Actual Play – 15 Minutes (9/10/2009)

GM: None
Players: Sean, Travis, and Chrissy
System: 15 Minutes

This is a little late, but I think the notes are still good.

We got together to try and give the system a complete run through, but only got through the pitch and character creation.

Pitch

We opted for a boy band, specifically a young boy band (pre-teen to early teen), and decided these were the stable of characters to pick from: The baby boy, the bad boy, the pretty boy, and the ethnically different boy. There may have been one other. Chrissy opted for the baby, I took the bad and Travis went with ethnically different (although it was a ways into character creation until we realized he was probably Chinese).

Character Creation

We got through all four of our “When I was…” building blocks and “I did it all for…”, which is essentially all of character creation. We ended with just under our cap on groups (20 groups max, I think we had somewhere around 16).

Observations.

1. The Pitch feels perfect. Nearly identical to the PTA pitch session with the added benefit of enforcing that a cast is created during the pitch rather than during character creation. This is a pretty “rules-light” portion of the game, but it seems to work great every time.
2. The one thing I would add to the Pitch is the Fame scale. Since how big we’re going to get has a lot to do with how epic the game will be, I think that is something that should at least be discussed in the pitch, and then possibly mechanically formalized during play.
3. The character creation “when I was ___” section still feels a little stifling to me. I have two thoughts.
   1. There isn’t any reason these formative times need to be at the same time in the character’s lives, they are just things that form the character, not his or her connection to the group.
   2. It is hard to break up the pre-fame lives into four distinct events for young characters. In our game the baby was 10 and it was really hard for me to fathom four major things happening to someone before being ten (despite having a 4 and a 7 year old myself and seeing how major things are happening to them all the time).
4. Item 3.2 above is partially ameliorated by Travis’s clarification that the events have nothing to do with what got you famous, they are just meaningful events that form you (by giving you traits) and your likely support groups (by creating cred and haters).
5. Another thought would be to try different numbers.  I’d like to see how three events plays out and see if it leaves the characters to barren or sufficianty developed.
6. Because the game has this dichotomy of how the character changes vs. how they are perceived I think the character sheet would benefit from being divided. My inspiration comes from the way texts look on iphones:
   
   I’m thinking personal effects on the left and appearance on the right. Also, I like light blue and pink for the bubbles, but maybe I’m just too much a fan of pink. This would help me differentiate between what parts of our characters are in the public eye and what part is personal.
7. Three feels like a good number to play this game. I don’t doubt it would work with more, but three is a sweet spot for me compared to two.
8. There is a definite meta-game you can play during character creation.  I, for instance kept trying to get “popular” kids as my cred group so I’d have a nice pool with them.  We haven’t discussed this but can you have a group both as cred and as haters?  We should probably test this play to see if it breaks when we use them.
9. We’ve been talking about created the cred/hater groups during the pitch and I’d like to try this.  In our game we got some groups that didn’t really fit with my concept of who would be important to a boy band, so I’m inclined to say let’s make the list up while we’re all collaborating and before people are getting stuck with a choice.