GM: Sean Nittner
System: Primetime Adventures
We did a pitch session for PTA today. WOOT!
I introduced the game to players, two of which didn’t know anything about it. I was pretty vague about the mechanics because I wanted to jump into the pitch session.
There are some strange constraints on this game. First, we’re doing it during lunch, so time is very limited. Second, one of our players is still very new to role-playing so he doesn’t share a lot of our preconceived notions about what is in a game. Third, we only have 3 players (4 including me). Personally I really like smaller games, so this makes me happy, but it is different for our norm.
We threw out a bunch of ideas inspired by these existing media:
Trapped on a island:
- Giligan’s Island
- Lost
- Naruto
- Lord of the Flies
- High School Deathmatch
We waffled on this. It would be a cool show and crazy to boot, but a little to us vs. them for me. I wanted something a bit more comical and personal.
We were eating at the dining commons and Alec looked over his shoulder and said what about playing people that worked here. That spurned on a whole bunch of other ideas
- GO (the movie)
- Clerks
- Our own personal experience with crappy jobs.
We were sold, we knew this show would be comical, personal and a blast to play.
The premise. I man whose last name is Choshky has just purchased an Osh Hardware Story and the adjacent TGI Fridays. He has decided to combine the staff for the restaurant and hardware store and call it collectively Ch-OSH-ky’s. The cast so far:
- Choshky – Super hardworking owner with horrible business sense.
- Kiss ass manager who never actually works (played by Cameron)
- Dorky kid at the hardware store in love with a waitress at the restaurant.
- The guy who should have been fired, but never is (played by Travis)
- Sincere hard working kid
- The guy everyone thinks knows what he is doing but is totally clueless
- The hot waitress
- The Lifer, who has been working at the hardware store for 40 years (played by Alec)
- The day dreamer who always thinks he’s going to be a super hero or something.
- The nice senile old lady who forgets everything.
We also introduced foils for each of the player characters.
- Cameron is foiled by the Day Dreamer
- Travis is foiled by the Sincere hard worker
- Alec is foiled by the Guy who people thinks knows what he’s doing.
We’ll get together again to actually create the characters, talk about issues and when people want the spotlight and then I think we’ll run the pilot.
Hey, do you want to do a one on one game? since you like small games? Alec and I did one for a bit, was really fun.
There is a cool 1 on 1 game called Breaking the Ice, that I would be down with trying. It is a game about a couple dating, but its intentionally made to be playable by any two people regardless of gender/orientation.
Or maybe Burning Wheel. I’m really liking what we put together for the WoW game.
Of course I need to invent an 8th day of the week to fit it in.
I think there’s a lot of other games that can work, but I’d be down for that. Some ones that I’d like to try single player mode: L5R, Silver Age Sentinels(again, this worked well for alec and I), and Star Trek(kinda).
See, my thought was that, out of all my friends, you’re really the only late night guy left. Everyone at my place and steve and fattig get into wow late at night, and so I was thinking that it could be more of a random, pickup esque game when it was late and we didn’t have anything else to do.
Have you guys created ‘sets’ yet? I think there’s also the notion of a ‘personal set’ for each character which I thought was interesting.
We haven’t done set yet, but thank you for reminding me. We’ll definitely hit that next time.