[Capes] Super Speed

[Sydney Freedberg]

Joe: The lady slams him upside the head with an obviously heavy handbag.

Ha!

(Substantive, thoughtful commentary to come... uh... later. I just had to applaud Granny, though. Director power rocks...)

[TonyLB]

Okay, I'm in the midst of writing up the new, simpler rules.  So far it looks like there will be about half the page count of the previous set (!)... it really does simplify down nicely, and explain better.

In the meantime, Thomas brought up a very useful point (in Actual Play) that goes hand in hand with keeping things speedy... making single-hero scenes still be a community event:

As i (hopefully) mentioned in some thread somewhere, i believe that it would be good to include some sort of meta-game mechanic that allows people not in a scene to do stuff... Perhaps allow them a Frame during Monologue (if it is kept) or allow them to buy singleton frames for narration. Basically get everyone involved even if their character's are off-screen.

So how about this... everyone who does not have their character present in a scene is playing the villains.  They all work off of the same pool of resources (which must, of course, be laid down on the table), and they have mostly the same game-mechanical rights, though the Editor should have a "first among equals" position, since he presumably knows more of the enemy plans.

In other games I would worry that this would result in people "softballing" their friends by having the villains deliberately engage in bad tactics.  But the more I playtest this, the more I realize that softballing would be counter-productive in Capes.  Why?  Because you don't get big VPs just for winning a Complication (or, you get some, but nearly trivial) you get the big VPs for winning a hard-fought Complication.

So the other players create more VPs in the world the harder they fight for the villains.  And more VPs is good for inactive players for two reasons.  First, the heroes might win those VPs.  But second (and, I think, far more important) the faster VPs are earned, the faster the scene concludes.

People who are playing in the scene don't mind if it drags on.  More spotlight time for them.  People who aren't playing in the scene want the essential elements of the scene to happen, Bam!, Bam!, Bam! and then for the scene to conclude so that they can get to their scene.  They're the perfect group to draft for the job of keeping things moving forward.

[Sydney Freedberg]

... everyone who does not have their character present in a scene is playing the villains.....the other players create more VPs in the world the harder they fight for the villains.....

[fanboy raving] Now that's a cool idea. [/fanboy raving]

You'd likely end up with particular players taking semi-ownership of particular villains ("Oh, let Joe do Dark Wallaby. You can't do the Dark Wallaby Voice"). Might even work to have some mechanism whereby each player creates & usually plays his/her own hero plus some other PC's arch-nemesis. (Obviously you shouldn't try to play both your hero and your own archnemesis....).

Potential problem: if all the heroes are active, it puts a lot on the editor -- there's an inverse ratio between the number of active PCs that must be managed and the number of inactive players to help manage them. Not a killer, just an issue.

Also interesting to see the bit of convergent evolution here with Scarlet Wake, another really innovative game to come out of the Forge of late.

[TonyLB]

It's not convergent evolution.  I lifted the idea.

[LordSmerf]

This provides a very elegant solution...!  Definately something that needs testing, but the basic premise is solid.

It's not convergent evolution. I lifted the idea.

And that is what i love about the Forge.  Someone has got the solution to whatever problem you are having.  All the games just get better!

Thomas

[TonyLB]

It would be even nicer if there were some way that they could be pursuing a single player agenda, and have ways of benefitting both when their hero is present and when they're absent.

In short, what goal should they be pursuing as they play villains in a Scene, above and beyond "make the Scene end"?

Hrm... perhaps Inspirations won by the villains can be awarded to a particular player (though not their hero) by popular acclamation.  Then the player can be constructing sequences of events as both hero and villain, and tying them together...

[*]Concrete, the Living Rock, has an advantage over the Road Crew (rogue excavation-themed villains) because he learned the locaton of their Hidden Base in a previous scene (Information Inspiration).[*]Kara, Concrete's player, also did most of the work of voicing Queen Midnight, the evil arch-villainess.  The group agreed to give her control of the villainous Inspiration when that unscrupulous arch-enemy sucessfully kidnapped Trudy Trueheart, the Love Exemplar of Captain Courage (Bystander Inspiration).[*]Kara decides to use both Inspirations, maintaining that the Road Crew is clearly acting under orders from Queen Midnight, and that therefore Trudy is being held in an elaborate death-trap at the aforementioned Hidden Base.  The heroes start with an advantage in the "Sneaky, sneaky" Complication, because they can enter the Base without anyone suspecting they yet know where it is.  The villains start with an advantage in the "Chinese Acid Torture" Complication, because they have an Exemplar to stick in their death-trap.[*]Kara, specifically, gets a lot of spot-light time, because Concrete's knowledge and cleverness proves to be essential to solving two big problems, rather than just one.[/list:u]Credit where credit is due, this goes back to what Sydney was talking about way, way back that the goal players have in telling interesting stories is to earn the right to tell more interesting stories.

