" of player "skill" and I think this bore out at least in part during that epsisode.

Two players reported that they felt the game was somewhat anticlimactic after stakes had been set. "Given both outcomes are interesting, I didn't really care if I won or lost the stakes. I am indifferent between the character suffering or triumphing" We had one incident where the player actually PREFFERED their character to fail, and we weren't 100% sure what to do.