Edit: This post was imported from Point of Play, my gaming blog, which I’ve collapsed into this one.

Thompson says “Holloway! Stop right there!” Cut to a shot of Holloway firing his gun.

Kitty goes home and finds her door ajar and scuffed up.

Juanita’s boyfriend comes to the Oasis looking for Holloway.

Holloway in the alley outside the employee entrance, talking to a man we don’t recognize: “Here’s all the info on Girardi.”

Someone talking to Thompson: “I can’t believe you broke protocol.”

Nguyen, Girardi, and Bruce Conway are sitting around a big table in a fancy conference room. The camera angle is above the head of someone else we can’t see: “We’ve got to stop this, it’s getting out of hand.”

Some issues with our power have seriously interfered with our gaming, so we finally get to play again tomorrow night. It’s Holloway’s spotlight episode, so we’re expecting that some really important, serious stuff is going to happen. It should be a lot of fun.

Edit: This post was imported from Point of Play, my gaming blog, which I’ve collapsed into this one.

And we’re back.

Scene 5: Ryan called for Plot, Thompson’s Office, security guard brings Thompson a tape of the Malone/Holloway/Andrew debacle in the alley.
The security guard tries to give Thompson the tape and Thompson peremptorily tells him to put it in his Inbox. The guard does, and Thompson picks it up, asking what it is. The guard explains that the cameras picked it up last night and that he thought Thompson should see it.

They go to a conference room and watch the tape. Black and white footage, no sound, but a good view of Malone giving Holloway a stack of money, then the whole deal with Holloway assaulting Andrew, the present breaking, etc. The guard leaves Thompson with the tape. Thompson hauls Holloway into the conference room and demands to know what Holloway’s doing. “You’re hitting streetwalkers, you’re making children cry; what the hell is going on around here? Are you taking payoffs here?”

“First of all, that streetwalker is my whore of an ex-wife; secondly, the ‘payoff’ was for the ‘97 Corolla I sold him last week.”

Of course Thompson knows Malone and so he knows that Holloway’s lying about the car, a nice touch on Rob’s part, I thought. This is an excellent example of how in this game, a player can screw over his own protagonist better than anybody else can, and have a lot of fun doing it.

The argument escalates and we go to a conflict. We have some trouble establishing stakes on this one and I wasn’t really satisfied with what we ended up using. We didn’t want to put “Holloway comes clean” at stake because next ep is Holloway’s spotlight and we wanted to wait for that. Thompson’s Issue of Control/Obsession came into play and we just went with “Thompson wants Holloway to explain what’s going on so that Thompson can get the situation in the casino back under his control.” I threw in max Budget on my side because I wanted Thompson to have even more pressure on him, and I won the flip.

Thompson calls Holloway on the lie and establishes that he and Malone are friends. “First of all, Ken Malone would never drive an import car.” We then had a brief pause while Ryan tries to figure out what Thompson would do, and Jake spent a fanmail to have Andrew enter the scene. That’s the first time that anybody’s used that rule, and it was perfect for the moment.

We cut to the hallway and see Andrew walking up and knocking on the door, using Jake’s Next Week On snippet. “Mr. Thompson? I have some information you might be interested in,” and walks into the conference room. We have a tense moment with the three of them, then Holloway says “I don’t have time for this. You know how things work in Vegas,” and storms out. Thompson doesn’t get his explanation, and we cut to the next scene.

Scene 6: I asked to go out of turn and called for a character scene, Casino Floor, and took the Producer’s privilege of skipping the agenda and going straight to framing instead.
Rae’s working in the casino, delivering drinks, then returns to the bar with an empty tray. We see a guy standing at the bar carrying luggage and when he spots Rae he drops his bags and shouts her name. It’s Rae’s boyfriend Ty (played by Matthew McConaughey, which pleased Bonita inordinately), a gaming commission agent from Atlantic City. Rae greets him with “Please tell me you are not staying at this hotel.” “Wha? Why not?” “No. You’re staying with me.” We had a brief attempt by Rob to play Ty, but we quickly shifted the role to Bonita who managed to portray McConaughey perfectly. It was a little weird.

Ty tries to convince Rae to cut out from work early, but Rae insists that she has to stay at work. He persists until she agrees to meet him in the lobby after her shift for dinner, and we skip right on to the next scene.

Scene 7: Deirdra called for Plot, Casino Floor, now that Kitty no longer has her father’s protection, she gets threatened by mafia.
Kitty walks into the casino and spots Holloway. We get a short montage of her following Holloway, snapping pictures and trying to keep out of sight. Finally, he turns sharply and to keep from being spotted, she backs quickly around a corner and right into Girardi, the mafia boss. “Miss Conway!” We see that he’s got a gun concealed at waist level. “I hear that you’re working on a new story. I’m very interested in hearing about it.”

Scene 8: Jake (with lots of help from Deirdra) calls for Character, Thompson’s Office, Andrew tries to get Thompson to let him help out.
We cut to Thompson saying “I’ve got some leads on the Holloway situation. Don’t worry about that right now.” He’s trying to get rid of Andrew so he can go over his numbers again. Thompson’s been working the paperwork on the roulette tables for the past week and it’s not adding up right. Andrew wants to take a look at the numbers to see if he can help, but Thompson’s not thrilled with the idea because it’s against regulations. We go to a conflict. Andrew’s stakes: “I want to be involved in the investigation as more than just a dealer.” I dump a ton of Budget because I think it’ll cause good conflict, but everybody else wants Andrew to finally use that math degree and get brought in as a numbers analyst. It’s his spotlight, nobody wants to see him get shot down.

Jake beats me thoroughly on the flip and wins Narration as well. Andrew glances over a sheet full of numbers and starts pointing out anomalies in the percentages and probabilities. Thompson’s impressed, and Andrew starts to explain the math behind it. Thompson holds up a hand and says “Save it. Just have a report in a manilla envelope in my Inbox tomorrow morning. And, fill out these consultant’s forms so I can put you on the payroll.”

Scene 9: Rob called for a Plot scene, multiple locations, Holloway abducting Andrew and warning him. We start in a nondescript room with Holloway snorting coke off a glass table. A gun is slid across the table to him. “Yeah, I’ll take care of him,” he says, and pockets the gun.

