1) If we want to play PTA for a four hour game session, but the producer runs out of budget, what happens?  I have thought of three options, all of which I have problems with: a) end early (which is not the goal), b) keep going, but the players then get to run roughshod over the Producer and his measley 1 card per conflict, or c) the Producer grants himself a free gift of extra budget, which hardly seems fair.  If there a better answer than these?

2) Having extra fan mail is obviously a very good thing toward helping one win conflicts.  Players get Fan Mail by awarding spent Budget Tokens to each other.  The smart play for player is to collude that they will work together to divide up the Fan Mail evenly and often - to the extent that the spent Budget Tokens might as well be distributed evenly to the players.  Assuming that the players in general follow this, is this a bad(tm) thing?  It seems to me that while players may have many differing priorities, it is not unreasonable to suppose that one might find a group of players that prioritize their success at winning conflict the most, and act accordingly in the aformentioned collusion.  To expect other behaviour or worse judge people harshly for working together toward the main mechanic would seem to be wrongheaded, IMO.  Thoughts?

3) A token of Fan Mail can either buy a card, or can buy an extra use of a Character Attribute.  As I understand it, Fan Mail spent for extra cards can potentially wind up as extra Budget for the Producer, but if you spend the Fan Mail for an extra use of a Character Attribute, that token is not "winnable" by the Producer.  Long Story short, if you can apply a Character Attribute, and you wish to maximize your chance for winning conflicts and minimize the Producer's, then you would want to prevent them from gaining Budget - therefor, in any case where you could bring to bear a relevant but exhausted Attribute you would always choose to refresh the Attribute instead of taking the card directly.

3a) Therefor I am assuming that the only occasions when you would spend Fan Mail directly on extra cards is a) if none of your attributes apply, or (possibly) b) if you in this conflict are already using all aplicable Attributes and still want more cards.  Yes?

That should get things started, in terms of my first few questions... 

Thanks.

Hello,

1) The budget is a pacing mechanic.  When it begins to run out it's time to start wrapping things up.  This is just how the game works.  Assuming a group of three players a session lasts between two and four hours depending on the pace.

2) Fan mail is intended to be awarded for appreciating each others creative input.  I have NEVER seen the behavior you describe in practice.  If it were to happen I don't think mathematically anything would break but it suggests that you're not playing with the right group of people for the game.  In practice, I've seen the opposite problem.  That is, people's standards for being impressed are SO high that fan mail doesn't get awarded at all.  In my games I tend to have a large Audience pool that simply goes unawarded.

3) What you describe is correct and you're right that the Attribute would still have be relevant.  Again, in practice, I've NEVER seen this happen.  Not once.  People just spend the fan mail for the cards.  Similarly, I've never seen over use of Attributes.  It's a very rare game that I've seen people hit their attribute limit and then only usually only on one of their attributes.

Primetime Adventures works best with a group of people who are committed to the quality of the fiction and the characters as their primary priority and use the mechanics as an expression of that commitment.

Jesse

Hmmm, I can certainly appreciate that if you get just the "right" group of people, people with the "right" priorities or habits, no problems will develop.

Does this game (and that of other narrative type games) rely on getting a group of all the "right" people?  Or do the rules still work even if the people follow only them?  In other words, are players expected not to play to their most effective?

Also, any other ideas on how to play a session of PTA so as to last a particular time?

Thanks

Hi Syndr,

PTA is hard to break if you follow the rules. There's no need for the "right" people, only the right approach and that appears to be intuitive when players think in terms of playing a TV series. I've never seen the game fail.

I find it pretty obvious that PTA is not going to do anything for anybody if the group isn't on board with the game's presumed goals and parameters. Thus players who are constantly looking to minimize the budget with their choices will not be getting any satisfaction out of the rules system. It's easy to optimize and the optimal game plan is always the same, anyway. This is good for this sort of game, as the game is supposed to support your attention for dramatic events, not give out tools for ruining the GM. So I'd recommend either getting the players on board with the game's purpose (enjoying creative storytelling), or playing something else. Saying that "the rules can take it" is just foolish, I think; Monopoly rules can also take players not caring about winning the game as long as they can speak with funny accents, but that doesn't mean that playing the game that way is reasonable.

In practice the above has never been a problem for me, though, as the vast majority of players tend to pick up on the cues of the rules system well enough, even when they're not the sort to exactly listen to you when you tell them that the purpose of the game is to create a great tv-show. A player would need to approach jerk-level inflexibility if he insisted on trying to find a way to "beat" a game that has no competitive elements at all. Thus the whole scenario Syndr paints is pretty unlikely in practice.

