On Wed, Jan 18, 2006 at 01:44:53PM -0600, Karen J. Cravens wrote:
>On Thu, 12 Jan 2006, Roger Burton West wrote:
>>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.
>So was Tim one of the first two, or the other two?
Tim was one of the others - I've played with him at a previous Stabcon,
but I've known Phil and Kari for a few years.
>>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.)
>Any of that sound useful to swipe for other games?
One could... but to a large extent they're designed to supplant
conventional mechanics, I think. Having an edge of "ex Special Forces
guy", for example, would mean that you had a bunch of relevant skills,
and that you might have some disadvantages from it (a trick knee, say),
and that you might know old military buddies, and so on.
Taking _House_ as an example since I've been watching it recently,
Foreman would have "Black former juvenile delinquent" as an edge; it
gives him skills (breaking into places), advantages (lets him play the
race card effectively) and disadvantages (negative reactions from some
people).
I'm not sure quite how the Personal Set idea is supposed to work; I
think it's the standard place your character is found in.
>>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 fan mail thing sounded kind of interesting to me... I'm always looking
>for nifty ways to increase the communication of that-was-cool between
>players.
I got the feeling we weren't either awarding it or spending it as fast
as the system expected us to. Certainly we had a large pool of
unallocated fan mail most of the time.
>>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.)
>This is the part I'm never sure of. On the one hand, I kind of like
>narrating things (I like to GM sometimes too), but on the other hand it's
>kind of useful to have the gamemaster as the default "truth" of a world,
>so that you've got all the players trying (with success, one hopes) to
>synch their vision to his, versus all the players trying to negotiate a
>shared vision. Less nebulous that way, it seems to me.
This is absolutely a collaborative system (and one which genuinely
deserves to be called a "story-telling system"). This is not a game for
a GM who likes to build a detailed world and set PCs loose in it (which
is what I usually am, as a GM). It would be very hard to have any sort
of long-term plot which was kept as one player's secret, even if that
player were the GM; he'd have to get the narration at key points or
share the secret with the others.
>>For a single session, th'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.
>
>Way back pre-Fudge, when we were disillusioned by Champions but hadn't yet
>picked up Fudge, I scribbled some notes for a superhero game (no, really,
>I'm *not* a game designer, honest) where the point cost for an ability
>wasn't based on an abstract "power level" but rather on how much screen
>time it was worth. You could put a lot of points into a really trivial
>power, and that meant the GM had to give it lots of screen time. (Or more
>tactfully phrased, that indicated to the GM that you wanted to spend lots
>of screen time on it.) I had just had the then-novel idea that you'd have
>to *spend* points on disadvantages instead of getting points for them, and
>we switched game systems. And genres.
That's something I've been thinking about recently in the context of
GURPS (my system of choice). It's standard to say "you have X points
available, plus up to Y in disadvantages"; if disadvantages were really
worth negative points, you wouldn't have to put a cap on them. But
disadvantages actually _increase_ screen time for that character - I
can't go on the plane because I'm afraid of flying, I'm the one who gets
easily seduced by the femme fatale, or whatever.
Looking at it algebraically, one's saying:
A - D <= X
D <= Y
But I think a more interesting way to put it would be to acknowledge the
screen time effect explicitly and count disadvantages towards a
distinct, positive, point total:
A - D <= X
A + D <= Z
The mechanical result would be the same, but I think players might think
a bit more carefully about screen time if it were presented this way ("X
points available, total of ads plus disads no more than Z").
>>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.
>That's not really so strange, it's just that most times we consider that
>to be part of picking the game, rather than the first part of the game
>itself.
It's not something I've seen in a game before, even a nominally
universal one which might be expected to have such a component. I think
the reason for this is largely that, because this game is all
collaborative and improvised, there's no need for the GM to do massive
amounts of advance work; in a more conventional game it would put an
entirely unreasonable burden on him.
--
Roger, gaming grognard
Lots of role-playing stuff: http://tekeli.li/
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