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So: my first session of Capes Lite, kindly run by Vaxalon with some help from Lxndr.  I do not own Capes itself.

* Vax ran his energy-blaster hero, Kozmik Ray

* I played the Incredible Hulk, since it's a pretty simple concept and I didn't want to get tripped up with nuance

* Lxndr played the seductive pimp-bot, Don 1

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This wasn't so much a story, exactly, as an attempt to figure out what the dice are all about, since I'm a newbie.  

We had something where the Hulk wanted to destroy the Trump Tower in Manhattan to make way for more Bauhaus architecture, and then Kozmik Ray decided to stop him, and then Don 1 tried to win his legal rights from his creator, the diabolical Dr. Trump.  

Somewhere along the line we retconned it so that Don 1 had paid Hulk to go on a rampage to destroy Trump's real estate holdings, but that was kind of thrown in there late in the session.

I had some trouble figuring out what I can roll, and when.  I also had some difficulty figuring out some of the root concepts of Capes as a system.

Eventually the Hulk succeeded in demolishing the tower--the details don't matter much, but Trump got so irritated he refused to compromise with the pimp-bot's legal team.  I won the goal to smash the tower, Lxndr lost the bid to become a free robot, and Vaxalon got some story tokens for failing to stop my rampage.

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What follows is my personal impression based on one hour of occasionally confusing play.  It therefore should not carry much weight, and your own experiences will likely vary.

1.  Capes has this in common with Donjon: the "shared imaginary space" (or game world, or whatever) is almost like a gas or a liquid: there's zero resistance players' participation, directorial stance, or whatever.  This is clearly a result of the players assuming GM duties, but even so, it's kind of disorienting: what I can do isn't determined by anything even remotely resembling causality, but by the arbitrary formalism of the game system.  (This may be true in most games, but with Capes it becomes especially apparent because the world is made out of tissue paper.)    

1A.  We destroyed the office building where Don1 and Donald Trump were having their negotiations.  In theory this would influence said negotiations; in practice it didn't.  I guess this would present difficulties, except as I note below:

2.  I have trouble seeing why anyone would bother describing the "shared imaginary space" at all.  (or, in a less extreme form: why do it at the end of each roll, rather than wait until the process concludes?)  Clever or stupid manipulation of the imaginary world makes no difference; it could almost be dispensed with.  You'll notice I didn't include any details of the imaginary world: that's because the imaginary world was utterly irrelevant, like a vestigial tail.

(This comment is a result of the deliberately artificial nature of this particular session.  Obviously if you care about the characters, or their world, or the issues at stake, then the imaginary space matters quite a lot.  But this wasn't the case in tonight's goofy one shot.  I do not own a copy of Capes, so I can't say how well the rules foster player buy-in.  Without such buy-in, however, it feels very hollow.)

3.  Good character design is absolutely essential: not "good" in terms of mechanics, since in that respect one Capes character is virtually identical to the next, but good in terms of conceptual zing.

4.  Without player buy-in, I was tempted to slap dice around at random.  At one point late in the game, I rolled to interfere with Don 1's attempt to win his legal rights.  The Hulk, as a character, was meant to be on Don 1's side, but I as a player made the choice to oppose Don 1 at random: I had an applicable score, so why not use it?  Later I claimed that I simply wanted to make Trump a more powerful antagonist, but the real reason was simply to screw around and roll some dice.

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I had fun, and it's an interesting concept.  But I came away thinking that if you don't care about the characters in a Narrativist game, there's no point in playing.  I suspect this could make casual one-shots difficult for newcomers to enjoy.

Was this face-to-face, or IRC?  I know folks had been talking about an IRC session.

It was IRC, but I don't think it matters to the issues James brings up.

Tony: Did you ever keep a copy of our brief 'Kung Fu' playtest on IRC? I forgot (first time on IRC and everything, sorry.) Because I really did feel that I was getting into the SIS. It wasn't 'immersive', because I was also trying to manipulate events with Director Stance, but I did feel, well... engaged.

James (or Fred): Did you keep a transcript of your session?

Because I'd really like to see a 'compare and contrast' of the two games; not because one's going to be better than the other (fun was had in both games, right?) but because it might illustrate why we're getting different things out of the game.

