[Capes] Polishing

[efindel]

Anyway here's my thought, stop me if you've already heard it:  The relationships between neighborhoods (and between people, and between people and neighborhoods) are objects and past events.

Boston's relationship with New York isn't "Antipathy".  It's "The Yankees".   America's relationship with France isn't "Contempt", it's "D-Day".

I'd just like to say 'Wow' to this.  And to go on that this idea seems useful for a lot, lot more than just Capes -- I can see it being useful in any kind of setting generation.

This is Seriously Cool, Tony.  You should write the idea up for someplace that'll pay you for it.  ;-)

[TonyLB]

Oh... yeah, I hadn't even noticed that now you can have "Free" Events and Goals, since they now have a cost.  Which makes a meaningful niche for Recurring Conflicts attached to Exemplars, because after all they're free!  I'll gorge myself on samples I don't even like when a store is giving them away for free.  And the system doesn't suffer for a glut of Events and Goals (in fact it thrives on them).

As for how and when to add more... this system's got a conspicuous lack of character advancement.  So maybe at the end of a session a player or players can pay ten Story Tokens to create a new Recurring Conflict associated with someone or something... your Exemplar, your archnemesis, a neighborhood, the mayor... whatever.

[LordSmerf]

Tony,

Perhaps I haven't mentioned it recently, but you have really good ideas.  I love the idea of character advancement being tied to producing more "free" Events...

Thomas

[TonyLB]

Cool.  Glad you like it.

Do you think it should be a straight cost (e.g. Ten Story Tokens), or should it scale with the number of recurring Conflicts already associated with a given person or place (e.g. Five plus two per Recurring Conflict already on that element)?

i.e. Should you be encouraged to set Lois Lane up with "Falls from a High Place", "Denigrates Kansas Origins", "Goal: Romance", "Gets the Scoop", etc., etc., etc.?  Or should there be an incentive to spread the Conflict goodness around, adding some recurring conflicts to Jimmy Olsen, Lex Luthor, the Daily Planet and so on?

[Sydney Freedberg]

One thought that struck me when I woke up early this morning (and tried to go back to sleep, and couldn't -- shouldn't 3 hours of jet lag from going FROM California TO the East Coast work the other way?) is that Exemplars could be, instead of simply Things On Your Sheet, a fourth category of Abilities, i.e. things that let you roll dice. (Rather like Relationships being treated as skills in HeroQuest, Dogs in the Vineyard, etc.) So alongside Powers, Attitudes, and Tropes, you could have a fourth category, Relationships -- covering both individuals (Exemplars) and neighborhoods -- whose strength and in-game power is rated on a scale of 1-5 like other Abilities.

Though I think simply allowing people to introduce a free Event/Goal (i.e. one that doesn't count as your turn) when their relationship is involved somehow is probably more elegant.

But this does bring me to something that's been nagging me about the system for some time -- I've raised it a while back, when someone mentioned Miller's With Great Power.... having everything about the character covered by one mechanic, Aspects:

The division of Powers vs. Attitudes vs. Tropes (aka Reactions) still feels somewhat artificial to me. The immediate pragmatic problem is that, counting 5 Drives, 3 Exemplars, a set of 5 Abilities, a set of 4, and a set of 3, a player must define 5+3+5+4+3= 20 (twenty ) distinct things to create a starting character -- of which 5+4+3 = 12, the Abilities, are completely freeform (whereas most systems with this many mandatory elements just have you assigning points among a fixed list of Skills Everyone Has, e.g. Paranoia). Click & Lock goes a long way to fixing this, though not all the way yet.

But the bigger issue I have -- and this is probably as much my personal game-design aesthetic as much as anything else -- is elegance: It just seems that we're making more distinctions than we need. Someone brought this up a while ago on an earlier thread, so I won't take credit, but I'll restate it, with the added insight of four sessions of playtest:

The various Abilities are really defined by three things. One is level (a 4, a 5, a 2, whatever). But the other two, the really crucial ones, are binary:
- Is it an action or a reaction, i.e. can be it used only on your turn or only on someone else's turn?
- Is it mundane, i.e. can be used once free of Debt but is then blocked, or heroic, i.e. can be used infinitely but costs Debt each time? Currently Powers are always heroic, Attitudes always Mundane, but Tropes/Reactions can be either -- which seems awkward.

Frankly, since chain-reactions of "no, I trope that" was such a big part of the fun in playtest -- and such a powerful form of teamwork -- that I'd be tempted to let everything be used as a trope/reaction:

Andy: "I blast by you using my Super-Speed -- I roll a 4!"
Bob: "Well, I use my level 4 Commanding Attitude to proclaim 'You shall not pass! I get a -- uh -- damn, two. I don't accept that result..."
Claire: "No, take it, I can trope that."
Bob: "Okay..."
Claire: "I use my level 2 'Unsettling Stare' to back up your Commanding Attitude and force him to pay attention -- I get a six! Ha! I am the champion!"

Or something like that.

