[Capes] Floundering on Infinite Earths

[Larry L.]

So we got together on short notice at the FLGS to play some Capes. Chris, Steve, Shane, and I finally got to meet Mark. We decided we wanted to do something a little more directed than our previous sessions, so we brainstormed a while, before settling on "cosmic heroes" a la Green Lantern or Silver Surfer. There was some talk about how it would be cool if heroes could run into their counterparts from alternate dimensions.

For comics code, we all agreed that hero death, villain death, innocent death, genocide, whatever, were all fair game. The only item that ended up getting into the Comics Code was "You can't destroy the multiverse." I had a hankering to put something more than that in there to try to enforce some stylistic constraints, but couldn't figure out how to phrase these as restrictions. Steve wanted to have items that were actually permissible, but still allowed for gloating, but I rules-lawyered him down.

I declared that I had already come up with a scene while everyone else was still thinking about it, so I got the go-ahead to start the first scene. I described how the evil superbrain Galactus... what? oh, yeah, that is the bad guy from Silver Surfer. I knew it sounded familiar... the evil superbrain Nebulon, in the form of a moon-sized spacecraft, accompanied by his galactic armada approach the earth. I then introduced the conflict "Event: The Earth is destroyed." There was some muttering about vetoing that into a Goal, but I pointed out that there's plenty of other Earths out there, and revised it to "Earth-037 is destroyed."

We played out the first scene. Chris introduced a Swarm of nanobots to defend the earth. Mark created teleporting hero Gateway. Steve played the planetary defense grid. Shane created something called "The Enigma," a mysterious force pulling the strings.

The scene drags more than I expect it to. Gateway learns (by Mark winning narration rights) that Nebulon is human in origin. I win "Earth is destroyed" at the same time as Chris wins "Nebulon is destroyed" so he narrates how Swarm has chewed up Nebulon's hull, rendering it inoperable, and I follow with the description of the mass of Nebulon colliding with the Earth, breaching the singularity reactor and obliterating everything. Steve has a pod of survivors escape. I win a conflict to have Nebulon's core escape to another dimension.

Next scene is Steve's. He seems pretty stumped for where to go, and we toss him some ideas. After I few minutes, he narrates a medieval world, where a wizard high up in his tower is in the middle of some kind of summoning ritual. I don't recall the exact player interaction that established that the wizard accidentally summons the Nebulon core and Swarm, still duking it out, but Chris threw in some cool narration about earthquakes due to the dimensionally adjacent Earth being destroyed. I wasn't real keen to keep developing the story of Nebulon before introducing the good guy story, but my turn was last so I rolled with it.

I came up with The Green Knight, who was pretty much inspired by Arthur-as-a-super from Tony's game. Chris re-played Swarm. Shane brought in a noble lord. Mark made a mind-reading princess type, who wasn't physically present. Interestingly, I was out of story tokens for this scene, so I tried to pull for the Nebulon core to do what I wanted it to even though nobody took it as a character. Sometimes I couldn't come up with a good enough excuse for the Green Knight to be involved and had to remain uninvolved in those conflicts. Instead, I introduced a goal of Nebulon and the princess making a telepathic agreement, and let Mark do my fighting. (Sheepish grin) In the end, the Green Knight ends up being an upright bonehead, Swarm kills all the NPCs in the room (not Chris' narration!), and the Nebulon core is stolen by... I don't remember which faction won that conflict. Steve opined that this was not quite what he had in mind when he framed the scene.

I had joked earlier about setting up a scene involving Mormon gunslingers in the old west. For the third scene, Chris sets up a cavalry versus Indians battle in progress. Chris and Mark make braves. Shane reprises the Enigma. I make one General Coster, whom everyone wordlessly assumes is a creep and needs to die. Steve brings in the survivors of Earth-037. After going a few rounds with no supers, Chris brings in the Thunderbird to trump a six I've got on the table.

Again, we manage to tie multiple conflict resolutions together to good effect. I happily lose at keeping General Coster alive, and reap the story tokens, and... somebody's goal of General Coster meets his Earth-037 counterpart won. So Coster and his counterpart stare at each other in shock and confusion, and then Chris narrates the Indian spear erupting from Coster's heart spraying blood all over the survivor.



Now these three scenes drug out over something like five hours. Ultimately, I don't think this session was as successful as our previous games. The instances of successfully riffing off one another are described above. For the most part though, it's like we weren't quite clicking. Mark caught on right away, so I'll safely rule out the newbie factor. Every opportunity for reactions was a notable pause, as we checked to make sure nobody was reacting before going to the next turn. I'm suspecting five players is where Capes starts bogging down. Also, our library of click-and-locks wasn't relevant to most character concepts, so there was a distinct character creation time at the beginning of every scene.

We introduced a house rule at the beginning that everyone starts with one story token. Not sure if this had any meaningful effect on the game. We also ran into rules disputes over who gets which story tokens and Inspirations that I thought we had ironed out after the last game.

