In the afternoon, I was in a game of Primetime Adventures (PTA). This is the game that tries to create good television. I'm hoping to use this as the ruleset for a game I'd like to run for Annie so I was anxious to play through a session and see how it worked "on the table".
Hey, Tom! Glad you got to try PTA. I haven't overlooked your email asking about the game - I just hadn't had a chance to get to it. In the meantime, you may get something out of my 20x20 post reflecting on PTA from when Dungeon Majesty was in full swing.
Here's my one real thought on running the game. (It runs counter to what seems to be the conventional internet wisdom on PTA, so feel free to disagree or ignore.) The AP posts I've seen on PTA at the Forge & Story Games have enshrined the idea that it's best played as a zany collaborative improv, where nothing gets decided until you sit down at the table.
That may work, and it's definitely neat when a game comes together out of nothing, but I note that most (all?) of those posts describe one-shots rather than complete series. I'm not sure I'd want to invest seven sessions into whatever the group happened to come up with in, say, twenty minutes of brainstorming on the first night.
At any rate, that's not how we ran Dungeon Majesty. DM was much more like a regular* game in that I pitched the original show idea to the players and got their buy-in. They had input, certainly, and they invented their characters, but I had a gestalt in mind from the start. Once we started playing, I did prep for each episode. I didn't know how each episode would go and I had to do a lot of tap-dancing on the fly, but planned the opening scenes pretty closely and I had twists and bangs and funny lines ready for the scenes that followed. (The screen presence arcs and the "next week on" scenes were great inspiration for my plotting.)
*where "regular" means "You know, regular for us. Not old school D&D or 90s railroading, but not Polaris or some Scandinavian LARP either. Regular! I know it when I see it..."
After the opening of each episode, the players framed all scenes and narrated all the outcomes they won, and we never fudged the dice, so they still had a lot of narrative power, and I had to be very flexible in my prep. It wasn't like I could railroad things even if I'd wanted to. But it wasn't all being spun out of thin air either.
I think some people in the indie scene might think we were playing PTA "wrong" (this even comes out in some of the comments to that old 20x20 post), but Dungeon Majesty was a hell of a lot of fun. I wouldn't have done it any differently.
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Hey, Tom! Glad you got to try PTA. I haven't overlooked your email asking about the game - I just hadn't had a chance to get to it. In the meantime, you may get something out of my 20x20 post reflecting on PTA from when Dungeon Majesty was in full swing.
Here's my one real thought on running the game. (It runs counter to what seems to be the conventional internet wisdom on PTA, so feel free to disagree or ignore.) The AP posts I've seen on PTA at the Forge & Story Games have enshrined the idea that it's best played as a zany collaborative improv, where nothing gets decided until you sit down at the table.
That may work, and it's definitely neat when a game comes together out of nothing, but I note that most (all?) of those posts describe one-shots rather than complete series. I'm not sure I'd want to invest seven sessions into whatever the group happened to come up with in, say, twenty minutes of brainstorming on the first night.
At any rate, that's not how we ran Dungeon Majesty. DM was much more like a regular* game in that I pitched the original show idea to the players and got their buy-in. They had input, certainly, and they invented their characters, but I had a gestalt in mind from the start. Once we started playing, I did prep for each episode. I didn't know how each episode would go and I had to do a lot of tap-dancing on the fly, but planned the opening scenes pretty closely and I had twists and bangs and funny lines ready for the scenes that followed. (The screen presence arcs and the "next week on" scenes were great inspiration for my plotting.)
*where "regular" means "You know, regular for us. Not old school D&D or 90s railroading, but not Polaris or some Scandinavian LARP either. Regular! I know it when I see it..."
After the opening of each episode, the players framed all scenes and narrated all the outcomes they won, and we never fudged the dice, so they still had a lot of narrative power, and I had to be very flexible in my prep. It wasn't like I could railroad things even if I'd wanted to. But it wasn't all being spun out of thin air either.
I think some people in the indie scene might think we were playing PTA "wrong" (this even comes out in some of the comments to that old 20x20 post), but Dungeon Majesty was a hell of a lot of fun. I wouldn't have done it any differently.