Why don’t we just play Primetime Adventures?

By On June 11, 2012 · Leave a Comment

So, I think Primetime Adventures is a great game. So great a game, that we might well ask why we don’t just use it for everything. Well, because of reasons.

Let me unpack that a bit. Some time ago, I was promulgating the notion that most of what makes a successful instance of RPG play is shared genre-expectations among the people at the table. I still think that this is true.

Primetime Adventures is a game with some powerful mechanisms for getting everyone at the table to share those genre-expectations. It’s a one-two punch: first the pitch, where everyone at the table gets in the same general area of idea-space, and then fanmail, which works[1] as a feedback mechanism to let players tell each other “yes, more of that, please!”

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  1. When it works. It can and does fail. [↩]
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Game Tasting: Primetime Adventures

By On May 19, 2011 · 2 Comments

And on to night three. It was Primetime Adventures, by Matt Wilson. John ran it, Dan, Kate, Thaddaeus and I played. We decided on a show that ended up feeling like The IT Crowd meets Sliders, and it worked pretty well as a concept. I played the nerdy highschool protagonist, Kate my military brat tomboy friend, Dan my wisecracking grandmother, and Thad the entitled rich guy in town. We got sucked into a parallel world (where we were in a steampunk fascist America at war with communist Canada) and hijinks ensued.

The game was hilarious and great fun. Having two semi-comedians at the table certainly helped, and it helped them earn a lot of fanmail. It was immediately clear how the fanmail mechanic was the real point of the system, and having some people who were great at working with it made the system shine.

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Game Tasting Week

By On May 15, 2011 · 1 Comment

So, this coming week, we of Transneptune (with some friends) are going to spend this coming week trying a different game every night. And we’re gonna post about it.

Here’s the schedule:

Hopefully, the posts will go up the day after, but they might be delayed if we’re busy. Which we probably will be.

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