Primetime Adventures allows you to have everybody bring something to the table and simply start a scene in the middle of the most bizarre (and sometimes coolest) events. One thing “conflict” is not a shouting match. A character can brood alone in his own moment of conflict and have the other players meddle on that even though they are not physically there.

I do have other comments on that, especially, cause I do a lot of screenwriting, but I’m not going to go on and on about it. Either way, the game tells you to bring the conflict as early as possible, though you don’t need that. The term “scene” is not properly explained or used. There’s a difference between a sequence and a scene. Sometimes we do find the conflict in the middle of a sequence but not in every scene, so the conflict is a connection of the scenes.

PTA, unfortunately, does not explain to the common player that he is allowed to roleplay a bit, conflict shows up, roleplay it, and roleplay some more after it. Now here’s the catch. Spotlight. It tells you how often you should intervene on scenes, not only who can win over who.during the card drawing.

Anyways, I do have a lot takes on PTA, but I’ll stop here (I’m writing too much). I have played PTA a lot, so my players and I came across a lot of different difficulties, that I can imagine you guys are going through. The thing is PTA helped all of us to implement everything in every other game that we play.

I don’t like the term Downtime as it seems to suggest that downtime is not interesting time. You know how the touchy folks like to dig for the insults. Knowing this I will use weasel words, you have been warned. Anyway….

I also don’t think the problem I “hear” you describing is downtime as much as it is scene framing. Scene framing is one of the areas you see a big difference between “Forgie” / “Indie” games and “Traditional” games. There are several reasons I think for this. Let me wander….

We know that roleplaying is an art, or activity, that is in it’s own literary space. (Listen to Wick talk about that on my 49th episode. Pa-luug.) Roleplaying being a relatively newly codified system of expression it tends to look at other literary forms for guidance.

What I’ve noticed is that Indie-punks tend to talk about movies when talking about roleplaying and looking for something to cast their allusions, metaphors, and fancy English class terms, onto. If you look at the way scenes are set they’re much more focused on delivering the parts of the story that matter most and moving on. Cut to the important bits, conflict, resolution, and perhaps the aftermath for important emotional or thematic scenes.

Traditional gamers seem to always be talking about books, and plot. If you look at the classic view the Gamemaster brings the plot, setting pieces, and adversity, and the other players inhabit a point of view and respond to the situations they are thrust into as character. This kind of gaming tends not to use very strong scene framing, so much so that mentioning the term scene framing will cause confusion, it certainly took me awhile to understand the term. I call this gentle scene framing. Scene framing happens, but the cuts tend to be much smaller and more focused on accounting for everything that happens once the characters have been created and the story started. The extreme form of this has rules like travel times, and wandering encounter charts. We might detail every single boring day of the week long trip to recover the macguffin dungeon, and have one exciting night encounter during that time with Frogs who fart area effect flames for 2d6 damage per attack, no save. We might set watches and roll not to fall asleep and write poetry, or use our cooking skill to be impressive, or roleplay a dispute between the Thief-acrobat and the Paladin.

Now getting back to the Forgie / Indie games, many of them are built on a very cognizant use of Gamism to drive play. Ron talks in his article on Gamism that Gamism is focused strongly on the situation as the center of play. Assuming he’s correct, then it follows that games that intentionally use Gamism as a support to encourage the type of play the designer intended, would be very situationally focused. The rewards are built around that. This can be very disturbing to folks who aren’t use to the type of movie cutting that goes on. Not to mention how destructive it can be to trying to inhabit the point of view of the character.

As an exercise I can’t think how to reward the type of play you feel you are missing even though I inherently understand what you are talking about. I’ll stop now to let you get a word in edge-wise, plus work calls.

My answer is 65:30:5.

On the flip side of this, you can run into some pretty bad time management problems when you pursue character development in situations that do not explicitly promote group action. When you’re repelling a Centurion boarding party, it makes a lot of sense to stick together. After the toasters are spaced, the fleet has jumped, and the dust has settled, having a player character spend a bunch of time working out her complex marital and child-rearing problems in private is a sure-fired way to disengage the other players (and switching the spotlight around tends to break the mood). Tell me how much fun Starbuck’s player was having while Tyrol and Callie were doing their private soap-opera thing.

Everything in moderation.

I think there’s a big difference between “moments of crisis” and “conflict,” and any really good bit of downtime still has conflict — just not crisis.