Fred:  I was mostly trying to judge what "one hour of play" meant.  One hour of FTF play is, quite frankly, a great deal more communicative than one hour of IRC play.

How many Pages did you get through?

We did, as I recall, three pages; each player was first once.

Quote from: Doug Ruff
James (or Fred): Did you keep a transcript of your session?

Because I'd really like to see a 'compare and contrast' of the two games; not because one's going to be better than the other (fun was had in both games, right?) but because it might illustrate why we're getting different things out of the game.

I didn't, but I will tell you this; I think that the reason that the game was not terribly immersive, was that noone was really taking it seriously.  Capes is a game that's very responsive to the moods of the participants.  If the players are being silly, it's going to come out silly.  We were, and it did.

The first line was "HULK SMASH UGLY TRUMP TOWER!  MAKE ROOM FOR BAUHAUS!"

I think we got through 3-4 pages.  I can't quite remember what we accomplished in each one.  

I wanted to try Capes because of a silly thread on RPGNet where people were insisting that it wasn't really an RPG, mainly because it wasn't similar enough to Dungeons & Dragons.  I felt this was a ridiculous argument, but now that I've given it a shot, I think I can better articulate what they were trying to say:

Vincent Baker had this diagram, called How RPG Rules Work.  In Capes, that bottom-most arrow, the one going from the "imaginary space" to the dice, doesn't seem to exist.  Furthermore: the arrow going from the "imaginary space" to the players seems very, very weak--it depends entirely on the emotional investment of the players... and it only happens at the Stakes level.  

Let me give my understanding of the Lumpley Principle: rules are a way to negotiate what happens in the "imaginary space."  In Capes, it seems like this principle isn't at work: the only rules in place that affect the imagination are those that win Conflicts.  Otherwise, you are free to change the imaginary space however you like.  I'd argue that this devalues the imaginary space somewhat, at least for those of us dealing with "traditional gamer" habits.

At an early point in the session, the Hulk was thrown into the East River.  I  thought about narrating, "The Hulk digs down to the center of the Earth and blows up the entire planet, except for the three player-characters, the Trump Tower, and the law office."  This is an asinine way to play, since presumably it would violate the social contract, but there's nothing really preventing me.  Likewise, once I did that, another player could narrate, "Hey, my character restores everyone on Earth to life.  Also, the Hulk is now a cross-dresser.  Enjoy that purple tutu!"  

The imaginary space in Capes seems to restrict which powers you can use... but only to the extent that you're willing to abide by (in our case) an unspoken social contract about how farfetched the group can get.  (In the "Hulk in East River" example, I did nothing to affect the legal battle because any use of the Hulk's powers felt preposterous.)

I dunno.  Obviously I don't have the actual rules, and we didn't get into exemplars and stuff.  So maybe that will change over time.  i had fun and hope to learn more soon though.

This kinda gets back to the thread in the Muse of Fire boards, just a few days ago, where I expressed some of the same sentiments, though perhaps not as succinctly.

I am coming to the conclusion that this is not a bug; this is a feature.  The game assumes that if you play the way you describe, it's because you LIKE to play the way you describe.  Capes is all about "Is that what you want?  Sure!  Here you go!"  It's not the game's responsibility to tell you what you can and cannot have.

In a more conventional game, there's a GM there to say, "Whoa, sorry... you can't do that." or "You can do that, but..." or "Can you elaborate on that?  How are you going to deal with this, and that, and the other?"  

There's no GM here.  Noone's going to hold your hand... if you want to drive the game into la-la-land, it'll happily drive right off the cliff, over the rainbow and through the woods.  It's up to YOU, to keep the game within whatever bounds you care to keep it in.  If there's a disagreement between the players about such things, then one of two things can happen:

1> Use the conflict mechanic to resolve the dispute.  This is Tony's preferred manner of dealing with the problem.  I have come to realize that in the vast majority of situations, he's right.

2> Use the social contract to resolve the dispute.  I am *still* of the opinion that sometimes (exactly how often, I can't tell yet) players are better off stepping OUT of the game, and just talking about what they want out of the game.

