Comedy is Easy, PTA is Hard

Posted by Rob MacD on February 3, 2005 at 05:41 PM

As some of you know, I’m running a game of Primetime Adventures called Dungeon Majesty. We’re three “episodes” (game sessions) in to what will be a six episode “season,” and we’ll be playing again next week. So I’m doing some thinking about what has been, from my point of view, a terrific and funny and interesting game.

PTA is the much-talked about, much-praised game where you create an episodic television series. The premise of our particular game, which I think I’ve made a point of not committing to print or screen before this very moment, is that some amalgam of the hip “new school” screenwriters and directors—people like Paul Thomas Anderson (note his initials!), Wes Anderson, Sofia Coppola, Spike Jonze, Charlie Kaufman, David O. Russell—produced a six episode TV series about an oddly mixed group of unhappy people who come together every week to play a classic dungeon-crawly role-playing game called Dungeon Majesty. So it’s a real game about a fake TV series about a fake game, named after a real TV series about a different real game. Still with me?

Jeremiah has already posted about the mini “fan community” we’ve acquired—really just a few friends and internet friends who like to read the recaps and kibitz about them. That's been flattering and fun. I think I will want to say more at some point about the very po-mo meta-ness of our game about gaming. But my subject here is PTA more broadly.

PTA has gotten a lot of praise, here and elsewhere, and it deserves it. There may not seem to be that much meat to the game at first glance (one could explain the rules in one page) but it really is a powerful little engine. The fan mail economy, the preset screen presence, the episodic structure—everything works for me. Our game has been a big pile of fun so far. And it is true that just about anything you could imagine as a TV show can be modeled (at a high level of abstraction) with the rules.

There’s only one part of the praise for PTA I disagree with: that it is easy to run and play. I’ve seen people saying things to this effect in a number of places: that you can model anything effortlessly with the PTA rules, that PTA sessions require little prep, and that satisfying stories come together like magic. Maybe I’m just slow (I don’t think I am), or maybe I have too many ingrained gaming habits (more possible but I still doubt it), but I’m here to tell you: PTA is hard work! Fun work, yes. And fun work that leads to fun play. But easy, effortless, like magic? No way.

Zero Prep?

First, there’s this idea that running PTA requires very little prep. That’s because the players take turns framing each new scene after the first. So the GM doesn’t have to prep anything after the first scene, right? Well, no. At least, that wouldn’t work for me. Each GM in each game has their own comfort level as to how much prep they need or want before a session. Some people could run PTA without anything planned out after the first scene, but those people are the same people who could run a game of Unknown Armies or HeroQuest or anything relatively rules light with zero preparation. I am not those people.

My standards for Dungeon Majesty are just a little bit higher than my own ability to improvise from scratch. I want the DM episodes to have themes, where the events in the game within the game mimic or mirror the events in the lives of the protagonist gamers. I want clever asides and funny cool surprises and well-drawn characters and locales. Some of these things come to me while we’re playing, but some of them I have to sketch out ahead of time.

That doesn’t mean that I know where the session is going to go before we play it. Quite the opposite. My prep for PTA has evolved in an unplanned way towards something that resembles the system of bangs and kickers espoused at the Forge for Sorcerer and HeroQuest. It’s a funny combination of openness and preparedness. I come up with way more possible events than I actually use, and then the name of the game in play is listening to the players, juggling the possibilities, and hoping to spark some kind of crazy reactions between their ideas and mine. It works, and it’s fun, but it sure isn’t zero prep.

(As an aside: I trust everybody here already knows about Art Deco Melodrama and the other famous Forge threads where Ron Edwards gives advice (some would say instruction) on how to run Sorcerer. For a few months now, Mike Holmes has been doing the same thing with HeroQuest. Like Ron’s Sorcerer threads, Mike’s approach may not be for everyone. But also like Ron’s Sorcerer threads, Mike’s HeroQuest threads are full of rich advice on the craft of GMing any game. You could start with this one if you’re interested. It has the clearest explication of bangs I’ve seen to date. Or you could just scan the HeroQuest forum for Mike’s name.)

Models Anything?

