I should have spent some additional time before the first week so that we’d have a larger cast of characters, but it worked out even with light preparation. The players give you lots of good hooks [a contact, a nemesis, and their issue] during character generation, so you have a good place to start your prep. “Next week on”, where each player contributes a five second scene snippet from the upcoming episode, is an excellent mechanic that fuels good GM prep.

PTA was quite different from anything we had played before. It wasn’t as brain twisting as Universalis, but it was certainly a mental exercise much of the time. There were also mechanics like spotlight, fan mail, and budget that were really fun from a gamist perspective.

It was tough to separate scene setup from scene resolution because we got so excited in setting up a scene that we would often start to try and resolve the scene before the goals were determined. We had a hard time with setting goals sometimes as well. We seemed to improve on both of these issues as the series progressed.

I must take the responsibility for the whole time travel thing. I’d been watching a lot of sci-fi recently and everyone gleaned onto my enthusiasm for a time travel game idea. In retrospect, we should have avoided something as complicated as time travel for our first time playing the system. Time travel almost seems like a “third rail” for games sometimes.

While PTA was a real challenge for us to grasp, we did have a lot of FUN playing it. That is ultimately my bottom line when it comes to games. I can see us trying it again, perhaps with a different series premise, sometime in the future. Of course that doesn’t mean that you can’t run Spirit of the Century the next time you have the GM chair Scott.