[Capes] Players and Villains

[TonyLB]

Welcome back, true believers, to design of Capes: Superhero Storytelling!  When last we left our intrepid designers, they had created a system that looks like it will run faster, stay leaner, and be easier to understand.  Only time will tell.

But wait!  In their discussions of how to keep players constantly involved, our paragons of creativity have proposed that decent, hard-working players should have a chance to play dastardly, accursed Villains!  Will they be able to construct a system that encourages the sundry inanities and insanities of the villainous mind?  Can they recreate the spiteful, dysfunctional mechanic of a villain group in action?  Keep reading, and find out!

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So the goal is to give the players (including/especially the Editor) the tools to make it easy to imitate the way that villains function in comic books.  That means addressing at least some of these apparently nonsensical behaviors:

[*]Tying the hero into a death-trap and then walking away[*]Taking Exemplars hostage[*]Deliberately aligning your actions to attack the Drives of the heroes, even though that gives them an advantage[*]Gloating[*]Telling the hero your plan because "you won't live long enough to thwart me"[/list:u]I have this feeling that the villain's goal (or at least intermediate goal)  is to force the hero to Stake tokens.  But I don't know why.

But the other possibility is that there's something like "counting coup" going on here... that when a villain gives the hero a sporting chance and beats them anyway it means... more... somehow.

So, I'll keep cogitating, but I could certainly use some help.  This is a bit tricky to get the mind around even in the abstract, and that means it's going to be absolute murder for players (who have to deal with it in concrete immediacy), unless good tools are provided.

[Sydney Freedberg]

Just a thought -- this question is eluding more substantive analysis at the moment:

The answer has got to have something to do with villainous Debt -- with what they're trying to prove.

How? Maybe since their drives are the mirrors of the heroes', that means, for example, that they're trying to prove that the Truth does not set you free, so they want to tell you terrible truths and show you how helpless you are to change them; or they're trying to prove that Love is a weakness, so they kidnap the people you care about; or that Hope is an illusion, so they try to smash the things everyone cares most about.

Now the current system doesn't actually tie the specific Drive being staked all that strictly to what it's being staked on. Perhaps a little more definition in this department might serve both heroes and villains?

[Alan]

Hi Tony,

This latest set of rules is shaping up in to something exceptional.  I think the players as villains idea is great.  One question came up for me: who keeps the inspiration that a villain wins?  Editor or player of the villain?  If the player can earn inspiration this way, must he use it for the villain in future, or can he apply it to his hero?  (And can hero inspiratoin be used on villain complications?)

I've got two other suggestions for your rules:

1) Maybe bringing an Exemplar into a scene ups the rewards of staking debt tokens.

2) After character creation, rearrange your rules so the reader encounters the rules in the order they will use them.  The rules about Page One, starting a scene, who creates starting complications (and the physical act of placing a card with one die for each side etc.) and how many, etc. should come before explainations of the conflict system and narration.

Excelsior!

[Sydney Freedberg]

1) Maybe bringing an Exemplar into a scene ups the rewards of staking debt tokens.

2) After character creation, rearrange your rules so the reader encounters the rules in the order they will use them.

I second both these motions.

[TonyLB]

Alan!  Welcome aboard!

I'm interested in your suggestion that Exemplars should accentuate the importance of Stakes.  My experience so far has been that their presence does this even in the absence of any mechanic reinforcing it, but if we can figure out an elegant rule then that will make it even better.  I don't have any ideas for an elegant rule yet, however.

On layout and sequence:  I appreciate your suggestions, but I've just about concluded that there is no single layout that will please everybody.  I'm sorry if that sounds dismissive of your concern, it's just that after having tried it in a dozen different orders (including three variants of the starting point you recommend), and having gotten strong negative feedback from somebody on every single way of ordering the rules, I'm a little burned out on the discussion.

So... to the thread!  Have you guys got any ingenious ideas on how to encourage comic-villainous patterns of thought and behavior?

One of the insights that came up previously is that the villains don't want just to execute their evil schemes.  They want to win an unspoken argument with the heroes.

