[Actual Play] Capes in Missassauga, a forensic analysis

[Hans]

Hi all:

Well, we have jointly decided to put our Capes game on hold here in Ontario, after 5 sessions.  That does not mean we will not play Capes in future (I personally hope to play a lot more), but I do not think we will be returning to the story line as described in our Wiki site (which I will update with the last session, eventually).  I thought it was worth discussing our experience.  Its going to be fairly stream of consciousness, sorry, and its too darn long.  Oh well.

* How in Sam Hill do you get more than one scene in a night!?  We had 5 sessions, five LONG scenes.  One of the biggest problems we were having was that we really felt like we weren't getting anywhere.  The amount of story "events" that took place in those five scenes would have taken one night, tops, in a game like Primetime Adventures (more on this later).  But we spent a LOT of time getting around to them.  Admittedly, we were all learning the rules as we went, and no one ever called Capes a "rules lite" game.   However, sometimes it seemed as if we were spinning our wheels.  As an example: I made the mistake at one point of putting at a Goal that seemed, at the time, sort of a throw away.  However, both Liz and Josh ended up locked into deadly combat over this goal that neither of them really seemed to care much about (primarily because they were both trying to get rid of debt off of their character sheets.)  An inordinate amount of time was spent on narration associated with this Goal, when in reality it probably could have dealt with in a paragraph.

* Cleverness can be a bad thing.  Both Piers and I started scenes with "clever" ideas, ideas that in other games would have led to some interesting game play, probably.  In Piers case, he was interested in a scene about the formation of the super-powered task force, so it was essentially a group of people around a meeting table.  In my case, it was a scene travelling from said meeting table to the first mission, with a television playing in the background.  In both cases, our "cleverness" pretty much backfired.  We ended up with scenes that pretty much ended up going nowhere (although they took a long time to do it).   What we need was some freaking ACTION!

* Colour and situation, not setting and character.  What I realized after playing Capes in these sessions was that Capes is fantastic at colour and situation, but pretty much horrible for setting.  Character is sort of in between.  I realized this because I realized we had been trying to create a very "setting" rich game.  All of us, but especially myself, were trying to jockey for ways to introduce interesting stuff about "WHY" things were happening, while not enough of us (especially me) were trying to make things actually happen.

* Epic stories a bad idea:  Those of you who have read our wiki know that we were going for a "BIG" story; man, we were trashing out cities right and left, having alien invaders turn people all over the world into zombies, you name it.  But the bottom line, on reflection, was that all of this was just window dressing.  We spent an inordinate amount of time on all this stuff, and in the end it was just a distraction.  Hence, I am of the opinion that "BIG" stories are a bad idea for Capes.  (more on this below)

* Fractured narration.  There was one instance where the group of characters was in an airplane, heading straight for the city sized alien spacecraft on a crash course.  Three characters are of interest here; Johnny, Ms. Scarlet, and Top Gun.  Here is how things went.  First, Ms. Scarlet's player narrates Johnny as unconscious, and falling to his doom after people ejected from the plane.  Ms. Scarlet is narrated diving downwards to catch him.    Then, the next player (a little while later) narrates Johnny conscious, zooming up to grab Top Gun out of the airplane.  Then, a little while later, someone narrates Top Gun falling to his doom out of the aircraft, but stoping himself by magnetically levitating his own belt buckle.   Note the disconnect in those pieces of narration.  Is Johnny unconscious or not?  What happened to Ms. Scarlet?  Why did Johnny save Top Gun only to drop him again?  None of this was intentional.  Essentially, what was happening was that people simply could not keep track of what was going on in the story line.  By the time all the reactions had finished for one action, and that person had taken a 2nd action with their other character, the specifics of what had been narrated as part of the first action were sort of lost.  Hence, the narration often seemed choppy and incoherent. 

* Lead up to the resolution of conflicts hard to time.  Ok, so "Event: The airplane crashes into the ocean" is on the table, from the 2nd page.  So, everyone starts narrating various tidbits that are starting to bring the airplane closer to its eventual doom.  Then, just at the moment when we all think Liz (I think it was Liz) was going to resolve the conflict, someone happens to roll the unclaimed side slighty upward at the end of the page.  Meanwhile, the airplane has been narrated to be moments away from crashing, and now has to somehow survive another page.  So, we end up with what is probably the longest airplane about to crash scene since Randy Quaid took 20 minutes to fly into the big spaceship in Independence Day.  The bottom line is that it is very difficult to pace the narration on events such as this so that the end result is something that is satisfying.