Parking lot. Andrew is leaving the casino, and Holloway steps out of the shadows, clocks him over the head with the butt of his gun, and knocks him unconscious.

Warehouse. Andrew is tied to a chair. Holloway is standing behind him, out of his line of sight. Holloway lectures, trying to warn Andrew off the investigation while keeping his own identity concealed. Conflict! We had some stupid difficulty working out this conflict, and it was completely because we were pre-playing the narration when we should have just been establishing the stakes. We got confused over what players wanted and what characters wanted and how it could all happen. Eventually we came down to some solid Stakes: Andrew wants to kick his abductor’s ass. Holloway wants Andrew to back off from the investigation. I loved this conflict and I wanted everybody to know it, so I threw in max Budget, despite wanting Andrew to win his stakes. Everybody else threw in some fanmail, realizing that this was a big one. Jake won his stakes, and Rob lost his.

Holloway leans in to adjust Andrew’s bonds, and Andrew slams his head back into Holloway’s face, breaking his nose and knocking him to the floor, dropping the gun. Andrew rocks the chair over onto the floor, landing on the gun and breaking the arm of the chair. With his freed hand, he grabs the gun and waves it wildly toward Holloway, who flees the scene.

Scene 10: Bonita calls for Plot, Rae’s Apartment, using Deirdra’s Next Week On snippet.
Rae and Ty are in bed at her apartment. This is the first time we’ve seen this set, so Deirdra describes it a little. It’s is filled with books, a juxtaposition from what we expected. Rae determines that Ty is asleep, then slips out of bed and wraps a sheet around herself. We get a montage of her working at her computer, looking through paperwork and drinking coffee. Finally she calls and wakes Thompson up, telling him that she ran the social security numbers on the roulette dealer change paperwork that Nguyen gave him. All the people listed have been dead for forty years. Not only that, but she’s looked up Girardi as well and he’s on the board of directors for a dummy corporation. Also on that board is Bruce Conway. We cut back and forth with quick clips as they bring each other up to speed on all the stuff they’ve found out. Rae wants to bring in Kitty on this, and we’ve found our conflict. Stakes: Thompson wants to go by the book and to keep the reporters out of this. Rae wants to cut through the red tape and take immediate action rather than waiting and gathering more information. Deirdra’s exact words were “My character wants to GO GO GO GO GO!” Bonita threw in fanmail to me, hoping to beat Ryan so that Kitty would get brought into the action.

We flipped and I got exactly zero successes. Both Deirdra and Ryan beat me solidly, but I won Narration. Thompson brings up a Gaming Commission law ruling out any chance of bringing in the reporter, but Rae convinces him that they have enough to move on and says “Where do we start?” Cut.

Scene 11: Ryan calls for Character, Andrew’s Apartment (and parking lot), using the last remaining Next Week On snippet. He also asks for Malone in this scene, something nobody expected but everybody liked. We threw around some ideas on what could be happening in this scene and eventually settled on an agenda: Andrew confronts Malone in his own apartment.

High dolly shot of Andrew’s car pulling into the parking lot of his apartment. Two police cars and an ambulance out front, lights flashing. Andrew flips out and tries to shoulder past a couple of uniformed police officers guarding the door. They stop him and ask him for ID, etc, and he demands to know what’s going on. “An old lady had a heart attack,” they tell him. Paramedics come out with his babysitter on a gurney and Andrew stops them to ask how she is. They tell him that she’ll be fine now, that Caroline called 911 and then did CPR until they showed up and probably saved the babysitter’s life. Andrew stops and we get a good shot of Proud Father as the paramedics roll out.

Andrew and the two uniforms head upstairs to his apartment and when he walks in there are a couple of lady officers talking with Caroline in the kitchenette and Malone is standing in the living room looking at the newly reframed family photo. Conflict! Just to make sure everybody appreciates the situation the way I see it, I lay out a brief flashback montage. Andrew comes out of casino and sees Malone giving Holloway a stack of money. Holloway slaps Andrew’s gift for his daughter out of his hands, breaking it. Holloway slams Andrew against the door. Caroline sits in the car, watching her father get manhandled. Caroline sitting in the alley, cradling the shattered picture and crying while Andrew stands nearby, incapable of comforting her. Holloway knocking Andrew unconscious. Holloway fleeing the warehouse, leaving Andrew tied to the chair waving the gun. The gun. Zoom in shot of the gun now tucked into the back of Andrew’s waistband. The guy who paid off Holloway, the thug who attacked Andrew twice and abducted him, and threatened his daughter is standing in Andrew’s own home with his daughter not ten feet away, he’s fingering the family photo, and worst of all he’s wearing a badge, so Andrew can’t even go to the cops because apparently they’re dirty, and Andrew. Has. A Gun. If it wasn’t such terrible audio quality, I’d post the clip of everybody going “OOOOOOOH.” So there’s our conflict. Stakes? This is where we stumbled. The stakes should have been “Andrew wants to keep from completely snapping,” but we somehow got “Andrew wants to get these cops out of his house right now.” I throw in my whole remaining budget, and I get some fanmail to help me out. Jake gets some fanmail too, we flip, and I win, but he high card and gets Narration. This is where I realize that the stakes weren’t that great.

We talk a lot about how it could resolve, and it comes out that Andrew snaps at Malone, saying he wants Malone out of his house and yadda yadda. Malone is all calm and cool, saying that they’re nearly done, but that the lady officers want to talk with Caroline for a little while longer and then they’ll go. Andrew grits his teeth and goes into his bedroom. He opens his top drawer and puts in the paperwork he got from Thompson. On top of that, he puts the gun. The camera pulls out through the bedroom window and we end with a shot mirroring the end shot from the pilot.

Edit: This post was imported from Point of Play, my gaming blog, which I’ve collapsed into this one.

Roll opening credits: Oasis.

Scene 1: Matthew calls for Plot, Kitty’s Office, Andrew talks to Kitty about Holloway.
I called for the first scene, setting up Andrew going to Kitty’s office to talk to her. We had some confusion over why Andrew would be there and what he was after, but after some stumbling and stuttering, we sorted it out. Andrew knows that Holloway is up to something and wants him exposed publicly for it. He relates what he saw in the alley (with a flashback scene for the viewers) to Kitty, and she muses on it, then decides to tell Andrew what she’s gotten on Holloway so far. No conflict in this scene.

