On Sat, Jan 14, 2006 at 02:58:05PM -0600, Tim Hall wrote: >Being one of the 'other two', I supposed I should put in my 2p's worth :) Ah, it was you. I wasn't sure that "Tim" on the badge was the same as Tim Hall here and on Pyramid. >> 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. >I get the impression that this is supposed to be a key part of the game, >especially when what gets adopted is an amalgam of ideas from several >people. Yup. Given that games are explicitly meant to run for a limited period (I think it's 5 or 9 sessions/episodes), this is clearly something that's supposed to happen quite often. >Certainly riffing off each other's ideas can produce something more >interesting that the players could have come up with individually. It >wouldn't had occurred to me to make my character German rather than >British, for example. Thanks for pointing out that character generation was to some extent a process of consensus too - this might go some way to reducing the tendency of some players to come up with game-breaking characters. >> 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. >I think it would take a few sessions to really get my head round the >whole scene framing/conflict determination thing, because it's very >different from a traditional RPG. Agreed. It's something I'd like to try more of, but I think I'd want to learn it with other players from an experienced GM before I tried to run it for other people who hadn't previously met the game at all. >> 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. >In a longer campaign I think characterisation will be very much >develop-in-play. The Edges in particular are nebulous enough that I don't suppose there will be any difficulty in coming up with back-story when it's needed. This certainly matches the televisual approach. -- Roger, gaming grognard Lots of role-playing stuff: http://tekeli.li/ ---------------------------------------------------------------- GAMERS Home Page: http://www.phoenyx.net/gamers/
