[Primetime Adventures] Dark Fragrance
Roger:
I think this might be the flipside of a very good thread -- (PTA) Players wanting their PCs to fail? -- which I would recommend to your consideration.
Don't feel too bad -- lots and lots of shows with professional writers have fallen into exactly this trap. The dude has some money and holy crap it's a big deal whether he spends it on the thing he wants or whether he spends it on the thing his dad wants him to spend it on. Then the critical moment comes and... ah, no worries, there's enough money for both. It's a big cheat, and everyone knows it, and it totally sucks.
That being said, it's still your job, even in PTA, as a player to strive towards the best interests of your character, in my opinion. You have quite enough to worry about. The Producer should be shoving you into the tough choices. It's his job to exclude the weak cheaty middle.
The thing I'd like to hear more about is the Bangs, or more specifically, the Bang procedure. I get the sense, perhaps inaccurately, that you, the player, is as surprised by the Bang as the character is. So I'd like to hear more about how Bangs happen at your table.
Cheers,
Roger
Chris_Chinn:
Hi Roger,
I'm not sure Sushu's full procedure for setting up Bangs, though she mentioned prepping for session is in, some ways, like prepping a lesson plan for school. A useful lesson I learned from GM'ing our last game, that I passed on to her, was that since the first scene goes to the GM, to hit hard with a conflict right away. PTA helps, in that the players give you a set of "Next time..." scenes which serve as great jumping off points.
For us, sometimes the situations were "Whoa!" surprising for us as players, sometimes I could see things coming- Han Zhen getting set up to rob his own father's house was something I saw coming as soon as the mention of robbing the rich was brought up. Obviously, though, it's easier to take an "audience" mindset when the scene isn't focused on your character.
And then there's the sort of interplay between player characters that surprises almost everyone. Jono had Han Zhen come to Ling Bai looking for a substitute father-figure, and Ling Bai, being a traditionalist, totally yelled him out about being an unfilial son, and how much his father must have struggled and worked for him to have a good life. Not only did it break the expected trope, it also worked well for putting pressure back on Han Zhen as a character - not letting him escape facing his father. I didn't plan that, but it worked out perfectly in play and really set the tone for the last act of the campaign.
Chris
Jono:
Sushu did quite a detailed write-up about how she preps and GMs. It's here: http://summercomfort.livejournal.com/541550.html
She always keeps detailed notes about the game on her laptop. (This enabled us to recall the "next time on..." scenes even when a month passed between sessions). She would do what she called "lesson planning" by looking at what had happened so far and writing out ideas for what could happen next.
She has very little experience with "trad" RPGs having only played D&D like, twice ever, so she's never really suffered from most of the common gamer hang-ups and dysfunctions. It's interesting to watch her running a game for the first time and discovering the things that I've been struggling with for years. Like she said this:
Quote
Wow, I didn't know how little of planned background stuff ever get used. Thus far for me, it's about 30-20-50: 30% gets used that session, 20% can be salvaged for later possibilities, and 50% is completely scrapped. That's ... not very efficient use of planned material.
Chris_Chinn:
Oh wow, I totally forgot about that post!
Yeah, over the course of a season, Bangs get better as you get a better read on what the players are -really- interested in, the nuances of their Issues and Relationships, and what kinds of conflicts causes them to spend Traits and Fanmail.
Chris
Christoph Boeckle:
Thank you Jono for this detailed answer!
I'm really liking the idea of those partial scenes. Let me see if I got this straight: partial scenes were short conflict-less scenes about secondary characters. Did protagonists ever appear in them directly?
I get what you say concerning your issue about not asking. Alas I have no good advice. I hope you'll find some way out next game!
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