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.