[Capes] Social resolution mechanics

[TonyLB]

I am not so sure that it is that simple.  Let us look at the example of Silver Star.  She has a "Cold Ruthless Terminator" Attitude, in many social situations activating this Attitude would be fairly inappropriate...  

Is that different from (say) activating Pseudo-teenage Angst in the middle of combat?

A (perhaps) linked question:  Should the use of Attitudes in social settings be governed by different rules, because of the larger role that emotion and behavior have in conversation (as opposed to in fisticuffs)?

[LordSmerf]

Now clearly, to handle something like that, you don't want Complications that would be resolved at the end of a scene.  I'm going to posit (at least for the moment) a different class of things called Issues, which are like Complications, except that they don't automatically resolve at the end of a scene.

I'm not sure, really, when they should resolve though.  Does the ordinary mechanic seem adequate?  I guess it would keep the contests close in control, if they're important, precisely so that people could jump in to regain control if it were in danger of being resolved against them.  Maybe I just need to have more faith in the system... or maybe there need to be more stringent rules for how to resolve Issues.

The idea of Issues is great.  Especially if you combine it with the idea of limiting the number of Turns a non-combat scene can have and then setting a Resolution Target for Issues.  Example: Peter Parker and Mary Jane Watson have this Issue, we can just call it "Does he/she love me?" for now.  Each side has a "win" condition that the ohter person reveal their feelings first.  Now we assign an arbitrary Resolution Target of 50.  As soon as either Peter or MJ reach 50 points in the Issue they "win".  For more important Issues you set higher Resolution Targets.  Since you only get so many Turns this will prolong Issues longer...

If we extend most of the current rules to non-combat we also get a situation in which you can choose to accumulate Debt in order to resolve an Issue more quickly and in you favor.

In fact you could attatch an Issue to each Drive instead of an Exemplar.  My guess is that many Issues would result in Exemplar-type characters anyway.  Example: Batman does not have an Exemplar for Justice even if it is his most important Drive, but he clearly does have an issue...

EDIT: Crosposted with Tony.  Answering Tony's question...  Yesand no.  It is easier to justify Attitude use in combat because most of that is the Attitude driving you internally and coloring your actions, but there are many ways to accomplish your goal of "saving the people".  In social situations Attitude still drives you and colors you actions, but in Social situations you have fewer ways to get your way (i think).  I could be wrong in the way i am thinking about this which is why i would like to playtest this a bit...

Thomas

[Sydney Freedberg]

Multiple inset madness!

As far as non-combat and discovery of facts go: all the wonders effects work in non-combat situations...

I am not so sure ... Silver Star....has a "Cold Ruthless Terminator" Attitude, in many social situations activating this Attitude would be fairly inappropriate...  

But Silver Star is a combat-focused character, with combat-focused Powers, Attitudes, and Tropes. Another character could equally well have investigative or social ones (e.g. Batman presumably has a Trope "scare you into confessing"; Poison Ivy has a Power "enslave you to my will") -- and the same chargen rules and same Conflict rules would, I think, work.

[statisticaltomfoolery]

I am not so sure that it is that simple.  Let us look at the example of Silver Star.  She has a "Cold Ruthless Terminator" Attitude, in many social situations activating this Attitude would be fairly inappropriate...  

Is that different from (say) activating Pseudo-teenage Angst in the middle of combat?

A (perhaps) linked question:  Should the use of Attitudes in social settings be governed by different rules, because of the larger role that emotion and behavior have in conversation (as opposed to in fisticuffs)?

I think that there's an inherent assumption that I've been adding: declaring powers, tropes, attitudes or whatever needs to be justified: if the player or Editor can't come up with a good reason for using X, they can't use it. The tightness of what's reasonable is part of the implicit or explicit Social Contract of the game: an investigative noir game is going to have a different flexibility to it then a Silver Age punch-up.

Attitudes in this context would be usable either for fueling motivation, or for actually talking to and performing actions.

So I don't think there need to be separate rules: I think that low-VP scenes are a fine way of handling this.

[statisticaltomfoolery]

Anyway, I got distracted there: I think that with all players going being a great step in the right direction to making sure players don't get left out, here's another: make discovering a fact about someone part of the normal play. You want situations where someone is doing the critical investigative work to figure out the flaw in the doomsday machine, at the same time that the other heroes are fighting the bad guy.

Yes!  Full agreement here.  The Fact system is too clunky and separate from the rest of the events.  If I need to build another system to resolve it in scenes, I'll do that, but now that you mention it... how much nicer it would be to have it all working in a unified system.