Scene 2: Jake calls for Character, Andrew’s Car, Andrew picks up Caroline from school.
Andrew’s working hard to be The Good Father in this scene, asking lots of questions about her schoolwork, yadda yadda. It comes out that her grades went into the toilet after her mother died and she’s been having to work pretty hard to get back on top of things. The two of them break into what’s obviously an old argument and we cut to the conflict. What does Andrew want? He wants Caroline to recognize that he’s trying to be a good father. At this point, I brought up a question. Our spectator, Aaron, was set up to play Caroline, and I wondered if he could set up stakes for her. I had a pretty good idea that he shouldn’t, since we don’t have an Issue or anything, and figured that it would almost certainly be some serious Drift of the system. We laid out the cards and Andrew won it with a bare margin. Caroline breaks off the argument and tells Andrew that she understands what he’s trying to do but that he’s pushing too hard. Her grades are getting better, and she needs him to lay off a little. He agrees to ease up and they make plans to do something fun together soon.

Scene 3: Rob calls for Plot, Juanita’s Apartment, using his Next Week On snippet.
I set up Holloway going to try to persuade Juanita to go on a cruise. He goes to her apartment, pauses before he knocks, and detects something amiss: the music coming from the apartment is skipping. Holloway draws his gun, knocks, and says “Juanita, I have something for you!” For a few moments nothing happens, then shots explode through the door, narrowly missing Holloway. He whips to one side, and we hear Juanita scream at him “You aren’t gonna keel me, you son of a beesh!”

“I’ve got your money!”

Heels quickly clicking on the floor, deadbolt flips, chain rattling, and the door opens. Juanita smiles sweetly. “Chu have my money?” Juanita has a tiny dog who stands behind her feet and growls at Holloway. He gives over the money and a ticket on a cruise, but she’s suspicious. “You want me out of town?” She tears up the ticket.

Holloway sighs and tells her that she has to stop shooting her mouth off and how does she know he’s working for the mob, anyway? We stop to discuss it and come up with the idea that she’s sleeping with some low-level mob thug. She throws that in Holloway’s face, and we pull up sharp for a conflict. Rob’s stakes: Holloway wants Juanita’s to assure him that she understands that she has to keep her mouth shut. Looking back, I think we should’ve stated this as “Holloway wants to convince Juanita that she has to keep her mouth shut.” When we flipped the cards, though, he lost anyway. While Holloway was trying to explain why she has to keep quiet, her new boyfriend shows up at the door mad as hell. Holloway still has his gun out and when Tony sees it, he starts to reach for his own gun, but Holloway has the drop on him. Holloway says “I don’t have time for this,” and bails.

Scene 4: Bonita calls for Plot, a Restaurant, Kitty eavesdrops on her father and gets threatened.
This was a plot scene, but we thought that hitting the father-daughter relationship between Kitty and Bruce would dovetail nicely with Andrew’s Good Father complex, making it work well for Andrew’s spotlight. This was supposed to use Bonita’s Next Week On snippet, but we had some severe confusion over how exactly that snippet was framed, so I just ran with it. We had some serious difficulty with trying to pre-script this scene rather than just letting it play out and had to pull back hard and restart a couple of times to get the flow correct.

Kitty enters a high-class restaurant and tells the maitre ‘d that her father’s secretary told her that Bruce was having lunch here. He waves her through and she heads back in that direction. She bumps into a waiter on the way, drops her notebook, and stops to pick it up when she overhears her father talking to…someone. We can’t see who it is. He’s seated at a booth, and Kitty slips into the next booth to eavesdrop. We get a nice shot from the side of the two of them sitting back-to-back. Bruce is saying “There’s only one casino in this town that they don’t own right now, but from what I’m hearing, they’re closing in.” Then Bruce starts asking questions about issues that need addressing, including “Is the Holloway thing taken care of?” and the other party responds to all of them with a “yes.” Finally, the other person says “Are you sure your daughter isn’t going to be a problem?” and we (and Kitty!) recognize Steve Nguyen’s voice. The camera pulls back to show him as Conway responds “If it looks like she will be, I’ll take care of it.” Nguyen nods, finishes his drink, and leaves. Conway gets up to leave and spots Kitty. He says “What are you doing here?!” and drops into the booth across from her. Kitty: “Spying on you! What are you doing here?”

An argument develops rapidly and it closely mirrors the one between Andrew and Caroline, with him saying he’s trying to keep her safe and her saying she doesn’t need to be protected. Conflict! Bonita was a little torn on what her stakes are for this one. On one hand, she wants information from her father, but we realized that the important stake, the stake that tied to her issue, is that Kitty wants her father to recognize that she’s an adult and stop trying to shield her. Ryan threw in a nice idea for Kitty to say something about having done her homework on this story to help develop the mirror with the earlier scene and got some good fanmail for it.

We flip and Bonita wins it easily. Kitty bristles and argues that she’s a big girl, that she’s done her homework, that her story is important, and the doesn’t need him protecting her. Bruce gets cold and steely-eyed and tells her that she’s on her own and that she needs to understand that some stories should be left alone. He finishes with “I’m involved with these people; I know what I’m talking about,” and then storms off.

Kitty pulls her mini-cassette recorder from underneath the table and turns it off.

And now, a word from our sponsors.

I’m about ninety minutes into the three and a half hour recording. I’ll pick up here tomorrow.

Edit: This post was imported from Point of Play, my gaming blog, which I’ve collapsed into this one.

Saturday we played our third game of Primetime Adventures. It was the first Spotlight Episode we’ve done and I think there were some things that were really great and some things that were regrettable. In this post, I’m going to talk a little about the gameplay rather than the game itself. I’ll still do a recap of the scenes, just in a later post.

Regrettable: Rather than taking notes, I borrowed a mic from Jake and recorded the audio of the session, planning to listen to it later and take notes from that. In retrospect, I think that’s not such a great idea. The biggest reason is that I have to listen to the damn thing afterwards. The session was about three and a half hours, making the process of listening and note-taking a big chore that I keep putting off. Also the audio quality was terrible, making it even less fun. There was some clowning around with the mike that was distracting to the gameplay, but not so much that it really bothered me. Before doing this, I considered the note-taking during the game to be something that slowed us down and was somewhat chorelike, but now I’m starting to think that it provides a good opportunity at the end of each scene to pause and make sure that everybody’s on the same page. The players all said that they didn’t mind it during the first game and so I think that’s what I’ll go back to doing.

