Capes and PBEM?

[Justin Marx]

Hi there everyone,

Maybe a redundant question, but if it aint, then this is the place to ask it. After reading some examples of actual play (the one with Major Victory.... sounds frikkin cool), I am on the verge of picking up my very own copy of Capes and enriching Tony's purse. However, I am far far from home, my normal gaming crew, indeed from any gamers (in the People's Republic of China) for a long time yet and I am itching to play this game. As a couple of my friends in Australia sound interested as well, we want to get it, but I need to know one simple question - can this game be reliably played via email? If so, what sort of rules amendments need to be made, would it ruin the spontenaiety (sic?) of the game, and the way that players confront and challenge one another, etc.?

Either way I'll be buying the game. If it can't work via PBEM (and thank Christ its on pdf), then I'll be picking it up a lot later from now however. As my group all do different things in different places, IM is probably not an option. Randomisers for results can be handled online without too much difficulty I believe so that is not the issue methinks. I'd appreciate any answers to these questions from people who have played the game inside and out and would know if it would work.

Thanks
Justin

[TonyLB]

Good question!

The basic challenge is that Capes has a lot of points of contact.  Technically, every time someone takes an action you would need to wait for every other player to waive their right to react.  And if one of them does react then you need to wait again for every remaining player to waive their right to react in return.

On IRC (for instance) this is no problem.  People get into the habit of quickly saying "No React" (or just "NR"), and the actions just blaze by.  But each point of contact (no matter how minor) in PBeM can take hours and hours, because people are (naturally enough) away from their computers doing other things.

So, when we tried to do this PBeM I recommended the following rules modifications to make things run more in parallel and less in sequence:

• Any player may (and should) declare their disinterest in reacting if they conclude that they're not going to react on a certain conflict:  "As long as we're still winning this conflict I'm not reacting," for instance.  That lets you bypass people's opportunity without even an email from them.
• For anyone who might want to react, they say what their condition on the die is, and what they'd use to react:  "If it drops below three I react with Bully-2 to drive it up."  This lets the acting player, once she receives responses from everyone, resolve the mechanics in a single post.
• If folks really trust each other they can also give some fragments of roleplay to go with their reactions, and the acting player can thread them together into a single action-reaction narrative cycle.  This will knock off some of the spontaneity of the game (as fragments will only loosely respond to each other), but it will also knock off the final sequenced point of contact.  If you have that trust, I think the game would fly over PBeM.

Anyway... it's a hard row to hoe.  Games like (to pick a random example) Amber, with many, many fewer points of contact make for very easy PBeM play.  The Capes rules work against you pretty hard, because they give a huge mass of small but (possibly) important tactical choices at every juncture.

[Justin Marx]

Hmm..... from the actual play posts I was reading I was concerned that it seemed like the constant interaction between competing players was what made it work. I guess I am going to have to convince my group to sort out the IRC angle. There are some players that I have who are good competitors, but not people I would trust per se to devote that competitive spirit to bilaterally rewarding play. I also wasn't sure if the narrative sequences worked in large chunks of individual input (ideal for PBEM) or in small pieces built together (IRC, F2F). I'm guessing the latter, due to the high points of contact, as you said.

Thanks for the response, Tony. I think I should get my copy of the pdf and go over the mechanics and ruminate with some more specific queries. Out of interest, you mentioned you tried to do PBEM. How successful was this endeavor? Also, not to drag out a simple question too much, is there any alteration for IRC play at all? And, can you point me in the direction of any IRC/IM play-groups which I can either join or supplement with additional numbers if there are any?

As a side-note and as feedback, I found Capes interesting from the actual play thread. My friends got into it simply from the flash character sheet - we were all very impressed.
Justin

[TonyLB]

Sorry for the long response time... I was off showing the boys around my family out of state, and had less (i.e. no) internet access than I'd hoped.

Anyway, the collapse of the PBeM Capes attempt went very much the way collapses of PBeM games sometimes go:  Six people expressed intense interest in the concept.  They made up some totally incompatible characters.  One person did one action.  I did a reaction to that action.  The next four people never made any attempt to either act or react, which brought the game to a screeching standstill before anyone could even get to playing.

I think the collapse was more about PBeM (with its low barriers to "I wanna do this!" and its comparatively high barrier to actually doing things) than it was about Capes.  But then, I'm biased.

[Stickman]

As a fellow participant in the failed Capes pbem I'd agree that any failure was due to to a lack of immediate response from players, which I think is inherant in the medium. I'd guess that a group of three or four people who *really wanted to* could make it work, but to ne honest IRC sounds like a better bet.

It also highlighted something for me, which I know both Tony and the guys at the Universalis forum have spoken about several times. Both games demand that you buy in. Pacifism is not an option. If you want to play, then play. If you want to be peripheraly involved in some kind of game, play something else, and leave Capes to the guys and gals in spandex