[Capes] Curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal!

[TonyLB]

Eric was playing two characters:  Orobouros, a trans-temporal entity that masquerades as a God, and Saura Gul, his lizard high priest.  He'd been playing these guys on and off for sessions and sessions.  They had a pattern:  Saura Gul Staked Debt so that Orobouros wouldn't have to.  It was a lovely minion/master shield system, and worked like you would expect... Saura Gul constantly yo-yo'd from little debt to tons of debt (as victory and defeat dictated), while Orobouros rode an even keel, occasionally vestingin something and winning it due to Saura Gul's selfless efforts.

Now I don't know about Sydney, but this increasingly made me want to really get Orobouros.  Ticking off Saura Gul was not the same sort of victory that really sticking it to the snake-god would have been.  This desire started out minor, but grew slowly and surely.  In last night's session it absolutely peaked.  I went in with the definite intent of delivering a crushing defeat to Orobouros, no matter what it took.  The result was that Saura Gul was hammered.  He had a "Despair" drive of 4, and had 12 debt on it.  Way, way overdrawn.  He was a total failure, scolded constantly by his god.  Orobouros, of course, felt fine... practically no Debt at all.  He was utterly content with his place in the world.

Eric got to narrate the "True Nature of Orobouros."  And he had Orobouros go into an absolutely classic shpiel of villainous hubris.  "Foolish mortals!  You have discovered that I am not what I claim... but it will do you no good!  I still have the lizard-people as my pathetic pawns.  Even knowing the truth, they don't have the backbone to defy me!  What you've learned changes nothing!"  As I was listening to this, I thought to myself "Man, this sounds very familiar.  This is the kind of thing the overconfident master always says... right before a key minion turns on him and seals his doom."  And suddenly it all made sense.

There's Saura Gul with this ton of debt.  All he needs to utterly control the story is a conflict where other players (i.e. Sydney and I) will roll up the many low dice that staking Debt provides.  He has absolutely no prospects of doing that as long as he keeps acting as a shield for Orobouros.  Very literally, his misery comes from the loyalty he has shown.  Orobouros has no debt.  Which is absolutely peachy as long as he has Saura Gul to care about things on his behalf.  But alone?  He's toast.

Before the start of the next page I took all my remaining Story Tokens and sunk them into creating different Conflicts where Saura Gul could Stake his debt in defiance of Orobouros's wishes.  And sure enough, Eric Staked on every single one of them before his first action.  I really like how the system rewarded me for figuring out what Eric wanted and providing it to him.

Saura Gul defied his false god, and the thematic force of that decision sealed Orobouros's fate.  It was a hard-fought battle, but only because every player was playing characters on both sides, and we had a vested interest in making it as big an achievement as possible.  Orobouros managed to scrape together four debt of his own to Stake against "Destroy Orobouros".  We rolled all four of those dice up to sixes.  He still lost... and there was literally nothing more that he could possibly have done.  Our characters cared so much more, and had suffered so much, that there was no stopping them.


So this is why I just don't get many of the arguments that folks have been floating in the Muse of Fire forum recently.  They say that the system doesn't encourage thematic stories, or create consequences of past actions.  But this experience (and many others like it) seem to me to be doing exactly that:  Saura Gul was empowered to betray Orobouros to his doom precisely because of how he'd been treated in the many sessions leading up to this one.  That's not Eric deciding to overlay some meaning on a system that doesn't support it.  The possibilities are right there in the mechanics, for everybody to see.  I saw them, and I wasn't even looking for them.

[Larry L.]

I think I queried about the setting in the last Actual Play post, but didn't get the info I was looking for. I'm still intrigued by this pseudo-fantasy setting. How did this come to be? Explicit prep or emergent?

I too do not get said criticisms. They do not seem relevant to my actual play experience.

I say this because I want to discourage the idea that the reason you don't see the problem is because of some "Tony Factor," i.e. you designed the game, so you have some secret ability to run the game correctly.

To all the hypothetical "flaws", for some reason I keep coming back to, "Sure it doesn't work -- if one of the players is being a total dick." There have, however, been a handful of Actual Plays where things didn't quite jive, so perhaps there is something to Capes that some of us just intuitively understand, which is not explicitly in the text.

