Two Thoughts On Capes

[jburneko]

There are two thoughts I've had about Capes from the very first time I read it.  I was going to reserve these two thoughts until after I had some Actual Play under my belt but with all the discussion I've seen and the descriptions of Actual Play I think my thoughts are validated.  I will of course re-evaluate when I play Capes for myself.

The first thought is that Capes really is a stress test on the creative cohesiveness of a given group.  Reading the discussions I'm reminded of early discussions about Narrativism and particularly Director Stance where there was a general out cry from "typical gamers" that if you hand over that kind of authority to the players then there was nothing stoping them from just declaring that they killed everything, seduced everyone, and ruled the world.  This of course implied that gamers have no self-control and that the only thing stopping them from declaring such things was either the rules or the GM.

Now while, I don't think it's true that gamers are as childish as those early claims make them out to be, I *have* observed in Actual Play that typical gamers are incredibly bad listeners when it comes to picking up the creative "vibe" of their fellow players.  There is a tendancy for the player to hide selfishly behind their character and their character's actions.  My character does X, Y and Z without any regard for the bigger picture which is way up at the social context level of play.  They just care about what their character is up to and just don't listen to what their fellow players say or contribute.  Gamers who cling to the idea that a "party" of PCs is a must for successful enjoyable play are particularly guilty of this.  It's basically a declaration that the only thing keeping them invested in the other players' characters is SiS proximity to their own character.

Here's an example of the behavior I'm talking about from my own group.  We were wraping up a Ravenloft campaign.  One of the players had been playing this really self-serving arrogant halfling named Bascillius, and over the course of the game his ego had been pretty badly beaten down.  So when it's all over his player says something about how he goes off into the Ravenloft mists on a kind of spiritual quest to find himself, like Samuel L. Jackson's character at the end of Pulp Fiction.  It was very clear to me that this was meant to be a final coda for his character.

But as soon as this happens another player pipes up, "No wait, I go after him!"  Bascillius and I exchange this knowing glance over the table, confirming my interpretation of his narration.  So, I try to smooth things over a bit by saying, "Ah so Lenia (the other player's character) spends her days in pursuit of Bascillius."  I try to move on to another player but Lenia's player pipes in, "Wait!  Wait!  Do I find him?"  And again, Bascillius and I exchange knowing glances this time with a heavy sigh accompanying it.  At that point, I really wanted to shout: "Why are you totally ASS-RAPING Bascillius's exit?"

I had her make a tracking roll and she actually succeeded so instead of Bascillius having this kind of tragic coda that the player clearly wanted the game ended with Lenia's player basical shouting at Bascillius's player that he was being a fool and that he really needed to be doing X, Y and Z.  Had we left it at Lenia pursuing him both players could have had what they wanted.  Basillius would have had his exit and Lenia's player would have made the statement that she disagreed with him, intended to find him and one day straighten him out.  But because this player is basically tone-deaf to the wishes of other players she absolutely had to have the last word and the outcome she wanted.  This wasn't maliciousness on her part, she was totally oblivious to how disrespectful of the other player her actions were.  She just wasn't listening.

My piont is that if this kind of behavior exists even one ounce in your group Capes is going to magnify it a thousand fold.  In that sense Capes really is like the jazz band.  It's okay, to riff off into your own solo but it only works if you LISTEN carefully and purposefully to what the other band members are contributing, otherwise you're going to get total discord, not music.  This is not a criticism of Capes.  Real bands do this all the time so there's no reason not to expect it from your RPG group.  The book even mentions this, only it uses a baseball team instead of a band.  It's just that typical gamers lacks either the skills or the desire to do this effectively and Capes is going to crash and burn for that player and maybe even groups that contain such a player.  Capes is roleplaying on a professional level.

Note: Since Unversalis is brought up a lot in these discussions I will note that Universalis is designed to solve this "problem."  If it's clear to multiple players that another player just isn't listening and totally raping the contributions of another player they can bid that player into line.  But that does beg the question that if you have to spend game resources editing a discordent player's contributions, and not on actual story level conflicts and outcomes, then why are you playing with this person at all?

My second thought is probably going to be more controversial than my first one.  Here it is: Competition in Capes is a ruse.  It's a ruse in exactly the same maner that "realism" is a ruse in The Riddle of Steel.  Here's the logic.  Capes claims that what I'm competing for is the ability to assert more influence over the story.  But I think it's been sufficiently proven that if this is my PRIMARY goal then the way to win, is not to play: Avoid conflicts, and narrate everything you want to see happen as add ons to conflicts you don't care about.  Get a whole group of people doing this and it rapidly turns into He Said, She Said with no game getting played at all.  So competing for "influence over the story" is bullshit.  Doing so breaks the game, period.

But let's say my goal is, "address meaningful conflict."  Now, I'm putting goals on the table, not because I want them to go one way or another, but because I want to engage and address them in a measured meaningful manner.  If this is my PRIMARY goal, then achieving what I want through raw narration becomes unsatisfying.  Note: Ralph can corrrect me if I'm wrong but I got the impression that in Universalis there is no mandate to address in-game conflict via the system.  I can just narrate outcomes and so long as no one objects that's what happens, leaving Universalis vulerable to domination by personality.  In Capes, if you're not addressing in-game conflicts, you're not playing the game.