[LordSmerf]

This is really more of a kernal than an idea in and of itself, but now that we are discussing players playing Villains has any consideration been made toward eleminating the Editor?  I am not sure that it is possible, much less desireable, but i was wondering whether you had even thought about it.

What about people playing Villains in scenes where they have their Heroes?  Would this work at all?

Thomas

[Sydney Freedberg]

It's not convergent evolution. I lifted the idea.

Well, that works too. [If I were a person who used smileys, I would have inserted an appropriate smiley here].

Awarding villains' Inspirations to players to tie the plot together moves the game even further over towards Director Stance, which (as I understand it) is essentially player-driven creation of plot, setting, and (non-player) characters -- all traditional GM tasks. From there it's not far to eliminating the Editor altogether.

Now, the thing that always worries me about so much player control of the plot (as opposed to particular details) is the danger of incoherence. There's a playtest of Xiombarg's Unsung online somewhere that shows this: (minor spoiler ahead) there's a bomb, it's not clear who's set it, and two different players end up introducing mutually contradictory suspects, and while one is (as I recall) eventually explained away as a red herring, the integrity of the Shared Imaginative Space takes a bit of a beating in the process. (Am I being terribly Simulationist? I think not, because an incoherent "reality" is terribly distracting either to creating meaningful story -- Narrativism -- or tackling worthy challenges --Gamism).

Admittedly, long-running comic books get themselves into nightmarish mishmoshes of incoherence over the course of a few decades and feverishly revamp their continuity all the time. But I'm not sure this is something we want to replicate.

Universalis handles the potential for incoherence by having mechanisms for players to challenge each other's ideas; but even there you're dealing inevitably with improvization. The attraction, for me, of some kind of GM position is that there is someone who can act as the final arbiter of the imagined reality.

Now perhaps the only power the GM needs is some kind of veto over player ideas; I'm not sure.

P.S.: The logistics of "if every major villain is played by a player, what happens if every player's hero is active" -- that's a separate issue I'm drawing a blank on. But I don't think it's as inherently (and theoretically) knotty as the director power/GM veto question.

[TonyLB]

Annouce:  I've uploaded a new, simlified, version of the Capes Rules, now in thrilling PDF!

My fonts didn't embed properly, which seems to have whacked the pagination on one or two pages a little, but it's still a lot better looking once printed to paper than the web site.  Hopefully I can appease the anger of the many folks who have had to read it in its previous, unpleasant, formatting.


Re: Director Stance and Incoherence.

I think this may be more of a problem in other games than it is in this one.  Not to minimize the importance of the issue, but there are a couple of things already built-in to keep it in check:

[*]Complications aren't facts... the facts associated with them ("Battle in an underwater fortress" implies that the fortress is, in fact, underwater) are very clearly window-dressing for the conflict itself.  It's a subtle change of emphasis but (IMHO) a powerful one.[*]Inspirations can be ranked against each other numerically, which lets you often just say "A conflicts with B... but B had bigger dice, so A just doesn't happen, or has to happen in a modified way to suit B".  It's arbitrary and capricious in squashing one players views to present another, but it emerges from the game system in a way that doesn't associate it with anyone's judgment.  Nobody has to get into an argument whether B is a better idea than A.  And that, in my experience, is where the big emotional conflicts start.[/list:u]Honestly, I think the real problem in playing without an Editor is that the villain and hero sides start to resemble each other too closely.

The new rules make a point, in several places, of the fact that players acting their heroes have to cooperate and reach consensus on how to apply the various joint resources that they have for a turn... for instance, each side only gets on Special Effect.  The villainous side doesn't reach consensus.  The Editor has a supervillain-like role of bossing around the players acting villains, all while trying to incite them to their scurrilous best.  

If you take away the Editor as a central bossy authority then you'd want to replace it with some similarly dysfunctional method for the villain-group to decide who gets what resources, to differentiate them from the polite, cooperative hero-players.

[LordSmerf]

I am still parsing the new rules (which means i have not read them yet), but i was thinking about the last Example of Play and i am somewhat concerned about Complication generation.  Not once the scene gets underway, i believe that is handled very well, but to start.  It seems that with the Editor just assigning a bunch of things there is a significant risk of generating Complications that have no narrative relevance and little player interest.  I point at the Banter Complication.  It seems unimportant to the story, and it seems almost as if it is only contested because it was cheap and the other Complications were pretty much decided already...

