[Primetime Adventures] Dark Fragrance
Jono:
The phenomenon I was describing wasn't game-ruining by any stretch; it just created some rough patches.
You're right, making a Conflict and using my "Moneyhaver" edge would have been the sensible and obvious thing to do. I'm trying to figure out why I *didn't* do that. I had this weird mindset going on where I thought that in order to enact a cunning financial plan, it was necessary for me, the player, to come up with and describe a plan that was sound and realistic. Thinking about it after the game it's obvious that this is not the case and has never been the case in PTA, and yet while I was playing that's how I was thinking.
It's much like how in the previous PTA game, the Star Wars one, I kept trying to come up with a tactically sound battle plan as a player. Which led to all that silly business with my leaving Coruscant to go round up some rebel scum to help me with my next assault. Which led to boring and pointless scene before diving back into the real situation with nothing really having changed.
Since it happened in the Star Wars game too, maybe my lack of confidence with this setting wasn't the culprit after all. Hm. My own mind is a mystery to me sometimes.
I guess part of it might be that in PTA I'm always aware that conflicts are a limited resource. Only one of them per scene, I only get a scene once each time around the table, and there's only so many in a session before the budget runs out. All of which inspires a weird desire to strategize about what to "spend" my conflicts on, and a desire to avoid conflicts if they're not "important enough". Which might have to do with why I didn't just call a conflict over "Does my cunning financial plan work?".
Chris_Chinn:
Hi Jono,
There's actually a lot of strategizing you can do with PTA, but it all revolves on fictional positioning, story capital and where the focus of play goes.
For example, in the second-to-last session, I was at Screen Presence 1, and you were having your Spotlight episode. I spent one scene on my own goals (trying to get soup to Tien Mi Mi) before I realized that I would either have to spend a lot of Fanmail to do anything, or accept failing, and there wasn't anything I particularly wanted to fail at, at that time.
So after that one scene, I deliberately pushed all of my scenes and actions to be exactly what PTA says- be a supporting character during someone else's Spotlight episode- everything my character did after that point, aimed towards your character and his Issue.
Not only did it make it a better session, it also meant I didn't get saddled with a lot of failures and problems during that episode- whenever the scene included both of us, you naturally took the spotlight as appropriate to the Screen Presence. I also ended up getting more Fanmail without necessarily spending it, during that session.
Obviously, though, all of that is naturally comes out if you just stay in the TV mindset- it's someone else's Spotlight episode and you're a supporting character - you don't need to think of the math or advantages, you just go with it and it works.
Chris
Christoph Boeckle:
Hello guys
Could you give an example of a partial scene and how it was different to elaborate scene framing, please?
Jono, did you feel that just asking the other two players what they held as reasonable concerning the money issue and have a quick discussion to get on the same page would have been bad role playing? Or that it would break their enjoyment of the genre? From your message I get the idea that you put a lot of value in offering a quality portrayal of your character, and yet you were reluctant to ask the missing info to achieve that level of play.
Jono:
Hi Christoph,
About those "partial scenes". They were usually just a couple sentences each. Here's a paraphrase of one since I don't remember the exact details:
"We see Yu Ying* reading the note you left, and then we see her sprinting across rooftops in the night, wearing her ninja garb, jumping from one to the next. The camera pans up and we see the moon is reflecting off the water in the harbor. She's heading towards the warehouses near the docks."
*- (gah, what was her name? Something with a Y... I'm drawing a blank)
That would be the whole scene, just a few sentences. Then we'd go on with the next "real" scene in the PTA turn order.
The above scene happened right after another scene where Ling Bai had dropped some information about what this evil gang boss was up to (human trafficking, smuggling women in the cargo of ships, to be sold into prostitution) and where he was hiding out (in the warehouse near the docks). Yu Ying is a secondary character, but we know she's a badass fighter and we know she's going to have a huge grudge against the gang boss when she finds out. The partial scene establishes that she's found the info and that she's decided to head off to challenge the gang boss alone. This creates an expectation for later that Ying is going to be in trouble. We don't know what KIND of trouble, yet - maybe she'll kill the gang boss and then get caught by the police. Maybe she'll show up later having taken a beating, looking for help or protection. Maybe the gang boss will be dead and one of the protagonists will be blamed for it. It was up in the air, creating tension. Any player could then have taken up the Ying-vs-gang-boss story thread at any time, and run in their own direction with it.
We didn't use any formal procedure for narration rights. One person would start and others would speak up and add in details. It was very ad-hoc, based on a kind of shared intuition. We often started the narration with "I see..." or "We see..." or "I think we see...". What we meant was "the audience sees". Chris started phrasing stuff that way, to emphasize that this is what the audience is seeing, not something my character is seeing or doing. I liked that phrasing enough to pick it up and start doing it too.
Partial scenes came up at times when the logic of TV storytelling required a scene there to establish what was happening, but it wasn't important enough for the next player to want to use up their whole turn on it. (I want to use my scene for my own character, dammit!) Partial scenes were especially handy for connecting the results of one character's actions to another character even if those characters hadn't been directly interacting. It was also handy for showing what secondary characters were up to. I felt like they helped the whole story cohere better. Made later twists feel like they had been set up and weren't just pulled out of thin air.
Another example: "We see all the women who were rescued from the smuggling ring working at the nightclub. Ling Mei is like 'how are we going to find jobs for all these people?'. But since they're from all over China they know all the different local dialects and how to make the traditional meals. We see some customers going 'This is great! Just like my homeland!'. "
A real simple bit of narration just to let us know what happened to the women we rescued.
Jono:
Quote
Jono, did you feel that just asking the other two players what they held as reasonable concerning the money issue and have a quick discussion to get on the same page would have been bad role playing? Or that it would break their enjoyment of the genre? From your message I get the idea that you put a lot of value in offering a quality portrayal of your character, and yet you were reluctant to ask the missing info to achieve that level of play.
Erm. I don't feel it would have been bad role-playing. I'm not some sort of method-actor, "never break character!" guy, if that's what you're imagining. We do a lot of out-of-character table talk in our PTA games, throwing around ideas for what's going to happen next, cracking jokes, etc. I can't really imagine PTA without the kibbitzing.
It's more like, asking Chris and Sushu about the money just *didn't occur to me* while I was playing. I don't know why.
I think it often happens that when my character is faced with a really tough immediate decision, I go "oh holy crap!" and then I get a kind of tunnel vision about it, where I'm only thinking about what *I* would do if I was in that situation. I get into some kind of... deep Actor Stance I guess? Which means I don't even see options that should be fairly obvious. It happened in Star Wars PTA, too.
Thing is, I'm faced with tough immediate decisions a LOT, because both Chris and Sushu are great at bringing the crazy Bangs. (one of my favorites from this game: My wannabe communist-revolutionary student friends decided it was time to raid a rich family's house and forcibly redistribute the wealth... and they picked the house of my father who had recently disowned me. And they wanted me to lead the raid. Oh holy crap!)
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