Posts Tagged ‘primetime adventures’

Wherin we continue our discussion of the possibility of playing a Primetime Adventures series based on the following premise:

“a show about a time-traveling William Shakespeare and Abraham Lincoln zooming across the heartland of America in a stolen ‘67 Mustang with a goth-chick waitress who’s on the run from the Irish mob in Chicago.”

Daniel Perez, Chuck Hedden and I have been flirting with the notion of taking this seriously. Some ideas came up in another thread and this post is here to keep the pitch discussion going, should anyone wish to do so.

… starring Rich Rogers, Chuck Hedden, Arnold Cassell, and Mick Bradley.

I’m writing about our recent pitch session for a new rpg series that the Canoneers planned to play using Primetime Adventures.

Ah, Primetime Adventures, affectionately known as PTA. ‘A game of television drama’, it says on the cover. I find that to be joyfully true, and thus PTA has become a fun and rather frequent part of my rpg experience over the past few years. Practically any type of premise, any type of fiction, is possible with this game, as long as it can be framed within the general boundaries of a TV series. You could play a high-school monster hunters series, like Buffy the Vampire Slayer. You could play a premise like The Office, but make the characters an office full of spies![1] You can play super heroes, sci-fi soldiers, Medieval diplomats, pulp adventurers, school-age emo kids, or an emulation of The Beverly Hillbillies if you want. You could do a show about a time-traveling William Shakespeare and Abraham Lincoln zooming across the heartland of America in a stolen ‘67 Mustang with a goth-chick waitress who’s on the run from the Irish mob in Chicago.[2] In fact you could even play a series about a group of Dark-Age adventurers who go around exploring dungeons, killing whatever monsters they find and stealing all their stuff. As long as it can be framed episodically and the in-play focus is on the characters and their issues, relationships, and QUESTIONS, anything is possible.
Read the rest of this entry »

A big thanks to Paul Tevis for getting this great article on my radar:

John Scalzi – Three Cheers for Chewbacca, SciFi’s Ultimate Sidekick

I heartily agree with the whole thing – Chewie is one of my favorite characters, and exploring the nature of sidekick-ism through him is something I have done just for the hell of it on occasion. I even created an rpg character based on Chewbacca (Kashyyyk, from the PTA Star Wars game we play annually at GenCon) who is right in the thick of struggling with these issues. And reading this article brought a lot of the issues back to the front of my noggin.

Here’s a pertinent quote from Scalzi’s article …

Never once in the movies do you get the sense that Chewbacca is looking enviously at Han Solo’s captain’s chair and thinking to himself, man, how long do I have to hang around with this wahoo until I get to sit there? Why? Because Chewie is comfortable with himself as a person and a sidekick. He’s so comfortable, in fact, that he actually lets other people talk for him. I strongly believe Chewbacca could speak human if he so chose — but he prefers to let the other characters shine. That’s the sort of selfless assist to others that makes him perfect in the sidekick role.

- via John Scalzi – Three Cheers for Chewbacca, SciFi’s Ultimate Sidekick.

Now, imagine my SW-PTA character, Kashyyyk, is essentially that character – a competent, protective fuzzball who is by nature plenty content to spend his life as the sidekick, best friend, and pseudo-father-figure to the roguish hero Han Calrissian. Kash (who by the way can and does speak human) is committed to watching his pal’s back and keeping him safe in the midst of also helping him become the galaxy-saving rebel hero Kash believes Han can be.

But then pour all over that an interesting little twist – imagine that Kashyyyk is also the fated messiah of the wookiee race, destined to lead his people to a new era of freedom from the oppression of the Imperial Skywalker Dynasty and – at least in my mind – freeing them from their persistent role of playing second fiddle to humans.

Imagine that however the fiction plays out, Kashyyyk is going to find it nigh-impossible to remain true to BOTH aspects. You can pretend to walk the line between sidekick and alpha-dog all you want, but eventually it catches up to you. Eventually you’ve got to choose.

Now, I have NO IDEA how it will all play out. But I’m betting it’s going to be one helluva lot of fun, angst, and blood, sweat and tears.

Daniel Perez: Star Wars Primetime Adventures Spin-Off: The Sith Triumvirate

This brings me joy.

Once upon a time, the biggest obstacle for me in anticipation of playing Primetime Adventures was that I was scared to death of those moments in play when it would be my turn to frame a scene. In my head, I’d built scene framing up to be this incredibly difficult concept that only really talented and experienced people could do well, and since I was neither talented nor experienced, when my turn came I would either call for a really lame scene covered in weak sauce, or spew a poorly-formed notion that wasn’t really a scene at all, or I’d freeze up altogether and stare down at my hands in nervous silence because I would have nothing whatsoever to propose.

Read the rest of this entry »

Last night was scheduled as the night we would finally get to start our PDQ Argonauts mini-campaign via Skype, but when the time came, Rich and I were the only ones online. Daniel had to work late and Norwood continues to fly completely under the radar, at least in terms of replying to any of Rich’s or my attempts to contact him (which has me a bit worried, frankly, but that’s not the point here and now).

Bottom line, we didn’t play. Rich and I DID have an awesome hour-long chat just shooting the breeze about all kinds of life stuff, and I got to talk to his kiddo and that was lots of fun because the Mini-Orklord is way cool. But alas, no roleplaying. And thus the PDQ Argonauts game gets shelved indefinitely so that we can move on to other things that we’re scheduled to play.

Next up: April is Primetime Adventures month with guest-players David and Erin Moore, and although we’re not going to flesh out details until our actual pitch session, we’ve tossed some preliminary emails around and it looks like we’re all leaning toward some sort of space-opera sci-fi series. Whatever we end up pitching, it’s going to be a mix of one of my favorite games with several of my favorite players, so April is gonna rock. I’ll certainly share more as it develops on that front.

In May, we’re scheduled to play Burning Wheel with guest-GM Ogre Whiteside. I’m excited about this because BW is one of those cool rpgs that I own and have read and have heard a lot of good things about how it plays, but I haven’t actually played. So I’m psyched about that. And I’m looking forward to playing with Ogre because he’s just cool.

Of course, I’m also scheduled to run the Gutter Skypes through a Spirit of the Century session tonight. I’ve looked over their characters and there is some fun stuff cooking in my brain, but the hitch is, WildLion is practically hacking up a lung, it’s taken me nearly two hours just to get to this point in this post, I’m frazzled, and at this point running a game tonight is about the last thing on my mind. I so don’t wanna let those guys down, but holey moley all I can really focus on right now is kid phlegm and thermometers and Motrin and Mucinex.

In fact, he just woke up from a mini-doze with another coughing fit. Poor dude. We’re not used to him being like this – he NEVER gets sick enough to slow him down. I may be overblowing it but I see an Urgent Care visit looming.

I have been planning to write a post listing my picks for the 5 best tabletop rpgs for a few days now, as a response to a Facebook item that Sean Patrick Fannon posted last week. But I decided that instead of trying to list and justify why I would consider any particular RPG “the best”, I am going to create a list of games based upon a different premise – that being, what are my five most essential games?

In other words, If I were told by some higher power that for the rest of my life, I could only choose five rpgs that I would ever be allowed to play again, which five would I pick? Honestly, this turned out not to be as easy as I thought. I did a lot of weighing and pondering. And lets just say that I hope nobody ever tries to force me to only ever play only five games for the rest of my life. There are lots of games that I love being left off this list. Not to mention games that could well be on this list if I ever actually get to play them.

But, here they be – right now, at this stage of my life these are the five most essential roleplaying games I would not want to live without if I were forced to make the choice.

Read the rest of this entry »