[PTA] Players wanting their PCs to fail?
Ron Edwards:
Hi guys,
Morgan, I think you have it backwards. I suggest that you are describing a specialized version of what I’m talking about as positive, not a “good version” of what I’m criticizing.
I think I know exactly what you’re talking about because I’ve done it myself. A fair amount of our PTA show “The Heel” tended in that direction in play, as did the PTA game run by Georgios that I played in Berlin. I also think it’s a constructive feature of playing Polaris.
Marshall’s correct that Authority is the key issue, as I mentioned in my posts as well. In “rules” PTA play, Content and Situation Authority lie with the Producer, with the latter developing further into conflict-situations via near-standard role-playing within scenes. Outcome Authority lies with the narrator’s interpretation of card outcomes. Plot Authority lies partly with the process of deciding who’s got a scene next and whether it’s character or conflict, but mostly simply by springboarding off whatever happened in the last scene.
In this other way we’re talking about, basically, it revises the distribution of Situation Authority by spreading it around, maximizing the basic idea of “everyone can talk” into “everyone does talk,” and shrinking the Producer’s role over Situation into Authority-discussion-leader rather than Authority-person. It also shifts the Outcome Authority to the group as a whole and thereby shrinks the narrator’s role.
What I’m saying is that none of these forms of Authority are broken or thrown into a fragile state; they are merely distributed differently from textual-rules PTA play.
The Situation/Outcome discussion can also introduce a stronger element of Plot Authority into the whole of play, more into a Polaris mode instead of leaving it as loosey-goosey as textual-rules PTA play (which is very like Sorcerer and Dust Devils in this regard).
(I’m not surprised that a number of people have contacted me over the last year or so requesting explanation of the difference between Situation and Plot Authority. I have always replied, post in Actual Play about a scene from any role-playing game you’ve ever participated in, and I will use that to explain it to you. To date, no one has.)
To sum up, the big shift in the actual rules-of-play is toward a consensus-based approach, which I claim is the opposite of what I’m criticizing, which is clearly an individually-competitive based approach.
What makes them appear superficially similar is that the resolution mechanics are Drifted significantly toward Fortune-at-the-End instead of Middle.
However, I’m suggesting that in your (and my) case, this is perfectly valid and interesting Drift, and whether it’s “still PTA” is interesting but not an urgent matter. It’s valid because Authority and related concerns are altered from the PTA rules, but altered in a new, functional, and group-affirming configuration of their own. It’s sort of Polaris-by-way-of-PTA.
Whereas in the version of play which I’m criticizing, the group investment in play (specifically the SIS, “what is happening) is ruptured by the proposed alternate narrations, rather than confirmed. The seeming social unity of the discussion is actually social tension rather than collaboration.
Here are some points in your posts which I think support this conclusion.
1. Steve, you make it clear that the topic at hand in the SIS is still character-centric conflict exactly as I described in my posts above. Although the method of discussing and resolving it is different from the PTA rules, the “it” remains precisely the same.
2. Morgan, I think it’s very important that you specified that this Drift or shift or whatever is an added technique to play which otherwise is very like what I describe above (the positive kind, PTA by the rules kind). In other words, it’s a kind of Drift-y enrichment of playing PTA rather than breaking with it.
I think both of these points show that what you’re talking about is really different from what Hal and I are discussing about his play experience.
3. Granted, this last point is comparatively lightweight. Steve, you specified that the discussions generated possibilities of future outcomes, which may mean as distinct from absolute dictations of them. That might mean that although the final narrator’s role is diminished, it is in fact present, and might still carry some weight if called for. Based on my experience, though, I do find that the final narration using these techniques is mainly filling in Color, so I’m not going to claim this point as a big part of my argument. I’m pretty much pointing to a care in phrasing your post which leads me to devote further attention to it in later play.
Let me know what you think. This is a very important topic.
Best, Ron
morgue:
Hi Ron,
I've been mulling on this all day, and I'm entirely comfortable with your characterization.
Hmm. Here's a further comment - I'm curious to see if I'm thinking about this in the same way as you are.
Our Drifted local-PTA is functional in its own right, but with its emphasis on (a) fortune-at-the-end and (b) shared situation authority, it would be even more prone to the social tension you have talked about. If we sat down again and played that way, we might find ourselves moving into the style of play you criticise more easily than we would if we were playing it as written, because (a) is a point of similarity and (b) is a point of vulnerability to exploitation/abuse.
