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.