Why have conflicts at all?

[C. Edwards]

What an odd concern. Why should anything change? I'm not being rhetorical or anything here... Fred and Chris, you both think it's important, and you're smart fellows. So I'd like to know what you know.

I'm a Nar monkey. If the choices I make have no weight, no consequences, beyond the moment when I make them then I've got no basis for emotional investment in play. If I've got no emotional investment in play, then play becomes 2-dimensional to me. I'd be better off playing a board or card game.

When my decisions fail to have a tangible effect on future events, the game becomes the sort of silly and unfulfilling fun that Ralph talks about here.

-Chris

[Vaxalon]

While I'm not a big comic book fan myself, I have several friends who are absolute FIENDS about them, and whenever one of their favorites are turned over to a new writer I get chat messages coming through for weeks afterwards about how the new guy is ruining their favorite character, that he either can do all kinds of things he couldn't before, or worse, can't do things he did easily before.

Some comics fans go through endless discussions of who is stronger than who, who's a meaner fighter, whose powers would win out over whose, and they use as much of the back-continuity as they can remember to back up their statements.  For many, reading the comics is not so much an entertainment in itself, as it is a chance to gather information to use in these discussions, which are the real entertainments for them.

The bit can be pretty small.  In DnD, it's that I have a +2 base attack bonus rather than +3, or I can brew potions when I couldn't before, or I own a magic sword that I didn't before.

Generally speaking, they are statements about the character, though they don't have to be.  They are statements about what the character is capable of.  "Character Advancement" is the general term used for this.

Is it authority over future events?  Yes, to some extent, but it's small.  I don't need to be able to say "Kozmik Ray is the most powerful superhero of all time" to be satisfied.

I'm still working out how, exactly, to implement this in Capes.

[TonyLB]

This is getting fun!  I still have no idea what you guys think is important about this, but at least we're talking.  I hope to figure it out eventually.  So, a quick reminder:  I'm not asking questions to lure you into a trap, or to set up my own position.  If they sound too ignorant to possibly be straight questions, just assume that I really am that far distant from your viewpoint.

I'm a Nar monkey. If the choices I make have no weight, no consequences, beyond the moment when I make them then I've got no basis for emotional investment in play.

Okay.  Why not?  Isn't making the choices the important thing?

The bit can be pretty small.  In DnD, it's that I have a +2 base attack bonus rather than +3, or I can brew potions when I couldn't before, or I own a magic sword that I didn't before.

Generally speaking, they are statements about the character, though they don't have to be.  They are statements about what the character is capable of.  "Character Advancement" is the general term used for this.

Is there a difference between "I now have +2 base attack bonus" and "I now have six less hit points, because an orc bit me on the arm"?

[Vaxalon]

The bit can be pretty small.  In DnD, it's that I have a +2 base attack bonus rather than +3, or I can brew potions when I couldn't before, or I own a magic sword that I didn't before.

Generally speaking, they are statements about the character, though they don't have to be.  They are statements about what the character is capable of.  "Character Advancement" is the general term used for this.

Is there a difference between "I now have +2 base attack bonus" and "I now have six less hit points, because an orc bit me on the arm"?

A slight one, one of degree, because getting back lost hit points is easier than getting back lost skills.  They aren't qualitatively different.

Let's say that Orc was undead, and that in the process of losing six hit points, it also drains a level, and thus a point from my base attack bonus; this is something that is not as easy to recover.

In the first case, all I have to do to get the hit points back is sleep overnight.  In the second, I will have to either go on some adventures to earn that level again, or maybe quest to find a high-level priest somewhere that can reverse the drain.

That's goal-in goal-out.  1> Orc wins conflict, gives me "Fred is level-drained" fact.  2> Fred wins conflict, uses "Fred finds high level priest" to remove it.

[C. Edwards]

I'm a Nar monkey. If the choices I make have no weight, no consequences, beyond the moment when I make them then I've got no basis for emotional investment in play.

Okay. Why not? Isn't making the choices the important thing?

The choice itself is important, but without a pattern of what I'm going to call "thematic causality", it has no meaning. Capes is not conducive to creating patterns (a chain, with each link informing the next) of decision/action/consequence because future actions are not dependent on past events or actions.

The Social Contract is the only glue available in Capes that can hold the CA of the group together. I'm not saying Capes needs to be a Narrativistic masterpiece in play. But I don't see the the tools present to help a group with any CA.

-Chris

*edited for clarity

[Andrew Cooper]

I'm a Nar monkey. If the choices I make have no weight, no consequences, beyond the moment when I make them then I've got no basis for emotional investment in play.

Okay.  Why not?  Isn't making the choices the important thing?

No.  Emphatically and most definately no.  Making choices that are unimportant and have no weight is unsatisfying and irritating (to me).  In every game I've played in, if the GM had taken the choices that were important to us, as players, and made them irrelevant, we'd have been outraged and probably would have rebeled.  

I'm a Gamist (mostly) so I'll come at it from that angle.  In D&D the tactical choices are what is *really* important to my group.  I can alter the color of a character's hair and nobody cares.  It isn't important to my players that a certain character be *the best* Fighter in the world or *the strongest*.  What does matter is that if Fred moves his Rogue into a certain position on the board to get that flanking bonus and a Sneak Attack, he'd better be getting it.  