[Eric Sedlacek]

(Eric here...)

I would just like to add a little bit from my perspective.  Tony said "I saw them, and I wasn't even looking for them."  Well, I wasn't looking for anything in particular myself.  I never once thought to myself in terms of how the mechanics were leading me where I was going, but lead me they did.  I was just doing what came naturally.

I remember the point where a light went on over Tony's head and he said "I know where this is going!" It was at that point where I looked at the debt piles and realized the mechanical implication of what I was already planning to do for merely thematic reasons.  Once again, the system worked and in a way I had never seen before.  It had been pushing me to go for the thematic knockout blow without my even realizing it.

Capes is rapidly becoming my new religion, and since I don't argue about religion...

[TonyLB]

Larry:  The only things that were explicit prep were:  Six spotlight characters (Lord Ronan Ransom, Fistfire, Zak, Vanessa Faust, Minerva Danaan and Lincoln Kettridge) with one paragraph each, three "key" time periods (1980s, Victorian era and Pretopia of the lizard people and robots) with about three paragraphs each, and the notion of a time-travelling organization led by an absent figure, "Tempus".

Everything else has emerged during the game.  Saura Gul was created because Sydney got a kick out of my one-sentence blurb about the Seergassa lizard people, and fleshed them out hugely.  I think Orobouros was mostly created because Eric wanted to torture Sydney.  But in the course of the torture, Saura Gul clearly became as much Eric's character as Sydney's.  

And now, frankly, I am very tempted to play him (after an appropriate cool-down period), because I'm quite fascinated by the position that he is in:  Having oppressed his people for so long in the name of a false God, he's got to have guilt (or, more likely for him, despair).  And they probably hate him, for their various reasons.  But is giving them their freedom any sort of answer?  Don't they need him to guide them now more than ever, even if they don't know it yet?  How far will he go to maintain the authority he needs in order to save his people from even worse tyranny?  When push comes to shove, are the enemies of his one-time God (i.e. our spotlight characters) worse enemies than those that will arise from his own people?  Who will he look to for help?

[Sydney Freedberg]

....explicit prep ....Saura Gul was created because Sydney got a kick out of my one-sentence blurb about the Seergassa lizard people, and fleshed them out hugely.  I think Orobouros was mostly created because Eric wanted to torture Sydney.  But in the course of the torture, Saura Gul clearly became as much Eric's character as Sydney's.....

One of the fun, albeit occasionally terrifying, parts of Capes is watching other people use their distributed-GM power to take things you created and run with them in directions you didn't expect.

For example, Orobouros is a traditional symbol of a dragon looped around itself, eating its own tail; it symbolizes eternity, but specifically eternal cycles, and is thus inherently opposed to, say, progress. So that exists outside of the game. Now watch the hand-offs:

[Tony] The ambiguity of whether the "Pretopia" setting Tony created -- dinosaurs and cavemen? Living together? -- was past or future...

[Sydney] ...led me to start dropping hints about an adversary somehow tied in with Orobouros: I began by putting "Orobouros Sigil" on Saura Gul's character sheet in prep before the first session, and then introduced were-dragons concerned about the state of the timestream and Saura Gul's time-looping abilities in play....

[Tony]... but Tony really likes arcane technology and robots, so he (I think on impulse [EDIT: Nope, he had a plan; see post below]) had the protagonists detect tech on Saura Gul and in ancient Seergassa ruins...

[Sydney]... so I began narrating Saura Gul's Orobouros Sigil as a technological, not magical, artifact, and the  were-dragons as T-1000-style shape-shifting robots....

[Eric] ... and then Eric introduced Orobouros as a character in its own right, not just a symbol shared by other characters.

[Sydney] Meanwhile back in prep, I had created my character Minerva Danaan with the explicit intention of having a terrible destiny which would involve the other protagonists meeting her future self (which just happened in the last two sessions) and, oh yeah, would somehow tie in with the Orouborous bad-guys I'd vaguely thought of in the pre-play prep as well. But under the influence of all the in-play back and forth, Minerva turned out to be a shapeshifting android herself, and I set her up as Orobouros's creator.

