Where Capes is weak.

[Vaxalon]

Yes, it pushes... not everyone is able to compete on the same level.  Some succeed more than others.

[Brennan Taylor]

Yes, it pushes... not everyone is able to compete on the same level.  Some succeed more than others.

Like I said, pure Capitalism.

[TonyLB]

It's quite a kick in the teeth some times, though... especially to folks who self-identify as experienced roleplayers, and think they have nothing more to learn.

I remember the first time that the Capes system stood up and told me "You sir, are currently doing a crummy job of securing the interest of the other players."  It was humbling.  It was also, not coincidentally, the start of my improvement in that area.

[Larry L.]

I think this makes Capes a good super-hero game. You know that "Invulnerable 5" is always as powerful and relevant as "Talk to ants 5". You don't have to agonize over how to phrase your abilities in order to use them, all super-heroes are created equal. Also, the fact that you might need to cover up the narration of others makes the session seem very comics like. If someone narrates the goal "Goal: Capture villain" and narrates how he rips the arms off the villain, the player of the villain would need to describe how they grow back or how they are later replaced by cybernetics. This kind of discrepancies improve the super-hero comics-feel of the game, and I think it's a feature.

For this reason, I think Vaxalon's criticism doesn't hold water. The super-hero genre allows a huge amount of flexibility before SIS breaks apart.

However, this "weakness" is the one I've been eyeing as limiting the game from other genres. I'll have to give Uni a whack before I decide if this is specific to Capes or a rather more general property of GM-less games.

[Callan S.]

Capes is unabashedly competitive, in my opinion... RPG Darwinism.

Taking it that Capes is competitive: Competitiveness is about making other people think your cool for what you did.

People who are using disjointed scenes clearly aren't interested in making cool narration that other people will think is cool.

Instead it sounds like your group are used to contributing what they like, because some GM figure shepards that into an acceptable submission. This rather than the player making it acceptable because they are competitive and want to look cool.

[Doug Ruff]

I built Capes to squeeze out as much of that hidden social gaming as possible, and replace it with explicit social gaming.  I think it's much healthier.

Heh. If the players don't kill each other first...

More seriously, Your examples (which I haven't quoted, as they are long, and only a few posts back) are another good illustration of something I was trying to say on a recent RPG.net thread about Capes. Capes demands that all players make a contribution.

I had previously understood about the 'put up or shut up' mechanic where it applied to Goals and Events (if you don't like the way the story is going, you have to fight for it! Which is way cool.)

I didn't understand that it also applied to mediating wheter narration of an abiility was satisfactory. To me, this is a bit scary. Because in your second example, Anne is carrying Joe in order to make up for his inadequate narration.

Capes is Step On Up for narration*, and Joe isn't Stepping Up. This is dysfunctional play.

(*I'm going to stay short of saying that it's Step On Up Narrativism, as I'm not confident enough of my grasp of Narrativist play. But I'm confident that this is a Step On Up issue and as such it has to be addressed).

By the way, I'm glad this thread is still going!

[dyjoots]

Capes is Step On Up for narration*, and Joe isn't Stepping Up. This is dysfunctional play.

(*I'm going to stay short of saying that it's Step On Up Narrativism, as I'm not confident enough of my grasp of Narrativist play. But I'm confident that this is a Step On Up issue and as such it has to be addressed).

Capes promotes... Violent Narrativism.  It's most certainly focused on Step On Up and all that jazz in Gamism, but the mechanics specifically support the address of a theme in such a way that it is unavoidable if you "play" the game well.  Winning and losing conflicts, bidding and manipulating resources, and just plain whooping your friends' asses all comes together to address the premise.  Weird, huh?

[Eric Sedlacek]

Capes is Step On Up for narration*, and Joe isn't Stepping Up. This is dysfunctional play.

Maybe it is and maybe it isn't.  Anne certainly doesn't seem satisfied with his input in the example, and since he won, she doesn't have to be.  If this is Joe being uncharacteristically uninspiring, then no harm, no foul.  However, if this is typical of his play, how many story tokens is he going to get from Anne in the long run?  Around zilch.  In other words, Joe will get what he has coming one way or another.

[Vaxalon]

Hm, I forgot about story token awards.

If someone is making trouble, twisting the system around into truly pathological play, the other players can retaliate by shifting story tokens away from him whenever possible.

[TonyLB]

Pathological play... such as?

[Vaxalon]

Example number one:

Joe plays a conflict.  "Doctor Bane picks a daisy."  Something innocuous.  It gets ignored.  "Pfft.  What a waste," say the other players.