Why? Because he made that decision based on tactical information and that is what is important to us so it had better carry weight.  If I don't give it weight (by applying the appropriate bonus or damage) then I'd better have a reason... like "The creature is undead, Fred.  It's immune to Sneak Attacks but you still get the flanking bonus." or "The creature is immune to flanking... says right here in the rules."  Then it isn't that I've robbed his decision of weight or importance.  It's that he made a poor decision.  As a Gamist, I can live with making a poor decision but if the GM (or the rules or anything else) takes away my ability to make any decisions that matter, I'm going to be pissed and not play.

In Nar it is other decisions that matter, obviously, but I think the sentiment is probably still the same.

[Larry L.]

Later on, Bulk is being played by a new player, with no story tokens.  Bulk and Chrome meet again.  They are back on even terms, now.  The "bulk is stronger than chrome" goal is long forgotten, and it is as if nothing has happened between them.  

Unless Chrome's player takes the initiative to honor the earlier accomplished goal, totally outside the rules system, and treat Bulk as if he's stronger than Chrome, then the entire conflict has proven nothing.  Bulk spent resources and turns to prove that he's stronger than Chrome, but he's not.  They're back to square one.

Is this something that is not adequately handled by the Spotlight Characters optional rule?

As far as "powergaming," I actually don't see anything in Capes to appeal to the powergamer, since a large part of enjoyment of that play style comes through character advancement. The only things that seem to approximate character advancement are exemplars and, to a lesser extent, accumulated debt. Inspirations are vaguely like character advancement, but as you point out, there's nothing forcing a player to use them for such purpose.

For me, it is good enough that a given character's narrative grows with play. So maybe it could be said that Capes has "freeform" character advancement.

[TonyLB]

No.  Emphatically and most definately no.  Making choices that are unimportant and have no weight is unsatisfying and irritating

Sure.  But since when is the importance of something to CA measured in terms of how much it changes the world?  Wouldn't that imply that people playing Nobilis are automatically addressing Premise more successfully than people playing My Life with Master, since their characters are vastly more important and powerful?

Frankly, it seems much more like an issue of distribution of authority than pursuit of creative agenda.  You want to have a certain authority, later on, to shape the SiS... and you want to appeal to your character's actions and accomplishments as the basis for that authority.

What Fred is saying sounds like that to me too.  He's talking about having the authority to say "No, this change is a big change, and if you want to overcome it then you need to gather enough authority to best mine... in other words, you need to earn the right to change this back."

Seriously, I say this without judging.  That's what it looks like to me, and I think that it's a perfectly feasible way to distribute authority, but not the only way.  Am I misunderstanding something here?  And if so, what?

[Vaxalon]

Yes.  Absolutely.  I want to be able to say, "I worked to accomplish this thing, I bought it with resources, and if you want to take it away you have to work at it too."

[TonyLB]

That makes sense.  As I said, it's quite reasonable to distribute authority based on victory.  A lot of games do it that way.  But not Capes.  Capes distributes authority based on how much you entertain and challenge the other players.

Is this fair?  Probably not.  I'm not sure what "fair" means in this context, and I really don't care.

But I do know that people will learn to pursue what you reward them for doing.  If you reward them for victory then they will learn to pursue victory.  If you reward them for being entertaining then they will learn to pursue being entertaining.

[Vaxalon]

I'm not sure that Capes does as good a job of rewarding being entertaining as you say.  But I haven't played enough, and tried some of the tactics I've though of enough, to say with any degree of certainty.

I know that when I read the rules, I don't feel that being entertaining is what the rules are inviting me to do.

[TonyLB]

Well, that's where the next section of description comes in.  We've had a lively little discussion of Inspirations.  Let me summarize, and we'll see if we're all on the same page:

[*]Inspirations provide a mechanism that locally encourages people to fight for a Conflict if they desire that outcome (because they gain no local advantage by letting it lapse and then redeclaring it)
[*]Inspirations do not provide any global, permanent modification of the game-world.[/list:u]Everyone agreed on those points?

[Vaxalon]

Inspirations reward, as I see it, conflicts in which you win by a large margin.  These can be of two varieties:

Conflicts where no debt shows up on either side, but one person rolls on one side, and noone on the other, so that one side gets a 5 or 6 and the other stays at 1.

Conflicts where debt is played more on one side than the other, so that you can take your highest die as an inspiration free of opposition.

Inspirations provide no lasting modification to the gameworld.

[TonyLB]

Fred, does your silence mean that you agree with the first point I made?  "Inspirations provide a mechanism that locally encourages people to fight for a Conflict if they desire that outcome"  It's sort of important.  It's why you don't just give up and then revise in free narration, which I know is something you've worried about in the past.

I'd prefer to have more evidence that it's understood (before I start building on it) than simply "Nobody jumped up to say 'I disagree'."

[Vaxalon]

I disagree that inspirations provide a mechanism that encourages people to fight for a conflict if they desire that outcome.

If they desire the outcome, they'll fight for it whether they get inspirations or not.

Inspirations, to me, provide a mechanism that encourages people to fight in conflicts where they believe they're the ONLY one who desires an outcome.  You get big inspirations for winning conflicts that have little opposition.  If you win 5,4 to 4,3 you get a 2.  Whee!