[Capes] Pacing without Victory Points

[TonyLB]

I have yet to play a game where keeping track of Victory Points has made anyone a happier gamer.  Sad, but true.

As Sydney points out here, the Tension Threshold mechanic (in desperate search of a snappier title) largely does away with the need for VPs.  Tension Thresholds work basically like this:

[*]After resolving claimed Events at the end of each Page you sum up all the dice that are not currently on the winning side of an Event.  For a tied Event you add one of the tied sides, not both.  This total is called the Tension.
[*]If that value is higher than the Tension Threshold then something needs to resolve.  Now.
[*]Find the Event that has the lowest total on the non-winning side.  It resolves to the winner.
[*]If two Events are tied for this distinction then they both resolve.
[*]If such an Event is tied then the people in the tie both reroll their lowest die until it's not tied any more.
[*]If the Tension is still above Threshold once you've resolved those Events you repeat the process.[/list:u]Tension Thresholds encourage a paced churn and cycle of Events without requiring that it be directed at "ending the scene".  If you add this rule and remove Victory Points you come very close to removing the need for explicit Scenes altogether.

Scene breaks still serve two major mechanical purposes:

[*]Prominence points last for the scene they're in.[*]Blocked abiltiies are refreshed at the end of the scene[/list:u]Removing or revamping VPs seems... well, inevitable.  Nobody's tracking them anyway.  As they are they're built to be ignored.  Removing or revamping Scenes is tempting, but much less obvious.  What do people think?

[LordSmerf]

I still believe that Travis' suggestion last night is a very powerful one.  When all of the Events have been played out, the Scene ends.  This (hopefully) results in scene limits that make sense within the narrative itself.  Some scenes will be longer than others.

On the down side, this seems to indicate that there is no mechanical tie to make the scenes with less Prominence also be the shortest Scenes.

One thing that i would suggest, which is tangentially related, is that moving Prominence takes a Story Token.  The main reason i suggest it is that under the current rules there is an implicit encouragement to burn up a disposable Character's Tropes (like Stupid Minion) and then shift his Prominence to a new disposable minion for more Tropes, rinse, repeat.  Unfortunately this would be requiring a limited resource to be spent when it makes sense narratively for a character to swap out.  I am not sure what the solution here is.

Wait a minute... brainstorm...

Ok, how about this.  No more explicit scenes.  Each Player gets one Prominence to do with as they wish.  It costs one Story Token to move that Prominence (including the first movement from that player to their character).  Players may "borrow" Prominence from other players by paying them a Story Token.  Whenever a character is not present during a given Page they refresh.  Maybe they refresh one ability per Page they are off-screen, maybe they fully refresh.  That seems to encourage a bit of spotlight sharing.

I will probably have to think on it some more, since it seems a little problematic...  Let me know what you guys think.

Thomas

[TonyLB]

Well, you can make scenes with less Prominence take a shorter time to resolve by setting their Tension Threshold lower.  When any one Event has dice on the losing side that alone exceed the Tension threshold it will result in everything up to and including that Event resolving.

Story Tokens... ah, Story Tokens.  The dynamic here gets complicated.

The length of the scene in real time is more related to the number of actions all told than the number of pages.  A five page scene with two total Prominence takes roughly the same time as a two page scene with five total Prominence.  

But in the two Prominence scene, Events will resolve more quickly, with less ability for players to meaningfully contest them.  Even if players stake Debt on an Event they're losing, it is a comparatively small benefit because they'll only get to roll one of their split dice.  A slight statistical benefit, but by no means as telling as if they get two or three tries at the same Event.  This is not a bad thing, as such, but it has a place in the narrative structure.

The two prominence scene will have much more churn of small, randomly rolled Events (and therefore generate many more Inspirations, but fewer Story Tokens and Debt).  The five prominence scene will have fewer Events, more heavily contested with Debt (generating few or no Inspirations but lots of Story Tokens and Debt).

This actually strikes me as something to encourage.  There is a place for both rapid, chaotic, low-stakes events to set the stage, and for deliberate resolution of high-stakes events that force the players to choices with comparatively little random influence.

To close the feedback cycle, maybe make Inspirations more directly useful in those hotly contested Events?  If one could be played for no cost (other than losing it) on your turn then a Debt+Split+Inspiration-on-one+Roll-on-the-other combination becomes the Holy Grail of mechanics that everyone aims for.