Complications seem a nice way to resolve this...the player describes everything that's going on in their subplot, and when the editor starts throwing Control at it, then various problems arise in the hero's way.  Maybe the best way to do it is that you can declare a complication to be about discovering a fact of strength X. If it resolves out for the discoverer, then you get the fact; if it resolves out for the discoveree, then they get nothing/some small token (you want to encourage the discovery of facts, since in this method, the player who is taking time to discover facts isn't generating VP)

Now that's a darn good thought.  I'm not sure whether you're saying you discover a Fact of someone elses (like the villains cunning plan) or a Fact about yourself (What is the dark history of my mystic artifact, and why was it called the "Hand of Fear" in rennaisance Venice?)  And I'm not sure it really matters.

I'm confused though:  Why wouldn't somebody who is discovering facts be generating Victory Points?  Under the (in no way sacrosanct) current-rules, any Complication that gets resolved generates Victory Points.  And I sort of like the notion that the heroes can as easily complete their defeat of the villain by discovering something crucial about his past as they can by beating him over the head with a lead pipe.  But it's late and I could easily be missing something.

Now for a concrete contribution, on top of (I think) what's been said already:  I think that if you're actively trying to discover something about your opposition, the result of your failure shouldn't just be that you don't discover anything.  Symmetry almost demands that they should discover something about you.

This has fun consequences against the villains, but it's much more fun when contesting with non-supers in straightforward conversation.  For example, Peter and MJ's awkward conversations (in Spiderman... haven't seen SP2 yet, don't hand me spoilers!) are largely about each side trying to suss out the feelings of the other, while not risking revealing anything unambiguous about their own feelings first.

Now clearly, to handle something like that, you don't want Complications that would be resolved at the end of a scene.  I'm going to posit (at least for the moment) a different class of things called Issues, which are like Complications, except that they don't automatically resolve at the end of a scene.

I'm not sure, really, when they should resolve though.  Does the ordinary mechanic seem adequate?  I guess it would keep the contests close in control, if they're important, precisely so that people could jump in to regain control if it were in danger of being resolved against them.  Maybe I just need to have more faith in the system... or maybe there need to be more stringent rules for how to resolve Issues.

The idea of having complications that are not for VP is clumsy as above, but part of the idea from above was that there is an interesting tradeoff between winning the confrontation now and finding out Facts, which are more long-term payoffs. Even in the short-term, there is the possibly interesting tradeoff between resolving the situation at hand, and trying to find out Facts which will then possibly help you even more.

Anyway, I just thought of a different take on the same idea that seems much better:

When resolving a complication, players can choose to send some of the Control on the Complication into finding facts instead of VP. For every X Control points spent this way, the player can request a fact about a topic.

So, let's say that the heroes are foiling a bank robbery. They can win the encounter straight out, but if they slow down their progress to bank some victory points to request facts, then they can intimidate one of the robbers into revealing the secret hideout.  Or maybe they find one of the robbers has a tattoo which matches the mysterious tattoo they have.

That's pretty simple and likable, no?

I've left out where facts fit in as far as use, and I've left out how to adjucate unreasonable requests ("Now that we've saved the bystanders from the crumbling building, I'd like to know more about the supersecret organization of 12 men who rule the world.") My guess is that you either give the fact, or you just score the VP as normal.

[statisticaltomfoolery]

By the way, the other cool attribute is that this handles Issues wonderfully: instead of issues being like a complication, Issues are just collections of facts, and the player (or the cunning Villain) can spend VP to develop Spidey's relationship with MJ along.

[TonyLB]

The idea of Issues is great.  Especially if you combine it with the idea of limiting the number of Turns a non-combat scene can have and then setting a Resolution Target for Issues. [...] For more important Issues you set higher Resolution Targets.  Since you only get so many Turns this will prolong Issues longer...

But I'm not sure that I know which Issues are important, and which aren't.  I sort of like the way standard Complications become important only as people pay attention to them in the game.

Maybe a way to do it is that any Complication that has Stakes, but which is not resolved at the end of a scene becomes an Issue.  And then Issues are dealt with just like Complications except that when you want to resolve one, you need to retain control of it to the end of the next scene it's involved in, not just the next round of the current scene.

(B)ut part of the idea from above was that there is an interesting tradeoff between winning the confrontation now and finding out Facts, which are more long-term payoffs. Even in the short-term, there is the possibly interesting tradeoff between resolving the situation at hand, and trying to find out Facts which will then possibly help you even more.