Really Great: I finally got a handle on how to do conflicts. It’s spelled out pretty clearly in the book, but apparently I’m stupid or something because sometimes I was doing some sort of weird clumsy task resolution and other times I almost had it right but was mapping out the result of the conflict beforehand. All that crap is wrong wrong wrong. Conflicts are about want. The right thing to do is to get the player to figure out what his protagonist wants, in simple terms. “He wants her to understand that he’s trying to be a good father.” “She wants to impress her friends.” “He wants to establish that he makes the decisions around here.” “She wants to protect her friends. “He wants to help the Slayer kill the monster.” “She wants to prove that she’s not useless.” That’s all you need. That’s what’s at stake. Now, in addition to that, a player can outline stuff that the protagonist is doing to try to accomplish his desired stake, but the stake is all that’s really important. Everything else can get hashed out in narration. Once you’ve got stakes for everybody involved, you can go ahead and resolve it. No pre-deciding outcomes. That’s not how the game works.

I explained this to the players before we got started and it was miles easier to do conflicts and to make them meaningful. We still had a couple of fumbles, but we’re on the right track now.

Regrettable: We got started late and then we were eating dinner and dessert before and during the game. These added together to create a fractured, distracted atmosphere that served to reduce the intensity of play throughout the whole session. Next time, I think I’m going to suggest that we go out to an early dinner before the game, then try to reduce the distractions during the game itself.

I know there were some other things that I wanted to say, but I can’t recall them at the moment. I’ll throw in other stuff as it comes back to me. Hopefully the other players will chip in as well.

Edit: This post was imported from Point of Play, my gaming blog, which I’ve collapsed into this one.

Quick briefing: The core of the Primetime Adventures system is Screen Presence. It’s pretty much the only “stat” that your protagonist has. At character generation, each player creates a “story arc” for his protagonist that sets his SP for each episode. In a five episode season like ours, each protagonist has one episode where his SP is a 3, two eps with an SP of 2, and two eps with an SP of 1. The SP 3 episode is that protagonist’s Spotlight, where the focus is directly on him and his Issue. In the pilot episode, everybody has an SP of 2, and nobody can have the first episode as a Spotlight because we haven’t had enough time to introduce the characters yet. In a game with five players, we really probably ought to have done a nine-episode season to spread out the Spotlight episodes more, but we didn’t want to commit to that with our very first game. Most folks weren’t even sure it was going to be fun.

The Screen Presence matrix for Oasis looks like this:

Episode:      P  1  2  3  4  5
Thompson      2  2  1  2  3  1
Rae           2  1  1  2  3  2
Holloway      2  2  2  3  1  1
Kitty         2  1  2  1  2  3
Andrew        2  1  3  2  1  2

As you can see, our next episode is Andrew’s spotlight. The Network would be pushing this sucker all week long, playing the promos every chance they got and making sure to hammer on that snippet with the police cars flashing lights outside of his apartment. Andrew’s been getting pushed around a lot in the last couple of eps, but I think that this episode is going to be transformative. His Issue, his struggle to be a good father not just in his own eyes but also in the eyes of his daughter, is going to be a major theme. Not only that, now it’s emotionally tied in to Holloway’s illicit activities, drawing Andrew deeper into the season’s plot. It’s going to be a big show, I think.

Edit: This post was imported from Point of Play, my gaming blog, which I’ve collapsed into this one.

We played the first episode of Oasis just two days after the pilot. That should tell you how much fun we were having. We had a better grasp on the mechanics and how everything interacts so it all went a lot more smoothly. We covered nine scenes and we probably would have kept going if we hadn’t run out of time. We used every single one of the Next Week On snippets and we ended up with a really powerful setup for the next episode. I also took notes, which slowed us down a little but allowed for better coverage. Next game I’m going to try to record using my digital camera, then just transcribe from the video.

We had an audience this time around: Ryan’s brother Aaron sat in with us. We started him off with a couple of fanmail to spend, briefly explained what the show is about, and told him that he could speak up anytime he had an idea, and that if anybody said or did anything that he especially liked, he should say so. We’d explain how he could spend his fanmail when that became an option.

In the interest of not wearing my fingers off typing it all, I’m going to skip the camerawork descriptions and the intricate details. Hope you don’t mind.

As Producer, I had the first scene. I neglected to prep anything at all, so I wasted a few minutes racking my brain to come up with something. Eventually I hit on an idea and ran with it. The casino owner, Nguyen, walked through the casino floor trailed by a couple of assistants and half a dozen dealers. He was whispering to pit bosses and replacing dealers. A brief zoom on a whisper revealed him saying something about “these dealers are Our Guys.” Andrew is one of the dealers replaced. He gets inquisitive with the pit boss, who snarls at him and tells him to just take his night off with pay and be happy with it. I half expected Jake to press the issue and try to get more information or something, but he let it go. No conflict in this scene.

It was Deirdra’s turn to call the next scene and she asked for Thompson to grab Andrew and insist on following up on the “unscheduled dealer change.” The scene started off with a hilarious exchange where Thompson strong-arms Andrew and demands to know what’s going on, then pays virtually no attention when Andrew mumbles something about having no idea. We get a small conflict with Andrew wanting to go home to spend time with his daughter while Thompson wants to take Andrew with him when he goes to get some answers from Nguyen. End result: Thompson drags Andrew along.

Next up was Rob’s turn to call and he wanted to work in his Next Week On snippet. He puts the scene in the casino lounge and wants Kitty to overhear him. We move on to Holloway at the bar in the lounge, talking on his cell phone. For some reason we pass William Shatner making a cameo as a bar patron a few seats down. Kitty comes in just in time to hear Holloway yell “I don’t care what the fuck you have to do, just take care of her!” and slam shut his phone. She sits down, decides it’s not a time to pry, and buys him a drink. With a nice little “time passes” camerawork, we skip ahead. Holloway’s had several drinks, and now it’s time to pry. We have a confict over whether Holloway blows his top and whether Kitty gets some dirt. He doesn’t, but neither does she, and we move on to the next scene.