Secondly, as for debt-powered vs. mundane one-use Abilities, I'd be tempted to conflate them: Allow any ability to be used once for free, then reused only at a cost in Debt. This means that mundane characters, who have no Drives or Debt, still start strong but run out of juice fast, as in the current system, which is all as it should be. But this produces two cool effects for heroic characters:
1) They have an incentive to use their low-level powers first and try to work up the list, because that first use is free -- a nice escalation that exists for Attitudes in the current rules but not for Powers.
2) They can keep piling on the debt and driving ahead on anything, not just their super-abilities but on aspects of their personality as well. Thus in playtest Liz's "Saint Jane" wouldn't have been hurting so badly halfway through a long scene where she used all her Attitudes. Conversely, you restore the effect of the "reset all blocked abilities" Wonder from the original rules, which means you can better portray characters like Wolverine who basically bull through entire extended conflicts by sheer force of will at terrible emotional cost, which in game terms means piling up Debt reusing Attitudes.

All these are such major changes that (1) they may call for a different thread (2) they're probably undoable on Tony's deadline (3) Tony may just reject them out of hand as reflecting my very personal tastes in design (I'm a Grand Unified Mechanic fanatic, wielding Occam's Razor with savage glee even on things that shouldn't be cut). But I think these are at least things worth considering.

{EDIT: Whoops, crossposted with Tony}

[Sydney Freedberg]

P.S.: And if someone can find the original post where the two binary oppositions of "heroic-debt/mundane-blocked" and "action/reaction" were originally proposed, please post the link, because I can't find it, and I want to make clear this wasn't originally my idea -- credit where credit is due.

Also, the other thought I had based on playtest experience -- mostly playing villains -- is that it is possible to get stuck so deep in Debt that you don't care: yeah, you accept being Overdrawn (with consequent die roll penalties), and never ever able to get out again, so you don't try. I'm wondering if (a) there should be more levels of hurt beyond just "you're overdrawn" and (b) if there should be a way to buy your way out of extreme debt with Story Tokens.

And hopefully this thought is more in line with the theme of "polishing" (vice "taking apart and putting back togethe) than the previous post!

[TonyLB]

Okay folks, big post time.  Apologies for the length.  I've tried to tighten it so I'm not rambling.

I understand the appeal of unified system.  It's not to my personal taste.  I think a little differentiation is one of those (to quote Dinh, who Sydney pointed me to) "wise restraints that set us free".  So far I'm seeing this as a matter of personal preference, but there may well be an objective argument one way or the other that I've missed.

I'm feeling sort of smug, however, because I can field the other two points with a single answer... even though they look pretty distant.  "Why aren't Exemplars a character trait?" and "Why would villains ever get out of deep debt?"

My answer to both of those questions is this:  "The current rules are in place to encourage other players to grub for Story Tokens."  For context on what I'm saying, go to the most recent solo playtest, search for the word "opportunity" and start reading from about three or four lines before that, forward.  It points out my new hypothesis about how the game works.

Hypothesis:  Debt on another character will be viewed as Story Tokens not yet realized.  Much of the competition of the game will be to earn those Story Tokens.

Evidence:  The last session of the playtest started with every player holding about five Story Tokens and me holding slightly less than that.  This was in large part because the ST-distribution rules had been slightly broken in previous sessions (particularly that STs were rewarded for teamwork more often than for opposition, and they weren't spent quickly enough).  The session ended with most players holding one or two STs.  I was holding fourteen.  Why?  Because after the prison break I looked around the table and saw a huge pile of debt sitting on everybody's sheets, and I said "I should create a scene for them to burn that off and prove themselves."

This wasn't premeditated, it was serendipity.  I was mostly saying "God, Liz is really unhappy about how deeply overdrawn her character is... if we end the final session on that note she's going to be bummed".  I was, in short, thinking about it as a classic GM, who sets out to lose challenges from a selfless goal of abetting the other players' fun.

But if I'd had the rules system better explained to me (as it will be better explained in the rulebook) I would have done the same thing from purely selfish motives, to gain Story Tokens.  I absolutely cashed in on that scene.  I gave you the ability to Stake and win, and you did so with a vengeance, to my advantage.

So here's why the villains ended up with so much Debt... you guys had too many Story Tokens from previous sessions.  There was little motivation for you to lose Conflicts, and absolutely no motivation for you to create Conflicts custom-made to be lost.  In short, you weren't motivated to take the Debt away from them.

But imagine a different situation... imagine many (if not all) of you had no STs to your name.  Imagine further that I'd adequately described the rules.  It's not much of a leap to think of Eric introducing a "Goal:  Shame Atomaton" for Clarice, and then deliberately losing it.  That's three tokens of Pride less on her Debt (because she'd have instantly staked) and three STs more in his pocket.  And as long as the villain has Debt and somebody wants Story Tokens there's motivation to do it again and again.  I think that's the feedback loop that should prevent massive Overdraw... other players won't let the villain get that overdrawn.

That's also why Exemplars aren't a character ability.  Exemplars are not a resource for the player of that character.  They're a resource for every other player around the table.  You play an Exemplar when the hero is holding a bunch of your potential Story Tokens and you want to get them before anyone else does.