One thing that people have perceived as a weakness in Capes is that there is no mechanism to establish a fact in the game. I don't see this as a huge weakness, but some additional expressiveness added to the system might be nice, and I just had an interesting idea for the mechanic, so I thought I'd toss it out.
It's very simple. When a conflict resolves, instead of taking an inspiration, a player may choose to establish a fact with the same rating as the inspiration. Any player may use an action to roll up a die with a fact (limited by the level of the fact and the current value of the die). Any player may use any fact, but a particular fact may only be used once per scene.
Does this seem like a reasonable mechanic?
Steve
Hi Steve!
So, how's this different from the Goal-In, Goal-Out (http://www.indie-rpgs.com/forum/index.php?topic=15113.30) rule that Fred proposed some time back?
Why would you want to give one player a permanent advantage over other players?
Tony, you seem to be assuming that any given fact will always be an advantage for a given player. Since characters can shift from one player to another, and since a given fact could be used by any player, then I don't see how a fact could become a permanent advantage for one player.
It's a creative advantage for that player, whoever ends up using it. It makes it more likely that other people will fall into line with his creative vision, as expressed in that fact.
It sounds like a reasonable mechanic to me.
One thing I forgot to mention was that facts can be removed the same way they're established. It's not intended to be a dominating mechanic, just a way for players to describe the world in mechanical terms.
Steve
Hi,
There isn't a mechanism to introduce "Facts" into the game because it's not needed. Capes allows you to make stuff up all the time. I know this isn't a feature for everyone, but it is an essential part of the game.
I can see Facts breaking down in play as either:
- one player establishes a Fact, other players like it and use it too. It becomes an established part of the story, until someone gets bored with it and offs it. Nothing wrong with this.
- one player establishes a Fact, the other players don't like it. The player who introduced it keeps using it, which pisses off the other players so they team up to off it quickly. Much less happy with this. I also think it underlines Tony's "creative advantage" criticism.
But, basically, Facts provide an unfair advantage. Not to a player, but to a story element. And the Capes ruleset is designed to specifically encourage the story elements which other players are interested in too. There's a sort of "story Darwinism" going on, powered by the Story Token currency. Facts look innocuous, but I suspect that they break that system.
Yes, other players can negate the Fact by spending their own Inspirations if they don't like it. But ths requires players to actively negate each other's story contributions, and I think that's a bad thing. The current system allows players to shape the story through positive feedback only.
I think the fact mechanics that Grover and I have introduced have been designed to counteract the positive feedback loop of progressively larger and larger events being done and undone without any mechanism for bringing it under control.
That particular positive feedback loop is a new one on me. Do you think it's written into the rules? Or is it just an effect of players progressively realizing that they're empowered, and therefore addressing larger things for the sheer fun of being able to do so? Or something else?
In the game we played in IRC, I think it was a kind of frustrated one-upsmanship.
When one of us would have something we valued but were unable to defend knocked down, we'd knock down something even bigger that the other person was unable to defend. We stopped playing when we realized the whole thing was getting pathological and not-fun.
So... you're talking about knocking these things down in conflicts? Or in free narration?
Free narration. We've been over this point before... basically, because conflicts are SO expensive, you can only afford to have a few (or even just one) in any given scene. Everything else is undefendable.
Ohhhh... so this is the same misguided argument from you that I've spent hundreds of posts to refute before. Gotcha.
Everyone but Fred: These rules modifications were off the mark the last time (http://www.indie-rpgs.com/forum/index.php?topic=15113.0) he proposed them. Fred/Vaxalon himself was off the mark in various ways (http://www.indie-rpgs.com/forum/index.php?topic=15211.0) that have been pointed out over and over again. The rules-mods and Fred are still off the mark, for all the same reasons. Uzzah explained very concisely where the disconnect is in A lightbulb moment (http://www.indie-rpgs.com/forum/index.php?topic=15915.0). There's nothing new to see here.
If anyone else wants to tilt at the Fred windmill, split off a thread and have at it. Myself, I'm no longer interested in providing him with a sparring partner.
EDIT: For what it's worth, I think Grover's suggestions are a whole differen rule-modification from Fred's. They certainly haven't been refuted in anything like the same level of detail.
Quote from: TonyLB on July 26, 2005, 05:03:15 PM
EDIT: For what it's worth, I think Grover's suggestions are a whole differen rule-modification from Fred's. They certainly haven't been refuted in anything like the same level of detail.
Cool! I just really, really wanted to make sure we weren't kicking
that horse again.
So Steve, they're mechanically like Inspirations, except you
keep them after you use them?
It sounded to me like they were more like a shared pool of check-off abilities: They can roll up a die (I presume a die whose current value is equal to or less than the level of the Fact) and may only be used once a scene.
Well, YOU don't keep them... they aren't owned by anyone.
