[Capes] The Serial Aesthetic

[TonyLB]

We ran our third session of face to face Capes playtest last night.  Former sessions are recorded here.  By previous agreement, we had decided to only run three sessions.  And that consciousness really helped us with pacing.  We told one story, pretty much with beginning, middle and end each on a different night.  

Last night our resident Brick went off under the control of the mystical amulet of Wanatiki, and in alliance with his ex-partner-turned-villain, Eclipso, summoned up an evil hawaiian lava-God.  Jenny Swift, the speedster I was playing, tried to get clever by keeping the amulet away from the bad guys, but she blew it and ended up possessed herself.  We came within inches of destroying Honolulu, but in the end heroism and virtue triumphed over villainy and molten stone.  Yay!

We resolved several conflicts.  Volcanus was possessed, now he's not, villainy thwarted, yay.  Man-Shark, villain from previous episodes, redeemed himself through selfless sacrifice in uneasy alliance with the heroes.  It was cool.  Lava-Boy confronted his questions about whether he was fit to fight alongside his mentor, Volcanus, by actually fighting against him, and beating him.  Jenny Swift was forced to look past her selfish desire to monopolize Freya, and to act mature for Freya's own good.  I actually had a "Stinky Hateful Maturity" Inspiration off of that one.

But here's the thing:  In resolving these we created quite a few major new conflicts that we came nowhere close to resolving:

[*]Jenny now has to deal with massive guilt about having tried to murder her friends as well as a whole city of innocents
[*]Man-Shark and Brainstorm had the awkward beginnings of an impossible romantic relationship
[*]Freya has all-but-confessed her love of Volcanus to everyone in the group but Volcanus... can she now take the final step?
[*]Volcanus has to cope with the idea that Eclipso was willing to doom Volcanus's soul for temporal power
[/list:u]The thing is... creating these was not deliberate.  We were trying to wrap everything up in a neat package with a bow at the end of the third session.  Now I'm done with these characters, but all I can think is "I have to keep playing them!  The story isn't finished!"  I've encountered this situation in Capes playtests before, but I chalked it up to either evolving rules or insufficient time.  That was clearly not the case this time.  The system is producing this pattern.

I have to admit that it's a little... scary.  Part of the charm of stories is that they have a life-cycle, and that at some point they come to the end of themselves and you stop.  Nothing further remains.  If you wanted to pick up the same characters and tell another story, you could, but you'd have to be starting with whole new issues.  Having seen Capes in action many times, I don't think it does that.  Instead, resolving today's conflicts creates tomorrow's.

I suppose this is actually appropriate for a game that mimics a continuing run of comic books.  And at this point in the design it's certainly too late to go back and change.  But it wasn't what I intended when I designed the system.

[Sydney Freedberg]

It's not a bug, it's a feature!

One thing I've noticed about Narrativist game design (not that I've played many, but I've read a bunch since I got enForgified) is that there's often a drive for thematic economy -- to find a premise with a clear yes-or-no answer, tailor the mechanics to it, and drive towards a definite resolution of the question posed by the premise. Kickers resolve, children grow up, sorcerers go to hell or go cold turkey, the sins of the town are exposed and judged, etc.

Of course, there's a classical elegance to this approach. But there's a baroque delight to the perpetual complication machine that I think you've made in Capes, which as you say fits nicely with the genre. The Premise of "power is fun, do you deserve it?" is one that is nigh-impossible to resolve once and for all: As long as you keep using your powers, you keep getting into moral Debt, and you keep on having to pay it off by generating story.

Now someone who's actually played multiple Narrativist games should feel free to demolish my point, here.

[Doug Ruff]

I have to admit that it's a little... scary.  Part of the charm of stories is that they have a life-cycle, and that at some point they come to the end of themselves and you stop.  Nothing further remains.

But a really good story will leave you wanting more... I agree with Sydney that this is a desirable feature. I also agree with you that this is appropriate for a game that mimics comic book "series".

It could also be a good feature for "one-shot" demos as well. A good demo should inspire the players to think about what could happen next, encourage them to play again and above all, to buy the game. I suggest that you keep this in mind when you get to the stage where you can market this game.

[Sydney Freedberg]

...when you get to the stage where you can market this game.

Which is bloody soon, as I recall. This is straying off-thread, but Tony, could you give us (somewhere, not necessarily in this thread) a quick update on how close to a "Capes v1.0" you are? Dying to know.

[TonyLB]

Executive Summary:  On-track to release at Dreamation 2005, January 27th, with almost a month of margin for error.

Details:  Over a hundred pages are written, layed out, formatted and being subjected to the tender mercies of first-round proof-readers.  That includes all the rules, the example of play, character creation, drives, exemplars, click and locks, and strategy/tactics section.

I've got three more chapters to go:  Extended Rules for non-person characters (Abstracts like "Mystery", location-characters like "Devil's Pantry" and object-characters like "Monkey's Paw" or "MacGuffin"), a chapter on the actual feat of getting a game together (crafting the Comics Code and other aspects of social contract, as well as the various ways you can use things like pawns, laminated paper and china markers to make the workings of the rule system even easier to handle) and a chapter on how to prepare a story-thread so that you can attempt to insert it into the dynamic milieu of a Capes game.  

I saved those chapters for last because, really, they're the writing candy.  I just get to pontificate a little, which I love to do (witness this post).  I am on-schedule to have all three done and layed out by Friday.

There's also some work to be done on the Appendices (including tables to instantly generate comic-booky names like "Vanessa Faust" and "Brandon Powers", and such useful what-not) but the appendices are being written mostly for my own fun, not because they're in any way essential to the system.

And finally I'm only about 75% of the way through creating the interior art.  Luckily I had a massive burst of drawing-energy last week, so I've got the cover almost entirely pencilled and inked... just need to give it a nice mad-science-laboratory background and then color it.  So that's actually a bit ahead of schedule, which is nice because I was really worried about it.

I've gotten quotes and picked a printer, discussed the format of the book, set up a schedule for proof and delivery.  Need to get an ISBN and commercial rights to a few fonts.

And finally, I need to rev up the marketing engine sometime in the next week or so.  If anyone could point me to a good starting post over in Publishing for that I would be very grateful... my search-fu has proven weak, probably because I am subconsciously trying to avoid that portion of the process.