Have you ever tried to sell anything on IRC? Ever played poker over the internet?

Because it strikes me that a huge part of Capes happens at the social level. Each player must act as the salesman for the creative agenda he wishes to push. A fair amount of strategy comes from judging the other players' reactions, a la poker.

Toss out non-linguistic communications and the ability of the players to create a shared imagination space is impaired. True for any game, but especially true for Capes.

That, and understanding how to "game the system" to push one's own agenda, which is I think a tricky thing for newbies to grasp.

Oh yeah, there's the fun of having cards, chips, and dice all over the table.

I think Capes on IRC would be very much improved if there were a 'bot that could handle the creation of conflicts, keeping track of dice, who is allied, who is staked, what kind of debt is staked, etc.

Unfortunately, I know ZIP about IRC dicebots.

Quote from: VaxalonThe first line was "HULK SMASH UGLY TRUMP TOWER!  MAKE ROOM FOR BAUHAUS!"

That seems like a reasonable agenda to me.

More substantively:

Yeah, part of me would like less wide-open mechanics for "why this Ability affects this conflict in this way"; sometimes the system feels alarmingly loose - you have a sense of pushing with no resistance, as James said. But this ties in with what others have been saying about the difficulty of not being face-to-face:

Whatever else it is (and GNS classification is hard with this game), Capes is unabashedly Gamist: It thrives on players competing. Now, this competition is very well supported at the mechanical level. But if you only did mechanics, well, that really wouldn't be a roleplaying game (no Shared Imaginary Space). And I've come to think that an essential part of the competition is seeing who can give the coolest color narration -- with a very common manifestation being, "how do I take Ability X, which doesn't have an obvious fit to the Conflict at hand, and narrate so it's not only justified but jaw-droppingly cool"?

The great eample of this was from one of the early playtests (live? IRC? I wasn't involved, so I forget). A Speedster/Angsty Nice Guy character, Zip, had the ability "outrun the pain" or equivalent, intended to let him keep going despite all sorts of supervillainous pounding. And then the player used it in a social interaction, where the character suffered a crushing romantic rejection and dealt with it by running and running and running until the tears flew off his face at supersonic speed.... And everyone went "wow."

If everyone wants the silliest possible narration -- and silly is often easiest, especially with people you don't know well -- then you'll incentivize silly. If people grumble when narrations don't make any sense in the SIS and grin when they do make sense, you'll incentivize sense. These are rules that do a lot for you, but as many have said on the Forge before, rules alone do not a system make.... the players have to bring the right social interactions to the table as well.

{Edited to clarify final point}

I'd totally agree that the game-world will never offer any resistance to player input.  In fact, I would argue that is true of every roleplaying game ever created.  The game-world is fiction.  It doesn't do things on its own (not even passively).  If anything offers resistance then it is the players offering that resistance, even if they appeal to the fictional game-world for their authority.

Example to (hopefully) make what I just said abundantly clear:

QuotePlayer A:  "I put the time machine into overdrive, to invert the space-time continuum and destroy the universe."
Player B:  "You can't do that!  The time machine has that safety device installed by the Eldermost Guardians, remember?"
Player A:  "Oh yeah... lucky for the universe!"
Player B:  "You don't get to be the Eldermost without learning a few tricks."

Is that the game-world stopping Player A?  No.  It's Player B stopping Player A, and appealing to the authority of the game-world to do so.  

Want to do the same thing in Capes?  Play an Inspiration from having met with the Eldermost Guardians.  Already played all those inspirations?  Then that past scene is played out in its authority over the story.  You can't go back to that well again, it's dry.

Can you explain that scenario in more detail, Tony?  

I think some of us would be more comfortable, seeing how that works.  I know you've covered this ground before... but I'm still foggy on it, and going back to the other thread hasn't helped.

Assume that Player B has three inspirations on the table, "Met with the Eldermost Guardians," all at 6, and a few story tokens.

Assume that Player A has just narrated (either as part of an action, a reaction, or a conflict resolution) something world-ending, not covered in the comics code.  I don't understand how player A gets to interrupt Player B's narration with conflicts, inspirations, story tokens, whatever, to prevent the world-ending narration from ending up in the SIS.