Bonita wants to see what happens with Thompson, Andrew, and Nguyen, so we find the two protagonists just as they stop Nguyen and his assistants heading up the elevators. Rob steps in to play Mr. Nguyen for this scene and decides that he’s got a terrible accent, something we apparently overlooked until now. Thompson’s railing at Nguyen and demanding proper paperwork and documentation on the dealer changes, while Andrew is attempting to edge away so that the casino owner doesn’t associate him with this maniac. Somehow every scene with Thompson so far has been comedic. I’m blaming Ryan for going along with everybody’s ideas. We get a conflict over whether Nguyen can provide paperwork for the dealer change-over, and we decide that either the paperwork is going to be falsified somehow or it’s going to be nonexistent. Either way, something’s shady. Ryan wins, so the paperwork is faked. We should have thrown in another challenge to see if Thompson forgets about Andrew or hauls him along, but neglected to think of it and Andrew just slips away as Thompson goes back with Nguyen to his office.

Ryan calls the next scene and I think he had some trouble coming up with something. We had a bunch of folks make suggestions, and eventually we worked out something he liked. We cut to Holloway coming from an elevator and sniffing, obviously having just snorted some coke. He spots the roulette dealer who replaced Andrew palming the roulette ball and replacing it with another. We see Rae carrying a tray of drinks and watching as Holloway dashes over to intervene, get into an argument with the pit boss and then the short, chubby bald guy from the pilot (still played by Matt Pinfield) steps out of the crowd and talks Holloway down. We (and Rae) can see he’s furious, but he walks away. Rae’s attention is wholly focused on the action rather than where she’s going and as a result she walks straight into…William Shatner.

Drinks go all over Bill, and as he and Rae are trying to get themselves sorted out, Holloway comes in like a raging bull, ready to throw Shatner out on his ear for accosting casino personnel. Rae claims responsibility, Shatner exits hurriedly, and Rae jumps on this opportunity to ask Holloway what went on with the dealer who was that bald man? We get an excellent challenge on whether Rae gets a good answer out of Holloway. If Deirdra wins, Holloway fumbles and tells her something actually true about the guy, though he tries to cover it up (and fails). If she loses, he makes up a decent cover story. Deirdra wins the conflict, I win Narration. Everybody’s tossing out ideas fast and furious, but Inspiration hits me. Holloway plays it off: “Ah, that’s Mr. Girardi. He’s, uh. He’s from the Gaming Commission.” I think one of my favorite things about this game is when somebody says something and everybody just gasps and there’s a moment of silence while everybody thinks about the ramifications.

Jake calls for the next scene and wants to use a Next Week On snippet. Rae and Thompson compare notes. Rae relates what went on with Holloway, then Thompson passes over the paperwork that Nguyen gave him, saying something seems odd about it. Kitty, typing at her laptop at a table nearby manages to snap a picture of the pass. An older gentleman swoops in, kisses Kitty on the cheek, and sits down at her table, asking how her story is going. We know who he is, but the audience has no idea yet. No conflict this scene.

We’ve gone around the circle of players once (skipping Aaron, so we could show him how it’s done), so we’re back to my turn to call a scene. I go back through my notes to see what I want to cover and spot a dangling thread. I set Holloway in the Security Office getting a radio call from his security guards out front of the casino. There’s a situation. He heads out to find a cab, a cabdriver, and a Latino woman in a beautiful dress with exceptionally coiffed hair and exquisitely manicured nails going completely apeshit on a pair of security guards. At first I offer the character to Bonita, but Deirdra steps in to steal the scene with a shrieking, wailing, cursing, kicking Juanita, here to collect on money that she claims Holloway owes her. We learn that the cabbie was on the other end of Holloway’s “just take care of her” phone call, though we don’t learn who he is. We learn that Juanita is Holloway’s ex-wife (not to mention Nemesis), and we learn that Holloway’s short fuse has burned all the way down when he draws his gun on her to try to get her to calm down. She calls his bluff, knowing he won’t shoot her, and threatens that if she doesn’t get her money, she’s going to start telling people about his “new friends.” Oooooooh, there’s that collective gasp again, and here’s our conflict. Does Holloway keep his head, and shovel Juanita into the cab to get her out of there before she starts talking? Or does he lose it and knock her unconscious with his pistol to shut her up? Tons of fanmail flew in on this one. Even Rob was tempted to throw fanmail toward me because he wanted to see Holloway go further down that tube.

I dump a lot of budget into this one and with my fanmail, it’s no contest. We lay out the cards and I win by a landslide. Holloway snaps, the pistol crashes into the side of Juanita’s head, and he catches her as she falls. He dumps her in the cab and tells the cabbie to take care of her. The cabbie drives off. Silence. Holloway glances around at the onlookers, then turns to go back into the casino and stops short, nose to nose with Thompson. Oooooh.

I realize that is is a great time to use that Thompson/guards Next Week On snippet. Holloway shoves past Thompson and heads back inside. Thompson scans the scene, then buttonholes the guards, telling them “I saw the whole thing. If you see anything, come to me first.”

We gave Aaron the opportunity to call the next scene. He wanted to follow up on Kitty and the guy at her table, and I had an idea for how to handle it. He gave me the go-ahead and I ran with it.

Kitty and The Guy climb into a limo and have a chat where we discover that this is Bruce Conway, Kitty’s father. Bruce is a big-time newspaperman and Kitty’s living in his shadow, trying to make a name for herself. Bruce is cheery and paternal and condescending, suggesting that there’s nothing to the story she’s chasing and that she’d be better suited to going back to human interest stories rather than trying to break big news. He tells her that she’s free to use the limo for as long as she needs and gets dropped off at a big red-carpet, balloons-and-streamers gala affair. Just as he’s about to shut the limo door, Kitty drops a tough one. “How’d you know I was at the Oasis, Daddy?” Conflict! This one was another example of the “he fumbles the answer/he gives a smooth answer” conflict, something that I felt we did far too much in this episode and something I’m going to try to avoid for the rest of the season. I lost, and Bruce paused just a moment too long before coming up with “A good reporter never reveals his sources, dear.” What a dick. The limo drives off with Kitty and we see Bruce turn to accept a glass of champagne from…Nguyen! To drive home the notion that they’re in cahoots, Bruce says to Nguyen, “I don’t think we have anything to worry about.”

