# Primetime Adventures tags: #game/rpg/primetime-adventures ![[Primetime Adventures (cover).jpg|600]] **Primetime Adventures** is the story game that turns the gaming table into a television writer's room — or at least the pleasant fantasy of one before the network executives got their hands on it. Designed by Matt Wilson and published by Dog Eared Designs, it skips the dungeon and the dice and instead asks the table to create a TV show, genre, tone, and setting entirely up to the group, then play out its episodes as the show's starring cast. The role models it holds up for structure are the ensemble greats: *Buffy the Vampire Slayer*, *Gilmore Girls*, *Firefly*. ## Setting Like any good television pitch, the fiction of **Primetime Adventures** is whatever the table agrees to make. You establish a series together — a premise, a setting, a tone, a cast — unbothered by any studio demanding a talking poodle. One player takes the producer's chair, a role the book is at pains to describe as **facilitator, not dictator**: the producer runs the supporting cast and the show's villains, provides the adversity, and exists to keep the protagonists from getting what they want too easily. Everyone else plays a protagonist, one of the starring characters — the grumpy neighbor, the snooty receptionist, the war hero carrying survivor's guilt. The cast is built as a group, each protagonist carrying an *issue* (the private wound the season will poke at), an *impulse*, *edges* (skill, privilege, knowledge, and the occasional flaw), and a *personal set*. Each protagonist gets a **story arc** across the season — five or nine episodes — with a **screen presence** rating for each episode, a 1, 2, or 3 that says how prominent they'll be that week. Everyone gets one *spotlight episode* per season, where their threads all come together. It's explicitly collaborative, framed as a team where the thing you're all trying to win is a good show rather than beating each other — the whole game runs on that writer's-room spirit, not on competition. ## Mechanics Play is built as episodes made of scenes, and the signature loop is the scene that swells into a card-based conflict. Each scene decides what it's for — a **character scene** (will the protagonist resist their impulse?) or a **plot scene** (will the protagonist get what they want?) — gets set in motion, builds to a crisis, and then resolves by dealing the cards. The resolution is what makes Primetime Adventures memorable: it's **diceless**, run on a standard deck of playing cards. When a conflict comes to a head, the protagonist draws a number of cards equal to their **screen presence**, plus one for each **trait** they apply, plus one for each point of **fan mail** they spend. The producer draws one card plus one per point of **budget** spent, up to a maximum of six. Red cards — hearts and diamonds — count as successes, and the side with more successes wins the conflict. But here's the narrative twist baked into the rules: the player holding the single highest card gets the final word on how the outcome actually lands, and that can be the winner *or* the loser. You can lose the exchange and still narrate the beat that makes it sting or salvage it — storytelling chops genuinely matter as much as what the cards fall as. **Fan mail** is the resource other players toss at moments they love, letting a protagonist draw extra cards and shifting whose scenes get the spotlight; **budget** is the producer's counterweight. Screen presence isn't just card volume either — it also caps how many times a protagonist can lean on each trait in an episode. The result is a conflict engine that keeps the story moving no matter who wins any given exchange, which is very much the point. ## Editions - **1st Edition (2004)** — the original, resolving conflicts with dice rather than cards. *Not in the library.* - **2nd Edition (November 2005)** — swapped dice for a standard deck of playing cards and refined the screen presence / conflict loop; this is the form the card resolution is best known from. *In the library.* - **3rd Edition (first printing, 2015)** — funded by a 2014 Kickstarter that raised over US$30,000; an expanded, refreshed revision with the v3 rules and its play aids. *In the library.* (the held v3 core plus protagonist, series, and producer sheets) ## References - [Primetime Adventures 3e [Print+PDF] - Indie Press Revolution](https://www.indiepressrevolution.com/xcart/Primetime-Adventures-3e-Print-PDF.html) - [Review of Primetime Adventures - RPGnet](https://www.rpg.net/reviews/archive/13/13243.phtml) - [Primetime Adventures, Third Edition - RPGGeek](https://rpggeek.com/rpgitem/175317/primetime-adventures-third-edition) - [Primetime Adventures - Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primetime_Adventures)