[Capes] Takes Some Getting Used To

[Vaxalon]

It would have been prevented, but it also would have gotten in the way of play.  Conflicts come out VERY slowly; you generally only want to put the most important ones out.

[Doug Ruff]

OK, how about an extension of the Veto Rules? If you narrate something you do to another payer's character, they get the right to make you declare it as a conflict, or find a different narration?

I'm not saying that any of these ideas are a perfect solution, by the way. I'm just trying to explore how much can be done to bring potential social contract issues into the open by making them part of the Comics Code.

By the way, I can see a very cool crossover with Uni here: using Story Tokens to make unilateral additions to the Code (just like Tenets in Uni). If someone else doesn't like the addition, they have to outbid you in Story Tokens to strike it off. (I think this has been touched on before, but I don't think it's been explicitly connected to Story Tokens yet.)

[Vaxalon]

Story tokens are, also, a fairly scarce resource; you rarely have more than a few unless you've been playing for a long time.

Seriously, I think it's not something that the game system CAN address.

[Larry L.]

Nice observation Doug! I hadn't given that much consideration to the Comics Code. I had only thought of it in terms of color and gloating points. We just went with the 1950's code in the book for sake of getting started quickly, and things have worked really well.

I don't recall that Capes Light (old or new incarnations) has a Comics Code. Maybe a rudimentary one is needed.

Going back to the original post:

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.
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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.

I'd totally agree with all of these (except possibly the newcomer bit, more below). If do hope you're planning to play more than one scene; some of the more interesting strategies for the game come out of managing a stable of characters that complement one another. Good characters (in terms of zing) turn out to be important because they carry certain stories, but crappy throwaway characters turn out to be important as elements of those stories.

The chief obstacle to newcomers which makes it a little different than other RPGs is that all the players actually have to learn the rules. As I've expressed elsewhere, in other RPGs the GM is also the rules-master, so it's possible for him to translate newbie/slacker player wishes into game mechanics. Learning Capes is a little more like learning a board game like chess or go; a more experienced player can teach and show you things, but he doesn't "run" the game or even referee it.

Do you think it's this particular quirk in the learning curve that is creating the "non-RPG" perception on rpg.net?

[James_Nostack]

Okay, time for quotation ping-pong:

Why is [player narration] inconsequential? Because it doesn't directly effect the outcome of the Conflict?

[Because] it doesn't affect the outcome of the conflict at all, directly or indirectly. The narration is an add-on at every stage except resolution.

Your narration of tossing Hulk into the East River convinced James not to use any ability in response. How is that not an indirect effect?

Tony, that's correct, but you're missing my point: the imaginary world had an impact on my choices only because that was my choice.  According to my own gaming preferences, it would have been trivial,  therefore uninteresting, and therefore bad play, to play "tag-backs" on the  narration... but there was nothing stopping me.  I could have shredded through the SIS in an infinite number of ways, but chose to do nothing because doing nothing was the most interesting of the options available at the time.

The only way the SIS would matter to me as a player is if I were invested in the situation, which unfortunately wasn't the case this time because we were only screwing around.  I'd be curious to know if, and how, the Capes rules foster emotional investment in a character--that "zing" that makes a character interesting to the player.  (In D&D, this appears to involve really laborious chargen rules--so that even if you have a dull character it still ate up 2 hours of your life to create him, so by God he better perform well.  This isn't an ideal solution, but it seems to work for a lot of people.)    

If I just want to smash a building up, the last thing I want to do is to declare it as a Goal or Event. I can just narrate that I smash the building up. There is no requirement for me to appeal to 'continuity' or 'sim' concerns unless these are enforced by social contract.

Exactly.  If the shared imaginary space can be changed on a whim, change is meaningless because anyone can change it back.  Furthermore the method of change is devalued because cool narration is just as effective as dull narration.  Omnipotence can lead to indifference if you're not careful.

I'm not knocking Capes; I'd like to play it some more if only to clarify some of my own thoughts about what I find rewarding and interesting in RPG's.  But this appeared to be an issue for me this time around.

[Callan S.]

Umm, it just seems to be simulationist exploration going wrong in a narrativist system.

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.)

Are you supposed to be exploring what your PC can do in capes? Or exploring causality?

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.

To explore what happens when you roll them bones.

I'm not really sure; I suggested that he could just jump right out, but for some reason he took his time doing it.

I just get this super hero sounding speach in my head when I read this observation:  "MUST...PRESERVE...CAUSALITY! MUST...NOT...JUMP OUT OF RIVER STRAIGHT AWAY! CAUSE AND EFFECT...MUST...BE...MAINTAINED!!!"


James, would you say you were trying to explore the game world?

[James_Nostack]

Are you supposed to be exploring what your PC can do in capes? Or exploring causality?

I can do anything in Capes, so long as I don't narrate the conclusion to a conflict prematurely.  Because I'm omnipotent, nothing I do has any intrinsic interest: it was trivial to achieve, and equally trivial for my rivals to destroy.

As I mentioned in my very first post: this totally changes if I'm invested in the story/character/world/situation/whatever you want to call it.  

What was unusual about this play example is that I don't think any of the players cared very much about the Conflict, which means it shouldn't have been a Conflict at all.  Which implies that because we were just screwing around and didn't care about any of it, perhaps we should have been playing something else.  Weird!  It's like you can only play if you're out for blood!