As for getting the game to last the right length of time - I've never had a problem with the budget running out, as the Producer can certainly be careful with his spending while turning up the heat in the fiction, which in turn encourages the players to spend Fan Mail, which gives the Producer some more budget. Of course a long session will see lots of pretty low-resistance conflicts, but that alone doesn't break the game. Just choose well which conflicts you really want to make difficult and focus on those. Also, follow the game's advice on the four-act episode plan carefully - the Producer can easily pace himself in spending the budget if he takes care to spend the appropriate amount of time in each act of the story.

Eero wrote:
I find it pretty obvious that PTA is not going to do anything for anybody if the group isn't on board with the game's presumed goals and parameters.

So I'd recommend either getting the players on board with the game's purpose (enjoying creative storytelling), or playing something else.

Saying that "the rules can take it" is just foolish,

I think; Monopoly rules can also take players not caring about winning the game as long as they can speak with funny accents, but that doesn't mean that playing the game that way is reasonable.

A player would need to approach jerk-level inflexibility if he insisted on trying to find a way to "beat" a game that has no competitive elements at all.

As for getting the game to last the right length of time - I've never had a problem with the budget running out, as the Producer can certainly be careful with his spending while turning up the heat in the fiction, which in turn encourages the players to spend Fan Mail, which gives the Producer some more budget. Of course a long session will see lots of pretty low-resistance conflicts, but that alone doesn't break the game. Just choose well which conflicts you really want to make difficult and focus on those. Also, follow the game's advice on the four-act episode plan carefully - the Producer can easily pace himself in spending the budget if he takes care to spend the appropriate amount of time in each act of the story.

There are various spelling errors in the above reply, and I don't see a way to edit them.  My apologies.

Sindyr wrote:
The game has a mechanic by which the producer vies with the players to earn the right to choose the way the scene's central conflict resolves. 

Alan wrote:

Sindyr wrote:
The game has a mechanic by which the producer vies with the players to earn the right to choose the way the scene's central conflict resolves. 

It's really not productive to think of the Producer as opposed to the players. His role is to provide opportunities for conflict in areas the players and their protagonists care about.

Also, note that even if the producer wins, it's holder of the high card that determines how things go against the protagonist. This may even be the losing player.

Hi, Sindyr!

Did you ever play PTA, and this was something that happened in one of your games, or this is an hypothetic case that you calculated after only reading the game manual?

Because, frankly, it smells of "hypothetic case devised as an example without having ever played the game".

First, your hypothesis: you start considering "normal" that the three players will gang up against the GM, playing all together like a "squad". But this is not normal at all. I have NEVER seen a game of PTA where there was no contrast, no tension, no discussions or in-fighting between the protagonists (and I have done demos at conventions with different groups who had never played before). It would make for boring television, and the players know this. More so, the game manual is pretty explicit in the examples about the kind of TV shown that is based on: thinking to play PTA to play "all united like a well oiled squad against the GM" is like playing Vampire and them complain that it doesn't do western well: different genre

Second, you consider the total of the cards and the budget and the fan mail, without considering at all the flow from one to the other. A flow that would be very familiar to someone who had played the game. At the start, the players have no fan mail. If they play the pilot episode, everyone has presence 2, and in any case with 3 players not every episode will have a protagonist at 3. The traits aren't always usable.  But the producer has already all his budget. At the start, most of the cards you counted for the players aren't there, but the initial budget is there.  The producer can overwhelm the players and win all the conflicts if he don't pace himself and don't wait for the last part of the game to spend most of the budget.  But if he do, there is much fewer budget spent that you counted, much less fan mail, until the end. At the end, the player get fan mail (but, remember...  only one fan mail every scene! Not more!), so they can spend most of that to win a single final conflict, or keep it unspent for the future.

Most players will save fan mail for the really important conflicts, so they will overspend on these, not using always the same amount: so...
...third:  you count cards, but counting cards is not the same that counting won conflicts.  Getting the second card give you a chance increase much more strong that getting the seventh card.

Fourth: you counted way too many scenes. A session of PTA is usually much shorter. And they don't always have every single protagonist in them.

Fifth: players will play "well" to get fan mail. The amount will NOT be even, and if the players agree to share fan mail without using that rule of the game, not only they are NOT playing PTA, but they seem rather masochistic to me: "well, boy, we could try to play well and enjoy this game, by why do it, when we could play very badly, bore ourselves silly giving each other meaningless tokens of false fan mail, only to win a game where there is nothing to win or to lose?"

Or, said in another way, the answer to "how can I avoid putting my hand in a meat grinder?", is usually simply "why should you put your hand in a meat grinder? Simply don't".

Moreno wrote:
Hi, Sindyr!

Did you ever play PTA, and this was something that happened in one of your games, or this is an hypothetic case that you calculated after only reading the game manual?

