Even more questions...

[Sindyr]

Which of the following goals are not legal according to the Capes rules?

Goal: Fred opens the door
   where Fred is an NPC (ie, can you make goals with NPC's as subjects?)

Goal: The train gets to Hartford by noon.
   where the train is not being played by anyone, and is not a conscious entity.

Goal: Fred draws an ace from the deck
  (where Fred has no way in game to influence this random event)

Goal: The bomb explodes, killing everyone in the room.

Now I know many of the above could be rewritten as events, but what I am asking is if any of the above are not Capes legal as they stand.

[Ben Lehman]

My understanding is that these are all legal goals.

yrs--
--Ben

[Sindyr]

TLB, Sydney, et al -

Agree? These are all legal?

[TonyLB]

They all look legal to me.  Was there some reason you thought they might not be?

[Sindyr]

Wasn't sure if it was an unspoken rule that the subject of a goal had to be a played character, or even an sentient being.

Thanks.

[TonyLB]

Well, you're going to want ways to have characters act in pursuit of that goal, but that's more a question of narration and creativity than anything else. 

If Fred wants to draw an ace from the deck, but you can't figure out any way, ever, to sensibly roll on the conflict with any of his abilities then that's gonna put a crimp in your play.  But hey, that's your problem, right?  If you want to roll the dice you'll figure out some way to narrate.

[Sindyr]

Yup, cool.

Thanks.

:)

[Sindyr]

and more questions:

When you stake debt on conflicts: You can only stake debt from one drive per conflict? And can stake no more than the drive rating?
So even if I have more debt, even if I have ten debt on my Truth drive, if my Truth drive has a rating of three than I can stake no more than three debt on any conflict involving my Truth drive?
Which would seem to indicate that if the guy you are fighting has a higher rated drive involved, he may win because he can get more dice going.

When you create a character assign your nine points to your 5 drives, how come you can't set a drive to zero?  Why does Capes make you assign a minimum of one point to a drive?

Given the above rule, that would mean your max drive possible would be 5 - one 5 and 4 1's.

Now, being overdrawn means having to roll down the highest dice you own, roling down 1 die for each overdrawn drive.
This would seem to indicate that having one overdrawn drive is preferrable to 5 - and would further seem to indicate that having a drive rated 5 and using that for everything is safest. After all, there is no limit to how much debt you can put on it, and the only downside is rolling down one die - not that you will want to be in debt.  Plus, as soon as you stake debt, is no longer counts as being debt that can overdraw you.

So really, I guess if one had too much debt (say ten debt in a 5 drive) one could simply oversplit a "5" into 5 ones allowing one to drop below the debt line.  Then split new sides as necessary to make sure that the side I am on does not win - and I get to give away my 5 debt as tokens.

So why would someone not choose 5-1-1-1-1 for their drive structure? Tactically that is, apart from character vision reasons?

And is the (only) reason that Capes rule is that one must at least have a "1" in each drive to prevnt a 9-0-0-0-0 character?

[TonyLB]

So why would someone not choose 5-1-1-1-1 for their drive structure? Tactically that is, apart from character vision reasons?

Y'know, I'm going to leave this one alone for a few days, and see if Sydney responds.  He's the worlds foremost authority on what happens when you pile all your debt into one high-scored drive.  He knows the dynamic better than I do.

[Sindyr]

Tony, whilst we wait for Syndey on the 5-1-1-1-1 question,  why did you create Capes in such a way that you disallow taking a zero in a drive?

[Hans]

Now I know many of the above could be rewritten as events, but what I am asking is if any of the above are not Capes legal as they stand.

The legality has already been answered, but I did want to point out that most of these goals could NOT be rewritten as events.  For example:

Goal: The bomb explodes, killing everyone in the room.

Is very different from...

Event: The bomb explodes, killing everyone in the room.

In the case of the event the bomb WILL explode, and anyone in the room WILL be killed.  The Goal does not require anything, it is completely open to the resolver as to what will happen.  In fact, I just realized that is why events can be vetoed by anyone, and goals can only be vetoed by who they are written for.  Why it took me this long, I have no idea.

Even this event...

Event: The bomb is about to explode, potentially killing everyone in the room.

is different, because it still REQUIRES something.  It requires the bomb to get to the "about to explode" stage.  The goal could have the bomb never even get below 5 minutes on the timer.  And that it the key...none of your goals require anything, but rewriting them as events would.

This is probably completely stating the obvious.  Consider this Hans's mind working, finally, after all this time.

[drnuncheon]

Tony, whilst we wait for Syndey on the 5-1-1-1-1 question,  why did you create Capes in such a way that you disallow taking a zero in a drive?

I'm interested in what Sydney has to say on this, too.  As for your other question, since Tony hasn't answered, I'm going to indulge in rank speculation:

You can take 0 in a drive.  In fact, every character with drives has a 0 in five of them - those being the five you don't choose for your character.  Forcing you to take at least a 1 in the other drives provides a certain minimal level of "these are more important to me than these other five things" in the mechanics (and prevents completely one-track characters - for those, just use characters with undifferentiated debt).

Also remember that when a character stakes Debt, it has to be on an issue that is morally charged  for them - you may be shooting yourself in the foot if you only have one Drive (or only one high Drive), unless you are really convincing with the narration.

J