Howdy again.
Yes, we just got through the pilot episode. We've decided we want to go ahead and play some more (so the 5 episode character arcs) but the pilot did feel a little .. disjointed? incomplete?

So - 5 characters slightly modified.
* Chief Atkins
Issue: Paranoia
Edges: Combat Veteran, Bridge crew.
Connections: Admiral Bennett , Head of Navy Intelligence.
Personal Set - Dark corners of the ship

* Father Michaels "Chaplain" (political officer)
Issue - Justify turning in family for Heresy.
Edges: People Person (Human Intel), Ultra security clearance.
Connections: His daughter.
Personal Set - Confessional (interrogation room)

* Doctor Kay Bennett
Issue: Disagrees with church stance on alien extermination
Edges: Xenobiology, Supreme practicality
Connections: Admiral Bennett, Her father.
Personal set - Research Lab

* Henry "Doc" Barnes
Issue: getting old
Edges: Experience triage medic, cybernetics
Connections: Ship's XO - War buddy.
Personal set: Medlab.

Everyone seemed fairly excited to get this underway. Overall it was good, but there were a few major hiccups at times. I'll go scsne for scene and point out what it felt like.

Pilot episode - "Cakewalk"

GM Intro - Set on alien world, in a domed city. Big crowds in the streets watching a televised announcement - The Emperor is declaring their planet of Eridani IV to no longer be a colony, but now a full member planet with all the rights that entails. Much cheering, camara starts to zoom on one table in a cafe. "The HMS Vengeance, newest addition to the fleet will transport an Imperial Governor to liase with the new government of our newest member of the Empire.".
People at table talking - "are we ready for this?
- "everything is underway already"
- "Do you have enough time to complete preperations"
- " We have 6 months before they get here, we'll be waiting"
fade to black and intro music.

Everyone seemed hyped and were jumping to do their scenes.

1 - Character, Chief Atkins, Docking bay of the HMS Vengeance
- Wants to show security is lacking on the ship - conflict succeeds + narration
Cheif comes aboard to meet the captain and XO, gathers his luggage and waits for it to be scanned etc - then he calls back the deck hand and asks "are you sure about this?" Then proceeds to pull out various little parts and put together a rifle from parts in the bag.

Everyone seemed fine and dandy. Everyone happy - the XO of the ship is annoyed at being "showed up", and captain is happy to have the chief there to tighten security. - Chief was given a fanmail.

2 - Character, Doc, Ground medical testing labs
- wants to disallow some VIPs on medical grounds - succeeds
- Big Centrifuge testing people for grav etc - the doctor is marking people not allowed, and gets into an argument with the Governor-to-be. Gov makes a fuss about needing experienced people, and Doc says - military vessels, military rules, they take the slow boat. Just as fading out doc says "right governor, you are up next", taking out his pen and charts.

Also, had people laughing, Doc got a fanmail.

3 - Here we encountered problems. The Xeno wanted a scene where she was supervising the unloading of her gear where because of her pre-planning she'd got everything packed nicely. She wanted her "practicality" to be the conflict, and she lost the conflict and narration rights. - Which caused her to get angry about "why should i bother makign up a scene if it fails"

This caused everyone to try to reword what was happening, or how the scene/conflict could have been setup.. Eventually she just said "delete scene, someone else goes on, i'll think of something else.

3b - plot, Father Michaels - about bringing on sealed containers.
- his conflict was going to be his authority as a "church" member, against the security - he wanted to be liked by the crew even though he's breaking security. Lost, but won narration.
The scene was a couple of templars carrying a huge sealed container with all sorts of warnings on it (biohazard, radioactive, etc) and there is a showdown between the ship security who dont want the stuff on the ship, and the father. He manages to get everyone to put their guns away, but the crew refuse to help with the loading, and just stand aside letting the templars struggle with the loading equipment and getting the sealed containers into the ship.

The liked the standoff, and people were intrigued by "whats in the boxes". Father got a fanmail.