Only time for one more scene and it’s Deir’s to call, but we all pitched in with ideas. We’ve hardly hit Andrew at all this episode and the next one is his spotlight, so he’s obviously going to be involved. We’ve got one more Next Week On snippet to use, so it’s easy to lay this one out.

Holloway’s outside the employee entrance with Malone, the dirty cop (after some discussion, we determined that ‘Maloon’ didn’t test well in the pilot and got renamed). It’s late and they’re in the middle of a conversation. Malone tells Holloway that Holloway’s lucky that he got assigned to follow up on the Juanita incident, and that their “mutual friends” aren’t happy that she’s threatening to talk. How’d she know about them, anyway? We haven’t found out yet. Anyway, Malone tells Holloway to send her on a cruise or something to keep her out of the way and hands over a stack of cash, using up our last Next Week On snippet.

Here’s where it gets good. At that moment, Andrew comes out of the casino’s employee entrance carrying a brightly wrapped gift box and sees the exchange. Holloway pockets the money as he rounds on Andrew, demanding to see some identification and generally scaring the living crap out of him. Here’s our last conflict. Can Andrew keep his cool and calm down Holloway, or does he handle himself badly and come across as a threat? Nearly everybody wants to see Andrew get out of this okay, so Jake gets lots of fanmail spent in his favor, but the cards fall heavily for me. Andrew stutters and stammers, trying to explain that he came back to pick up a gift for his daughter that he forgot here, but it doesn’t help. Holloway slaps the present out of Andrew’s hands and we hear a tinkle of glass as the box hits the pavement. Malone takes the opportunity to leave as Andrew finally comes up with his employee ID card. Holloway glances briefly at it, then heads into the casino.

The camera focuses into the background and we see Andrew’s car out in the empty parking lot. The door opens and Caroline gets out, runs past her father, and sits down in the alley to open the present. It’s a picture of their family before Andrew’s wife died, but the glass in the frame is shattered and the frame itself is splintered and broken. She cradles the present in her lap and cries while Andrew stands paralyzed in the cone of illumination from the security spotlight over the door, humiliated in front of his daughter, burning with shame and rage. Fade out.

Next Time on Oasis:
Deirdra: Rae is on a phone, her face illuminated by a computer screen. “There’s a problem with this list. I ran the socials. Thompson, they’re all dead.”
Jake: Andrew knocks on Thompson’s office door. “Mr. Thompson, I have some information you may be interested in.”
Rob: Holloway knocks on a door. “Juanita, I have something for you.” The camera pans down to a gun in his hand.
Bonita: Kitty is eavesdropping on her father and gets threatened.
Ryan: Andrew’s car pulls into the parking lot of his apartment and there are police cars there with lights flashing.

Edit: This post was imported from Point of Play, my gaming blog, which I’ve collapsed into this one.

We got started a little later than we expected, so we had almost exactly three hours to play out the pilot episode. From everything I read, that should be plenty of time, so we buckled down to get right to the good stuff. This is how I remember it, but if I have any details wrong, hopefully the other players will speak up to correct me.

As the Producer, I got to call the first scene and it was Plot. I started out describing the show intro with a helicopter flyover shot of the Vegas Strip, then over Downtown, ending with a shot of the Oasis. Follow that with credits (Somebody Famous as Stone Thompson! “You’re really going with that? ‘Stone’? Really?”). From there, we cut to the casino floor. There’s a lounge with a stage and Grand Reopening banners all over the place. Dealers are standing at the tables and lots of people in dressy dress clothes are paying attention to a guy on the stage in a spotlight. The guy is Steve Nguyen, the casino’s new owner. He welcomes everybody to the reopening, says some nice words, and we learn that the Oasis has been closed for several months after some kind of incident or difficulty, though what exactly has happened isn’t mentioned. Nguyen bids everybody to have a good time, then steps off stage into the wings, where A Mafia Guy is waiting. Mafia Guy asks Nguyen “How long will it take?” and Nguyen says “With this staff, there’s no way to tell.”

We cut to Sam Holloway, the chief of security, manhandling a pickpocket and throwing him out of the casino. It wasn’t at the opening of the show the way we’d discussed, but it was close and everybody seemed to get a kick out of it. Bonita spoke up and said she’d like to have Kitty speak to Holloway. Kitty’s at the grand opening because she smells a story, but isn’t sure what it is yet. They chat for a second, and then inspiration hit me. A different Mafia Guy, this one described as short, chubby, bald, and sweaty (I’m picturing Matt Pinfield for the role) draws Holloway aside and says that The Syndicate is going to offer him one more chance to change his mind and play for their team. He shows Sam a small bag of white powder. Everybody goes “Ooooooh.” Yeah. That’s right. I’m not holding back.

So here’s our first conflict. Rob decides that he wants Sam to take the drugs and tell Mafia Guy that he’ll turn, but he’s not planning on actually working for them. He’s just looking for an inside angle so he can take them down. Bonita speaks up and asks if Kitty could see any of this. Hey, that’s an angle I hadn’t even considered! I decide that Mafia Guy is going to buy the act, but I fumbled a little over setting the stakes and in retrospect I think I may have done it a little wrong. I don’t remember exactly how we set it up, but I won narration and it resolved with Holloway taking the drugs and agreeing to work for the mob and Kitty getting a snapshot of it on her cameraphone. The image freezes on the snapshot, then fades to black.

Ryan calls the next scene and he says he wants it to be about Character. We’ve talked about how Rob’s protagonist Holloway and Ryan’s protag Stone Thompson would be butting heads because of their opposing jobs, and Ryan wants to establish that early.

We see that the blackness on-screen is an extreme closeup of Holloway’s black jacket as he walks away from the camera. SECURITY is bright yellow across his back. He’s in an unmarked hallway and he stops at a door with a keypad. He types in the code and the door to the Security Office pops open. I forgot to mention it to Rob, but having Holloway on his personal set should’ve allowed Rob to erase his use of Holloway’s Cocaine Habit trait in the previous scene, even though Ryan picked the location. We follow Holloway inside where a couple of security goons are staring at black and white monitors following the action all over the casino. Just as the door is swinging shut, it’s stopped by Thompson. He’s a big guy, maybe 6′4″ or so and muscled. He’s sporting a Marine haircut, a short-sleeved white button-down and a black tie. He’s got a clipboard. He eyes the security goons. “Mr. Holloway, can I speak to you? In your office, please.”

