In PTA, how do you do a scene where you cut to the villain, he describes a maniacal plot to his crony, and then you cut back?

As the producer you use your turn to frame a scene with just NPCs.  Then you just narrate the scene for the player's benefit.  As a player pick a Location and an Agenda that only involves NPCs you want to see a scene with.  The producer then just narrates a scene with those characters.  Caveat: The producer has scene framing power so he can drag a PC into if he wants.

Example:

This happened in my game.  One player wanted to see a scene between NPC Stephen, her character's sister's love interest and his new business partner.  She wanted this scene because she thought the business partner was up to something nefarious and she was right.  So she set the Location as Stephen's new office and the Agenda as Stephen discussing plans with his new business partner.  I, as the producer, then just described as short scene in which the business partner reveals some of his plans to Stephen and Stephen's reaction to them.

That's about it.

Jesse

That makes perfect sense, although it's a little non-participatory.

Ryan wrote:
That makes perfect sense, although it's a little non-participatory.

I don't have much experience with PTA, but I added a "twist ending" scene with only NPCs to the end of the one game I ran and the players loved it. I kept it very short and to the point. So I guess my advice would be, do it at the end of the game and keep it very short.

When I produced PTA, I had impulses to do cut away scenes, but always felt that I didn't want to waste my scene on something that didn't directly involve the players. I have had success with little villain's progress scenes -- I kept them short and to the point and they rarely lasted more than one or two minutes. I think they're a great vehicle for telling players what you have in mind for the overall play -- even what the PCs don't know. It creates a cool tension and gives them something to pull into their own scenes.

I think that the next time I play PTA, I might suggest that anyone can throw out small "meanwhile" scenes that involve the progress of the opponents or activities of nemeses. They just have to stay snappy and get back to a scene involving a protagonist quickly.

Scenes without protagonists are possible, but they should include contacts and/or nemeses. Worked fine in the mafia blood opera game of mine with the scene where we established he's not only a double, but a triple agent playing the law against the mafia for his own good. Conflict then was about wether the contacts who witnessed the scene would tell the protagonist they were attached to.

As Alan said: It was a short scene, only to establish the line of information that was used or broken, so the following scenes would have a turning point to revolve around.