Questions Regarding Conflict Resolution

[Bret Gillan]

Hey Tony, I've played a few one-shots of Capes and love it. I really think it would shine in long-term play but just haven't been able to get a campaign together.

Anyhow. Questions that have come up during play that I haven't been able to sort out from the rules:

Only one person can claim a Conflict, and that person is basically the first to get to it, correct?

When multiple people have allied in a conflict, the Resolver can decide which of those allies, including him or herself, gets the Inspiration from that Conflict, correct?

Also, an AP example that is unrelated to the previous two questions where things got fuzzy:

Two metahuman occult investigators were looking into a number of homeless people getting killed in an alley by some sort of creature that erupted out of the sewers. They're interviewing a homeless man about it and one of the players creates "Goal: Discover demon's weakness." Could the homeless man claim that goal as his and, in a flash of mumbling, near-incoherent insight, suggest to the metahuman investigators what the weakness is? This happened in play with the homeless usurping their goal, successfully taking it, mumbling about how the demon smelled like gasoline and tar as he was shuffling out of the detective's office.

Also: A final note - I really love this game. It makes everything from epic battles to pumping street punks for information interesting and important. It's also the only game where I've seen anything like everyone jumping into a conflict over the homeless man's "Goal: Urinate on rug." :D

[Bret Gillan]

Edit: "Only one person can claim a Conflict, and that person is basically the first to get to it, correct?"

Should read, "Only one person can claim a SIDE in a Conflict, and this is determined by who claimed it first - everyone after that can only ally, correct?" Sorry about the incoherence of that. Hadn't had my morning coffee yet. :)

[TonyLB]

Hey Tony, I've played a few one-shots of Capes and love it. I really think it would shine in long-term play but just haven't been able to get a campaign together.

Not an uncommon problem, I'm afraid.

Only one person can claim a Conflict, and that person is basically the first to get to it, correct?

In a given page, yes.  Only one person per side (at the end of the page) can Resolve that Conflict if their side is winning.

When multiple people have allied in a conflict, the Resolver can decide which of those allies, including him or herself, gets the Inspiration from that Conflict, correct?

No, they can't give the winning Inspirations away.  The resolving player must keep them (although they are, of course, welcome to later spend them on behalf of other players).  The losing Inspirations they may give away, because sometimes they just can't keep them for themself (if they didn't have a losing character).

Could the homeless man claim that goal as his and, in a flash of mumbling, near-incoherent insight, suggest to the metahuman investigators what the weakness is?

Absolutely.  He could also accidentally fumble a lighter and set part of the creature on fire, whereupon it flees into the night ... another perfectly legitimate way to have a non-research oriented character make important discoveries.  Further, the claim is by the player, so that player could narrate your metahuman investigators discovering the thing that he, the player, wants to reveal in the game.  The main thing isn't success or failure, it is that that player is the one who gets to narrate the outcome.

For example:  right here in a Capes Play-by-Post, I resolved "Red Fury discovers something about her father."  Red Fury totally lost that conflict:  my mooks absolutely trashed her.  But I gave her information:  unwelcome information.  Terrible, haunting information that she'd far rather not have heard.

I love information conflicts.  They're such obvious cases of a player saying "We ought to do something interesting, who gets to be the one to decide what?"

Also: A final note - I really love this game. It makes everything from epic battles to pumping street punks for information interesting and important. It's also the only game where I've seen anything like everyone jumping into a conflict over the homeless man's "Goal: Urinate on rug." :D

Yeah, I like how people decide in play which things are little conflicts and which are big conflicts ... often completely independent of anything like "real-world" import.

[Bret Gillan]

Tony, thanks for the answers! I do hope to get a Capes campaign going someday, and it definitely tops my list of "Games I Love," so I'm going to keep plugging it. We've had some amazing and brilliant sessions, and I love how you can have three people with totally different genre preferences and styles and instead of having them conflict in play the blend! I'm known as a horror GM, and I ran a one-shot with a couple of guys who tend towards the goofy, and the result was a Garth Ennis-style dark comedy. Anyhow, until I can find a group of like-minded individuals who are interested in playing a game with shared narrative control, the only superhero games I'm going to find are Mutants & Masterminds.

Okay, I have another question: in your response you mentioned "losing Inspirations." I thought only the person who won and resolved the Conflict gets an Inspiration from that specific Conflict?

[Andrew Cooper]

That depends on the dice, Bret.  When the Winner of the Conflict matches up the dice, any dice pairs where the Losing side's die is greater than the Winning side's results in an Inspiration for the Losing side.  I don't have the book here with me at the moment but I think I have that correct.  Example...

Winning Side has 3 dice showing: 2, 3, 6
Losing Side has 2 dice showing: 2 and 6

The Winner could match the dice like such: 2/2, 6/6, and 3... which would mean the Winning Side gets a 3 Inspiration an the Losing side gets nothing.

or

The Winner could match the dice like such: 2/2, 3/6, and 6... which would mean the Winning Side gets a 6 Inspiration an the Losing side gets a 3 Inspiration.

[Bret Gillan]

Oh, durf! I knew that.

Thanks Tony and Gaerik.