[TonyLB]

Weird!  It's like you can only play if you're out for blood!

There you go!  I knew we'd end up on the same page eventually.

Yes, you can only play if you're out for blood.

[Vaxalon]

This game is like a loaded gun.

Don't play with it; only take it out if you mean business.

[Callan S.]

As I mentioned in my very first post: this totally changes if I'm invested in the story/character/world/situation/whatever you want to call it.

Yes. But will you invest without the system first establishing causality?

The account seems to involve tooling around with the game mechanics, waiting for them to deliver causality by the way the mechanics interact.

Capes SIS rests on competition...you describe cool stuff because you want to beat or keep up with others who are describing cool stuff.

Capes SIS doesn't rest on system generating causality, so someone who's waiting to be impressed by its causality before they invest with cool descriptions, is going to investing very little.

What prompts you to invest? Do you ever find ret-cons lower your investment, temporarily? I do.

[Valamir]

This is a pretty interesting thread.

Tony. What do you perceive the purpose of the narration to be?  Given that its a requirement for players to do it, but that it has zero mechanically enforceable effects, what is the design intention for making it a requirement?  Perhaps illuminating the thought process behind the design will point out ways to better describe the act of narration in the game to avoid these effects.  On the surface, without playing, I have to concur with the notion that omnipotence renders even the most dramatic narrations trivial.  Given that, there must be some reason to allow them at all let alone require them.  Zeroing in on what that reason is might get right to the heart of the matter.



On a related note.  What would the effect be of allowing spontaneous Conflict creation as a reaction to another player's narration.  For instance:

"I throw the Hulk into the east river"  leads to
"No you don't I"m making that a conflict"  leads to there now being a conflict "Hulk gets thrown into the east river"

On the surface that would seem to give some mechanism of constraint to the narration.  Players would then be motivated to self police their narration to avoid saying something that would motivate the other player to turn it into a Conflict rather than allow it to happen.


I am concerned about the effect of unrestricted narration.  I'm not sure that having the only check on really stupid narration being the threat of even stupider narration is an effective game rule.  The very first thing many gamers do when they get a new system is try to break it...not try to understand the underlying genius...they try to break it.  If even people who are trying hard to appreciate Capes run afoul of unrestricted narration, I can only imagine what less generous critics will do with it.  I'd hate to see this issue get all the attention and blind people to how really cool the actual mechanics are.  From a marketing perspective, having to constantly explain to people that "its not a bug its a feature" generally doesn't help sales.


I think maybe you need something to help players define where the boundary for acceptable narration is.  Whether this is an actual mechanical reinforcer (like the reaction Conflict idea) or just a very clearly lasered in discussion of what narration rights entail and how to use them I don't know...but it seems clear that leaving the issue open to individual group interpretation is asking for less than ideal interpretations.

[TonyLB]

This has diverged hugely from the Actual Play involved.  I'm splitting to here.

[John Kim]

Actually, it doesn't affect the outcome of the conflict at all, directly or indirectly.  The narration is an add-on at every stage except resolution.

Which is why he suggests saving up all the narration until the resolution.

Well, as Tony points out, the narration can have a social effect on the other players even though it doesn't mechanically affect the outcome.  However, I definitely know what you mean here.  I similarly have tended to be offput by multi-stage rolling mechanics -- i.e. an extended contest in Storyteller and similar RPGs, or in HeroQuest.  When describing an intermediate stage, it often feels to me like I'm just jumping through hoops.  This is less likely if there is a definite mechanical result which affects future rolls and/or the SIS directly.  

James -- would this match your feeling?  i.e. Do you feel similarly at other extended contest mechanics?  

Umm, it just seems to be simulationist exploration going wrong in a narrativist system.
...
I just get this super hero sounding speach in my head when I read this observation:  "MUST...PRESERVE...CAUSALITY! MUST...NOT...JUMP OUT OF RIVER STRAIGHT AWAY! CAUSE AND EFFECT...MUST...BE...MAINTAINED!!!"

James, would you say you were trying to explore the game world?

It sounds like quite the opposite.  i.e. There was no in-world reason for him not to jump back out of the river straight away, which is why it seemed strange.  The reason he didn't was a metagame social aesthetic -- i.e. the feeling that a "takeback" of just immediately undoing another player's narration wasn't good.

[James_Nostack]

There you go!  I knew we'd end up on the same page eventually.  Yes, you can only play if you're out for blood.

To get back to actual play analysis, I suspect this may be a barrier to entry for casual gamers who simply want to see how Capes works.  

Tony: let me repeat a question I asked up-thread: does Capes do anything in particular to make a player care about the heroes/world/situation, or (as in most RPG's) is that simply assumed?

[TonyLB]

I'm not quite sure what you mean by "make a player care," (emphasis mine) in this context.  Perhaps a brief example of how another game does it?

What Capes does is to magnify small episodes of caring into larger ones, and to get everyone in the game involved in helping each other care.  Here are a few of the more obvious methods the game uses for that.

Creating Conflicts:  If you do care about something, that something becomes central to the events of the SiS.  This magnifies any issue you're conscious of.

Debt:  As you accumulate debt you are more and more empowered to care about a conflict.  Your caring has game-mechanical consequences.

Story Tokens:  If you care enough to want to achieve something against opposition then you care enough to want Story Tokens to help make it happen.  How do you get them?  Make other people care.  It's infectious that way.