[Eric] And then Eric set up the Big Fight with Oborobouros that ended up revealing that, no, Minerva wasn't entirely responsible for his evil after all, because Orobouros existed independently of her outside of space and time.

And I've missed at least a few iterations, I'm sure, but you see how complexly ideas pass back and forth? I've been pushing a plotline for the entire campaign, but all I started with was a few core ideas (Orobouros as symbol of bad guys, dragons as bad guys, Minerva as struggling against her destiny) and then it all blossomed only in actual play as it got captured and twisted by the other players. Sometimes that was gut-wrenching: What, Orobourus is a PERSON? What, Minerva didn't create him? But every time I relaxed and let go of "ownership" of "my" idea, and the other person turned it into something far richer than I'd imagined.

[Larry L.]

Sydney,

Wow. That was a great write-up of how Capes actually works in play. The way it encourages this sort of "competitive" creative collaboration is very difficult to explain based on the rules alone. But I've been there.

Religion indeed. Can I get a witness?

[Sydney Freedberg]

Oh, and Tony reminds me he had an agenda for getting high-tech and specifically androids involved, which was to give his character's love interest -- a computer -- a body to download into for more romantic possibilities, or interesting thwartage thereof. Which of course was a completely different agenda from mine, but happened to knock it in a very different and intriguing direction I'd never thought of. (Huh? They're all robots?).

So if you really mapped out the flow of ideas, you'd get not one relatively tidy progression like the one above but actual multiple lines of story ideas that intersect, bounce off, recombine, and diverge.

(Which is one reason why a "Goal In:Goal Out" system, while cool in theory, might be painfully restrictive in practice, by the way).

[Larry L.]

And now, frankly, I am very tempted to play him (after an appropriate cool-down period), because I'm quite fascinated by the position that he is in: Having oppressed his people for so long in the name of a false God, he's got to have guilt (or, more likely for him, despair). And they probably hate him, for their various reasons. But is giving them their freedom any sort of answer? Don't they need him to guide them now more than ever, even if they don't know it yet? How far will he go to maintain the authority he needs in order to save his people from even worse tyranny? When push comes to shove, are the enemies of his one-time God (i.e. our spotlight characters) worse enemies than those that will arise from his own people? Who will he look to for help?

Sheesh. That's way too cool. This is the sort of thing that gets me jazzed about Capes -- this kinda crap can just emerge. Not that such engrossing conflicts can't occur in other games; just to me it's always felt like, uh, engineering is required.

Maybe I've just got a lot of pent-up frustration from years and years of Actor stance.

[Eric Sedlacek]

Religion indeed. Can I get a witness?

Amen, brother!

[James_Nostack]

To all the hypothetical "flaws", for some reason I keep coming back to, "Sure it doesn't work -- if one of the players is being a total dick."

The problem isn't that one of the players is being a dick.  The problem is that one of the players may want something very different from what the other players consider fun.

This is hardly an insoluble problem, but no one wants to admit that (a) this is possible, (b) this is undesirable, or (c) it can be fixed.

The defense I've heard so far is that "It can never happen!  But when it happens it's always fantastic!  And besides, there's no design solution anyway."

I think that argument is wrong on all counts, but will postpone any further comment until our next Actual Play thread, when I hope to have more experience.

[Valamir]

Tony, Eric could you go into a little bit of detail about how this exchange of events was encouraged by the system.  The initial post is rather light on those details.  It reads to me more like a case of players grooving on each other's vibe socially with very little to do with the mechanics.

Eric roleplayed Ouroboros in a manner that made Tony want to take him down a peg.  Eric roleplayed Ouroboros's treatment of Saura Gal in a way that allowed other players to see Saura sympathetically and pick up on the opportunity to engage in a standard genre trope of minion betraying master.  The betrayal and eventual defeat of Ouroboros was then handled through resolution mechanics.

Nothing in the text so far points to any specific system support for any of this.  The same roleplaying and genre tropes could have led to this outcome in any game...only the resolution mechanics of running through the betrayal would have been different, but any game would have rules for handling the big climactic fight scene (some less entertainingly to be sure).  Highlighting some areas where the these events were specifically tied to the mechanics of Capes would be quite helpful.