I think the huge, anything-goes premise of the game was too tough to keep everyone on the same page. I can't see that the system offers anything outside the comics code to keep aesthetics pointed in the same general direction. It's like there weren't enough shared cliches that other players could recognize and latch on to.

I think this premise would have worked under Universalis, with things getting ironed out in the tenet phase. I guess I'm left a little doubting to how well Capes can handle anything that's not vanilla supers. (There, that should get Tony's attention!)

Also, I have a rules concern about if PCs are permitted to die, but I can drag that over to the Muse of Fire forum.

Side note: There was also some kind of big Mutants-and-Masterminds -a-thon going on in the shop. It involved minis and battlemats. They seemed to be having fun. One heated rules argument did break out.  I'm pretty sure no one got to blow up the earth, though.

[Christopher Weeks]

Sorry I'm so negative, but...

I thought the game sucked*.  Larry was right about our earlier game being better, but I think I've come to the conclusion that Capes isn't my cup of tea.  But I can't exactly figure out why.  And further problemetize this diagnosis, we haven't ever played with all the stops out -- fully taking advantage of exemplars is the most obvious deficit in our play.  When we're playing, I can't figure out when to take what stance.  And I feel like in the rush to come up with a cool narration, it's not very cool.  So overall, I think that Capes play is unsatisfying for me, or our group, or something.

Our plan for cosmic-scale and multiple parallel Earths would have panned out more with more scenes over more time, but geez!  How long should it take to get so little story?

* Don't get me wrong, there were some fun moments of play, but overall, I wish we'd played Dogs or even boardgames.

[Grover]

Yeah, I think the biggest problem that we're having is that we're trying to develop all the characters and relationships in play.  I'd like to try one more game, where we do the default setting (so we can use the click-n-locks), spotlight characters (so we have a better focus for the game), and maybe a little work on relationships between the spotlight characters too.  Now that I think of it, we started by talking about the setting, but before we came up with spotlight characters, we jumped into the first scene.  I never really came up with a spotlight character that I wanted to play (Although I was having fun with the planetary defense forces), and I didn't really know what the other players wanted to play (read- focus on) when we started. 

Our problem when we play Capes seems to be that the game drifts apart.  I notice that when we're talking about the comics code, nobody ever says that they want to have spotlight characters.  I wonder if maybe this is a sign that we don't care enough about the characters.

Steve

[Mark Woodhouse]

Well, I had enough fun that I bought Capes on Monday. So it wasn't a total loss. But I have to concur that there was a definite laggy-ness to play. I felt that we never really achieved any solid common idea of color - was this a dimension-hopping story with common characters, a set of linked scenes, what? I don't think any three of us had a comics touchstone in common. We started play with a pretty vague idea of what we were doing, and I think it showed - each scene gelled eventually, once enough was established, but nobody really drove.

Glad I could make it, and I'm looking forward to Dogs!

[TonyLB]

I'd love to have something to say here, but nobody's asking any questions... and I hesitate to jump in and say "Here's how to fix X, Y and Z problems that you haven't asked me to give you a solution to!"

So if you're just venting about a session that went badly, I'm right there with you.  That stinks!  I hate when sessions go badly.

If you wanted something more then, like AlexTrebek, I must ask you to phrase your answer in the form of a question.

[Christopher Weeks]

I must ask you to phrase your answer in the form of a question.

OK, so when will you next be in Minnesota?  I think having you play with our group might clear up the inarticulate "but, how do you play" questionoids that I have.

[TonyLB]

Well, I'll be at GenCon, so if you're there then we should meet.

[Larry L.]

Well, I'll be at GenCon, so if you're there then we should meet.

I was looking forward to this, but it has turned out that I can't attend this year. I think the same goes for Chris, Steve, and Shane.

I think my specific point of concern is: What's the right way to "bootstrap" the game? It's like there's this magic factor that needs to be ironed out before play, and it goes above and beyond the usual social contract issues.

[jburneko]

Perhaps I can offer some help as my own Capes game is a little wobbly.  Not bad, just wobbly.

The key is this: Figure out what the other players value about their characters.  Then attack those things.  This can be a major problem because a lot of gamers aren't really invested in their characters at all beyond a neat ability pool for overcoming challenges.  When there's nothing a player values, emotionally, about his character the Conflicts are just words on paper and don't mean jack.  The game feels hollow and like a bunch of random events loosely strung together.

Jesse

[TonyLB]

Well, I've just been reading some posts over on RPG.Net about "unrules"... rules whose only purpose is to tell you that other rules, from other games, do not apply here.  So, for instance, DitV's "Don't hide things from the PCs" is a solid unrule.  I'll phrase in terms of the unrule concept.

