We've just started a Primetime Adventures season. Primetime Adventures (PtA from now on) is an excellent role-playing game by Dog-Eared Designs where you create and play a TV series.

Our show is about academic occultists in Turku, year 1666. It is light-weight character driven historic drama with occult and magical elements. As such the premise is very intriguing and our cast is very strong. However, we haven't played PtA before and as with all new things there's much to be learned.

One of these things is how much to plan ahead. One of my friends wrote a detailed idea of a troublesome situation for his protagonist (player characters are called protagonists in PtA) related to a smuggled book and a bunch of smugglers the protagonist is not able to pay. As he introduced it to the group he asked if he was planning too much far ahead or even playing in planning mode as this is something that was advised against in the Sons of Kryos podcast about starting Primetime Adventures as well as the Story Games thread with PtA advice.

So, here are my thoughts about it. Generally, I don't think that you can play in the planning mode yourself as a player. The advice given in the sources above refers mostly to the premise setting session. There, it is perfectly possible for the players to start imagining the future interactions between protagonists. If done in great lengths, it can harm the game as potentially great gaming material is then set as background for the protagonists.

Other thing to think about is if this kind of planning is beneficial. I'm positive that in this incident it was very good for the game. As it was the pilot session, and the hook that this player set both gave insight on his protagonist and fit in well with the bang the producer had provided in the beginning of the episode, it really did help. 

But for it to be beneficial the player in question still had to introduce it to our group as part of his scene request made to the producer (as the game master iscalled in PtA). I think most of us hadn't read the idea before the session and even if we did, I think it is important that it was introduced the way the game mechanics allow you to bring stuff to the table. What I mean is that from the scene request onwards it is the producer's task to make the idea become reality in the game fiction by laying out the actual situation based more or less on the ideas the player came up with.

This brings us to another useful principle: nothing is laid in stone before it is addressed in play. My friend could have written a five-page essay about the situation, but none of that would have been present in the fiction until the other players agreed to it in play. The way we do that in PtA is that producer as the player in charge of other characters and the environment makes the final call. The other players' roles in this negotiation is to voice their opinions and try to influence the player framing the scene and the producer if need be.

This doesn't mean you have to be coy or shy about your own ideas for your protagonists background or plot hooks or whatever. Quite the opposite, in fact. PtA has a system for integrating your ideas and a pretty good system for other players to voice their opinions (encouraging or discouraging) as well. So you can feel safe suggesting new stuff as you know that it's the other players' (and not entirely your) responsibility to ensure that your input is beneficial to the game. Every player can request scenes in his turn so everyone can try to turn the game to those things that interest them.

I've got a couple of role-playing game projects started. I've just started on the basic premises the next step being producing something playable to experiment with. The biggest hurdle (for me at least) seems to be imagining the play - how to structure the rules to facilitate a certain kind of play experience. And even more simply, imagining the best possible play experience. There seems nothing tangible to use as a guide.

But then it dawned me that the first stake of a role-playing game, the one thing holding the wishy-washy stuff firmly on the ground has always been the character sheet. I remember when we got bored with D&D with my friends (we were 11 or 12 at the time), we came up with a viking rpg in a couple of hours - all we needed was a spanking new character sheet (complete with six attributes sounding a lot like STR, DEX, CON, INT, WIS & CHA). Just by making the char sheet we had our own viking heartbreaker (but fortunately we didn't go and publish it and sell it for real money).

But, nowadays I'm a bit iffy about char sheets being as useful as they used to be for prototyping uses. Sure, you still put all the crunchy bits of your character in the sheet, but how exactly does a char sheet show what kind of game you are dealing with?

Maybe you have more room for the important stuff. The 3:16 sheet has a lot of space for flashbacks and they tend to have a big impact on the play on a scene level. But, other than that I would think that you would need a different kind of artefact to design your game's play experience with. Right now I'm thinking game boards - using a game board or something like that to illustrate the game's scene structure, the interplay of different mechanics or somesuch. You could even have a score board instead of character sheets. The score board would have positions for all the different combinations of character stats so you would see at a glance where everyone's at.

I don't know, what do you think is important / helpful at this stage as a design / demonstration tool? Are char sheets informative? How?