Yeah, I agree that there's an important place for that sort of tradeoff.  So far, though, I've seen people doing it by way of losing one Complication in order to win another.  For instance, they lose the "Clobbering" Complication, while winning the "Fallen Data Disc" Complication.  Which is vitally different for narrative color and Facts, but neutral vis-a-vis victory points and the pacing of the game.

I worry that people would be driven away from information-gathering activities if they could never regain the VPs they passed up.  Did you envision an explicit long-term benefit (mechanically speaking) to offset the short-term loss?

[statisticaltomfoolery]

(B)ut part of the idea from above was that there is an interesting tradeoff between winning the confrontation now and finding out Facts, which are more long-term payoffs. Even in the short-term, there is the possibly interesting tradeoff between resolving the situation at hand, and trying to find out Facts which will then possibly help you even more.

Yeah, I agree that there's an important place for that sort of tradeoff.  So far, though, I've seen people doing it by way of losing one Complication in order to win another.  For instance, they lose the "Clobbering" Complication, while winning the "Fallen Data Disc" Complication.  Which is vitally different for narrative color and Facts, but neutral vis-a-vis victory points and the pacing of the game.

I worry that people would be driven away from information-gathering activities if they could never regain the VPs they passed up.  Did you envision an explicit long-term benefit (mechanically speaking) to offset the short-term loss?[/quote]

Just throwing out a few ideas:

1) Start a complication at an even greater edge (Now that you know that his machine is vulnerable to water, you can start the complication: "Rerouting water pipe to surface" at a bonus due to the fact)

2) Force debt to be staked

3) Facts could be used to build up drives/advancement: as you learn more about yourself, influence the world, your drives increase.

4) Plot purposes: stopping the bank robbery but letting the robbers get away may leave you helpless to stop the next phase of the plan, while getting some facts may let you interrupt it.

[Sydney Freedberg]

Just throwing out a few ideas:

1) Start a complication at an even greater edge (Now that you know that his machine is vulnerable to water, you can start the complication: "Rerouting water pipe to surface" at a bonus due to the fact)
....
4) Plot purposes: stopping the bank robbery but letting the robbers get away may leave you helpless to stop the next phase of the plan, while getting some facts may let you interrupt it.

These "tactical" uses seem very strong ones to me: Either you can use Facts gained (i.e. knowledge is power) to start appropriate Complications you wouldn't have realized were useful before; or you can start the next action scene at an advantage -- i.e. instead of only hearing about the next bank robbery after it's started and rushing to the scene, you're there waiting for 'em.

[statisticaltomfoolery]

Just throwing out a few ideas:

1) Start a complication at an even greater edge (Now that you know that his machine is vulnerable to water, you can start the complication: "Rerouting water pipe to surface" at a bonus due to the fact)
....
4) Plot purposes: stopping the bank robbery but letting the robbers get away may leave you helpless to stop the next phase of the plan, while getting some facts may let you interrupt it.

These "tactical" uses seem very strong ones to me: Either you can use Facts gained (i.e. knowledge is power) to start appropriate Complications you wouldn't have realized were useful before; or you can start the next action scene at an advantage -- i.e. instead of only hearing about the next bank robbery after it's started and rushing to the scene, you're there waiting for 'em.

I thought 4 was more amorphous, but you're exactly right: you can easily funnel facts into starting scenes at an advantage. This also gets a lot of the feel of the partial victories: "You may have foiled me this time, but now I know your secret identity/still have the MegaChip!"

An issue comes up with this: some facts will be clearly great for starting some scenes at an advantage, while others won't. Do you want to make rules to support the different types of Facts, or is this just covered by the general "Be Reasonable" part of the Social Contract?

[Sydney Freedberg]

....there's an important place for that sort of tradeoff.  So far, though, I've seen people doing it by way of losing one Complication in order to win another.  For instance, they lose the "Clobbering" Complication, while winning the "Fallen Data Disc" Complication.  Which is vitally different for narrative color and Facts, but neutral vis-a-vis victory points and the pacing of the game.

Being a big fan of simple, unified mechanics, I like the idea that trying to generate a Fact could be treated as a Complication like any other (and traded off against like any other). I don't see any reason to allow victory points for one and not for the other, really. I think there's plenty of tradeoff dilemma in "do I concentrate on keeping the bad guy from cracking my skull, or do I fight my way to the Box of Mystery and open it / get the witness away safely / stand over the dying minion as he confesses the Big Plot."

And in general, any non-combat (e.g. social) interaction is probably best treated as a Complication: Instead of activating your "Guns Pop Out of Arms" power, you need to activate your "Cool Dude" Trope (or whatever).

[TonyLB]

I'm not entirely sure the system needs Facts any more, if it has these new elements.