The other thing to try for is to encourage two prominence scenes to have five pages, and five prominence to have two, rather than vice-versa.  If you spend all of your time in high-prominence mode, doing five pages at five prominence, then Inspirations get very short shrift indeed.

I have some thoughts on that, but they are sufficiently radical (and quite possibly stupid) that I hesitate to tack them onto this already long post.

[TonyLB]

Thomas brings up a good point which I didn't properly address.

The main reason i suggest it is that under the current rules there is an implicit encouragement to burn up a disposable Character's Tropes (like Stupid Minion) and then shift his Prominence to a new disposable minion for more Tropes, rinse, repeat. Unfortunately this would be requiring a limited resource to be spent when it makes sense narratively for a character to swap out. I am not sure what the solution here is.

Heroic Sidekicks?

That may sound humorous (in fact I got a little chuckle writing it) but I mean it as a serious response as well.  The hero-players should have just as much opportunity as the Editor to drag in secondary characters and work them for their Blocking abilities and (where relevant) their Debts and Drives.

In our face-to-face game, for instance, Eric pulled in his Duty Exemplar Chessmaster, a crippled ex-superhero who is back in the lair, feeding Eric's hero tactical advice over a headset.  Eric racked up a goodly amount of debt on Chessmaster, then shuffled him off-screen.

Unbalancing tactic?  I tend to think not, in the long term.  I've begun thinking of that Debt as mine, at least provisionally.  I can bring in Chessmaster and his, ahem, foibles (of which there are many) on the villainous side, and spend that hard earned debt to split some dice later if I want.  Unless some other player beats me to it (which they well might).

[LordSmerf]

Sidekicks are an interesting idea, but i am not sure that it is a total solution.  It probably helps, but it does not seem to really alter the way i see this working.  Let me try this again, in the most broken way possible:

I am the Editor, i create a large number of Minion type "characters" and give them all 5 Tropes.  I then introduce them and Trope every roll until it falls to my satisfaction.  Once a given minion has used 3 or 4 Tropes (probably one or two Pages) then i swap him out.  I am not talking about "having backup" so much as using the fact that i can use all of my Tropes in one Page, and that once they are all blocked that you are able to swap them out.  While this strategy is just as available, by the rules, to the Heroes, situation makes it somewhat troublesome (i.e. "We're in the Villains lair, here comes the Cop!" "What?").

Another thing that i am somewhat worried about (sorry to make this thread about Tropes, i will try to get back on topic in a minute) is a level 5 Powered Trope.  If i can use it on every roll (or worse, multiple times on every roll) not only to i get to wrack up the Debt in order to split my dice (think splitting on three Events on Page 2), i also get to roll all those dice again.

Now, back to the topic at hand.  I think that some combination of Tension Threshholds (or whatever you call them eventually) and resolving the last Event very well might be all you need.  That said, i was thinking of something that might be interesting.  You get together at the start of every Scene and decide what the scene is primarily about.  You create a single "Scene Event" for that Scene, and once it is resolved the Scene either ends immediately (with unresolved Events fizzling away) or begins to wrap up (no new Events).  That might work, but i can see some negatives in there too.

Thomas

[efindel]

Just to toss my own input in... I think my favorite of my own suggestions is that a scene begins to close (i.e., no new Events can be created) when the last one of the initially-created Events is resolved.

Thus, there's not a single pivotal Event for the scene, but a selection of them.  IMHO, this allows things to develop in a more "natural" way than if a single Event is made the key to ending the scene.

And I'm definitely against the idea of ending the scene immediately when the "key" Event(s) is/are resolved.  To go back to the playtest session, if we'd done it that way, then the "Admits Defeat" Event, which is the one that really turned out to be the most significant Event for the story, would have been left unresolved!

[TonyLB]

I feel obliged to point out that "Admits Defeat" was not even one of the initially-created Events.  It came substantially later, despite its import.

I think the "Initially Created" label is just a slight expansion of "Scene Event".  It's saying that you know ahead of time which Events are going to be important.  I'm fine with discussing that possibility, so long as everyone has boned up on our previous Scene Goals thread, so that we're not covering the same ground again.

[TonyLB]

Thomas:  Your dysfunctional-extreme example is a point well taken.  I hadn't gone that far in my thinking, but it makes clear a trend that had been worrying me at a lower level.

Perhaps it would be appropriate to add a limit that each player may Trope a given roll only once?