Ahh, okay. So there would be like a "Fact Tracker" sheet in the middle of the table with checkboxes for each item, and anyone can use his turn to invoke a Fact? And Facts don't provide trump/veto power, they just roll up/down a die like any other ability?
That's what I'm reading Steve to say. Which may not, actually, be what he's saying.
I'm also unclear (if I've read him correctly in other things) whether Facts could be used on a reaction, in the same way that other abilities could. The answer to that makes a huge difference in the strategy of how they are created and used, so I'm interested to hear from Steve how he thinks it would work.
I should make some things clear:
First, Tony has the right idea - they are basically a pool of check-off abilities anyone can use. I hadn't actually thought about their use with respect to reactions. I don't see that there would be a problem with allowing their use as a reaction, but I'd be interested in hearing more about that.
Second, I didn't think of the idea with the intention of correcting a problem in Capes (at least, not a problem of dysfunctional play). My main idea was that Capes provides a good way to mechanically describe characters, but not really a way to mechanically describe facts (although, now that I think of it, Capes loose definition of character would probably allow you to define an arbitrary fact as an aspect of some character or other). One thing I enjoy about RPGs is the way you can use them to describe imaginary worlds, and I thought that this is a mechanic which will allow for a more complete description without being too disruptive to play.
Finally, Fred - I think the problem that you're running into is taking what Tony says about competition too seriously. It's true that Capes supports a high level of competition between players, but if the players care more about winning than they do about creating an aesthetically pleasing story, then you are going to get ugly stories that nobody cares about.
Steve
Well, actually, I'm pretty serious about competition for resources. I think that the good story
emerges from that competition. Yes, competition to be the "top dog" in the SIS
outside of the game-mechanics will lead to unhealthy social-bullying. But competition to be top dog
inside the game-mechanics just leads to fun! Because the mechanics are magical and powerful.
So, here's what I'd do with your system, from a purely "I want to win resources" perspective:
- I will never, ever use one of my own abilities when there is a Fact that can apply instead. Because every one of my abilities I use brings me one check closer to being forced to fall back on powers, generate more debt than I need, and eventually give other people story tokens beyond what I need to give them to win.
- By contrast, I want other people to be using Facts as little as I can manage, because every one of their abilities they use brings them one check closer to creating eventual story tokens for me.
- Therefore, any Fact I create will be as persuasively worded as possible, so that anyone who wants to use it has to pay (essentially) a Royalty in story control to me, the Fact's creator. So "Captain Proton is totally, in all ways, cooler than anyone else and should be worshipped"... that's a Fact I'd make, because I want it to support my vision of events, whoever uses it.
- When other people make such persuasive-Facts and put high numbers on them, I will, myself, use them early in inconsequential ways so that they don't get used against me as a reaction later in the same scene. So if Mega-Lass creates a fact "Survived a blast of fusing star-material: 6" then I'm going to use it to say that she can shrug off a paper-airplane thrown at her by a child, so that later in that scene, when I smack her with my Tachyon Beam, she can't use it to react me down.
I
think that the strategy above is pretty well sound, though I haven't playtested and seen it in action enough to be certain.
My worry, if the strats are sound, is that all of the strategies point to the benefit of using Facts first, and only falling back on your own check-off abilities when all Facts are expended. That's a pretty radical reinterpretation of the way character personality influences the game-world, and I wonder whether it would undermine the strength of character-to-character interplay.
This has made me wonder if, after reading ubering characters, if one could merely make a villain/hero/character titled "The Setting" or "Physics", and have it lash out angrily at whichever side it felt it should support? Y'know, have abilities like "Object in Motion tends to stay in Motion" or "Enforce Continuity".
I mean, if they are important enough aspects to worry about, someone can pay the story tokens to keep the enforcers around.
Oh, that would be so funny as an object lesson to somebody who kept coming to Capes with the misguided notion that "But this is what would happen in reality" is a legitimate creative argument. "Dude, if you're so in love with Reality, then play it!"
Such wonderful possible exchanges: "Captain Smash grabs the building by the spindly radio antenna on its top and uses it to SMASH Professor Smug! I get a five!" "No way! Reality reacts with 'Leverage equals force applied times length of lever arm.' I roll a two." "Well then, I'll react with Cheesy Monologue, and roll your two... up to a six! Take that, oppressive forces of conventional physics! You and your evil master, Isaac Newton, shall never stand in the path of JUSTICE!"
And, at the same time, on a less completely cheesy level: Yeah, you can definitely bring those things in as ubers, and they really can (and do) change the tenor of a conflict. It's a nice, gentle, way to enforce your own notions of what should happen... if people object, they get to object with their Debt Tokens (which, classically, Reality wouldn't be able to counter), you get Story Tokens to further your agenda in future scenes, and they get their way because it matters so much to them. Public Opinion, on page 108, is precisely such an uber, for those situations in which people want to say "Oh, you just wouldn't get away with saying that on live television," or something similar.