4 - Char, Dr Bennett, Unloading equpment in her lab.
She wanted to have an incompetnt aide let some xeno-form samples escape, and the Dr deals with it (bringing in practicality). Wins narration.
The aide is unloading a cage and gets it caught in the boxes - cage springs open and a ball of fur and teeth screams and runs into the corner and starts eating wires - aide jumps on table and panics - asking about "what was it". Dr B sighs and gets out rubber gloves - and picks up the animal once its electrocuted. "Pity aout the loss, but it will taste better than the rations on board" She tosses the now dead animal to the aide - "please take it to the galley and have the chef prepare my dinner with this". She then turns and types out a requisition form for a new aide.

OK, had people in stitches. The Doctor is coming across like "Dr House", brilliant but has no feeling for other people or things - the idea of eating the monstrosity alien animal was just hilarious - especially the description on how to cook it :)

GM scene - on board the ship. Ship goes through jump and is immediately attacked. We had the various people getting ready "head between legs" The doctor in the galley trying to eat and getting upset when Grav goes away as the ship prepares to jump. Father Michaels praying for a safe jump, and the Chief strapping down in the bridge. As they come out of jump into the outskirts of the Eridani system, alarms go off as contact is immediately made with unidentified ships.

5 - character, "Doc", In med bay.
- wants to show how his long experience is good for the team. success, looses narration.
We had the med personel strapped down when the alarms go off - She's immediately launching into orders, preparing for incoming injuries. Also orders the team into protective gear and straps to be ready for violent manuvering - they are all greatful for this whe the ship starts firing engines and launching fighters and the "gravity" goes all over the place, but no one gets hurt.

6 - char, Dr Bennett, In her lab
- wants to show that her work is vital - succ and wins narration.
With the ship manuvering, charging weapons etc, the lights flicker a little and some of her work looks at risk - she opens the intercom to the bridge demanding that the captain send down an auxiliary power generator to keep the power fluctuations to a minimum. The Captain is frustrated "why now of all times" and is about to wave her off, when the Chief reminds him that "this is the Admiral's daughter, are you really sure? When he brings up the personel files they come up as "classified" with a note to accede to all requests. The captain apologises for the trouble, and send a damage control team down to her lab (struggling in the shifting G forces, bouncing through corridors carrying the aux power generator)

7 - plot, Chief Atkins, on the bridge
- wants to show how he was already expecting trouble, and everything is under control - Succeeds
When everyone is reeling from the suprise attack, the captain and XO are frantically yelling orders and getting pilots to fighters etc. The chief just  opens up the comms to the weapon crews - "Initiate plan delta", and the point defense weapons are immediately firing away at the incoming missiles. "Fire cannons!" which were already pointing back into the sensor blind spot. Massive explosions result as missiles are shot out of the air, and a Large fighter is obliterated as it was preparing to take out the engines by suprise.
Fighters are launched and the enemy fighters are scared away after a couple are shot down.

8 - plot, Father Michaels, in the confessional.
Wants to get the surviving pilot to repent his sins and confess. Fail.
He has the surviving pilot rigged up to wires and electrodes, interrogating and scaring him. The pilot is defiant and talks about how "the brotherhood will protect us, your evil inquisitors and governors will never find safety on Eridani!" Eventually, the pilot is "put on ice" and kept for later interrogation.

9 - plot, Doc and Dr Bennett, in the med bay (gm scene)
- They want the scene to be about discovering the enemy are not quite human.
Doc: I am still helpful under this pressure - succ
bennett: she learns what it is from the pilot's dna - fail.

We started out with a charred and explosively decompressed body being put through an autopsy. Doc is relying on his cyber implants to keep him active and precise after the heavy Gs of combat. Dr. Bennett is pouring over DNA samples. Alarms are tripped in the computer as it picks up "non human comtaminants" in the samples.