The player (controlling Doctor Bane) stakes a single point of debt and rolls the die up to a 5.  The other players, having more interesting conflicts to play on, still ignore it.  They're busy defending their lair (the Revenger building) from an attack by aliens, a conflict that reads, "steal the Barzitron from the Revenger Building."

Joe waits for the Barzitron conflict to be claimed before he claims the daisy conflict.  He arranges for it to be resolved directly after that, and of course wins it.  In addition to getting a 4 inspiration out of it, Joe narrates.  "Doctor Bane picks a daisy.  The stem of the daisy is connected to a radio-control detonator that he had buried there the day before.  The basement of the Revenger building is engulfed in flame as a series of hidden explosives go off.  The entire building collapses, killing everyone inside."

Joe has used the freedom to narrate that the rules give him, to entirely change the implications of his conflict.

"Damn," says Jane, "That sucks."

********************************

Example number two:

A new scene starts.  Joe is the scene-setter.  He is getting a little tired of some of the characters that keep showing up in scene after scene, so he says, "Meanwhile, across town, apart from the action in the previous scene, an entirely different group of heroes confronts The Thing From The Harbor, a mutant harbor seal, come to take revenge upon the "legged ones" for a century of pollution."  He plays his monster as a villainous super, and encourages the other players to think up some new heroes.

Jane, who has been playing the same superheroine in every scene since the game started, wants none of this.  She takes her turn after Joe, and chooses her character anyways.  Rather than talking through the interpersonal conflict between her desire to play her favorite character, and Joe's desire to see a raft of new ones, she takes refuge in the rules, which allow her to choose any character that hasn't already been chosen for that scene.  

"Isn't your character in the previous scene?" asks Joe.  

"Yeah," says Jane, "I guess this one's a clone."

"But you've got all the same debt on your character sheet," says Joe.

"Okay," says Jane, "She travelled backwards in time to be in this scene, too."

"Our Comics Code says no time travel, Jane," says Joe, "We decided it opens up too many opportunities for retcons, which we all hate."

"It doesn't matter how she gets there... she's in this scene," says Jane, "I'm not required to explain how."

Jane has just used the rules to take away Joe's ability to frame the scene the way he wants.

************************

Example number three:

James is now the scene-setter.  He begins a period of "free narration".  During the course of this time, he describes his character doing any number of things that the other players would much rather see handled by means of conflicts.

"Hey, James," says Joe, "Don't you think that should be a conflict?"

"James says, "I'm in the 'first' seat for this scene, so I decide when we start taking turns.  And I'm not ready yet."

************************

The awarding of story tokens is under the control of the winner of the conflict.  In addition to considering the events of that particular conflict, he can also include considerations about whose play, in general (rather than just that conflict) they like better... in fact, given the subconscious component of such preferences, he can hardly do otherwise.

[Larry L.]

Dammit man! Have you yet encountered ANYTHING like these hypothetical examples in play?

I think in practice any of these will resolve themselves at the social contract level. As in, "We don't want to play with you any more, because you are delibrately trying to make the game suck."

[Vaxalon]

Exactly.  The awarding of story tokens definitely has an aspect of social contract to it.

If someone is playing in a way that ticks you off, but not badly enough to actually exclude the person from the group, you'll probably end up being stingy with story tokens awarded to him.  That's my point.

[TonyLB]

Fred, I see zero problem with any of your examples.  It's all stuff I've seen, responded to, and enjoyed in actual play.

I think that you're balking at these examples because you can't stop being a game designer.  So when something happens in a game that you don't like, your first question is "How could I redesign the game system so that can't happen?"  Which means that you never get to the far more productive question of "Is there something I can do within the game system to respond to this in a way that satisfies me?"

I am not going to go point by point and tell you what I would do, within the rules, to turn these to advantage.  You're a smart guy.  How about you flex your mental muscles and tell us what you'd do to respond and make these contributions into something interesting and productive?  Answers may not take the form of "I do X, Y and Z to convince the pathological player to do something else."  It must be something that you, yourself, can do within the rules to take back your fun, whether the jerk-player cooperates or not.

[Vaxalon]

How am I trying to redesign the system?

I'm using something that's already a part of the system (story token awards) in a conscious way, to reward play that I like, and therefore punish play I don't like.  Isn't that what story token awards are for?

Before I realized that story token awards could be used this way, the only response I could think of to deal with this kind of play (if it were habitual) was, as Larry said, to boot the offender from the group.