It may not actually be a problem, but i believe that a really tight set of rules describing setting up a Scene (especially guidelines for Complications) would be a huge asset to the game.

Thomas

[TonyLB]

Before I answer the question, I'm interested:  Is there something new to the rules that makes this stand out to you?  Or is it just the different sequence of events in the Example?

Now, to answering the question:  That Example was written separate from the Inspiration system, to simplify it and focus on the particular rules changes I was putting forward.

However I expect that in normal play more than 50% (and possibly as high as 100%) of new Complications would be created from Inspirations in the hands of players and the Editor.  Particularly once players earn the right to gain villain Inspirations for NPC play, and therefore have a vested interest in both sides of the Inspiration coin.

Guidelines for setting up a new scene are on Page 12.  Man, I like having page numbers to refer to.

[LordSmerf]

This will be short since i only have about 5 free minutes.  I started reading the rules this morning and two things stood out, one comment and one suggestion:

1. I really like the way that Overdrawn Drives work in the newest system.  Each one really hurts.  And that is definately a good thing.

2. I was thinking about making sure that the players are invested in each and every Complication and something hit me...  You get as many dice as you have Debt staked...  This eliminates the Passion Effect, but it replaces it with a system in which you can not roll at all unless you find a Complication important enough to Stake on...  I am not entirely sure what kind of systemic repurcussions this would have (can you create Complications in which you are totally unopposed?  what does that do to Inspiration balance) and thus am not sure if it is even a good idea.  I thought i would toss it out because it struck me as quite cool and appropriate.

I will continue reading and hopefully have some more for you this evening.

Thomas

[LordSmerf]

Before i begin my (brief) commentary on the newest rules i want to answer the question that i so thoughtfully ignored in my last post:

Tony, it is not the new rules, it was as you said the new set of events in the Example that got me thinking about ensuring that Complications are important.

Now, having finished reading the PDF rules i have decided that i only have one major quibble at the moment.  The introduction the Frames mechanic seems to indicate that playing without Frames is the preferred method of play.  I must strongly disagree.  I feel that the Frames mechanic is one of the things that makes Capes truly great, which is probably why i suggested Frames of some sort early in the project.  I feel that Frames both empower and limit players in a really exciting and narratively powerful way.  Basically i feel that the text should read differently.  Frames are hard to get used to, as evidenced in our IRC game, but i feel that if the rules can be tightened up (especially for dialog and non-combat stuff) the game will be much more powerful...

You are, of course, free to disagree, but if you do i would like to hear why you think the game plays better without Frames.  Do you feel that they are a crutch and that better stories are told with no limits?

Thomas

[TonyLB]

The rules are still in process, and one of the more labor-intensive sections that I'm working on is, in fact, a good description of Frames, in the only medium really suited for the discussion.  Because I know that description will eventually come along to make Frames much more accessible and attractive, I deliberately shelved the issue for the current revision, rather than spend a lot of energy in a text-only presentation destined for the scrap-heap.

That said, even with a really well constructed description, Frames are an inherently visual construct.  I think it's oversimplifying to say that it takes a long time to get.  Some people are going to leap to it instantly, because it meshes with the way their minds work, and some people are never going to feel fully comfortable using it.

I can envision particular groups agreeing that Frames will be the universal gold-standard for their sessions, but I do not feel comfortable making that standard an unwavering part of the rules.  There are folks who just aren't going to enjoy it, as much as thee and me both might find that difficult to comprehend.

[Sydney Freedberg]

a good description of Frames, in the only medium really suited for the discussion....

Ha! Pretty pictures. Me like.

More seriously, and in more complete sentences, I see your point that not all groups would get Frames, but I'd argue for making it the default, with an opt-out in the rules for groups that really don't want to do it. In fact, in the final version, I'd argue for making at least some of the Examples comic strips too.

If you take away the Editor as a central bossy authority then you'd want to replace it with some similarly dysfunctional method for the villain-group to decide who gets what resources, to differentiate them from the polite, cooperative hero-players.

Here's a thought: Whoever's controlling the villain with the least invested in the scene has final say. E.g. whoever's staked the least Debt, or has the most untapped Powers and unblocked Attitudes (not sure of an elegant way to track this mechanically, off the top of my head). Why the least invested rather than the most invested? Because these are the bad guys, and their dynamics should be, as you said, disfunctional: You want to give them an incentive (a) to hold back vs. the heroes and (b) to fail to back each other up.

After all, isn't it common in stories that the bad guys fail because Villain A, while nominally cooperating with Villain B, is quite happy to let B take most of the punches while A takes most of the loot? Heck, this even happens in the Example, with Cheshire's minions running off with the money while their boss is getting pounded.