Having more game resources means you can address more meaningful conflicts.  Having Story Tokens means I have more actions and characters which equates into more conflicts.  Inspiration allows me to chain conflicts together in a meaningful manner.  But to have all of this work your groups priority must be: Story Now, not Step On Up.  The competitive element of the game over resources is a subservient tool to the primary goal.  The tool is there to provide meaningful adversity in the absense of a GM.  The only way to really address YOUR conflicts is to provide adversity for your fellow players and THEIR conflicts.  This is extremely similar to the way the deadly realism of The Riddle of Steel is a tool to get players to address their Spiritual Attributes in a meaningful manner.

So there you have it.  My full Capes analysis.

Jesse

[Valamir]

I think you're spot on with that analysis.  I do have a couple of points though.  I think you're absolutely right that groups with even 1 ounce of that communication difficulty are going to crash and burn with Capes.  However, I don't agree with the implication that this limited to dysfunctional gamers and that it wouldn't happen if you play on a "professional level".  Continuing with the band metaphor...while its true that some bands manage to find that zen state of the perfect riff...many many more crash and burn, often before their first gig.  Its not just gamers that don't know how to listen to the verbal and non verbal cues of others.


The difference between Uni and Capes is that Uni creates a band of tolerance.  Capes has zero tolerance.  In Uni if you head down a path I don't like (for no worse reason than a creative difference of opinion) I have the power to try to stop you.  But that power comes with a price.  I then have to balance my negative feelings towards what you are doing with the negative impact of what it would cost to stop you.  If I REALLY don't like what you're doing the cost will be worth it.  If I only kind of dislike it than the cost won't be.

Therefor in Uni you don't have to give me exactly 100% everything I want.  You just have to get somewhere within the ball park of what I can live with.  I may not 100% agree with you, but as long as I don't disagree enough to throw Coins on it you can have your way.  And through THAT mechanism comes all of the really cool stuff that can get introduced that I'd never have thought of myself but which I wasn't opposed to enough to pay to stop.

Capes, however, has no tolerance band at all.  One might be tempted to think that it has MORE tolerance since if you say something I don't like I don't have the power to try and stop you (right then).  But that's not the case.  It would be if what you said lasted and became an ongoing piece of the SiS (what I think Tony would call Meaning in the Middle).  But instead in Capes I have the power to undo whatever it was you did...essentially stop you after the fact instead of efore.  Because this costs me nothing to to do, there is no tolerance built into the system.  There is no MECHANICAL reason for me to not simply undo whatever you do that I don't like as soon as I get the opportunity to do so.  The ONLY thing stopping me from doing that is the Social Contact.

Meaning, the game relies 100% on the social contract to produce functional play and the system provides no mechanism for smoothing over problems that occur at the social contract level.  Small disagreements at the social contract level get magnified out of all proportion because the SIS in Capes is about as fragile an SIS as I've ever seen.  Nothing other than my unwillingness to completely destroy the game in the process.  So when you say its a stress test on the creative cohesiveness on a given group I agree 100%.  But I don't think that only the dysfunctional "why would you even play with that guy" groups will fail it.


BTW:  There is a mandate to address in-game conflicts via the system in Uni, if by this you mean times when using the Complication (dice rolls) are mandatory vs. spending Coins to do whatever.  The mandate is simply "any time you narrate an effect to a Component I control...its a Complication".  The indirect mandate is that without Complications you lose the primary way to generate Coins for future use.  The reason this is different than Capes (where Conflict generates and Inspiration and Debt Reduction) is because Coins are also the primary way to accomplish things OUTSIDE of the Complication where Inspiration and Debt has limited value outside of Conflicts in Capes...but that's all pretty tangental to your point and I bring it up only because you asked.

[TonyLB]

Jesse:  Spot on analysis!  I'd only quibble with two things.

First:  How well you listen to others is important as an absolute, but also important relative to other players.  If you're empathy skills are for crap, but they're twice as good as the other members of your group, you will clean up in Capes.

Now I tend to agree that if everyone in your group is below a certain absolute level of empathy, you're probably doomed... in any game.  Capes will get you to the train wreck much faster, that's all.  But if at least one player has a level of empathy sufficient to profit from emapthizing with the other players, that bootstraps people into a competition over who can be more empathic.

Which gets to my second point:  Absolutely, competition over story control is a ruse.  Free narration makes the Story-Outside-Conflicts nothing but a sandbox for imagination.  But competition over controlling the direction of the Story-Within-Conflicts is very real.  It's a competition of empathy.  It's "Step On Up and show how well you can figure out how to hurt and tempt your fellow players, punk!"

What happens when you Step On Up?  You learn.  Plain and simple.  If you can get your group to the point where they are competing to be more empathic, you've hit Capes's groove.

[TonyLB]

Meaning, the game relies 100% on the social contract to produce functional play and the system provides no mechanism for smoothing over problems that occur at the social contract level.

I'm really curious.  How much do you think free narration is a percentage of play, compared to conflict-mediated narration?

Because in my experience it starts about 50/50 but quickly shifts to 1%-free / 99%-conflicted.  Whereas your comment seems to imply that you expect 99%-free / 1%-conflicted.