Most RPGs are all about the characters: who they fight, how they advance, what they can do. Primetime Adventures in the antithesis of this: the characters only matter in their place in the story.
Matt Wilson's game can be a challenge for gamers who cut their teeth on classic roleplaying games. A character's strength depends on only two things: how much the story is focused on that character and how much the player has contributed to the story. Everything else is just description. Characters are based around an issue, which guides sessions where that character is the focus, but has no mechanical effect on the game. The system is clean and simple, but its effect is to bring out a story from those playing it.
Primetime Adventures unabashedly uses the terminology of the TV shows it imitates. A game is a season, each session is an episode. The gamemaster is the producer. Each character's strength is based on their screen presence, which is laid out for the entire season at the beginning of play. In some episodes characters are the stars, and sometime they're support, depending on their screen presence. Screen presence lets players draw more cards when resolving conflicts, and is the primary factor in success. Certain cards count towards winning, and the player with the highest card narrates the result. The winning player may not be the narrating player, so the narrator may have to narrate another player's intent.
The other variable is fan mail. Any time a player does something cool, another player can award a point of fan mail, which can then be used to draw an extra card during a conflict. Fan mail also forms an ecosystem with the producer's budget, which is used to set challenges, so that challenges are always balanced against the characters.
Primetime Adventures is not just a game that imitates the structure of television shows, it's a guide to how to tell stories. The rules form an interactive framework that shows the rules of storytelling as an interactive system, not a static statement. Anybody who's ever tried to tell a story should play this game.
Indie Story Telling Game for the Casual Gamer
I recommend this to people who enjoy story telling. It is hard to call this an RPG since there are only few guidelines, no charts, no dice, no hit points and such. Rather, like many of the indie video games here, this indie RPG is a interesting experiment in redefining what an RPGs are.
I played this at the Strategicon Gateway 2008 convention, for the first time, this past weekend. Everyone at the table was new to this game and learned the basics in 5 minutes. We then wrote the outline of the script, for a one episode in 10 minutes. Thus after 15 minuets we started acting (role playing) the stuff we outlined and took turns directing (narrating) the episode.
We choose to do a show called Ward 13, a hospital with a vampire doctor and a werewolf nurse, who treated paranormal patients while trying to look normal. I played Mr. Ed, the account, who tried close Ward 13 because it was not profitable.
Playing Primetime Adventures felt like I was in a free form interactive fiction (Emily Short stuff) that I have been playing since I discovered Play This Thing.
The organizer of my game session mentioned that he know TV writer who play this game to sharpen their skills.
BTW
Primetime Adventures was a runners up in Independent Role Playing Game of the 2004
http://www.rpg-awards.com/2004/game_of_year2.shtml
All you need is one deck of cards, and the small paperback rule book that is about 100 pages long, which is shorter than some of PC strategy game manual.
@chaosbreaker
Sounds like a good session. This my be obvious, but I have to ask: was the vampire doctor named Dr. Acula? :)
You're right about PTA being significantly different from traditional RPGs, but I think it's still very much an RPG. I was recently discussing with someone the nature of abstractions in games, and how those abstractions appear to the players and characters, and PTA is a shining example of a game where the rules abstractions involved are entirely 'meta.' The logic of who's good at what and how the character interacts with the world is entirely based on things that only make sense to the player, not the character, as opposed to games like D&D, where a character's abilities would (presumably) make sense to the character. I think this is the difference that makes PTA a little bit of a stretch when you first play it, but it's also what makes a lot of indie games stand out.
This kind of in-game logic (based on the story) also lends itself a little more to thinking of your character as a character in a novel that you're writing: some partial reflection of yourself, but not 'you.' Some people come to games to be someone else, and rules that rely on logic external to character knowledge (like fan mail, or screen presence) can break them out of character. Games like this aren't for everybody, but if you don't mind rules that are based on factors other then an emulation of real life, it's a great game.