[Capes] Balancing Powers, Attitudes and Tropes

[TonyLB]

I've put a second draft of Capes online.  It's a superhero game with the premise "Power is fun, but do you deserve it?"

It runs on a system of dice pools that swell and shrink from turn to turn.  The more dice you roll for any particular action, the more dice (statistically) you'll lose.  So the question of how you get dice back into your pool is fairly central.

My first draft had undifferentiated dice sources.  Do a thing you'd said your hero often does, get some dice.  No solid rules beyond that.  I tried to link it to ways that combats evolved, but it was fuzzy thinking (and therefore fell apart when I tried to explain it carefully).  Overall I think I was on the road to making a system that could only be played by someone who thought the same way I do.  The mechanics were so subjective they would only work smoothly if everyone judged them the same way.

In this revision I've broken the sources up into three categories, which vary somewhat in intent and mechanic.

There are Powers, which are the closest to standard abilities.  Useful, powerful, and playing directly into a debt mechanic that drags the heroes into proving their worth later.

There are Attitudes, which are the heroes emotions and social behavior.  Each one gives a benefit only once per scene, so they push people to roleplay characters who can respond to events in several different emotional modes.

And there are Tropes, which give a benefit only after you succeed at doing the specific kind of things that make your hero cool.  Also only useful once per scene, they prompt people to vary their tactics and outcomes.

My hope is that each of these types will have something interesting for somebody.  I'd want to revise further if it seems that one of them is obviously the most useful and entertaining, so that preferring it to the others would be as obvious as giving your D&D fighter an 18 strength.

Do you think I've given each type of die-source its own distinctive place and appeal?  

And do you think these roles are sufficiently objective that they'll help people to see the abilities in the same way, even if they approach the game with different priorities?

[ErrathofKosh]

I'm going to have to run a quick game to see how it all fits together.  But, after a quick read, I am really beginning to like how this game is fleshing out.  I think you went the right direction with the Powers and Drives, now that I see the mechanics.  It should provide good motivation for Debt.  I also love the Exemplars; they are definitely an important part of any superhero.  

I'll run a scene or two tonight and see how it turns out.

Cheers,
Jonathan

[TonyLB]

Wow... that's a scary concept.  Somebody actually using this wholly untested game.  Thank you and Yikes!

Anyone else care to comment on how you think the abilities balance each other, in the warm, cozy, comfortable confines of the purely hypothetical?

[ErrathofKosh]

The three dice sources seem to balance well...
At first, players don't realize the advantages of attitudes and tropes, but as their dice pool dwindles and their debt increases, they become apparent.  

Now, some questions...
When activating a power you receive a debt token, where do you put it?
What happens if your character runs out of dice in the Pool and has maxed his debt?  
Do attitudes ever have a negative effect on the character?  (Maybe after the action is finished...)
Forgive me if I've missed a rule that answers any of my questions.


That's all I can think of for the moment...
Anyone else want to chime in?

cheers

Jonathan

[TonyLB]

The three dice sources seem to balance well...
At first, players don't realize the advantages of attitudes and tropes, but as their dice pool dwindles and their debt increases, they become apparent.

Wow!  Cool!

When activating a power you receive a debt token, where do you put it?

The twin questions of "When can you accrue debt in a particular drive?" and "What situations justify staking debt?" are weighing on my mind.

What happens if your character runs out of dice in the Pool and has maxed his debt?

Hrmmm... that's a good question.  I hadn't thought it likely to come up, but I certainly bow to your superior experience of actually playing the system.  I agree that, theoretically, you could run out of Tropes, Attitudes and assignable Debt.  I'll have to think about what that would mean (other than that the combat has gone on awfully long).

Do attitudes ever have a negative effect on the character?  (Maybe after the action is finished...)

The Editor has the opportunity to Reverse (Level 6 Wonder) an attitude.  I added this with the intention of letting editors capitalize on (say) crazed berserker psychopath heroes by throwing them into a situation that requires calm and diplomacy.  But it is an awfully high-level Wonder.

Speaking of which... what range of Wonders were accessible in actual play?  I've been running some dice-only solo playtests (just to see how the numbers work out in isolation) and it's lead me to think that I may want to increase the "Wonder-per-die" level.  Possibly by saying:

[*]1-2: Discarded without benefit[*]3-4: Discard for a Wonder Point[*]5-6: Wonder point for free[/list:u]I think I've figured out how the other numbers in the math of the system should change if I do that, but I'm interested to know whether folks think it's a good idea.

[Tobias]

Read it through.

Tone is cool. Had to laugh several times. This is good. I wonder if it's fully comprehensible to a group of 0-experience roleplayers, but hey, they don't really exist, right? At least, they don't en-masse buy stuff. :)

Love the examplars.

One thing I was thinking about though, is where does this 'debt' come from? Is it a wholly internal, self-drive thing? Does it come from the examplars?

The reason I'm asking is - how can (super)villains exist? How do they defeat the standard goals of Justice, Truth, etc. and still function?

[Sydney Freedberg]

This is really, really neat -- especially the Drives/Exemplars/Debts system, which add up to a strongly Narrativist and non-Simulationist approach to the "emotional power-up" issues we're discussing in that other thread.

It also confuses the heck out of me when I try to figure out how all the moving parts fit together. There is a lot of currency going on, and I suspect there are feedback loops I'm not seeing. The examples of character generation were very helpful -- may I strongly suggest an example of play next?

[TonyLB]

I'm actually working on the examples of play.  The two dice pools make it very hard to present it clearly, though I think that in practice it would be pretty easy to shift dice back and forth.

Tobias's question about villainous motivations is also percolating in my brain.  I think it will be food for another thread though.