The argument varies, but goes something like this:  I'm an evil villain not because I am too weak to be good, but because good is a stupid/false/failed view of the world.  I will now prove this to you (oh shining avatar of a philosophy that, if true, would shame and humble me deeply) by showing you in this specific, tangible situation how evil triumphs over good.  The villains need to destroy the heroes in order to feel good about themselves.

But... but... we don't want to reward players for the outcome of successfully tearing down the heroes.  That would make things a zero sum game, which isn't really all that much fun.  We want to reward the villainous players for the process of trying to tear down the heroes.

Okay, here's a thought:  Currently, in the system, when a Hero wins a Stake, the Debt Tokens on that Stake just "go away".  This seems wasteful.  What if the Editor distributes those Tokens to the players most responsible for drawing the hero into making the bet.  They get to keep those Tokens and redeem them for valuable prizes (of some as yet un-invented type) in the game.  But only when the hero wins the Complication.

[Ron Edwards]

Hiya,

Tony, if you get a chance, run a search on the word "dickweed" and you'll get a bunch of threads about playing villainous characters (intentional or unintentional on the character's part) constructively. Might be good reading, food for thought, etc.

Best,
Ron

[TonyLB]

Now there is a search I would not have constructed on my own.  I'm off to read, thanks!

[John Harper]

What if you put villain behavior in the hands of the players in the form of tropes? Each hero could have a few villain tropes that could be activated like any other. Stuff like "Taunts me with his master plan", "Kidnaps my loved ones", and "Forces me to watch the massacre of innocents."

As soon as villain behaviors are a player-tool, they will happen in play on a regular basis.

[Sydney Freedberg]

What if you put villain behavior in the hands of the players in the form of tropes? ...like "Taunts me with his master plan", "Kidnaps my loved ones", and "Forces me to watch the massacre of innocents."

[Sydney blinks in awe, forgets about deadline]

Yes, yes, yes -- almost.

The one problem is that you don't want to have every supervillain behave the same way towards a given superhero: I.e. if Nice-Man has the Trope "Foes gloatingly reveal their master plan" and can invoke it against every adversary, it might force out-of-character behaviour from, say, the Evil Doctor Taciturn or the cruel Captain Cautious.

So I think there's room for two types of traits. One belongs to the hero and is passive, like "girlfriend gets kidnapped" or "captured and tied up." The other belongs to the villain and is active, like "gloatingly reveal my evil plans" or "puts captured adversaries in deathtraps and walks away." So the bad guy is rewarded for putting himself/herself at a disadvantage --not presumably in terms of winning that particular complication, but in terms of dice s/he can use for something else.

Hmm. Tropes are currently written as re-rolls. Perhaps these traits are villainous Tropes that give the bad guys re-rolls to get away after the good guys have foiled their evil plans once again? In effect, the villain is taking a penalty on his evil plan of the moment (by gloating) but trading that off for a bonus on escaping when things go wrong (as they inevitably will). Which would explain why comic book bad guys rarely win but rarely lose decisively either.

EDIT: I still kinda like the idea of allowing characters to have disadvantages which their enemies could invoke against them for dice, too -- though this may be too traditional Champions/GURPS.

[Alan]

Hi all,

Here's something I sent Tony by PM.  I just realized how it could be relevant to Villains as well, so here it is.

I haven't playtested the game, so I'm only throwing out ideas.

If you think some incentive rules for Examplars (or villains!) might help, the simplest way would be to change the investment ratio of the drive related to the Exemplar that's present. ie: if you win, you get to dump additional debt directly from your character sheet; if you lose you get back triple (or +2) or whatever.

A villain designated as a hero's nemesis might also have some special relationship mechanic like what I suggest for examplars.  The player might choose the nemesis's tropes.

Another way to think about it, would be to have an Examplar or Nemesis as a complication unto themselves that the hero player can enter into play. To lose the complication is to exacerbate the Exemplar relationship and staked debt tokens go into a pool for the Exemplar.

Regarding what to do with tokens eliminated by winning a complication: let them disapear. My intuitiion is that an additional rule here would be unnecessay complication.

