[PTA] Players wanting their PCs to fail?
Marshall Burns:
Hang on there, the made-up example with Bob there was one of a player suggesting what someone else's character does. Which is an important distinction, because that someone-else's response to that suggestion IS an application of authority, and it is part of System even if it's not part of the "resolution mechanics."
Ron Edwards:
Hello,
I'm not sure what I can offer as a prescriptive, except these three abstract points. For a social, proactive activity to be successful, three things must necessarily be in place.
1. The people must trust that the activity's procedures actually work and they must be willing to understand them and use them for what they are.
2. They must want to do exactly this thing, at this time (to the exclusion of other things), and with these particular people with whom they are doing it (as opposed to "just anyone").
3. They must be willing to make mistakes as they learn how to do the activity, as well as to accept however-well-it-works at a given time as a means to enjoy it better next time.
All of these are normal and common expectations for most people engaged in most such activities. They're not really well-established in gaming culture, as I see it.
Regarding your last two posts, it seems to me that your group might do well to consider whether #1-3 are in place, and whether they want them to be in place.
But even before that, I recommend thinking about something that you wrote: your goal to convert the other players. That makes me less confident about the whole endeavor. It's not the same as the more positive situation of people gathering to do what they want even if some of them aren't sure about how to do it exactly. It doesn't lend itself well to the points listed above.
Best, Ron
morgue:
I sent a PM to Ron about this thread that he suggested I post.These are the relevant parts.
My response to your comments on this subject (I read the "chesting" threads on S-G a couple years ago and have seen other instances over the years) has consistently been an intuitive agreement that you're dead right and that's how it ought to be, and in my (sadly infrequent) play of these games since, I've pushed in that direction with success.
However, I have to acknowledge that a mid-length game of PTA I played through with friends (run by hix) before I'd encountered this line of thought did, heavily, get into the pre-conflict discussion - and it was incredibly successful. I think it delivered exactly the right play experience, with conflicts that were always the most awesome conflict that we could come to. Often, but not always, the outcomes would be relatively settled, and narration rights tended to be used in play to throw crucial details in the mix and to mess with and elaborate on the main outcome, which seemed to be enough for our group, although it fits perfectly with your concerns about that general play making narrators disappear - for many conflicts, the narration wasn't really worth much in the final analysis. (I am compelled to add that there were many conflicts that did work exactly as you recommend, with no pre-narration at all, and they worked fine as well.)
I'm not sure how that works, that I can feel you're right but have direct experience of a contradictory example. I'm not convinced that what we were doing fits Valamir's counterargument either.
My current thoughts on this are that we stumbled into a functional version of this play that might well not generalise (even to us trying to do the same thing again now); that this kind of play therefore is risky but not inevitably dysfunctional; and, crucially, that there were specific things we were doing that allowed us to be successful. The trick, of course, is that I'm not sure what those specific things were. I suspect that there might be something of value in figuring them out, not so we can say "here's the way to do pre-narration right!" but just of general use in understanding how people are interacting with these kinds of resolution systems.
So I guess I'm wondering if you've previously addressed people saying they've had functional play in this mode - I'd be keen to read a thread on this subject.
---
[I'll resist the urge to add extra context now, mostly because I need to leave the house in ten minutes and have many things to do. Of course, I invite comment from more than just Ron, as appropriate.]
hix:
To elaborate on what Morgue's said, our process seemed to be driven by the joy of discovering what made our characters tick. Thinking about it, I'd say the following steps were involved:
+ As a group, we always had a unanimous consensus about whether a situation had turned into a conflict.
+ All of us were willing and curious to explore what the precise nature of that conflict was. Usually, that meant probing (as a group) the psychologies of the characters involved, and how their Issues could manifest.
+ Sometimes, after going through that process, we'd think we'd settled on a conflict but someone would express a reservation that we hadn't gone 'deep' enough. We'd then reexplore it, and come up with something that satisfied all of us.
+ There was always a point where, as a group, we'd say that we'd clarified what the conflict was about in everyone's minds, and that we were ready to go to the Draw.
+ As a consequence of all that discussion, possibilities for good and bad outcomes would usually have emerged. While this was a case of us pre-determining the outcomes, I think we focused strongly on characters' emotional states and on the immediate changes to their relationships with other characters involved in the conflict. There was never any massive forward planning on our parts.
My interpretation of what we were doing was that we took great pleasure in making our characters' lives as difficult as possible, because we were all fascinated with what they would do next.
(The write-up for our game, Phoenix, is here. Inspired by the seige of the Branch Davidian compound at Waco, it's essentially a small town drama crossed with a creepy sci-fi vibe about a cult that might be taking over all of the locals.)
(Matt, who joined us for Season 2, also talks about the joy of character failure in PTA here.)
Ron Edwards:
Thanks guys! It's a big day so my reply will probably be delayed.
Best, Ron
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