[Primetime Adventures] Dark Fragrance
Chris_Chinn:
Hi,
We just wrapped up our second campaign of Primetime Adventures (the first was based on Star Wars). The group consists of myself, Sushu, and Jono, all of us are in our late 20's to early 30's, and Jono & Sushu are married. We've been playing once-a-month games for over a year now, and it's been working out well. Jono & I were the players, Sushu was GM'ing for the first time.
Our series is based on Hong Kong action-dramas, based in the 1920's in Shanghai, following the situations around the "Night Fragrance" nightclub. The protagonists were:
- Ling Bai, middle aged martial artist from the sticks who has moved to Shanghai to help his sister, Ling Mei, run Night Fragrance.
- Han Zhen, a young rich boy going to college who has gotten swept up in faux Communist revolutionary crowd, who frequents the club.
Everything involved a lot of triads, dirty fights in alleys, rivalries, unsavory deals and compromises, and struggles between family and ideals.
We had a great time, and Sushu found GMing it to be pretty easy to work with. She's a teacher and noted that prepping to play was like preparing a teaching plan. She had this really excellent quote, "It's not focusing on outcome, but the experience that matters."
PTA is a deceptively simple game- it has a lot of emergent qualities that only show up with longer term play and people developing skillfulness with the system.
TV Mindset
Ben Lehman once pointed out that PTA works great when everyone is trying to play a game that is a TV show, and works like shit when everyone tries to use it as GURPS Light.
This is absolutely true, and part of it is that the former keeps everyone focused on relevant fiction with quick pacing with the system supporting, while the latter only highlights how little "meat" there often is when people attempt to do a casual "And then, and then, and then" series of events without editing or emotional weight applied to some.
The dangerous part of this is that sometimes it's easy to fall into "storyboarding" or attempting to negotiate the future story without actually playing it out. We found this mostly came up when it came to conflicts, and trying to figure out stakes.
I personally found it was best to just go with a gut decision about what stakes made sense, rather than over-think it, and it helped for us to step back and call out storyboarding when we found ourselves slipping into it:
"Hey, stop. This is what you're trying to do, let's pull the cards and play it out after we see the results."
This happened in the last game with a conversation between characters, but it was easy enough to simply start putting out cards as a visual signal that it was time to just hit the mechanics.
Partial Scenes
We found at several points in play, it was useful to briefly describe a "partial scene" - that is, a montage, a quick shot of foreshadowing, etc. No real dialogue, no real conflict. We didn't count these as full scenes in the PTA sense, and we negotiated them all on the fly, but they were often a useful and necessary step at times to bridging the gap between the usual high intensity conflict scenes and sometimes, just fitting with the expectations of what you'd see on TV.
I'm not sure if there's a good way to fully structure these or if that's just how they need to work.
The Issue isn't the Issue, the Spotlight isn't everything
It's really neat to notice that whatever Issue you write down, probably isn't the real issue for the character, but you'll figure it out in hindsight. It's rather, a direction that in the pursuit of, that you'll find out what's really going on.
Likewise, the Spotlight episode might be the time when everyone focuses on your character and your character's Issue, but often it's the period AFTER the Spotlight when we really see who and what your character is made of. Because the Spotlight episode gives your character a lot of power to win conflicts, your character puts forward a lot of thematic statements... but afterwards is where we really see whether they can live up to them, compromise them, or drop them altogether.
I imagine if you wanted to play a tragedy, putting your Spotlight episode early in a Season would probably mirror that a lot.
(My own character, Ling Bai, started off as a stand up guy who was just trying to make an honest living while getting sucked deeper and deeper into triad gangster drama, during the Spotlight, he broke all ties... but it was the two episodes afterwards where he then found the only way to really protect everything was to be just as violent as the people he was opposing...)
Also- it's good to apply TV Mindset to when you want your Spotlight episode. My character started with "Feels like a loser" as an Issue, and I put his Spotlight Episode at the 3rd session, because self pity gets old quick, whereas another Issue might be more interesting to tackle later in a Season.
Player Investment over time
An interesting and overlooked quality to PTA is that being able to save Fan Mail between sessions means you can rack up a lot of Fan Mail as the Season continues- at the same time, you're becoming more and more invested in the fiction and events, and thus, have more incentive to spend Fan Mail.