Holloway looks around. “This is my office.” Our first Fanmail is awarded!

Thompson makes jerky head motions and Holloway shrugs and sends his goons off to patrol the casino floor. Thompson makes noise about how Holloway hasn’t been filling out the appropriate forms and paperwork that the Gaming Commission requires. Holloway’s kind of snitty for such a big guy. Holloway points out that that paperwork isn’t due quite yet and that he’s actually filling it out right now, only Thompson is interrupting this very important paperwork. Thompson sees that his attempt to establish his dominance is slipping away and starts to lay out his preferred procedure for how the paperwork should be turned in to him. Manilla envelope, name in the upper left hand corner, in the appropriate in-box, etc. I smell a conflict. I have a little trouble again, because I still haven’t gotten the hang of the multiple protagonist conflict yet. It’s not Rob vs. Ryan, it’s Ryan vs. me and Rob vs. me with different stakes in each one. We settle on this: If Ryan beats me, he establishes that he’s the Alpha Dog and can call the shots. If he loses to me, he gets sent home with his tail between his legs. Rob says that Holloway’s going to do the paperwork required by the Commission whether or not he wins. That’s not at stake. Instead, if Rob loses to me, he’ll also do all the extra stuff that Thompson insists on, though he’ll do it begrudgingly and he’ll make it painful for Thompson by doing things like writing in pink ink and generally folding, spindling, and mutilating the system. If Rob wins, he makes it clear that he only has to do the work mandated by law and no more.

We lay the cards down, I beat Ryan and Rob beats me. I think Rob won narration and with some suggestions from the rest of us, smoothly finished up the scene. Highlight: Stone Thompson, angry and dejected, stalks out of the Security Office and slams the door, only it’s the type with the automatic-close hinges and it stalls halfway through the slam and through a security monitor we see Thompson standing and watching as it sloooowly closes quietly.

Bonita set the next scene, asking for a Plot scene where her protagonist tries to get some information out of Jake’s roulette dealer and Deirdra’s cocktail waitress. We talked for a minute about the difference between a Plot scene and a Character scene and decided that in the pilot, there wouldn’t be a whole lot of difference, but down the road it would become more evident.

We pan from the security monitor watching Thompson across the panel to a digital clock and watch as the time flies past, then over to another monitor where Andrew is getting replaced at his table. It’s the end of shift, so he heads over to the bar to say goodnight. He sits down and Rae, in a skimpy cocktail waitress outfit, stops by to say goodnight. Rae gripes about rude casino patrons and high heels and why isn’t there ever a security guy around when you need one (as we see Sam Holloway walk past in the background) and Kitty (who has been looking for more opportunities to develop her story) sees her chance. She swoops in, pulls up a chair and engages them both in friendly conversation. Conflict! Kitty wants info on Sam Holloway. Deirdra wants Rae to recognize that Kitty is a reporter, not just some chickie making conversation. Andrew just wants somebody to be nice to him because he’s feeling low. We laid out the cards and it all fell out very smoothly. Kitty didn’t get anything interesting because Rae knew exactly who Kitty was and why she was there, and Rae diverted Kitty by bringing up what a hero Andrew is, raising a teenage daughter alone.

My memory is starting to get fuzzy. I should’ve taken notes while we played. I’m going to try to get the rest down, but if I expect I’ll misremember things. I believe Rob called the next scene and wanted to reveal the working relationship between Rae and Thompson. So we leave Kitty and Andrew talking pleasantly together as the camera follows Rae back to the bar. She stacks some fresh drinks on her tray, then crosses the casino floor, lifting one hand to adjust her hair near her ear. We hear the crackle of a radio. “We have a problem,” she says. “There’s a reporter nosing around and she’s working an angle.” We can’t hear the other side of the conversation, but the shot ends by revolving around Rae to reveal Thompson sitting with stacks of papers spread across an empty casino table.

Conflict shows up quickly. Rae wants to follow up on the reporter, find out what she knows and what she’s after. Thompson wants to make it clear that he decides what’s important and worth following, not Rae. We come to a conclusion on the stakes of the conflict quickly. If Deirdra beats me, she gets cleared to investigate Kitty. If I beat Deirdra, Rae still investigates Kitty, but she has to do it off the books and against orders. This brings into play Rae’s Girl Scout trait, as well as her Super Sekrit Spy trait. The set-up with Ryan is a different Issue, though. We haven’t decided whether Thompson is actually Rae’s superior or whether they’re working together, so we make that the stakes for his conflict. If Ryan wins, Thompson is Rae’s boss. If I win, they’re peers. I don’t remember which of Thompson’s traits that Ryan used, but I think he worked in his Perfectionism somehow. This was probably the first time I did a good job on working out the stakes so that each conflict was separate and could go either way and we’d have an interesting outcome no matter which way it flopped. Several people spent fanmail to jump in on various sides, and it worked out so that we determined that Rae and Thompson are equally ranked, and that Rae could persue the thing with Kitty legitimately.

I think Jake called the next scene, but I really don’t remember what the meat of it was. I know it started with Thompson leaving the casino, walking across the parking lot, and a shadowy figure stepping out near his car. Thompson reaches inside his jacket and we see that he’s packing a gun in a shoulder holster. The figure quickly steps out, raising his hands and identifying himself as Kenneth Maloon, Thompson’s old army buddy. We learn that Maloon’s in the pocket of the mob, though we don’t know why yet. He’s not corrupt, but they have some dirt on him. He’s hoping Thompson will find the leverage to take down the people who have him collared, and here to warn Thompson about something. There was a conflict, but I don’t remember the details. Sorry. Hopefully one of the other players can flesh this out.

