Idea Brainstorming for the last CmC episode.

Okay, we played it already and we had to go for a cliff hanger end because after more than 3 hours our creative juices were all ejected, but it was amazing, especially until we nearly got stuck in the last scene. The next day I realized, it was the perfect first partof a 2 eposiodes season finale, but we will probably never play the last one. Still I got inspiration for a "hail the formless one!" conclusion for Tali.

This was some brainstorming I did before. Not everything was used though.


The captain was a integral part in creating the chemical weapon that ended the Freedom Wars.

The blue fog is the the chemical weapon.

The Federation left the soul of the captain on the holodeck, as a trap for the crew of the Gilgamesh.

The female captain ESTENGRA that abducted him is waiting down in the weapon factory with his body.

WAINE has to find a way to reconnect body and soul of the captain.

The captain's body was supposed to be the key to set free the ULTIMATE WEAPON.

TANI will be able to take over the factory with help of CLARA and ALGERNON.

Captain JAMES J. HERBERT will make an unpopular decision, once he is back alive.

He will be able to jump to the FEDERATION homeworld and blow it up - with his old crew?

Captain, My Captain - Episode 2 - Scene Overview

Scene 1 (Producer): Plot
A space ship appears and the ship's captain tells that for crossing the Triton sector (where they ended up after the fail jump in the last episode) they need to pay customs to pass. They are undecided.
Waine (and Tali) decide to offer their nemeses as price.
Conflict: ?
Outcome:

Scene 2 (Tali's player): Plot
Captain Xis and 3 of his minions come on board- Tali takes the personality of Captain Bob.
Conflict: none
Outcome:

Conflict ideas afterwards that would have been easier to integrate with the agenda given by the players:

Scene 3 (Algernon's player): Plot

Conflict:
Outcome:
(Added scene:)

Scene 4 (Waine's player): Character
Captain Xis checks out the lab of Waine. After he meets Algernon and explains himself.
Conflict:
Resolution:

Scene 5 (Producer): Plot
Mafalda and Captain Xis steer near the black hole.
Conflict:
Resolution:

Conflict ideas afterwards that would have been easier to integrate with the agenda given by the players:

Scene 6 (Tali's): Plot
They leave the ship and Xis explain the shape changer conspiracy.
Conflict:
Resolution:

New opened plot developments: what influence do the shape changers really have?

Old open plot thingies: the memory crystal with Tali spying on Algernon & Co., the cooks collar of

Things we did not according to the PtA rule set

We made some errors again. Different ones than the first time though:

1. We did not properly set up the scene with Agenda, Focus and Place...

2. We forgot that the player with the highest single card tells the output... Instead it was mostly the Producer.

3. The players' did not want to decide up front who would have a spotlight episode when. It seemed like that the want to grow the spotlight out organically. (That reminds me of the way I was very sceptical about the "unorganic" drama model in my first script writing course.)

4. I was really stupid to misinterpret the rules and tell the players that they could only spend on fan mail in each scene. I have no idea, where I picked that up. I reread the rulebook and it is definitely not the case...

Captain, my Captain s01e01 Scene Overview

Scene 1 (Producer): Plot
Cook and Assistant take over commando and tell about their ship from back in the Freedom Wars
Conflict: ?

Scene 2 (Tali's player): Character
Meeting of the protagonists in a small room to discuss what to do now
Conflict: Crew member Michael is sent to order them back and wants to convince them to cooperate
Outcome: The protagonists come along, although Waine stays in control of the situation and bullies Michael

Conflict ideas afterwards that would have been easier to integrate with the agenda given by the players: there would have been a NPC like Michael as part of the meeting and he would have discussed with them instead of giving orders

Scene 3 (Mafalda's player): Plot
The pilot tries to steer the ship dispite being drunk
Conflict: will she be able to take it to Zebulon
Outcome: she fails and it goes somewhere random

Scene 4 (Algernon's player): Plot
The ship comes out of hyperspace near a space station that is attacked by 2 pirate ships. It is on collision course.
Conflict: the cook-captain has post war trauma and tries to attack the space station, there will be people injuried
Outcome: they can't stop the cook and the Michael (scene 2) is killed in the crash as Waine is not able to save him
(Added scene: flashback to Waine's and Michael's happy times in the holo deck)

Scene 5 (Waine's player): Character
There is a space funeral for Michael.
Conflict: will the crew blame Waine for Michael's death? especially as he bullied him before?
Resolution: they don't blame Waine

Scene 6 (Producer): Plot
The Federation commander of the space station comes on board to find out who was guilty for the destruction
Conflict: will they offer the cook on a silver plate or play the card that they were able to scare of the pirates and therefore helped?
Resolution: they cook is blamed and receives the Collar of Punishment

Conflict ideas afterwards that would have been easier to integrate with the agenda given by the players: Tali's role as daughter would have been used, for example as an excuse...