In a certain way, as well, because the Producer can get more Budget when you spend Fan Mail, it's a loose reward system to the Producer to encourage them to find conflicts that make you want to spend Fan Mail. It ties itself back into the basic conflict mechanics by serving as a flag to the Producer when they are hitting conflict material the players are invested in.
Positive Swinginess
Typically "Swinginess", or the tendency to shoot to extreme results is seen as a bad thing. Though, this is usually in the context of rpgs where the mechanics are about character survival AKA continued player participation.
Since PTA has you do stakes setting, in which the results aren't whether the protagonists live or die, but rather outcomes and complications, the swinginess is both important and exciting, but not game-killing in any fashion.
We've had a lot of times where 6 cards have lost to 3 cards and similar upsets which makes it always tense, even if you have the advantage.
Screen Presence 1 - Losing to Win
Screen Presence 1 means you're probably going to get hammered in any Conflict you get into. So, I found it works really well to pick conflicts you want to lose and/or spend your character's efforts and scene setting on a character with a higher Spotlight. For the latter, it means you usually end up in less conflicts while at the same time making a better session for another player by playing the support role.
Between getting tragically slammed AND supporting other players, it's pretty interesting that Screen Presence 1 episodes seemed ideal for me to get more Fan Mail. In a lot of ways, because you're so limited on what you can do, it's easy to focus on just playing the best you can and getting Fan Mail as you go.
Chris
Roger:
Super interesting, Chris -- thanks for this.
One question: Can you give us some idea of just how much fan mail was being issued per session, as a rough average?
Thanks,
Roger
Chris_Chinn:
Hi Roger,
Sure thing. With two players, less Fan Mail goes around, especially since the GM isn't allowed to give Fan Mail in PTA by the rules. I know in our previous game we skipped that rule, and I can't recall if we did the same for this campaign.
I remember myself and Jono each getting somewhere between 2-5 Fan Mail a session, primarily depending on the issues and how "on" we happened to be that night. Interestingly enough, Spotlight 1 episodes are a great time to earn Fan Mail, between being a good support for other characters AND running yourself through the wringer by choosing conflicts to lose.
By the end of our 5 session Season, I had accumulated 6 Fan Mail going into that last session. I think Jono had saved 5 Fan Mail going into the previous session, which was his Spotlight episode.
Chris
Jono:
I was one of the players in this game. My character was Han Zhen, the wanna-be Communist revolutionary. My Issue was "naivete / privilege" - meaning I had grown up in conditions of luxury and so while I had the best intentions of fighting for the working class, I had basically had no contact with them and no understanding of what their lives were like... or how the world really worked outside of my sphere.
Han Zhen also thought that he could learn martial arts from a book. Same thing.
I got REALLY lucky with the card flips the first few times I tried to fight someone for real. This was one example of the swinginess that Chris mentioned -- really, Han Zhen *shouldn't* have been beating these people. But we narrated it that I did some move that was so inappropriate for the situation that it caught the other person off-guard. After getting lucky like this a couple times, HZ had quite an inflated idea of his own kung fu prowess. This kept ratcheting up the tension for his inevitable comeuppance. It was a dramatic irony sort of thing, where the audience knows something the character doesn't. I got a kick out of it (no pun intended).
There's this thing I want to talk about which was a continuous problem for me in this game. Not game-breaking, but significantly problematic.
I should start by mentioning that Chris and Sushu are both big fans of Wu Xia and related genres -- from wire-fu movies to Chinese historical war dramas to martial-arts comics, they've had a lot of experiences with these tropes. I have not. I mean, I like martial arts, I like Chinese history, I've enjoyed what little I've seen and read, but I'm not real versed in the cliches, the expectations, the story structure, the cultural references, etc.
(I watched "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" for the 2nd time a couple nights ago, with Sushu there to point things out. She revealed whole worlds of deeper meaning there that I missed the first time around.)
So in our Dark Fragrance game, the other two players had this rapport, this unspoken shared understanding of Color, almost a whole visual language, that I was missing out on. I didn't have a lot of real clear pictures in my head of what 1920s Shanghai would even have looked like (despite looking up some archive photographs). This is a handicap in PTA where describing things visually, TV-style, is so important.
