Ganging Up

[dunlaing]

I'm playing in a play by post Capes game which is going pretty well and which I'm enjoying. One interesting thing is happening, though,...every scene ends up with just one person on one side.

In the first scene, I created a hero. The other players created a villain, a possessed train, mook villains, and a lovecraftian horror.

In the second scene, I created a villain. The other players brought in 3 heroes. One player almost brought in another villain, but petered out of the game.

In the third scene, someone else created a villain. The other players (including me) created mook goodguys, 2 supporting heroes, and the spirit of a blimp.

This seems suboptimal to me. It seems like the spread should be much more even, with 4 players having 2 on each side plus whatever they buy with story tokens. Is this typical though? What are people's actual play experiences with this? And is there some element of Capes (or tactics in general) which encourages this?

[Vaxalon]

Why are you complaining?  Make your stand, take your lumps, and rake in the story tokens.

[Zamiel]

This seems suboptimal to me. It seems like the spread should be much more even, with 4 players having 2 on each side plus whatever they buy with story tokens. Is this typical though? What are people's actual play experiences with this? And is there some element of Capes (or tactics in general) which encourages this?

For early Scenes, its perfectly valuable to build yourself up a bit of a Debt battery and pull in some Story Tokens as you go ahead and escalate Conflicts by staking and splitting, and other folks have to stake Debt to beat you on the Conflict ... at which point you double your Debt and take their stakes, and smile a lot because sooner or later you'll turn that around on them.

Plus, don't forget you can introduce Conflicts that they want to compete for between themselves. Goal: Captain Heroic is about to put down The Villainous Pervert before Major Victory does serves two purposes, first, it means that there's likely to be some Captain versus Major wrangling while other Conflicts go by the wayside, and secondly, it means you as the Pervert can't be put down by the Captain or the Major until the Conflict resolves. Blocking Conflicts are the bee's knees.

[Kintara]

I'm the player playing the villain in that third scene, which is where we're at right now.

Personally, I don't think it's a bad thing at all. I think what really matters as far as creating good Capes play is having conflicts people crawl over eachother to get involved in, win or lose. You can do that with all heroes, all villains, or any mix thereof.

I think what happened with the first and second scenes was that you decided to play your spotlight character, then we decided to play ours, and now in the third scene no one is. It's kind of interesting how that turned out. We'll have to see what happens next scene. Perhaps we'll all decide to play our spotlights, and we'll all choose Fantastic Four-like conflicts where we bicker amongst ourselves. It's early enough in the game that I think we're focused as much on testing the waters and establishing the mood as we are on trying to entice the other players into going along with our ideas. Along those lines, it might be a good idea to do a scene where everyone brings in their Exemplars.

[Zamiel]

Along those lines, it might be a good idea to do a scene where everyone brings in their Exemplars.

Unless your Exemplars are other Powered characters, Scenes with all-non-Powered characters are great for getting some Inspirations of various sizes, but there'll be no Story Tokens in the offing. Plus, without the other member of the Exemplar relationship present, no Free Conflicts.

[Kintara]

Along those lines, it might be a good idea to do a scene where everyone brings in their Exemplars.

Unless your Exemplars are other Powered characters, Scenes with all-non-Powered characters are great for getting some Inspirations of various sizes, but there'll be no Story Tokens in the offing. Plus, without the other member of the Exemplar relationship present, no Free Conflicts.

I meant along with their Spotlight characters, so everyone would need to spend a story token.

[dunlaing]

I don't mean to be bitching about it. I just think it seems like a sub-optimal distribution of characters. It's not bothering me, I'm just wondering if it's typical or if people eventually start evening things out in order to optimize the flow of tokens/inspirations.

You know, part of it is the pace of play-by-post. I would hope that you could get through a minimum of 2 scenes in a session of tabletop playing, and preferably more. You can get through about a page a week in play-by-post. That makes things like introducing more conflicts much more of a "do I want to add at least a week to this scene" issue than a "would this conflict add to the game" issue--for me, anyway.

[Eric Sedlacek]

I don't mean to be bitching about it. I just think it seems like a sub-optimal distribution of characters. It's not bothering me, I'm just wondering if it's typical or if people eventually start evening things out in order to optimize the flow of tokens/inspirations.

There isn't anything inherently wrong with it, but experienced players tend to develop the mindset of wanting to get in on under-represented sides of a conflict.  That makes this less likely in a game of experienced players.

[Vaxalon]

It's in your best interests, reward-wise, not to gang up.

An experienced player, seeing a 2-on-1 situation, will bring in a character on the 1 side to even things up.