I suspect (from what I read above) that the unrule you're not integrating into your play is this:  "Capes is competitive."  You should be seeking out ways to compete with each other.  Don't compromise.  Compromise is poison to the game.  Conflict is good.  Players disagreeing, vehemently, is good.  Players agreeing about what should happen is bad.  There is no competition when everyone agrees.  When everyone is agreeing, just skip ahead until you get to somewhere that they violently disagree again.  Indeed, if you can't find anything that the group disagrees about then you must manufacture it, as quickly and ruthlessly as possible.  Which means simply drawing a line in the metaphorical sand and saying "This side of the line is RIGHT, and that side is WRONG!  I oppose to the death anyone standing on that side!  Have at you!"

So, in the context of the game you described:  "Event:  Earth-037 is destroyed" looks strange to me.  You wanted X, player B wanted not-X... player B had absolute veto power to achieve not-X, but you somehow convinced them not to use that power?  It's very uncompetitive.  It sounds ominously as if you guys were fervently pursuing compromise.

But aside from the breakdown of bloodthirstiness, I wonder:  What were the two sides on that Event?  How did the entire future of the story hinge on how the conflict played out?  I mean... earth blows up either way, so what's at stake?  For example, was the survival of the escaping remnants of humanity at stake in that conflict or was that a separate-but-parallel conflict?

Now I may, very easily, be dead wrong about what happened.  But hopefully, if I am, the answers to these questions can set me on the right track.


Cross-post:  What Jesse said, regarding attacking what the players value, is great advice.  It addresses both the questions of "How do I get to the competition?" and "How is the competition about more than just rolling dice?"  Nonetheless, I will leave my longer, more rambling, post in the hopes that it can help someone.

[Larry L.]

Tony,

The stake of the first conflict? I thought it would make an cool prologue for just how evil this thing was. I was actually just gonna narrate the whole thing out, but it seemed more dramatic to throw down on the table and let anyone who wanted fight for how they thought it should play out. Note the Event did not specify who or what would destroy the earth. You'd have to ask the other players how they'd have proceeded had they won that one.

Man, the conditions for "Veto event = cool, veto event = lame," seem way too fuzzy to me. I think my argument against making it a goal was something along the lines of "C'mon, there's plenty more Earths where that came from! It'll be fun!"

The "survivors escape" was a separate, parallel conflict introduced by Steve.

One thing I noticed that was a little different in this session was there was substantially less kibbitzing between points of contact. Things like suggestions of "You know what would be cool if you did...?" were less.

I guess to my mind this was a result of us trying to follow the advice to be more competitive instead of more cooperative. I think it just lowered the level of communications between players to what could be expressed by the system. So, uh, I think it's something more nuanced than "Be competitive."

My previous line of strategy for Capes was "Lead with the villain. Give the good guys a raison d'etre." But I'm thinking "Establish something in the SIS that you value, right away, for other players to target," might be more on track.

[TonyLB]

Man, the conditions for "Veto event = cool, veto event = lame," seem way too fuzzy to me. I think my argument against making it a goal was something along the lines of "C'mon, there's plenty more Earths where that came from! It'll be fun!"

I'm not sure what you mean by "fuzzy" here.  If someone doesn't like an Event, qua Event, they're doing you a huge favor by telling you.  You have just learned that (in this instance) they don't want the earth destroyed without a fight.

The moment I hear that, I no longer want the "Event:  Earth is destroyed."  I want "Goal:  Destroy the Earth."  I want to give people a chance to fight for their own vision.  Then I want to squish them like bugs, and get my own way instead.  But if, through some freak of fate, I don't succeed then I will console myself with a large pile of story tokens.  It's a win-win.

Does that make any sense?

[Christopher Weeks]

Actually, I think Tony's note did hit on what we're doing wrong, but it wasn't his main focus.  I think the real problem is that we didn't care.  Seriously.  I never particularly cared about the outcomes on Sunday.  In our other game, I didn't particularly at first, but once cool things started happening (particularly with the Dark Disciple) then I cared.  I wonder if we were just at the point of starting to care about this game.  And then maybe an even more extended bootstrap than Larry was meaning is what we needed.

[Larry L.]

Yeah, what Chris said. I think the thing that's bothering me is "Is there something we're supposed to be doing to care now?" 'Cause "Oh let's slag on and maybe we'll care eventually," is the kind of game I'm eager never to foist on anyone again. Seems like a waste of time.

Tony,

So getting an Event vetoed is good? This runs counterintuitive to my idea of competition; this is what I mean when I say it's not just a simple as "compete." I want my event to occur, right? There's a right way to fight for what you want, and a wrong way to fight for it. So is Steve expected to dig in his heels here, or am I expected to keep an eye out for opportunities to fight and lose?

[TonyLB]

"Is there something we're supposed to be doing to care now?"

That one's really pulled me up short.  I'm not sure I know how to answer that.

Caring isn't the end result of a process.  Caring is the beginning.  It is what you bring to the table.  Exposing what you care about, being willing (eager!) to fight for it and maybe lose it... that's your contribution to the game.

Go check out Play like you MEAN it!  It's that thing.  Nobody can make it happen for you.  It happens when you drop your barriers and show the other players what matters to you.