(I think now I might understand now how a non-reader of fantasy fiction must feel when invited to game with people who are all well-versed in a shared milieu of kobolds and halberds and druids and so on...)
Anyway, I was determined to stick it out and do my best anyway. Even if some things went over my head and I had to ask some dumb questions, I enjoyed the game, and I *really* enjoyed seeing my wife GM an extended campaign for the first time, in a genre that she's so excited about, and prove herself to be *really good at it*.
There were some awkward moments. Like, I wanted my character to be well-versed in high society etiquette type stuff. So I would say something that I meant to be respectful and flattering, only to the other players' imagination of the scene and their understanding of the in-game cultural context, it came off as awkward or silly or whatever. I would have to fall back on "Well Han Zhen would know what to say, he says *that*." The three of us are tight enough that we can work through this stuff and keep the game moving, but there were some times when it distanced me from the role-playing I wanted to do.
Because of my lack of confidence with the genre and setting, relative to the other players, I felt uncomfortable injecting a lot of details of my own unless I was building on characters and situations already established. I didn't want to, like, get it *wrong*. I know this is dumb, but, like, I didn't want to call some move Tiger Style if it was actually Crane Style or call some philosophy Daoist if it was actually Confucian. That kind of thing. This is somebody else's daydream I'm playing around in, better tiptoe so I don't break anything.
An example - Sushu, the producer, role-plays my character's father giving me a chunk of money and telling me to go buy up a building down by the docks (the building used by a free clinic that's helping the poor and sick in the neighborhood - OH NO loyalty to my family vs. solidarity with the downtrodden! It was a great Bang). Anyway I've got this chunk of money but, like, how much is it? No numbers were exchanged, so is it enough to... bribe the corrupt police chief who is harassing the nightclub? pay off the nightclub's debts? pay off the free clinic's debts? buy back our singer Tien Mi Mi from the rival nightclub who won her as gambling stakes earlier? Enough to do more than one of these things?
Now in a PTA game where I was more confident about the setting I might just *assert* that the money was sufficient to do thing A and also do thing B. I might just take the ambiguity left by the producer's narration and shove my own fact in there. And it would probably work out fine. But in this game, I was really uncomfortable asserting facts like that because I started thinking about the economics of 1920s shanghai and how much the police chief gets paid and how much property costs and... basically all this "realism"-based, historical, hyper-simulationist stuff... and realized that I didn't know what was a reasonable assertion to make. So I played it in a very cautious way, either assuming that I couldn't do any of those things with my dad's wad-o-cash, or else asking "permission" from the producer for anything that I wanted to do with it. Not saying this was rational, actually I think it was quite poor play on my part and that I passed up some interesting opportunities. It was especially poor play for PTA, which, I mean, there's a *reason* you don't track exactly how many dollars your character has in PTA, know what I mean? It's supposed to be fast and loose and rule-of-drama and what-would-play-well-on-TV but here I am continually slipping into this overly cautious, logistical, simulationist, actor stance, permission-seeking mode of play.
Basically I had a really hard time getting into the Director Stance which seems to be key to fun PTA play. It got bad enough that the other players had to keep on reminding me "Jono, stop thinking logistics, it's a TV show".
You see the difference between these three cases:
1. "I bribe the police chief with some of the money, then take the rest and buy a slightly smaller building." (Pushing into the SIS an assertion that the money is sufficient; stop me if you don't agree.)
2. "Can I bribe the police chief and still have enough to buy a building?" (Asking because I believe it's the GM's job to decide on all relevant facts and the player can only declare character intentions, so I need to ask permission to do anything)
3. "Is the money enough to bribe the police chief and still have enough to buy a building?" (Asking because I want to clarify my understanding of how big you were thinking when you role-played that wad of cash into existence, with the understanding that it's totally up for negotiation)
Even though number 2 and number 3 are identical on the surface, the intention behind them is quite different. I think number 2, de rigeur in many trad games, is quite poor form in PTA but I think I unintentionally slipped into that mode of interaction more than once during this game.
--Jono
Chris_Chinn:
Hi Jono,
Wow, that's really useful to hear! I didn't know you had that level of logistical questions going on while we were playing. I figured if you had an issue money-wise, you'd pull in a Conflict and use your "Rich Boy" Edge to resolve it - it's actually part of the reason I figured you took that Edge in the first place.
Chris
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