Father Michaels jumps in here and rolls for "the church confiscating the evidence". and wins

The med bay is sealed and "biohazard warnings" come flashing on. Templars in full armor some in - bringing the sealed containers. There is a wriggling mass that was in the body, the Doc sees this and backs away from the table. The Church scientist uses tools from the containers to grab the wriggling object, puts it into specially pre-prepared containers, and leaves. Dr Bennett was so engrossed in the weird DNA contaminant results on her screen that she didn't notice what the church guys actually came and took away.

- There was a lot of argument about this scene. I really wanted to have the "alien" in the body, but bennett's player really only wanted DNA changes to show "disloayalty to the empire". I was also unsure how to handle the jump in by the father - he compared his succ/high number against the existing numbers. This scene felt very forced.

10 - plot, Doc, in the XO's cabin after the battle.
Wants to find out what is going on - succ, fail narration.
This was a talk between the XO and the doc, old war buddies reminiscing on old times. Doc is sayign that everything is harder than she remembers, but at least its exciting. Turns out that things will get much more exciting "are you sure you can handle it?" as the ship was sent out to investigate problems on the edges of the Empire - the governor etc is just a cover to avoid questions about sending the warship out there and avoid panic.

11 char - chief atkins - accosing the father in a corridor on the ship.
- chief wants to call into question the safety precautions of the church - fails and looses narration.
Father Michael is stopped in a little corridor with no one about but the chief - he is angry about having a "contaminant" outside the med lab which is designed for containing problems - he's asking for the templars, acolytes and the father himself to be scanned for contamination. "Its all taken care of - we have a lot of experience with this, more than you can imagine, and your scanning wont have any further use."

12 - char, Doc and Bennett, eating dinner in the galley after its al over.
- i dont actualy remember what we were rolling for here :( Dr Bennett is sharing her meal of "antarian spined squig" with the Doc, There was talk about how they are planning to get to the bottom of this - Doc was unhappy about having the contaminant taken away and made "classified", and Bennett is curious as to how the DNA changes were made by this contaminant - they both agree they have to get their hands on the bio-material - and they remember that there was a living pilot captured... Final talk about how the cakewalk of ferrying VIPs is not turning out how they expected.

scene ends with the camer shooting through the ship corridors until it ends in the sealed off section for church personell - and zooms in to be on the face of the enemy pilot frozen in the cryo chamber.

end of episode.

The biggest issues were that the entire episode felt a little disjointed.

The whole "framing scenes" and "making conflicts" were extremely problematic. It felt more like the players were rolling to define the plot - and i had to keep reminding about getting the issue and edges involved - eg, the Father never actually mentioned his issue in any conflict.

also about "fluff scenes" with no conflict - seems that eveyone wanted more of these to add more flow to the story.

As a whole we thought it was fun, and they spent time trying to plot out their issue arcs. They were talking about a big head to head between the Dr Bennett and Father Michaels about "exterminating" the planet coming at the end of the 5 part series- The Doctor wanting to keep the aliens for study and use, while the Father wanting to wipse out the planet to prevent more contamination.
The Doc will have his issue of "getting old" come up early during fights with the enemy - working under the extreme pressures of battle for an early climax
The Chief will have a mid point climax - with the decision that the only way the suprise attack could have come is a traitor on the ship - and him finding the traitor will lead onto the argument about exterminating the planet.

Father - 1, 1, 2, 2, 3
Bennett - 1, 1, 2, 2, 3
Chief - 1, 2, 3, 1, 2
Doc - 2, 3, 2, 1, 1,

Hold off on replying, please, everyone. I'm experiencing a little hassle getting my post up.
Ron

bugger. Dont know how to edit.

Basic issue for me - the game shows a lot of potential, but there is a lot of different opinions on how much should be "meta-planned" before scene even starts, what we are really rolling for - is it the player or character that is setting the conflict?

What would really help would be to see an existing TV show episode done up like a PTA adventure. Where are the scene breaks, what are the characters rolling for in conflicts etc. Say a firefly episode, or BSG, or even babylon 5 episode.