Steve's description earlier reminds me of a specific aspect of our play that emerged over several sessions. We began structuring conflicts heavily towards a very specific model - that *every* conflict should be a test of the character's issue. Success would involve the character somehow taking a step towards resolving their character issue (say, by living up to their ideals), and failure should involve the character taking a backwards step or complicating their issue (say, by succumbing to habit or temptation or whatever). In this way, we ended up taking key character-behaviour decisions out of the hands of players and putting them at stake in the resolution system. You could phrase the conflicts thus: "I hope Joe Character acts like *this* - but I'm afraid they'll act like *that*."
Ron Edwards:
Hi Morgan (I find myself standing with your grandma regarding your name),
Here's my take on your statement: I don't think it's fair or valid to say that this Drifted-local version (which I think is very common) is more prone to dysfunctional social tension of the Chesting sort. My point is that I don't think this kind of play is related to the Chesting-type phenomenon at all.
Basically, there are three kinds of play we're talking about: A, PTA by the textual rules; B, PTA as you and I and others have Drifted it in a characteristic way; and C, Chesting-play which cannot really be called playing PTA despite the book being present at the table. As you can see, I'm saying that C is the odd man out, not B & C together. That means that it's not necessary to be concerned with how B might become C. To get see, you have to break with A, B, and any other form of functional Drift of A, as an entire group.
Now, that does leave open the question of whether B play harbors certain pitfalls of its own. I think it does, actually. At least in my experience, it tends to open the door for one or another person to start narrating scene-events more or less as a monologue, telling everyone else what's going on. I've also seen the nominal central player of the moment be steamrolled by a fellow player, which is more likely to happen in B than in A. And finally, speaking for what makes B less fun for me than A (when B becomes really the mode rather than an add-on), slightly-hyper group discussions about what exactly the conflict is happening and what it's about are extremely not-fun when they don't work well. When that happens, it's not a glitch or slightly-lessened moment, it's a brick wall that brings down the enjoyment of the whole session, for me.
So B play, as I see it, works much better as a modifier of A than as a full replacement for it. It seems to me that you, Steve, and the others may have been able to enjoy it maximally specifically for that reason.
Frank, I wonder if you and Giorgios might be able to enjoy PTA play together with that distinction in mind? I think the three of us could do it pretty well, actually. Maybe next time in Berlin.
Your point about every conflict becoming explicitly about the character's issue is a good one. I agree with your points and I think playing in this way tends to diminish the Issue rather than magnify it. There's never any situational context for a really meaty Issue-centric crisis, if every conflict is that crisis.
It's a hard thing to explain, because we spent so many years here beating the idea that "conflicts are relevant to the character" into people's heads, because they were baffled by the very notion of a "character issue." This is definitely the other side of the coin: "Now that you know conflicts can be relevant to an Issue, realize that it's OK to lighten up a little bit and touch upon issues only as commentary within the events of a conflict which doesn't light up the issue like a Christmas tree." This way a series of interesting Plot scenes can occur which generate mounting tension on a character's Issue, as the session proceeds - and the Christmas-tree, hard-core, My-Issue-In-Lights conflict will appear when it's most germane to the player via the character, in its own good time.
I really think that throwing the character's decision about what to do into the outcome of the resolution mechanic isn't a strong modification, in fact, I think it's considerably weaker. I have found repeatedly that PTA resolution works very well when everyone knows exactly what the character is really doing, just as in Dust Devils. The narrator in these games has remarkable leeway to establish the character's competence and the scope of the action's direct effects, in the context of the success or failure.
The above two points are actually related, because if you play in the sense described in the first one, then conflicts are often initiated by characters doing things, and so the problem in the second one tends not to arise.
Best, Ron
Frank Tarcikowski:
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Frank, I wonder if you and Giorgios might be able to enjoy PTA play together with that distinction in mind? I think the three of us could do it pretty well, actually.
Sure! I never doubted that.
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Your point about every conflict becoming explicitly about the character's issue is a good one.
Thanks! I remember making that point (and a few related ones) in an older discussion, [Heritage] Fun, but oddly unsatisfying play. Not in this thread, though. ;o)
- Frank
Frank Tarcikowski:
Oh, silly me. You meant the point Morgan made. Of course you did. Um, yeah. I agree.
- Frank
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