[TonyLB]

I like the notion of writing these into Tropes.  But I still feel like there needs to be a reward mechanic for the villains that doesn't connect to Victory Points.  Something they can achieve while "losing".

I believe that if the villains are meant to be striving for victory (the way the heroes are) then we end up with a zero-sum game.  The heroes can't win without the villains losing, and the villains can't win without the heroes losing.

When the hero manages to resolve his personal issues at the very last moment, and find the strength to defeat the bad-guy's plans, while the villain mumbles "Impossible!  Nobody can be that strong!"... that is the sign of a terrific villain.  They gave the hero exactly the right crucible.

If we can figure out a way to reward the player for playing a good villain in that style then we have a game where players can win as their heroes and also win while portraying villains, without contradiction.

EDIT:  Whoops... cross-posted with Alan.  Sorry!

[Sydney Freedberg]

Yeah, Tropes are only part of the solution.

I'm fuzzy-headed today, but:

If you have a great villain, you want that character to return and return and return -- even if you kill the first incarnation? Like the Joker for Batman, or Green Goblin & Hobgoblin for Spider-Man. So maybe the reward for really good villainy is not victory (victory is for heroes) but persistence. A great villain always loses but always comes back.

And I'm reminded of Universalis, where injuring a character means adding Traits to that character describing his/her injuries, which (because story importance = # of traits) actually makes it harder to kill them.

The obvious way to implement this mechanically is to reward villains with some kind of special resource that they cannot use on winning ordinary Complications, only on (a) getting away -- which is a sub-category of complications -- and (b) writing themselves into a new episode -- which is not a question that needs resolving for the heroes (if a player is there, his/her hero is in this issue) but which does for villains. But obvious does not always equal elegant.

[Doug Ruff]

Hi,

I've lurked this game a bit, but I haven't managed to organise a local play-test of it yet (but I want too, it looks damn fine!) So I haven't tested this idea in-game.

Villains are there as foils to the Heroes, yes? And Drives are about what is important to the Heroes? How about having a villain's Tropes linked to Drives?

For example, the evil Dr Hypnosis has Villainous Tropes relating to his powers of Mind-Control (Duty), Memory Erasure (Truth), and Despair Aura (Hope). He also prefers to strike at his foes through their closest friends (Love).

I don't know exactly what mechanic would be most appropriate for implementing these Tropes, but my instinct says that they should be applied against Heroes with Debt against a matching Drive, especially if overdrawn.

Anyway, hope this is useful. If I get someone to play this with me (my group is a bit disjointed at the moment, we're all working different shifts!) I'm assuming you'll want feedback?

Regards,

Doug

[TonyLB]

Doug:  Heck yes I'll want to hear about it!  I'm very excited by the prospect.  Soon you will have a new version of the rules PDF, far more friendly on the eyes (even if the text is essentially unchanged).  Watch this space!

I'm not seeing precisely how you mean to tie Tropes to Drives... though I like the concept of Tropes causing Villains to accrue Debt.  We had an idea a while back that villains shouldn't take Debt for Powers, but rather should hemorrhage information, and this might be a chance to get back to that without removing villainous Debt altogether.


Sydney:  Yeah... yeaaaaaaah.....

What you're offering as a reward mechanic to the players is not merely the ability to decide that a villain pops up again.  It's the ability to decide what happens in the next game.  Saying "obviously Magnetron the living generator couldn't be held by some puny federal super-prison!" is just a special case (albeit a popular one) of insisting that a particular element be written into the next game.

So somebody who does a terrific job as their hero (as shown by their high Temporary Drive scores) should get to request situations for themselves and their Exemplars.  

Somebody who does a terrific job as a villain (as shown by... haven't figured it out yet... maybe still how many Hero-Debt tokens they accumulate) should get to request the presence of certain villains or types of villains.  Maybe they even get to create a villain for the next session.  

Somebody who does a good job in the Letters Column gets to ask one geeky question that must be answered by the story of the next game.  The "Stay Tuned, True Believers!" question.

[Sydney Freedberg]

Quick thought: Perhaps the reward system could give players power over what kind of Complications get introduced, especially at the beginning of an issue (which so far is fairly undefined GM-fiat)?