Role Playing Games: Prime Time Adventures
Posted by Jim at December 3rd, 2005
I played Prime Time Adventures with Ed and Joe on Friday night. I’d been curious about it for a while and very much enjoyed it.
Prime Time Adventures is a game that involves creating a story in the style of a dramatic television series. The players and the producer (alias the GM) come up with the series idea and share responsibilities for imagining the events of the game and their resolution.
Our group’s idea was “Crashspace,” a story of college-aged aliens marooned on Earth and rooming with two human students. As an idea, it lends itself to comedy almost as easily as drama.
Having already played (and read) a few Forge influenced games now, I was familiar with the basic thrust of the mechanics. In this case you use cards as a randomizer instead of dice, but you still end up narrating the results of a success or failure. This particular game had some twists on this. For example, you the player don’t necessarily narrate the results of your actions. The player with the highest card narrates the results. it also included another interesting twist, “fan mail,” a system for allowing players to reward other players for doing something clever or amusing during the game.
As someone who’s more interested in creating a story that lasts over multiple episodes than self contained episodes, I was particularly interested that Prime Time Adventures clearly considers the entire season in the process of character creation. At the beginning of the season, you mark your character’s level of importance in each episode. That, in turn, affects how effective your charcter will be controlling the direction of that episode.
I’m still mulling over whether I can draw inspiration or even directly steal from this for my own stuff.
One thing that I dislike is purely personal. As someone who’s primary experience and attraction to gaming is as a GM, I enjoy describing what happens next. As a player, a person still gets to do this, but obviously you get to do this a bit less. In Prime Time Adventures, you only get to narrate the results of a conflict if you’ve got the highest card and in that case, you get to narrate everyone’s actions. This is fine except that I never got the highest card.
In pointing this out, I don’t mean to complain. I had a great time with the game. It’s a game that gives the players a lot of control. You can choose where a scene occurs, what sort of conflict will occur (if any) and even start scenes that have nothing to do with your own character should you feel the urge. It’s also worth saying that you very definitely do get to interact with other players in character and you can set your stakes such that you control the result of a conflict.
I’m just saying I miss the ability to describe my character’s actions as opposed to setting the stakes and making suggestions to the narrator.
This may well go away with more experience of the game. There’s certainly enough in it to explore for a while and one small dislike does not overwhelm the many things that I do like about it.
When we play, “who gets to narrate” really means “who has final say,” with everyone else shouting out whatever they want. There’s never only one person talking, just only one person deciding.
Vincent
That strikes me as a good way to go. It certainly deals with my one little problem. And bearing in mind that it was only the first game session, things may go more in that direction since we players are still very much feeling out the rules.
Jim Zoetewey