Balancing Capes

[Vaxalon]

"Both things" refers to "Playing this conflict will earn me lots of story tokens" and "Playing this conflict will stir things up."

[Sydney Freedberg]

I don't think Eric or Sydney care about having Story Tokens at all any more.  They may chime in on this, but if I just said at the beginning of next session "Okay, we're all starting at zero Story Tokens again," I would be utterly shocked if they complained...

Hey!

So the kick of GETTING one is bigger than the kick of SPENDING one?

No, not really.

I mean, I do enjoy sitting there getting pounded while I rack up the story tokens, but that's primarily because I see my pile grow while Tony's pile shrinks and my brain cackles, "Muahaha, you may think you're winning now, but when a conflict comes up I really care about, I am gonna KICK your ASS."

Now usually I fritter away my tokens before I can do anything too astounding, but still, I'm at least anticipating spending.

[TonyLB]

Sydney:  Ah, see, I am proven wrong.  Dat's cool.

Fred:  You're absolutely right.  My "by accident" comment was, in retrospect, very poorly thought out.  It's actually much more like wave/particle duality in physics.  There aren't two separate behaviors here, "playing a conflict that will stir things up" and "playing a conflict that will earn me story tokens."  There is only playing a conflict that provides emotionally charged adversity.

It's really hard not to say things like "I'm going to stir up some trouble because it will earn me Story Tokens," or "I earn Story Tokens because I like to stir up trouble."  I even know better than to say that, and you only have to look a couple of posts back to see that when my internal censor slips I go right back to that construction.

Urgh... I can't write this without preaching.  And I know you know this already, so there's no point in preaching in this thread.  Apparently I'm off to write up Tony's Standard Rant #1:  Story/Game Duality.

[Vaxalon]

Isn't that true in Capes only because you MADE it mechanically work that way?

To me, that's what's special and cool about Capes.  If you want to have that kind of philosophical bleedover, you have to do something special.

[TonyLB]

Oh good, there's something you hadn't thought of in the rant.  I do like to provide value-added.

The short version:  Every game works that way.  That's how RPGs work.  Some games do it well.