Scene 7 (Tali's): Plot
Tali sneaks shape changed on board of the ship and seduces the captain of the station to steal data about the Captain James Herbert
Conflict: can she get the data while the captain wants her to "explore the galaxy"
Resolution: she can

Scene 8 (Mafalda's): Plot
Can Tali escapefrom the space station while Mafalda is able to start the ship despite her alcohol problem
Conflict: straight forward, action scene
Resolution: they can

New opened plot developments: what's really on Zebulon?, 2 space pirate ships running of, the cook's collar of punishment, the data from the Federation's space station

Old open plot thingies: the memory crystal with Tali spying on Algernon & Co.

PtA and Immersion

We played today episode 1 of "Captain, My Captain". Obvisously it turned out completely different, than I planned. We had really cool scenes, but did not go anywhere with the plot - just forcing a little bit of advancement in in the end.
But that is not what I am writing about here. This is more about the fact that one player said, he missed the immersion in the game. Okay, I am the Producer, so for me it is different, but I guess the point of PtA is that players and the Director are not that much different.
Because I was totally immersed into coming up with cool ideas. Okay that is something different than being immersed in character, but for me it feels the same. I want to do cool stuff with my character anyways.
I can't play shy or afraid characters, because that takes out the over the top madness, that I immerse into. If I create one liners for my specific character or for another one, does not matter, as long as I can enjoy creating them.
If my character jumps for a cool action scene feels the same as if I descripe another character's jump.
In that sense I guess PtA is perfect for me. I would just need players that feel the same. And I got some. :)

But maybe it is not even so much the contribution of narrative power that makes PtA different for some people but just the fact, that it is a conflict resolution, not a task resolution (I hope I use the terms right...).
I wonder if we could play with the very same narrative powers, but conflict resolution and how it would feel then.

Primetime Adventures Game Report

So we played a spontenous oneshot this evening. We started 10 to 7 and finished 3 hours later.
After discussing on playing something contemporary and 2 of the 4 players coming up with old women as heroes, the other 2 of us vetoed and instead we went for a classic scifi space exploration series. The twist that the ship's captain had between abducted was instantly proposed and excepted.
From that point it was quite fast decided that the player characters would play the doctor, the gearhead and the alien. Further fleshing out brought us a Dougie Houser like doctor and the alien ended up as a shapechanging counsellour with the human cook of the ship as father...
We had it much harder with the name of the series and ended up with the working title "Gilgamesh (Space Putty)".
It seemed to have a Star Trek vibe (which I personaly imagined as Original Series like)

As the director I decided the Pilot Episode would be about the abduction of the captain and the first scene jumped right into that:

1st Scene
The 3 characters are on the bridge with their captain, a mustached Kirk variant in his early 50ies, when suddenly a discus shaped ship appears. The ship's captain, a green skinned woman with little horns and a German accent, tells that the Galactic Federation has decided to take the captain as a hostage.
The same second the captain is frozen in a blue stasis field.
At this point the players reacted the way they were used to from other RPGs. The proposed actions, and I told them that they could just resolve everything they way the wanted, as long as it was not the the conflict of the scene.
The heroes did not achieve anything in the beginning. In the end they got an ultimatum by the green woman to hand over the captain in 30 minutes. Here we had the conflict.
The councellor tried to talk them out of it and failed. Therefore the ultimatum was shortened to 15 minutes. We had not set proper stakes for what would happen in case the character failed. Actually this is not even in the rule book, but proofed to be quite useful to do as we noticed later on.
Then we tried to find the other characters' conflict together by discussing about it, as I was a little clueless myself. In the end we were able to set up that the technician would be able to find out something about the aliens if he succeded. The young doctor would depend on the failure of the gearhead to keep his self consciousness.
They all failed which could have been my fault for spending a little bit too much Budget.


2nd scene
The alien's player decided to go for a flashback: the captain's last brithday party. This was short and sweet: only this character was completely in action. Everyone else was in the scene but not involved. His nemesis (cook father) defined the conflict as he would try to blame failure of the cake on his son/daughter.
The cook's plan failed. The cook was sent off for some time by the captain. And most probably has hard feelings for his child - most fittingly for a nemesis.

