Actual Play – Surplus (1/26/2009)

GM: Sean Nittner
System: Primetime Adventures

For today’s inspiration for Cho-OSH-ky’s I stole from the episode “Surplus” from the office. The theme we agreed on was that there would be a surplus that had to be spent by the end of the day, otherwise it would be lost. Various characters wanted different things like: Advertising for the store, A new Key making machine, A ramp to the ceiling for their paintball course, a home entertainment system for their office, etc.

Kevin started the show off with a bang… literally. He got some high powered paintball gun and tried to shoot some apartment lady manager through the vent shaft. Of course, crap hit the fan and the show started spiraling from there.

So far so good.

What rocked

Kevin really started the game off with some fun. He’s a complete fucker and started all kinds of shit. Including hitting the apartment manager in the ass and Silas in the face, and of course breaking the vent shaft. That scene was golden.

Instead of having all the budget in my pile at the beginning of the show, I gave each character one point of fan mail and put three in the pot. This helped the flow quite a bit.

We didn’t worry about staging the “conflict” when setting the scene, we just let then arise through the narration. This seemed to work much better than deciding on a conflict before acting out the scene.

What could have been improved

I didn’t feel like we had a great challenge for Mr. Bawls. Mostly because I was pushing the “surplus” agenda on him when I think he would have rather done a personal scene. I think next time when we have a “what this show is about” I’m going to also offer a point of fan mail to someone who will introduce it for me.

One thought on “Actual Play – Surplus (1/26/2009)”

  1. Point 2 and 3 on the rockers is what I did on Sunday with my youth. It feels more natural, honestly.

    The other thing that was happening was Alec and I, when we talked about PTA, were realizing (subconsciously, at least) that part of what made my youth think it was awesome was that fan mail was flowing continually. I was trying to be better about awarding it, and he was too. That keeps things moving and makes for more high powered conflicts than having us not award and hoard our points.

    I much prefer having 5 and 6 card conflicts than 2 and 3. 🙂

    I think the player of Mr. Bawls is still getting his head around the conflict idea, and about whether he can say ‘no’ in this game.

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