Okay.

Here's what I'm offering, for you to consider. I'll focus on what seems to me to be the most problematic scene in your account, with the character Kay Bennet. Incidentally, what I'm about to talk about requires being clear about who is the character and who is the player, so it'd be helpful to know the player's name, for clarity only.

It looks to me as if you were playing as follows:

Player asks for scene. Player describes scene. Player introduces conflict. Player and Producer draw cards. Player succeeds or fails. Someone narrates.

This is ... well, it's not going to work. A long time ago, Paul Czege articulated a key point that it is extremely not fun to propose one's own adversity and then resolve it oneself, and even less fun after that if you have to narrate it. For events in role-playing to be enjoyable, there must be some kind of back-and-forth which is not based on consensus somewhere in the start or middle of the process.

You are probably familiar with the extreme opposite which is widespread in role-playing:

GM states scene. Players state (minimally) preparations. GM introduces conflict (or at least crisis). Players state tactics. Players and GM roll dice. Players succeed or fail. GM narrates.

Despite certain flaws or pitfalls, this is actually more functional than the sequence I laid out above. At least in this case various people have to listen to one another establish actual content and then respond with actual content of their own. This not only makes the creativity social, it introduces time into the fiction as they do so.

PTA doesn't do either of these, actually. I have seen a number of people fall straight into the trap you and the group fell into, because they think it should run like the first sequence. That sequence is not actually what the book and rules describe. I think the book is a little bit light on the details of what to do so that that sequence doesn't happen (which is not to criticize it particularly; no author can anticipate all the ways to misunderstand, especially ways he or she never dreamed of).

The functional sequence for PTA goes like this:

Player requests a scene. Producer frames scene. Producer and Player develop scene. Conflict arises from both or either's action(s). Producer and Player draw cards. Player succeeds or fails. Someone narrates.

Do you see the crucial difference? The Producer does not sit mutely while the player is forces to generate everything about the scene. The player is not forced to create a whole scene, conflict, issue-relevance, and character actions alike.

The back-and-forth is different from the traditional sequence, and far more oriented toward generating emotionally-relevant conflict rather than a threat to the characters' lives, but it is the same in the sense that it's still back-and-forth as the fiction proceeds.

Basically, you guys are storyboarding. You're not creating a shared imagined space in which characters move around, enter and exit, do things, say things, react to one another, and otherwise "be." The conflicts are not forming organically from interactions and situational features, but being imposed in the abstract.

To take it to that particular scene:

The Xeno wanted a scene where she was supervising the unloading of her gear where because of her pre-planning she'd got everything packed nicely. She wanted her "practicality" to be the conflict,

... and she lost the conflict and narration rights. - Which caused her to get angry about "why should i bother makign up a scene if it fails"

Ron wrote:

It looks to me as if you were playing as follows:
Player asks for scene. Player describes scene. Player introduces conflict. Player and Producer draw cards. Player succeeds or fails. Someone narrates.

The functional sequence for PTA goes like this:
Player requests a scene. Producer frames scene. Producer and Player develop scene. Conflict arises from both or either's action(s). Producer and Player draw cards. Player succeeds or fails. Someone narrates.

Do you see the crucial difference? The Producer does not sit mutely while the player is forces to generate everything about the scene. The player is not forced to create a whole scene, conflict, issue-relevance, and character actions alike.

Basically, you guys are storyboarding. You're not creating a shared imagined space in which characters move around, enter and exit, do things, say things, react to one another, and otherwise "be." The conflicts are not forming organically from interactions and situational features, but being imposed in the abstract.

Conflict arises from choices within all of that. The first and most obvious is that you could introduce an alien stowed away in her stuff. There's her Issue. You say, "What do you do?" Do you know it's time to draw cards yet? Yes, because the answer is no, because we don't know what Kay Bennett does yet. Always draw cards once you know what characters are doing. Is the alien terrified? Ready to bolt or attack, or begging for protection?

