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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.
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