Here I remembered the rules wrong, as I let the player build the whole scene till I as producer took over for the conflict. Actually the player was only supposed to decide on Focus, Agenda and Location. But it worked out quite nice and honestly I would have been a little bit overwhelmed doing it alone as I was still struggling with the rules.
What we learned was that if players' want an action based series, they maybe should not base their scenes at a captain's birthday party. ;-) Actually: I could have forced action in there, but the intrique part was more interesting to explore anyways.


3rd scene
A character scene by the player of the gearhead - with his contact.
Another case where the players' were obviously experimenting with the different focus possible by this rule set.
The gearhead and his contact where playing chess. The contact is a young autistic girl. She is somewhat of a genius in a not yet defined way, but mostly just a young girl. In the beginning the agenda was not completely clear here (I have to admit I did not really explain that part to the players). But especially in the beginning it seems fine to have scenes mostly for the color (and obviously to introduce characters which this and the scene before did).
The other characters would walk in. The doctor's player was the first to come up with a conflict. He was kind of jealous for the gearhead. This was already introduced in the first scene. In this case it was because the later one had a friend.
I introduced my idea for the conflict of the central character: the girl had a crush on the gearhead and wanted to tell him that she loved him. As the player created the stakes he actually only wanted to have a possibility for their friendship to grow stronger, but this now created a risk. If he failed it would take him in a direction he totally would not like, as she was probably pissed at him not wanting a love relationship. (I guess the direction that he falls for her would be a little bit too mean, but possible if the player agreed). This kind of shows that you can be pretty mean to your players if I wanted him to loose the conflict (despite seeing the look on the player's face), he would have lost. But in the end he would have probably just used another scene or even his spotlight episode to fix it.
This left the shapechanger and we agreed together that he was inside the room as a simple object. If he failed he would be seen as spying on them. I don't remember if the shapechanger could get anything positive for himself out of the conflict. I am quite sure it was mostly about learning something about humans and himself.

The conflict played out that the gearhead won, the doctor won and the shapechanger lost.
So the gearhead was able to convince his friend that she just misinterpreted her own feelings, while the doctor was able to pull out of the love thingy he watched, that maybe he was not loved himself by anyone at the moment, but that there was something positive possible - even for him.

I to finish the scene I created a cliffhanger: while we were not really able to put the alien in the scene without removing the focus from the others, I decided that someone collected the CCTV crystal to use it later against the spy. This sounded quite cool: As the scene comes to an end and everyone leaves the camera pulls back and we notice that we have seen all this from a screen. There is a shadowy hand that stops the recording and ejects the memory crystal which shows the shapechanger turning from a desk lamp back into something humanoid.


4th and last scene
Finally a plot scene again, as we run out of time. The aliens beam on board of the ship - they actually look like mermaids - to take along the captain.
The conflict is mainly who is able to find a way to track the aliens and/or look cool despite loosing, as it is already decided that the captain disappears. In the end everyone failed, although one of these failures was not revealed to the players and will play out in the long term (as the player wished).

I also added a cliffhanger which sounded really stupid in the beginning, but with creative input of the players it turned into somethin amazing: The AI tells the characters that the Headquarter contacted them: because of the situation martial law has been declared on the ship. The veterans from the Freedom Wars (20 years ago) as the only one with military ranks will be given command. These are the nemeses of 2 of the characters: the cook and the scientific assistent.


Retrospective:
We had to finish after maybe 2,5 hours of playing (not counting the 30 to 40 minutes of show and character creation). Obviously we did not have time to play until all the budget was used, but learned a lot and created the sketch of a show I am excited about.

In the end we realised that is really best to ask: what does my character win if he wins the conflict and what does he loose, if he looses the conflict?
I also think that you can easily play PtA with only 2 players and on director.

Note: I think, "Captain, my Captain" would be a good title for the series. This was proposed by one of the players, but taken as more of a joke.

One problem we had was the fact that one of the player's wanted to make her successes dependend on those of another player. You can't really pull that off. But this even makes sense as the success should be something the protagonist achieves and not something he watches...
I think the problem was that the player had imagined a rivalry with the gearhead in the classical Bones-Spock way, but everytime the gearhead achieved something interpersonal this was hard to pull off. The problem is probably that the Gearhead is in no way like Spock. But maybe our Dougie Howser will someday realise that actually he has the Spock position in this relationship...

One more thing: the players only started to understand the fan mail concept in the end. I think in the future the Audience Pool won't be overloaded any longer.