Well, yes, the PTA rules can model any kind of TV series, in that they don’t model anything but a TV series. There’s no combat system, no traditional skills or stats, no real character advancement. There’s fan mail and screen presence and how to cut from scene to scene. And all this I dig! One thing that’s very appealing about PTA is that it can model a “non-genre” show like Gilmore Girls as readily as a “genre” one like Buffy or Star Trek. (Or a genre show that’s not a traditional gaming genre, like E.R. or Boston Legal.) Which is great. But again my plaintive little whine: these non-genre shows are hard! When you disallow yourself the use of demons and Nazis and globe-spanning conspiracies and “you must find the magic Mcguffin or thirty-one realities are doomed,” you have to do a lot more thinking to come up with plot lines and challenges.

There are payoffs for this work, of course. One thing I’ve noticed is that when you put away the guns and swords and the threat of violent death, hormones rush in. Every one of our protagonists, I think, is involved in some kind of story involving romance or love or the lack thereof. And that has happened very organically without being planned or forced by me, and that’s really neat. And the other non-romantic storylines are still all about real-life relationships: friendship and parenthood and self-worth and so on. I guess when you take away the Vile Space Nazis and the Plot Device of Vecna, that’s what people actually care about. Who’d-a thunk it?

Like Magic?

The third strand of the “PTA is easy” meme is that somehow when you all get together the story itself comes together like some kind of magic. Everyone contributes their amazing ideas and it all fits together and adds up to a complete and satisfying story, paced and structured just like an episode of great TV. I guess I am in half agreement with this one. Each one of our sessions has come together in the end, and added up to something really neat and fun. But it’s taken real work to get it there. Often I’ve had doubts about where we were going until we arrived. And even though (or maybe because?) all of us are experienced gamers, we are all learning a new skill set in playing PTA.

How far into a scene do you go before calling for a conflict? When do you roll? What kinds of conflicts are good ones? How much control does the narrator of a conflict’s outcome have over the other protagonists? Do you share your ideas for a scene out of character or just play in character and see where it goes? There’s all sorts of fuzziness in the rules as to exactly how PTA should be played. Every group will come up with their own best answers to these questions, but they won’t be answered automatically and they aren’t, as far as I can see, spelled out in the rules.

(Another aside: On the subject of what conflicts are good ones, I recommend this thread from Vincent’s personal blog. See especially the comment by “Ninja Hunter J” and replies to him from Matt and others. Also, Neel’s remark later in that thread about “plot trumping” has relevance to my comments on non-genre gaming above. P.S. Vincent, if you insist on having all these great discussions about gaming on your own blog rather than here, the least you could do is provide an RSS feed!)

The Zeppo Factor

There’s also a sort of hiccup in the rules that hasn’t caused a problem for us, but I keep thinking it might. That’s the fact that screen presence equals effectiveness. In other words, in a PTA game of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Xander would be most effective at fighting vampires in the episode that focused on Xander, and much less effective in episodes that focus on Buffy or Willow. This works for some kinds of stories, but what if the whole point of the Xander episode is that he sucks at fighting vampires?

You might say that effectiveness for the character isn’t really what the dice provide; it’s more about story-shaping power for the player. But there’s a definite ambiguity there about what screen presence is for. It can be ignored when, as usually happens, the goals of the character and the desires of the player are the same. But when they aren’t—when our player Mike wants his nerdy character Andrew to strike out with Angelina Jolie—the rules take you into strange places.

I Would Watch This Show

The safety net that every game of PTA has going for it is that all of us playing know what a good TV show looks like. Our years in front of Buffy and The Sopranos and Hill Street Blues and Small Wonder (kidding) have trained us in a certain kind of storytelling. There’s a whole lot of tacit structure that we have to draw on in shaping an episode that we pretty much all share yet can be left unsaid. We know the structure of episodic television so instinctively that we can riff and improvise, confident that everybody knows the underlying chord changes, and it does all come together in the end. So one of the best things PTA has going for it is all the TV its players have probably watched. If you tried to use the PTA rules to run a game that wasn’t a TV show, or with a group of players that had never watched television, I don’t know if you’d get very far.

“I would watch this show!” That’s what everybody who plays PTA ends up saying, and it’s true. I would totally watch our show (here's the link again!), and I get the impression that other people would too. For all I’ve said here, PTA is a great game. It just hasn’t been an easy game to learn or play.

And that's cool.