The Issue is key, but not for abstract debate. It's key because when you put relevant components into place through normal framing and play, characters take action which tap into the Issue. With those actions under way, then you draw cards, and not before.

Let me know if any of this makes sense. Also, let me know if the tone I've adopted in this post is acceptable to you.

Hi Kentsu,

I trotted off to get my rulebook in order to confirm some of my points above and also to help with these. I think once you get over the biggest hump, the book turns out to be quite clear about most of your current questions.

I did screw one thing in my above post: the scene-suggesting player does provide the focus, the agenda, and the location. We should examine what those mean, because I think my point about the role of the Producer is still valid.

Focus = development of character vs. advancement of the plot. This can throw people badly, especially when they think advancement of the plot means saying right now what that advancement will be. This statement signals whether we "hang out" with the character vs. "something happens to or around her," and that's all. All you have to do is say which, and nothing about it.

Agenda = general description of what the scene's about, what the likely conflict is. If I had my way, this would be removed from the rules. I know what it means because I've been so close to the design and play from its outset. But textually, it throws people off cliffs. What it means is: don't have your character sitting and doing something totally boring. Propose something that lets us know why it's interesting to see her here now, but ... and importantly, not what happens.

Location = where it is. Here's where I was most wrong; the player says this, not the Producer. No big deal, I hope.

None of these pre-set the contents of the conflict. I say again, none of these pre-set the contents of the conflict. That is left to play itself. Look at the scene creation example on page 57. Pretty minimal, huh?

I'm going to take your questions out of order, to put them into the order we'd see them in play.

Scene request: Character scene, Kay Bennett, In the loading bay
Question - can other players say their characters are there as well? Or is that up to the GM?

start playing out via characters... player decides that she wants a conflict and states that there is a stoaway in her luggage
question - can she do that, or is that GM decision? Or is that a cause for a roll? Or should it be restated as "can i get it past security? or something else?

At this point the chief's player says "the Chief would definently not like that, I want him to stop it"
Question: valid?

One big thing - winning "narration" by getting highest number... How does that work? So taking the fixed up scene in the loading bay. What are the limits on what the narrator can state or cant state?

Damn. Left out a key point.

Okay, the player has stated the focus, the agenda, and the location. Now the point is that the Producer establishes the actual scene. Not the player. Until this moment, in-fiction play has not begun and nothing is actually established to have happened, or that it will happen. Only when the talking is taken up by the Producer and he or she starts describing things, and when necessary (if no one is active enough), saying "what do you do?"

Pop that in at the end of my answer to the first question I quoted, and the rest makes more sense, I hope.

Best, Ron

Ron's got most of this covered.

I think people sometimes confuse agenda for conflict. Agenda is just what you're up to. It's useful material for the producer to create the conflict, but it isn't the conflict.

Like, say, Cara wants a scene where Nicola's in the lab examining this strange thing she found, and she wants it to be a plot scene.

I'm the producer, yeah? So we don't just say, "okay, draw cards to see if you can figure out what it is."

And Cara doesn't say, "okay, there's something wrong with my microscope. that's the conflict." Cara can introduce that as an interesting detail, but no way is she going to just sit there and be the author of the story.

Say she introduces that detail. Maybe I say, "great, so that slows you down and you're there later than you want to be, late enough that your love interest, the cute lab worker shows up."

"Oh no," says Cara. "He can't find out about this strange thing."

Now we've both agreed on a conflict. There's a pretty defined yes/no question in there, but there's lots of room to fill in details in the narration.

I'm lazy and pulled in a conflict from an actual game I was in, but I bet you can squint a little and see how that might apply to the stowaway conflict.

re: entering scenes. I think of the spending of fan mail as a veto action, as in "oh yes I am in that scene." If everyone's cool with it to begin with, save your fan mail for something else.

Hope that helps.