First, your hypothesis: you start considering "normal" that the three players will gang up against the GM, playing all together like a "squad".

But this is not normal at all. I have NEVER seen a game of PTA where there was no contrast, no tension, no discussions or in-fighting between the protagonists (and I have done demos at conventions with different groups who had never played before).

Second, you consider the total of the cards and the budget and the fan mail, without considering at all the flow from one to the other. A flow that would be very familiar to someone who had played the game. At the start, the players have no fan mail. If they play the pilot episode, everyone has presence 2, and in any case with 3 players not every episode will have a protagonist at 3. The traits aren't always usable.  But the producer has already all his budget. At the start, most of the cards you counted for the players aren't there, but the initial budget is there.  The producer can overwhelm the players and win all the conflicts if he don't pace himself and don't wait for the last part of the game to spend most of the budget.  But if he do, there is much fewer budget spent that you counted, much less fan mail, until the end. At the end, the player get fan mail (but, remember...  only one fan mail every scene! Not more!), so they can spend most of that to win a single final conflict, or keep it unspent for the future.

Most players will save fan mail for the really important conflicts, so they will overspend on these, not using always the same amount: so...
...third:  you count cards, but counting cards is not the same that counting won conflicts.  Getting the second card give you a chance increase much more strong that getting the seventh card.

Fourth: you counted way too many scenes. A session of PTA is usually much shorter. And they don't always have every single protagonist in them.

Fifth: players will play "well" to get fan mail. The amount will NOT be even, and if the players agree to share fan mail without using that rule of the game, not only they are NOT playing PTA, but they seem rather masochistic to me: "well, boy, we could try to play well and enjoy this game, by why do it, when we could play very badly, bore ourselves silly giving each other meaningless tokens of false fan mail, only to win a game where there is nothing to win or to lose?"

Or, said in another way, the answer to "how can I avoid putting my hand in a meat grinder?", is usually simply "why should you put your hand in a meat grinder? Simply don't".

Hi Sindyr,

With respect, there isn't much to be gained from your pursuit of hypothetical questions when you don't trust our responses and make an effort to find worse case scenarios. Really, we're not making this up. PTA works well as written.

Read the rules. Play them as is as best you can interpret. Expect a session to last about 90 minutes or 2 hours. 2 hours of PTA is event-intense--no one will have the energy to play 4 hours.

Play the game, then come back and post about how things went. Then we'll be able to help you fine tune things.

- Alan

I agree with Alan. I don't intend to discount your arguments, Sindyr, but they simply don't make sense from the viewpoint of how the game actually works. I understand that you have a very clear vision of how the game should run, but that's because you're inserting your own assumptions that I don't think are actually in the text itself. I haven't read PTA in a year so I can't quote chapter and verse on this, but I did some pretty close-up reading on it when I edited the Finnish edition, and I didn't see the sort of player priorities you posit in there at all - the game simply assumes that the players are on board with the priorities of play, and that's that.

When I say "priorities of play", that's the place where your argument breaks down, by the way: you see, although you phrase it this way, players in PTA are actually not trying to beat the Producer in conflicts. This is not what the game is about. This whole thing of what players are trying to do in this sort of narrativistic game has been somewhat up in the air for several years, but we're finally now starting to get a handle on clear terminology for what the players are actually doing; perhaps it helps if I rephrase the game's intent in the same manner I'm using nowadays in my own, similar games: players of PTA are not trying to beat the game or beat the Producer's efforts against them, they are simply trying to advocate for their characters who struggle against adversity in their lives. Advocation itself, on the other hand, consists of two things: you express an interesting character for the benefit of the group, and you choose with sympathy on behalf of your character when important situations come up.

Does this distinction work for you? You see, when we're playing PTA, your projected resource problem never comes up because the players are never optimizing their resources with an eye towards winning conflicts - that is not their role. Instead, they are making moment-to-moment decisions on how to portray the intent and nature of their characters, and they're making choices as to what that character does. Specifically, when they are engaged in a conflict, they are not actually trying to win the conflict for themselves: they are evaluating how much their characters care about this situation and express that caring by investing more or less resources in the conflict. Drama then happens when consequences of these choices come back to haunt the character. Nowhere in this decision-making loop is there room for long-term optimization against the game system itself; individual characters might work together or against each other depending on the needs of expression the players have, players might spend lots of fan mail suddenly because they feel the need for their character to win the conflict... it's simply not possible to optimize this process to resource-drain the Producer while still playing the game according to its intent.

These same concerns rule over how Fan Mail is distributed and how the Producer chooses to spend his budget. Believe it or not, the game is actually built to favour the player characters in conflicts simply because that makes better television. This does not mean that they win all the time, either - the Producer has much discretionary power over when he's going to blow his Budget, and he'll pretty much choose the most interesting and important conflicts for that. So the dynamic ends up working in the end despite the seemingly overwhelming resources the players have; the Producer just accepts his role in providing adversity and makes most conflicts relatively low-burning, while allowing for a couple of big and important conflicts per session.