Also, keep in mind that pretty much all of the issues being floated in the MoF forum are in no way saying that Capes doesn't allow cool stuff to happen.  Rather they are suggesting that Capes doesn't do anything to filter crap stuff from happening.  So none of the concerns raised in the forums are really addressed by this post because this is an example of introducing cool stuff that everyone agrees is cool stuff.

If you want to address the concerns raised in those other threads with an actual play example you'll need an example where cool stuff was introduced and only some of the players thought (honestly) it was cool stuff while other players thought (honestly) it was utter drek...and then show how the mechanics helped resolve that in a way other than relying on social contract pressure.

[TonyLB]

Absolutely:  Saying that disagreements about narrative content don't happen would be silly.  Or, rather, if you did achieve that in a game, I'd be very sad to hear it.  Those disagreements are precisely the times that Sydney is talking about when one player grabs a story line and takes it in a new direction.

Now it's been a while since I've seen anything with this group that would qualify as "drek."  And I don't want to go beyond my normal group to single out anyone with that label.  So we'll have to use a less violent disagreement for discussing Actual Play, sorry:

Sydney clearly thought that Minerva being responsible for Orobouros's creation would be really cool.  Honestly, I thought that we could do better (both in terms of making Minerva less of a one-dimensional "I live for angst" character and in terms of making Orobouros a more interesting villain).  I don't know what Eric thought, but he can chime in.

Eric created "Event:  Orobouros's true nature is revealed," and claimed a side of it (threatening to narrate what Orobouros's true nature is).  They promptly fought each other up to fairly spectacular levels.  Eric and I both Staked Debt on his side (though I was mostly just lending literal moral support), which meant that Sydney was outmatched in the long term.  The only way he could win was to ramp it up too quickly for us to respond to.  But we were all flush with Story Tokens (as a result of having shown ourselves capable of accepting someone else's narrative direction in the past), so we were able to take enough actions to shut him out.

As generally happens with our group, Sydney saw that he was trying to shout down the rising tide.  Eventually, much as he wanted to control Orobouros's true nature, he decided to give rather than throw good resources after bad.  So, poor, poor Sydney, he had to content himself with a mere six Story Tokens that he won off of the heavily contested conflict.  You can check with him, but I don't think he was too disappointed, all told.

So there's one exchange that highlights how the resolution mechanic slants toward the people who care most (collectively) about an issue.  Is that the sort of example you were hoping for?

[Larry L.]

I will suggest that there is some kind of "Garbage into gold" effect occurring here. In other words, while there is nothing to prevent a player from introducing "crap stuff" into SIS, there is also nothing to prevent another player from augmenting that "crap stuff" into something he finds a little more satisfying. This feedback cycle of continual "upgrading" the quality of SIS elements results in an end product in which crap is filtered or ignored. No one is remembered for introducing crap, because they share in the credit for seeding an idea which later became cool.  The creative challenge of how to "trump up" other players' ideas becomes the real satisfaction -- shared satisfaction -- of the game.

Sadly, I cannot directly translate this into mechanics. I bet if you actually produced a transcript of table talk, you'd spot a number of originally lame ideas that were "starved to death" by the mechanics, de-emphasised in the SIS, and forgotten.

I'm still hoping that some unexplained assumption, which known makes the difference between a rockin' Capes game and a wonky Capes game, will emerge.

[James_Nostack]

I'm still hoping that some unexplained assumption, which known makes the difference between a rockin' Capes game and a wonky Capes game, will emerge.

Larry, there's no mystery about this.  The core problem is that there is no method to resolve disputes between players about what kind of game they want to play.  Either the players are on the same wavelength or they're not.

This is a critical, and easily foreseeable, difficulty for a game with communal GM powers.  I am very surprised that it did not get ironed out in playtest.

[TonyLB]

See, Larry, ask and you shall receive.  I think we've just seen the flawed assumption that undermines good Capes play:

Players should strive to be on the same wavelength about what they want in the game.

Which is simply wrong.  That's not how this game works.  Here's the corrected assumption:

Players should be committed to seeking out or manufacturing conflicts at every opportunity.