Facts were meant to address several purposes:  Notably, to get all the characters to share more information about themselves and their backstories, and to provide some serious sting to losing Complications.

I think that the same purposes can be addressed, more seamlessly, through information complications and by allowing some carry-over of the effects of Complications from one scene to the next.

What should the benefit be if you learn the villains plans in Combat Scene 3?  Combat Scene 4 should begin with you already having some control in a Complication (maybe "Clobbering", if you used the information to launch a surprise attack, or maybe "Force Field Net Around Building" if you used it to spring a trap... players choice, really).  Likewise, if you failed to gather information then the villains start out with Complications in their favor.

Suppose, for instance, the following:

[*]Resolving a Complication gets you VPs equal to the Control your opposition had.[*]It also gives you a bonus to be used later, equal to Your Control minus Their Control.[*]This bonus may be used (once) by adding it to the Control of any new Complication[/list:u]Does that pretty well address the tactical advantages that folks were envisioning building with Facts?

[Sydney Freedberg]

Krazy krossposting kids.

I'm not entirely sure the system needs Facts any more, if it has these new elements. Facts were meant to address several purposes:  Notably, to get all the characters to share more information about themselves and their backstories, and to provide some serious sting to losing Complications.

Again, as one who quests for a "Grand Unified Mechanic," this idea appeals strongly. It solves the tactical advantage aspect of Facts.

It doesn't solve the backstory element, quite, however. Perhaps you could treat what were Facts about a character as a new kind of attribute, alongside Powers, Tropes, and Attitudes -- something that bringing out your backstory allows you to get more of, and which can be activated for narrative advantage.

The system definitely needs some kind of "weak point" mechanic a la "disadvantages" in GURPS or "flaws" in Storyteller games: In Capes mechanical terms, I'd imagine these would things about you that your opponent can call on (if he knows about them) to get dice for his Pool.

[statisticaltomfoolery]

I'm not entirely sure the system needs Facts any more, if it has these new elements.

Facts were meant to address several purposes:  Notably, to get all the characters to share more information about themselves and their backstories, and to provide some serious sting to losing Complications.

I think that the same purposes can be addressed, more seamlessly, through information complications and by allowing some carry-over of the effects of Complications from one scene to the next.

What should the benefit be if you learn the villains plans in Combat Scene 3?  Combat Scene 4 should begin with you already having some control in a Complication (maybe "Clobbering", if you used the information to launch a surprise attack, or maybe "Force Field Net Around Building" if you used it to spring a trap... players choice, really).  Likewise, if you failed to gather information then the villains start out with Complications in their favor.

Suppose, for instance, the following:

[*]Resolving a Complication gets you VPs equal to the Control your opposition had.[*]It also gives you a bonus to be used later, equal to Your Control minus Their Control.[*]This bonus may be used (once) by adding it to the Control of any new Complication[/list:u]Does that pretty well address the tactical advantages that folks were envisioning building with Facts?

Very much! That seems much cleaner, and will cut down character generation time (generating nine facts probably takes a bit of time to do well), as well as streamlining debt and the main systems.

I think it just needs some glue to make sure it's about revealing interesting plot and character-related things and advancing relationships, and not just a mechanical bonus.

[statisticaltomfoolery]

Krazy krossposting kids.
The system definitely needs some kind of "weak point" mechanic a la "disadvantages" in GURPS or "flaws" in Storyteller games: In Capes mechanical terms, I'd imagine these would things about you that your opponent can call on (if he knows about them) to get dice for his Pool.

I'm not sure it does. Let's work through an example:

You discover, through winning a complication, that Superman is weak to Kryptonite. This floods into a new complication, which you start at a bonus to, of producing the Kryptonite. (or finding the Kryptonite, or whatever).

After that battle, you still know he's vulnerable to Kryptonite, but you have no more bonus; yet, you can easily start, as Editor, a scene with that complication in play, or you can have it be a complication you start in scene: you break into the lab, steal the kryptonite, then flip that into a new complication.

Issues: I feel like the flipping might be one turn too quick. Right now it stands that you can:

Resolve -> Take your bonus -> Start a new complication with that bonus

and then on the next turn, resolve that complication, and get an even bigger bonus for the next complication.

I'm not sure this is broken, I just worry about a steamroller effect.


On the other hand, how about the idea of anti-stats?

Superman has: Weak to Kryptonite -4

When someone can, they can draw on that trope/attitude/power/whatever for dice to their dice pool.

Marty McFly has the trope: "Can't Stand To Be Called a Chicken" -2

EDIT: Or negative dice to the afflicted person's pool, which makes a lot more sense.