My advice is look at the conflict resolution--which you might actually think of as scene resolution--as the least important thing of all the rules. Direct everyone instead to all the "jobs" line items, like say yes to the scene, etc. Imagine what it would look like if you were just playing without cards and coming up with things by consensus, and then add the cards to that as an opportunity to be surprised as the audience.

In all honesty you could play this game without budget and just say in a conflict you roll a d6, and 4-6 your protag's issue does not fuck things up in a scene. The budget, fan mail, traits, all of that lets you make that outcome a little less random, lets you put in physical form how much you're invested in what's going to happen.

Sindyr wrote:

Moreno wrote:
But this is not normal at all. I have NEVER seen a game of PTA where there was no contrast, no tension, no discussions or in-fighting between the protagonists (and I have done demos at conventions with different groups who had never played before).

That's terrible.  I am sorry to hear that - I prefer games where the players are all pulling together for a common goal.  After Capes left a foul taste in my mouth, so to speak, I was hoping (and had been told) that PTA would be quite the opposite.

I haven't had a chance to get a game of PTA going yet, but I can imagine that a lot of the people in my regular group might end up asking the same questions as the OP here. I'm currently trying to spread the word that there's a huge difference between wanting both success and failure to be fun and interesting, and wanting the PCs to never fail.

I'd be interested in hearing about how Sandyr's game went when it's been played. There are some people in my group who I know simply would not enjoy the kind of experience PTA offers, and that's fine. No system can be all games to all gamers. I think people who look at the rules in a game and start working out the best strategies to use with those rules are really not the kind of people who'll get PTA at first, and they may not even be the kind of people at whom PTA is aimed.

One of my players had this idea that he would pick the exact opposites of what he wanted to achieve. If his screen presense was low, then he'd have at least 50/50 chance of getting his way and if there were others involved to coax the producer into spending budged, more power to him.

When the guy told us this idea, he was clearly proud of it and was expecting to get respect. Instead I told him that while optimizing and/or "braking" a game would be cool with some games, in this game it's childishly easy and beside the point. The rest of us looked at him with sad eyes and that was it, no more misplaced gamism from this player and we had a great season. The most memorable scenes were from the episode in which his character was the spotlite character!

I also had this Mountain Witch game a while back, where the same player again started the same thing. This time it was with the trust mechanics. This time, however, another player answered to the call and the two of them started this disruptive game of one-upmanship which for me destroyed the session. I had to use some harsh words to get back to TMW.

Now I realize that I should have been more clear in the beginning outlining what the game was about and should have used more time to get everyone on the same page. The difference between the two sessions was that, in the PTA case all but one players were tuned to the narrativism of the game, but in TMW, the disruptive player had someone to play with.

newsalor wrote:
When the guy told us this idea, he was clearly proud of it and was expecting to get respect. Instead I told him that while optimizing and/or "braking" a game would be cool with some games, in this game it's childishly easy and beside the point. The rest of us looked at him with sad eyes and that was it, no more misplaced gamism from this player and we had a great season. The most memorable scenes were from the episode in which his character was the spotlite character!

Sindyr,

My god, you must have been there or something judging by the way, you fling accusations about me abusing my friends? WTF?

After carefully trying to explaing what this game is about, I said that for me, that's not what this game is about, even if it's totally cool in other games. Should I have lied and given him positive feedback? Perhaps massaged his ego with some babytalk instead of the direct style that he himself advocates?

I'm not judging you, your group or how you communicate with your friends, because I don't know what's the deal with you and your friends and it's not my place to know or judge. I don't take kindly to personal attacks as a responce to help offered, so there is no point in me trying to emphatize with you situation or offer any thoughts on this or any game.

Have a good life,

Just posting my honest reaction to it, all very IMO and YMMV.  I think my response is as valid and acceptable as the events and behaviours you spoke of.

Sindyr wrote:
Just posting my honest reaction to it, all very IMO and YMMV.  I think my response is as valid and acceptable as the events and behaviours you spoke of.

Sounds great - and in your capacity as Mod, can you also ask people to keep their successful uses of peer pressure to encourage conformity off this forum as well?  I would really appreciate, as it makes myself and others extremely uncomfortable and is also wholly inappropriate.

Thanks.

I don't even know what that means, but if these others speak up about it, I'm happy to listen.

Matt wrote:
I don't even know what that means, but if these others speak up about it, I'm happy to listen.

I think that's enough victimization for one thread. Let's close this now.

Thanks - let me know if you need anything further on these matters.