[Capes] Losing with Style

[TonyLB]

They obviously don't do enough in that arena.  I need to write up a GMing section that gives the tools for an Editor to provide a challenging balance of villains with motives to strongly contest complications where the heroes are Staked.

I do think that some of it would emerge from having numerical equivalency on two sides of a contesting fence (i.e. a roughly equal amount of dice-power between the Editor and the Heroes).  

If the Editor and the heroes are spending the same amount of dice, I wouldn't expect (for instance) that the heroes would win every Complication in a conflict, right?  It seems... well, possible but statistically unlikely.

[LordSmerf]

Capes is not Sorceror.  Debt isn't about stepping inch by inch closer to the abyss.  Debt is opportunity.  A drag on your short-term effectiveness, yes, but a boon (indeed, a necessity) long-term, through raising Drives and the Passion Effect. [Emphasis mine - Thomas]

The problem as i see it Tony is that Debt is not a drag.  It does not provide any sort of serious penalty (the -1 Wonder Level has not been a factor in any of my games, at least not yet), on the other hand it does not seem to provide any sort of bonus.  At this stage, and to mer personally, it feels very "tacked on".

Moving onward, yes, i believe that you have the right of it when you assume that if both sides have equal numbers of dice then they should split the Complications about equally.  The problem being that at the current level of focus (tactical situations) there is not enough room for you to have the Bank Robbery and the Late for a Date Complications effectively work.  At least i do not think that there is enough room.

So i guess i feel a need to return to one of my earliest questions: "What is Debt, and what do you want it to do mechanicall?"  I think i am still having a difficult time wrapping my mind around what your goal is here.

EDIT: Also the current version of the rules pretty much garuantees a dice advantage to the heroes' side roughly proportionate to the number of heroes in play.

Thomas

[TonyLB]

You mean that it guarantees that dice advantage if you challenge the heroes with one villain of equal numeric strength, yes?

[LordSmerf]

Yes, sorry, i should have made that clearer.  However, it should be noted that genre conventions hold that super-hero teams almost always outnumber their opponents, and the current system does not really provide for differing power levels...

Thomas

[LordSmerf]

Oh, oh, oh!  This just hit me.  Depending on how you want to set thing up Tony, it might be cool to set up a definition for each of the Drives with regards to the Game as a whole instead of hero by hero.  Then you could track overall Debt (the levels of the protaganists summed) for the Game and use that to somehow generate Dice/Control for the Editor...

Thomas

[TonyLB]

Yep... I've been thinking of ways to deal with team-vs-megavillain combats, but I don't have anything well crafted yet.

One fun way to handle it, that I've been toying with as a technique to put into the Editors toolkit (but not the only technique) is to make it a tag-team battle:  Only one hero may be combatting the villain at a time, and they may tag out with "Second Wind" (which would let a new hero in as it refreshes the abilities of the hero going off-stage).  It seems well suited for certain kinds of combat... particularly when one powerful hero mows his way through a crowd of mooks, then (Tag!) a minion-level villain, then (Tag!) the arch-villain.

My experience with solo-playtests has been that a -1 Level penalty can be very painful.  Out of interest, have you had a situation where a hero was overdrawn?

EDIT:  Crossposted with Thomas's second post.  What do you envision the "mass debt" thing doing for the game?  Can you give a fictional example?

[Sydney Freedberg]

It's a flurry of posts....

....One fun way to handle it...is to make it a tag-team battle:  Only one hero may be combatting the villain at a time, and they may tag out with "Second Wind" (which would let a new hero in as it refreshes the abilities of the hero going off-stage).  It seems well suited for certain kinds of combat... particularly when one powerful hero mows his way through a crowd of mooks, then (Tag!) a minion-level villain, then (Tag!) the arch-villain.

This works well for depicting a certain kind of super-hero combat, true -- although it's frankly the least tactically interesting kind. (Why do the mooks insist on fighting the hero one at a time? Why do the heroes take turns tackling the mega-villain? Why does no one ever display actual tactics? As a military historian turned defense reporter, I am annoyed). But this game is less about tactics than chararacter.

That said, let's not make the "tag team"/"one on one" model the only option: Occasionally, even in the comics, The Amazing Icicle uses his freeze-power to freeze Speed Demon in place so Slow Punching Guy can hit him.

at the current level of focus (tactical situations) there is not enough room for you to have the Bank Robbery and the Late for a Date Complications effectively work.

Hmmm. Not sure about that, actually. If you use the number of Complications recommended in Tony's current rules, and if you have explicit guidance to the Editor to include at least one "B-plot" Complication -- i.e. the girlfriend's waiting, you're late for work, whatever -- that might just do it in itself.

Because essentially what Tony's saying is, the dilemma is not "do I go into high Debt and suffer agonizing penalties" but "do I lose this Complication to win this other one?"

That said, I still like the idea of giving overdrawn Drives narrative teeth, darn it.

[LordSmerf]

Perhaps you are correct Sydney.  On the other hand there are no mechanical reasons to pick one Complication over another, it is purely narrative preference.  Now, that may be just fine, but it does not seem to make the choices very meaningful aside from whatever meaning each player assigns personally.  So, if that is not a problem then, well, no problem.  On the other hand, if that is a problem (i.e. if we want to make these choices matter mechanically) then some work needs to be done.

Oh, and the tag-team stuff is not a bad idea at all, but as (both of you) pointed out that should not be the only option.

Thomas