[PTA] Players wanting their PCs to fail?
Ron Edwards:
P.P.S. Why Taffy the Lich Slayer finds herself fighting a vampire in my example, I cannot say. Somehow it worked out that way as I typed.
Frank Tarcikowski:
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The net effect of this is to pre-narrate two paths for the story to take, and then determine which one gets taken. I submit that this is actually counter to the rules of PTA because it utterly negates the role of the high-card participant's narration.
Yes! I couldn't point my finger at it, but I've seen that happen in play and felt kind of uneasy about it. I do submit, though, that I know some people who play it that way and feel it's the best that role-playing gets. So who am I to criticize?
- Frank
Ron Edwards:
Hi Frank,
I do have some criticisms, actually, of that viewpoint. They're based on carefully observing play and play-reporting after this issue arose like a rotten corpse's belly inflating, sometime around GenCon 2005.
However, despite my urgent desire to puncture that problem as I see it, I also realize that we're talking about Hal's game and group, not any "they" or "them," who aren't here in the discussion. There's no point in a person dealing with a problem-issue if it's the same person who's claiming it exists.
Hal, to keep it on track with your group and play so far, what do you think fits or not in my last post? It seems to me as if you're already 90% of the way to adjusting play to deal with the issues you've raised (90% based only on what you've written, so it could well be all the way), so let us know whether I've gone out of the parameters of talking about that.
Best, Ron
Halzebier:
Quote from: Ron Edwards on June 30, 2008, 03:44:59 PM
What I'm saying is that I've seen PTA play reported in which a ton of that stuff seems to get resolved in some kind of story-conference dialogue prior to the card draw, again, leaving the final narrator with little or nothing to do - which I think usually yields a limping, basically low-function kind of freeform as the primary medium of play. (At most, it makes exactly one person happy, the one who likes to spin out stuff that happens for everyone else to listen to, or who likes yap-until-we-agree negotiations about what happens.)
This characterizes the current state of our PTA game quite well, as the number of 'story-conferences' and instances of rambling narration have gone up dramatically in our third session.
Let me relate a number of points:
(1)
Carl's beastmaster character Hugh has the issue "Mysterious Origins". Our show's opening credits introduces everyone's character a la Magnum, A-Team etc and Hugh's scene shows (1) how, as a baby, he is magically tattoed on the back by a shaman in the presence of his important looking parents, (2) abducted in a stormy night, (3) brutally tattooed a second time (a process which suppresses the original tattoo and turns it invisible), (4) left in the wild, (5) raised by wolves, and (6) that he ends up in the circus.
(2)
Episode two (= session three, as we did not count the pilot) was Hugh's spotlight episode so solving at least an important part of the riddle of his origins was on the agenda.
In an early scene, the travelling circus hastily broke camp to escape the baron's men (angered by a mishap in the opening scene which killed his housekeeper) and Hugh wanted to use his beastmaster powers to throw off the hounds.
I stated that the baron's party intended to catch up with and surround the circus. Carl invested a lot of fan mail, won the stakes, and narrated how Hugh turned the forest's wildlife against the pursuers.
(This entailed a far higher power level than this fantasy setting is accustomed to, by the way, and this power-creep also seems to be a trend with us -- Carl's character wasn't the only one turning out to be vastly more powerful than originally envisioned, and when we played The Pool last year, it was just the same.)
Next, Carl proceeded to narrate how Hugh's powers protected the travelling circus in the following weeks -- wolves driving away a hungry ogre, attempts at fishing in a creek yielding spectacular results and so on and so on.
This way of using one's narration rights - i.e., narrating the conflict's outcome and then adding lots and lots of things such as having visions of the future - was in evidence from session one but it's becoming more frequent.
(3)
A few scenes later, Carl wished for a scene in the woods with two NPCs -- "a well-meaning one in the garb of my parents" and "the ill-meaning one who paid Andrielle to apply the ink (and thereby reinforce the suppression of my original tattoo)".
I handed out the first NPC to another player, Henry, and all three characters clashed in the woods. There were two major problems here: Firstly, the agenda of the NPCs was not defined, so it was basically up for grabs. Secondly, Carl had most of his character's origin story already in mind.
The two opposing NPCs threw insults at each other and finally went for each other's throat. Hugh looked on, trying to determine who he could trust. Carl won the stakes and narration rights. He narrated (1) the ill-meaning character mortally wounding the well-meaning one, (2) Hugh preventing a finishing blow, (3) the ill-meaning character fleeing, and (4) the dying, well-meaning character telling Hugh about his past.
After the game Carl, somewhat contritely, noted that he had had a strong vision for Hugh's origins and had not wanted another player (including the producer) to fill in the details.
I've been mulling a bit over this. I think it's natural to define some integral things about one's character as off-limits, but I think it would have been much better if we had found a way to establish these things about Hugh in a more natural way (a flashback for the audience only, maybe?). Then the two NPCs could have gone into that scene with an actual agenda and we could have had a conflict about what is revealed (or taken to the grave).
(Keeping secrets from other players - and not just other characters - seems an awful habit for PTA.)
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One last thing: the ink scene - it seems to me that "does he notice" is almost never an engaging conflict. When it is, it's usually late in a story when a lot has already happened, and all the possible consequences of noticing or not-noticing are highly charged and will yield very, very different reactions. When it occurs as you describe, it's not a conflict because "does he notice" will only yield the obvious reaction of him saying, "Gee, what are you doing?" In other words, it's not a conflict of interest.
How might your group handle that (i.e. what are decent stakes here and who draws cards against whom)?
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I think they're serious issues too, the kind of thing that leads to people having Teh Awesome (they think) in their first session and then fizzling out as later play somehow seems not so great and they can't figure out why. Your group seems like it might be sort-of in sight of this fate, in the long run, so I guess I'm getting invested in helping. Let me know if I'm pushing your buttons or preaching too much.
You're spot-on, almost eerily so. I think we are intoxicated by (a) a lot of interesting stuff happening (the pace of our regular fantasy game is so slow that I dropped out six months ago) and (b) having unprecedented power to contribute meaningful decisions and new story elements. We're happily rolling along right now, but I agree 100% that more focus would benefit us.
I've repeatedly suggested the players "get into character and just play as you used to" (i.e. tell the GM what your character is trying to do), but I'm not pushing hard because I don't want to break the good mood.
Regards,
Hal
Ron Edwards:
Ummm ... how brutal should I be? Should I go with the cestus or with the talk on the porch?
That's a serious inquiry, because I want this discussion to be as socially-centered as if we were talking face to face in a specific venue.
Best, Ron
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