Deirdra called for the next scene. She wanted to follow up with Kitty and Rae and had the idea that maybe they went for pancakes. I jump right on that and we cut to Rae leaving the casino in street clothes, a clothes bag over her arm. She runs into Kitty, they go for breakfast at the International House Of Flapjacks, and the conflict sprang right up. If Bonita beat me, Rae let something slip and alerts Kitty that she’s not just a cocktail waitress. Otherwise, Kitty remains oblivious. Bonita called in Kitty’s Ambition to catch any little detail, and she won. On the other side, if Deirdra beat me, Kitty accidentally reveals that she’s got some sort of incriminating photograph of a highly-placed casino staff member. Deirdra brought in Rae’s Super Sekrit Spy to try to extract information from Kitty, but she failed. At some point over breakfast, Rae cites chapter, paragraph, and subsection of Nevada gaming law, and Kitty takes careful notice. That seems odd coming from a waitress.

We’re nearly out of time and can fit in one more scene. We’ve gone around the circle and we’re back to me, so I go back over what we’ve covered. Andrew hasn’t had much screen time and we haven’t touched on his Issue at all, so I call for a scene with Andrew and his Troubled Daughter, where he tries to be a good father.

Andrew pulls into the parking lot of his apartment building, rides up in the elevator, and steps out into the hall to see his elderly neighbor/babysitter storming out of his apartment. “That daughter of yours is a hellion!” Andrew is bewildered.

He opens his apartment door just in time to see Caroline slam the door of her room. Bonita steps in to play Caroline for us, and we have a tense little scene where Andrew goes into her room (”Another poster of Lance?” Fanmail to Rob.) and she rails at him for always being gone and working, never having time for the family before her mother died, having to move from the house to this tiny apartment, on and on. Immediate conflict. If Jake beats me, he calms Caroline down, she bursts into tears, and he comforts her. If I beat Jake, he fumbles the comforting, makes it worse, and Caroline runs out of the apartment and disappears. Oooooooh. Everybody loved that. I would’ve raked in the fanmail, if the Producer could get fanmail. Pretty much everybody who had fanmail to spend spent it for Jake, hoping to see a happy ending for Nice Guy Andrew, and that’s exactly how the cards fall. Caroline breaks down, Andrew hugs her and we end with a shot from outside the apartment, everything dark except the bright square of the window framing the father and daughter.

The last thing to do to finish the session is to let each player call for a very brief snippet of a scene that we may see in the next episode. We don’t necessarily have to use all of these the next time we play, but it’s a nice little part of the game.

Next time on…Oasis
Bonita: Kitty watches as Rae and Stone are talking and one passes the other a manilla envelope hidden beneath Rae’s tray of drinks.

Jake: Maloon and a shadowy figure talking. One gives the other a stack of cash.

Ryan: Thompson talking to a pair of Holloway’s security guards, saying “If you see anything, talk to me first.”

Deirdra: Rae is intently watching someone doing something and walks right into somebody, completely spilling a tray of drinks.

Rob: Holloway talking on his cell phone, saying “Just take care of her, I don’t care how.”

Edit: This post was imported from Point of Play, my gaming blog, which I’ve collapsed into this one.

Sunday night we got together to make up characters and talk a little more about the game. It started out a little slowly, but picked up speed as everybody saw how simple it was and people started offering suggestions to each other. We came out with the following protagonists:

Sam Holloway, the Oasis chief of security. Holloway is a workaholic dealing with a failed marriage, a violent temper, and a coke problem. His ex-wife, Juanita, didn’t show up in the pilot (which I’ll cover in another post) but almost certainly will appear soon. Holloway’s issue is Self-Destruction and is played by Rob.

Andrew Worcester, a roulette dealer in the casino. Andrew’s wife died about six months ago after a lingering illness that nearly bankrupted him and left him the sole parent of a 14-year-old daughter who resents having to move from the family home to a small apartment. Andrew has a degree in mathematics, but right now the Oasis is the best job he can manage. He’s trying to prove to himself and to his daughter that he can be a good father, so we classified his Issue as Self-Worth. Jake plays this protagonist.

Kitty Conway, a reporter for an as-yet-unspecified newspaper. Kitty lives in the shadow of her father, a veteran newspaperman in Las Vegas. She’s out to prove that she’s got what it takes to break big stories and doesn’t have to trade on the Conway name. Her Issue is also Self-Worth, and she’s played by Bonita.

Stone Thompson, an agent of the Nevada Gaming Commission assigned to the Oasis. Thompson is an anal-retentive, by-the-book, squeaky-clean, perfectionist control freak. He’s here to make sure that everything in this casino is on the level. He’s got an old military buddy on the police force who’s been compromised somehow by the mob, but Thompson’s loyal to his friends. His Issue is Control-Obsession, and Ryan insisted on the name “Stone.”

Rae Fannin is a fresh-faced, determined woman in her mid-20s. She is an agent employed by the Gaming Commission and has recently moved to Las Vegas for her first assignment: undercover as a cocktail waitress at the newly reopened Oasis. Her new job is her lifeline: the recent move and apparent choice of employment dismays her mother greatly, and although her on again/off again boyfriend (also a Gaming Commission employee) understands her situation entirely, he’s also been transferred to Atlantic City. Rae’s do-gooder nature is bound to cause her problems in the bureacracy of the system, as well as her on-site contact, Stone Thompson. Her issue is Ambition, and she’s played by Deirdra. [character blurb supplied by Deirdra. Thanks Deir!]

We established that the casino has been shut down for several months for some reason. We didn’t establish exactly what, but we tossed out some ideas. I think it’s going to come out in play that Something Big was behind the shutdown. The pilot episode starts with the casino Grand Reopening.

Rob pushed for every episode to either start with or include Holloway throwing somebody out of the casino. I love continuity stuff like that and everybody else thought it was good too, so we’re almost certain to throw that in.

We talked about sets that we’d use and had some trouble coming up with them. Rather than worry too much over it, we just threw out a few suggestions and decided we’d come up with the rest on the spot.

We’d originally struggled a little on The Big Idea for the show, but sometime last week I had a moment of inspiration that tied everything together. Unlike the Real Vegas, our Vegas is corrupt and the Mafia has a piece of every pie except this one, but they want in on the action. The Oasis is the one legitimate joint in a crooked town, but will it remain that way?

We lost power Monday morning before Katrina even got close to Jackson and finally got it restored about an hour ago. Sweet, sweet power.