On Sunday at Stabcon I played in a game of Primetime Adventures. The GM
was a fairly old-school RPGer with a background in theatre (real, not
amateur). I knew two of the other players reasonably well, and they're
also fairly long-term gamers. I don't know about the other two.
You've probably heard about the system, but I'll touch on it anyway from
a mechanical perspective. It's so simple it's almost non-existent: you
basically have one stat, "screen presence", which is a baseline measure
of how good you are at everything. You have "edges" (broadly,
skill/advantage/disadvantage packages) such as "run-down detective" or
"heroic pilot", and "connections" (people you know, though not
necessarily friends); you can invoke these up to three times each per
episode (broadly, = gaming session) to get a +1 to your screen presence.
Also, everyone has to have an Issue, some basic flaw that they're
working through - commitment phobia, alcoholism, etc. (You can also have
a Nemesis and a Personal Set, but these didn't really come into play.)
The GM ("producer" - didn't we give up having cutesy terms for GMs and
PCs a few years back) gets a budget instead - twice the total screen
presence plus a bit more, but each point is only usable once. When he's
spent it, it goes into the "fan mail" pool; that's not directly usable,
but any player can give points to any _other_ player for a bit of "good
play". Once you've been given points, you can spend them.
The game runs scene by scene; in each case, the aim is to identify the
"conflict", i.e. what is going to get resolved in this scene: "will you
let us into your camp", "I'm searching the room for clues", "we're
having a duel with swords", or whatever else. This always starts as one
PC versus the GM; other PCs can take sides. Each involved party draws
cards equal to screen presence (+1 for an edge, +1 per point of fan mail
spent) or in the GM's case budget expended; whichever side has more red
cards wins, and whichever player gets the highest card gets to narrate
what happens. (Note that about half the time this will be a player on
the losing side of the conflict.)
For a single session, that's basically it. For multiple sessions you
have variable screen presence - every character will have a "spotlight
episode" where it's 3 (and nobody else's is), and some background
episodes where it's just 1.
The other slightly strange thing about PTA, of course, is the campaign
generation system: for about the first hour of play (of the first
session only), we tossed around ideas about the sort of game we'd play.
This was quite fun, though I'm not sure how much I'd have enjoyed it if
my idea hadn't been substantially the one that got adopted; even so,
everyone had reasonably significant input.
In theory, the players should in some way rotate the choice of what
scene happens next (and do the initial narration, up to the point of the
conflict). I don't know how that's meant to be determined, but we were
all traditional enough gamers that we tended to lean on the GM perhaps
more than we "should" have.
Overall, it is very much a collaborative story-telling game rather than
a conventional RPG: I don't know how much protection you have for your
own character, but with other people potentially narrating events any
characterisation will have to be in fairly broad strokes.
I think I might enjoy playing this occasionally as a short pickup game,
particularly at conventions, but I can't see myself dumping the
mainstream systems in favour of it; apart from anything else, I enjoy
doing detailed research while preparing a scenario, and in this game
you're improvising _everything_. Also, all the players need to be on
their toes; someone who's had a hard day at work, or is just tired, will
noticeably slow the whole game down. That said, I'll still buy a copy if
I find one that can be shipped from the UK.
--
Roger, gaming grognard
Lots of role-playing stuff: http://tekeli.li/
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