[Capes] Vaxalon, Lxndr, and James Nostack have a go

[Grover]

I don't think it's fair to say that Capes is Tom and Jerry: The Role Playing Game.  In my experience playing Capes, that hasn't happened.  It looked to me like you started the game with that hypothesis, and were choosing your narration to achieve that point.  In Capes, you have to care about winning conflicts, but you also need to care about the character, setting, and color.  If you ignore the SIS, or don't care about it, there's no point to playing at all.

edit: Some people can't have fun playing football - is that a failure in the game, or a failure in the people.   Sounds like a false dichotomy to me.  I don't enjoy football - that doesn't mean football is flawed, nor does it mean I am.

[TonyLB]

Actually, I totally think the costume one would make sense.

You wouldn't do "Event:  Superheroes don't wear spandex", unless there was consensus around the table on that and what people wanted to debate was why, or who asserts it, or something else.

But I could certainly imagine two leather-clad commando-types and a spunky kid in spandex, duking it out verbally over "Event:  Someone is judged the most fashionable" or "Goal:  My costume is accepted as perfectly legitimate superhero garb."  

What you're doing in that is building the world, and its attitudes toward the leather/spandex divide, right there in the context that makes it relevant.

[Vaxalon]

Grover, can you elaborate on that thought, with specific reference to the events at [05]?

[Vaxalon]

Tony, that implies that the result of that conflict has lasting impact on the SIS.  Haven't we already established that it doesn't?

[Sydney Freedberg]

Tony, that implies that the result of that conflict has lasting impact on the SIS.  Haven't we already established that it doesn't?

I'm not Tony, but...

That's the tricky bit, yeah. You can't settle "spandex or not?" once and for all through the conflict system, so if you want it settled and done and off the table, that needs to be in the Comics Code. What the Conflicts system will do for you is make sure that "spandex or not" keeps coming up, over and over -- either because someone introduces a new form of the Conflict after one form resolves, or because someone uses the Inspirations from resolving it on something else ("My spandex stretches comfortably, allowing me to dodge Captain Vile's rain of blows!").

[TonyLB]

I think having lasting impact would be a terrible shame.  And unrealistic, to boot!  The fashion world is changeable.  Last month's oh-so-chic leather and kevlar can be supplanted by next month's spandex and lycra faster than a runway model can peel out of a latex cat-suit.

Or, to put it in more character-personal terms:  Let's suppose that Dark Walker and Scourge convince young Zip to wear some kevlar and a helmet.  He thinks it looks dorky, but he concedes that bullets are bad.  So what does he do?  He goes around to all the super-science outfits in town, looking for a material that looks like spandex, but protects like kevlar.  In a little while he comes back with a redesigned uniform, and makes his argument all over again.  What's more, he argues that they should wear colorful mega-mesh as well.  He's had matching uniforms tailored.

That's exactly what should happen.  Artistic disputes should only vanish when they're actually settled between the players.  Sometimes that happens in one Conflict (when it becomes clear who cares about it more).  It's a shame, but some issues just don't have any more staying power than that.  But sometimes the issue survives countless short-term resolutions, and that's really cool.  Losing a Conflict doesn't mean you have to give up on the issue.  It means you lost today.  Tomorrow is another day.

EDIT:  To link back to Actual Play:  Why would ripping Doc Trinity's spine out be the last time we see him?  Wouldn't that be a crying shame?  Better to have to fight that same fight over and over again, throughout the decades.  That's cool.

[Sydney Freedberg]

And in the meantime, until it's resolved, Dark Walker and Zip keep having Conflicts over "spandex or not" and walk away with Inspirations that help define them as characters: "I refused to wear spandex no matter what" and "convinced Dark Walker to wear a bright color" and on and on. The ongoing struggle provides character definition, plus resurces.

[Vaxalon]

Not if he IMMEDIATELY reappears as if nothing happened.  That would be NOT cool.  At least, to me.

I had planned to leave him there for the time being, because I had little choice.... I could either leave him there and play using some other strategies that I'd rather not go into at the moment, or bring him right back out (since the scene isn't over) to keep playing.

[Vaxalon]

The difference in taste on this topic gets back to my point over in "Capes Mindset" on the MoF forum.

[Grover]

The thing that made me feel you were deliberately trying to break the system was this narration :

"You know what? I haven't got all night for this invasion." Warhawk decides to cut to the chase, shreds Trinity's armor in half, breaks his spine in six places, and, racing across the Pacific at supersonic speeds, hurls the body into the depths of the Marinaras Trench.

I don't believe that you guys felt that this was not a significant alteration to the SIS.  I think you felt that it was significant, but since there is nothing in the rules to stop you from making it, you were going to go ahead and do that, just to show how broken the system was.

It would be fine narration for the conclusion of Goal: Warhawk beats down Dr. Trinity.  If you try, it's even possible to accomodate it, and come up with something cool (cyber-spines, undersea allies, etc).  But that narration is not primarily directed at persuading Fracture to betray Dr. Trinity.

[Vaxalon]

Grover, if you had been me (that is, playing Doctor Trinity) in that situation, what would you have done?

[Grover]

I would have said 'Quit being silly'.

Hmm - it occurs to me that, in D&D, if someone is being disruptive in the game, you have tools in the rules to fight against that disruption.  You don't have to settle any Social Contract issues out of the game, because you have in-game resources to draw on.  Would you say that your problem with Capes is that there is no way to deal with disruptive players other than to stop the game, and work it out at a Social Contract level?

[Vaxalon]

It is important to note that the player doesn't have to be TRYING to be disruptive, in order to disrupt.

The logs show two examples of that very clearly.

In the latter, James is TRYING to be disruptive.  At [05], however, I am NOT trying to be disruptive.  In both cases, however, the other player's play was disrupted.

To answer your question, yes.  As I have said several times, one of the unusual things about Capes (which can be more or less of a problem depending on what kind of player you are) is that there is no formal mechanism for dealing with disruptions like these.

[Grover]

You're referring to the situation where James came up with the hologram tactic, and you negated it by narrating that it didn't work?

I see two different ways to address that problem.  One is sort of a cop-out - Capes doesn't have a mechanism for tactical play on the part of the players, so he was simply expecting something that the system couldn't deliver.  Another way to look at it is to say that your narration didn't adequately address the coolness of his tactic - that you should've come up with a reason why it failed, instead of just saying that it did (and it was, after all, doomed to failure because he didn't control the conflict).  If I had come up with a cool tactic like that, I might ask for a more explicit explanation of how it had been negated ('I have infra-red cameras', 'I planted a tracer on Fracture', something like that).  

A question for James:  What kind of narration would you have liked to see for Dr. Trinity's AND THEN for the hologram trick?

[TonyLB]

A third way of looking at it:  Maybe James didn't offer Fred anything that made him interested in validating the hologram tactic as an important and ongoing part of the SIS, so he didn't.

I'm quite interested to know whether Fred found the hologram thing interesting at the time... I don't know whether that's a question he can really answer, though.  Time and memory cloud everything, and by now I'm sure he's thought of many ways that he could have made it interesting.