Free narration: whose character is it anyway?

[Zamiel]

Reese [is] Heather's spotlight character

Er... crap. I hadn't realized this, and so it happens that the thread veered off on a tangent.

Except that I pretty much explicitly said it doesn't matter that Reese is Heather's spotlight character, thus my little diversion about Eric chiming in. This is pretty much protocol for every character in our lexicon. If you have a different idea than someone else is narrating, you have a choice.

• You can talk it out.
• You can fight it out with mechanics.

But, also like I said, this is just a total non-issue in most games, since they only give you the first option, so I'm sure its been an issue for you before. How do you normally deal with game situations in which one person wants one thing and another sees it differently? Same thing here, save you have the additional option of going to Conflicts.

But, if I object, and assuming neither of us puts the conflict on the table, then, in the game fiction, does Hannah come in to the party wearing the dress, or doesn't she?

Dunno. Do you punch me in the head? Do you throiw popcorn? Do you call me an ass and stomp out? How do you usually resolve these sorts of things?

As I said, if you choose not to invoke the extant Conflict rules, then you're left with social resolution. This is not valid area for House Rules, in my view. You already have a mechanical means of resolving the conflict of vision at your fingertips, and as we've established repeatedly, it works just fine for things of this nature. What you're asking here is, "How do I resolve a social conflict amongst my group?" and I have no answer for you that would be applicable save pointing out the way my group handles things (occasionally Russian Roulette), or the Capes mechanics themselves.

As Tony says, such moments are obvious big, oozing, spurtulating flags that there are Resources to be farmed. If you don't choose to use the system to do so, other options are yours to imagine.

[JMendes]

Hey, :)

Hmmm. Interesting point, Zamiel. In "other games", character ownership is pretty much assumed if not outright stated in the rules. Narration of "other people's characters" is an extremely rare occurrence (except for the GM*). In Capes, however, character ownership is actually assumed to not exist, which is why the issue even comes up at all.

(*) Hmmm again. I was talking with friend and fellow gamer Rogerio, the other day, who was also in our two Capes sessions. He's the author of that D&D GM asteroid analogy I mention here. I think I just grasped the extent of what he's saying, and it applies here as well. Zamiel, correct me if I'm wrong, but what you're saying is, if I'm playing Hannah and the GM narrates Hannah walking in in the aforementioned cocktail dress and I'm all like, no way, then how do we resolve it.

Well, frankly, this (almost) never came up in those other games. I think it's because, in those games, the Social Contract converges onto a default level of ownership that is pretty much acceptable around the table, and it does so fairly quickly. In (my group of) Capes, though, it doesn't, which is why I figured a "house rule" might be a solution. After all, many house rules are nothing more than verbalizations of aspects of the Social Contract.

Like I said, interesting point.

Cheers,
J.

[Zamiel]

Hmmm. Interesting point, Zamiel. In "other games", character ownership is pretty much assumed if not outright stated in the rules. Narration of "other people's characters" is an extremely rare occurrence (except for the GM*). In Capes, however, character ownership is actually assumed to not exist, which is why the issue even comes up at all.

(*) Hmmm again. I was talking with friend and fellow gamer Rogerio, the other day, who was also in our two Capes sessions. He's the author of that D&D GM asteroid analogy I mention here. I think I just grasped the extent of what he's saying, and it applies here as well. Zamiel, correct me if I'm wrong, but what you're saying is, if I'm playing Hannah and the GM narrates Hannah walking in in the aforementioned cocktail dress and I'm all like, no way, then how do we resolve it.

Well, frankly, this (almost) never came up in those other games. I think it's because, in those games, the Social Contract converges onto a default level of ownership that is pretty much acceptable around the table, and it does so fairly quickly. In (my group of) Capes, though, it doesn't, which is why I figured a "house rule" might be a solution. After all, many house rules are nothing more than verbalizations of aspects of the Social Contract.

Like I said, interesting point.

I think it actually does come up all the time in those games, but its in such an uncontrolled and unconstrained field of discourse, and there is such a deliberate stigma in actually invoking it, that folks don't actually think much about it.

Consider: I'm playing D&D, and its deep in combat (as D&D often inevitably is). I'm playing a Monk with Great Cleave, but I've watched a lot of wuxia this week and I'd like to narrate, as a result of a successful attack and Cleave follow-up, that I swing through one pitiful kobold, the burly Barbarian catches my arm and flings me back the other direction, decapitating a second and third as I pirouette like a top. Can I narrate that? Sure, it's well within the meta-narrative as described by the result of the mechanics. What if the Barbarian's player doesn't want him to play along? How do I resolve it? That's effectively what you're asking. And the answer is the same, that the scope of the resolution of that conflicts lies outside the grounds of the rules as a whole. Resolving it, in the social sense, is none of the rules' business.

The asteroid analogy is fine, insofar as it talks about why the GM does things and why they don't, but it falls short in the specific case of Capes because we do have an in-built mechanic for resolving such conflicts between story authors. And its literally conflict between Players in the Authorial Stance (to descend into the black-magic dialect of the Forge), not at the level of Characters within the narrative. I can prove this by argument by noting that given a conflict between characters in any given Scene, if no Player at the table particularly cares how the conflict at the character-level resolves, there'll be no invocation of mechanics at all. This can apply to a whole fight, or even death. (Its perfectly conceivable for the Free Narration part of a Scene to consume a whole combat of one man against an army, with the first Conflict hitting the table being Goal: Archieodesius discovers the sword Trollbane amidst the corpses.)

To be completely honest, I think you're making more work in the course of this question than exists. If two Players disagree enough about whether a character does or says or is something, they have the mechanics to resolve it. If they don't want to invoke the mechanics, they just have to figure out how to settle their differences like adults, via discussion or violence, whichever is more convenient.

Capes makes it occasionally, even often, profitable to pick fights with folks over stuff they care about. Its not a game for the non-confrontational. The whole core mechanism of the system is built around picking fights you want to lose, so you can turn around and pick fights you can win. It also, and in parallel, makes awareness of the social context a part of the game, since if you're an ass, everyone else at the table will beat you bloody in Conflicts and arrange for you to come away with very little in the way of Resources. (You'd be surprised how little you can gain if everyone else at the table is willing to React to push your opponent to a 6, every time you get into a Conflict. And they certainly will, just to punish you, once they figure out they can.)

In that sense, Capes creates a self-correcting environment, which is a lot of the reason I am kind of baffled by your particular question setup here, and positively irritated by Syndir's repeated inability to Get It(tm). The underlying structure of the mechanics force crises of intentional conflict and then tell you how to deal with it. Pick your fights wisely, but pick your fights.