Let's Talk Cancellation

In the United States (where the vast majority of TV shows come from), the success of a show is measured by its Neilsen Ratings.

These are rapidly becoming irrelevant in the age of streaming, where a person can watch a show whenever they feel like it, instead of HAVING to watch it at a specific time, but in spite of this, you'll often see streaming services cancel shows that have lackluster launches.

Maybe I didn't feel like watching the live-action Cowboy Bebop show on Netflix when it first came out? Maybe I was watching Ghosts at the time, but was planning to get to it later?

But regardless of my own viewing habits, this is how executives measure TV success. Were people watching the day/week/month of release? Yes? Keep it on the air. Did folks wait a few months? Cancel it, and take it off the app forever. DVD and Blu-ray releases? Forget it. It's dead media now!

Yeah, I've got feelings about physical media.

So, how do ratings work?

It's pretty simple, really.

Let's take the U.S. version of The Office as our case study.

Season 1 had an average rating of 2.5/6. This means that 2.5% of all households with a TV were watching The Office.

Redditor u/Prax150 makes a pretty good breakdown of how it all works in terms of what the networks actually look for:

• 0.0 to 1.4: Cancellation territory for the major U.S. networks, like Fox, NBC, ABC and CBS. Smaller channels, like the CW will consider shows in the low 1s as their top shows.
• 1.5 to 1.9: At risk of cancellation. Sitcoms on Fox can often be found in this range. These would be your cult hits.
• 2.0 to 2.9: Pretty much guarantees renewal. Good, solid ratings.
• 3.0 to 3.9: Rare for a sitcom, but really popular shows like The Voice might find themselves here. Your big event reality shows and the like.
• 4.0 and above: The biggest shows around. The Big Bang Theory and Modern Family. And The Office for most of its seasons. If you make it here, you're pretty much guaranteed to be THE show that everybody watches.

The thing I like about this scale is that it's nice and small. It makes the maths nice and easy, and fits in the range we see with things like Technique scores and dice pools. You're not rolling 20d8 (unless you're some kind of maniac), but a 4d8 pool? 5d8? Certainly doable. If I wanted to, I could generate ratings using a dice roll.

So, that gives us a 4 to 5-point scale. Maybe even 6, for the top shows.

Starting Ratings

Let's say players get a starting Rating equal to the sum of their best Technique scores, divided by the number of players. This reflects the quality of its stars, which will draw in first-time viewers when it premieres.

A party whose highest Techniques are 3, 2, 4, and 3 have a total of 12. 12 divided by 4 gives us a starting Rating of 3.0, while a party of 3 and 2 (total 5) has a starting Rating of 2.5. You could even have a solo player with a 2 in their Technique start with a Rating of 2.0!

Those are all pretty solid Ratings--odds are, they won't stay there, but for a premiere? Sure, I can see it.

This Rating score should also naturally increase as their Technique does; as your actors get better at ACTING, audiences notice and keep tuning in. Maybe premiere Ratings are calculated at the start of a season, and then go downhill (or uphill) from there?

Ratings should also follow the decimal scale of real-life Neilsen Ratings. We don't need to get into the weeds of .25s, .75s and .33s, but a .5 mark I think is fair--therefore, Ratings are always rounded (up or down, I wonder?) to the nearest .5 mark. This also (deceptively) gives us a 10-point scale, which means that we can use percentage values (say, if I wanted to use dice in some way).

And, let's call it what they are. Ratings are my game's version of Hit Points. Except, instead of being per-character, it's per-party. I think I need to find other games that use party-wide HP for inspiration.

Cancellation Tokens

Maybe "Cancellation Token" isn't the word I want to use, anymore. What about "Ratings Drop"? It's relevant to the real world, and simulates what I want to happen. Your Rating score drops. Each failure brings you closer to Hiatus (a score of, let's say, 1.0?) by reducing your Rating by 0.5.

That's four failures for a 3.0 show, and three for a 2.5. Is that too harsh? As you progress, your Technique increases, and so your start-of-season Ratings increase as well.

The best way I can think of to prevent immediate Cancellation in the first gameplay session, is that PCs should be given a handful of very general starting Talents. Something that they can use in most situations to get them over that initial hump.