I've been playing Secret Files: Tunguska on Wii a couple of evenings with my s.o. I would really want to like Secret Files: Tunguska on Wii. The point-and-click adventure genre could be combatible with thw Wiimote and my tv screen and could even evolve into something more social and fun together with Wii's other features and a bit of game design magic.

Alas, the game's drawbacks make the experience a bit of a grind. First, the main character Nina's voice actor speaks in a really irritable nasal drawl. I mean, it sounds like the dreaded accent of people living in Helsinki (for all of you Finnish-speaking readers, for those fluent in English I would compare it as a mix between a popular high school teen-aged girl and Draco Malfoy). And, because she's speaking all the time you find yourself pulling your hair out especially when you are stuck with a puzzle.

Second, Nina looks a bit like a character from a low-budget tv series flirting with sex and porn. Do you remember Silk Stalkings? Ugh. The idea probably was to make Nina a cool, active woman protagonist but on the visual front the plan was botched big time. Overly slim waist and large hips along with ridiculous open cleavage (even when driving a motor cycle) give an unintendedly comical look to Nina, much like to the stars of those soft porn tv series. This is becoming a staple of point-and-click adventures so much that I'll probably refer them to as soft porn games from now on. I mean the characters in Syberia and The Longest Journey (the newer edition) were done with much better taste, but the underlying formula seems to be the same in each one. Could we have a change to this trend, please?

Third, the puzzles are as incoherent as ever.

I wanted WiiFit. I wanted it badly. I used to mock it, I still mock it. It's just plain stupid sci-fi apparel for Wii, among the light guns, guitars and what not. At least that was what I thought it would be. Nobody told me, that I was going to witness the thing I saw other night, while doing ordinary body test.

This article is an in-depth review of 3:16 carnage mongst the Stars role-playing game. Unfortunately it's only in Finnish at the moment. I wrote a short piece in English about 3:16 a little while ago, please check it out . The Finnish article follows: 

Kirjoitin Roolipelaaja 17:n lyhyen arvostelun Gregor Huttonin 3:16 Carnage Amongst the Stars -roolipelistä. Jutun pituus oli rajattu 1500 merkkiin, koska lehteen ei enää siinä vaiheessa, kun juttua tarjosin, olisi mahtunut pitempää. Tein annetussa tilassa parhaimpani ja mielestäni juttu on hyvä johdanto peliin. 1500 merkkiä on kuitenkin sellainen pituus, jossa ei ehdi kertoa läheskään kaikkea oleellista pelistä. Niinpä kirjotin jutun jatkoksi pidemmän arvostelun tänne Alt+Games -blogiin. Juttu on alla. Vertailun vuoksi voin sanoa, että pituus on reilut 12000 merkkiä, eli neljän sivun juttu Roolipelaajassa.

Koska Roolipelaajan arvostelussa selitettiin perusseikat, aloitan tässä heti asialla: omilla kokemuksillani pelistä ja systeemin kuvaamisella. Yleisen kuvauksen pelistä saatte Roolipelaajasta (mitä, eikö sinulle tule Roolipelaajaa?),  pelin omilta sivuilta tai Arkkikiven sivuilta. Kirjoitin myös aiemmin lyhyen ennakkojutun 3:16:sta tänne.

Ensivaikutelma

Jo tiedote pelin julkaisusta laittoi puntit tutisemaan. Vaikka tiedotteessa ei mainittu sanaakaan Starship Trooper -vaikutteista, fiktiopätkät ja pelin lyhyt kuvaus tihkuivat niin paljon mustaa huumoria ja ylilyötyä furutistimilitaristimeinkiä, että ostopäätös oli helppo tehdä.

Itse peliin tutustuminen vahvisti samaa positiivista tunnetta. "Mars mars pelaamaan, mitä siinä toljotat", peli tuntui kertovan jokaisessa luvussaan, "Ei se ole temppu eikä mikään". 3:16 tukeutuu niin syvälle scifigenrekonventioihin, että sen idea syöpyy mieleen kuin automaattisesti.

Peliin tutustuessa tuli myös tunne siitä, että simppelin ja kompaktin ulkokuoren alla piili äärimmilleen viritetty koneisto, jonka saattaisi nähdä koko loistossaan vasta pelatessa. Sen verran irrallisiksi eri mekaniikat ja niiden tarkoitus kuitenkin jäivät, että oli hiukan vaikea aavistaa, millaiseksi pelikokemus muodostuisi. Oli siis pakko kokeilla.