* Story control, who has it?:  At the end of our last session, Josh said something that I thought was very interesting.  Josh said that he felt like he had had very little control over what had happened in the game.  Now, some of this was due to some VERY bad luck on his part (I think at one point he rolled four or five ones in a row).  And some of it was due to all of us having overestimated the power of story tokens; story tokens are really only valuable in so far as you have more of them than other people.  But this comment was especially interesting to me because I felt I had had a LOT of control over how the story had gone.  Not all for the good, mind you; many of the problems I am describing here (such as the concentration on "setting" and the "big" events, which turned about to be bad news) were directly a result of my manipulation of things.  But what this told me is that I had taken a lot of control in the story seemingly from Josh.  On reflection, I realize that I had been, in essence, acting as an unofficial GM for the game.  How was I able to do this?  Well, a couple of ways.  First, I was the rules expert at the beginning, and understood the tactics better than anyone else.  Therefore, while I TRIED to be impartial about telling people their tactical options, I am certain that I was biased in doing so.  Second, I relied on my fellow players good natures to NOT veto many of the conflicts I played, and purposely wrote them to ensure that I got my way in the end.  I do not think this was effective, in the end, because while I was trying to be the GM, I didn't have the powers of a GM, so a lot of things that I was desparate to have in the story ended up being fought over, simply because they were what was on the table. 

* Panels of comic = action/reaction.  One thing that became clear to me was the following; Capes is a game that tells stories in the same way a comic book tells stories.  Each action/reaction bit of narration is essentially a "panel" in the ongoing story.  One of our problems was that we were treating these "panels" as mini-scenes, in and of themselves.  The amount of narration associated with the actions/reactions was incredible, sometimes.  But what this really means is that if the story you want to try to tell can't be chopped up into panels very easily, then don't use Capes to tell it.

* Primetime Adventures vs. Capes:  The final realization I had, as I was driving home from our last session was this...we had been trying to do a TV show instead of a comic book.  The story we were telling was pretty much an anime; even the way we described things happening was from a cinematic, not comic perspective.  And on reflection, I can now see where this was a bad idea.  We were essentially using the wrong tool for the job. 

So, what next?  Well, first, we are going to all experiment with the Burning Wheel for a while.  But my personal hope is that we, or at least some core group up here in our larger Toronto area indie-RPG group, comes back to Capes in the future, but in doing so commits to doing it like, I think, it was meant to be done.  "Superpowers are fun, but do you deserve them?"  That is the premise of Capes, and that is what we need to hit hard.  Spandex, fire blasts, tall buildings lept in a single bound, girlfriends hanging from suspension bridges, etc.  Keep each narration short and highly focused, preferably described like they were actually panels in a comic book.  Make sure that the scenes are situation heavy, and keep setting and other backstory stuff to a minimum.  If you NEED a darn wiki, then you are probably not doing it right. :)

I hope that Josh, Liz, and/or Piers pitches in on this at some point, to give their own perspectives.  But that is my take on things.

Hans

[jaw6]

* Story control, who has it?:  ... Josh said that he felt like he had had very little control over what had happened in the game.  Now, some of this was due to some VERY bad luck on his part... And some of it was due to all of us having overestimated the power of story tokens

To expand on this part a little... Playing Capes, I never felt like I had a good grasp on how, mechanically, to "get what I want". Talking with Hans about this that night, I think I decided this should be better phrased as "I can make things happen if I plan for them way, way, way in advance, but if the ground shifts a little, I don't feel like I have the tools -- no matter how large my toolbox gets -- to seize control."

As an example... As best I can remember now, there was a situation in the last session where I decided I wanted to win a certain conflict. I rolled, allied, and staked two debt from a 2-power drive to split, rolled some more. At some point, another player decided to try to win that conflict, and staked three debt from a 3-power drive. We then went on a story token spending spree, ratcheting both sides up, and up, and up... Point is: We each had the resources to max out our dice, but my two-way split was never going to beat her three-way, no matter how many tokens and inspirations I threw at it.

A story token may get me a re-roll, but I'll eventually run out of useful abilities. An inspiration is only useful if I haven't already maxed out a die. Debt is only useful until I've spent a drive-worth on the conflict... Sure, if I /knew/ in /advance/ that I'd be needing to stake more than two debt on that conflict, I could've rolled up another character, but there's my "seize control in a crisis" feeling, in a nutshell.

I began to feel as though, these resources, while they could add up to some interesting stuff, weren't that interesting in and of themselves, in the way of controlling the flow of the game. To that extent, the risk/reward cycle in Capes didn't make intuitive sense to me. I want to win/lose a number of conflicts, so that I generate debt/inspirations/tokens, so that I... ?

[Bret Gillan]

* How in Sam Hill do you get more than one scene in a night!?

 

Hans, based on what you've written - that one scene takes a whole session and you feel like the scenes are going nowhere, my suggestion is: STOP MAKING CONFLICTS. If you don't have a specific direction you want to take a scene, if you don't have a brilliant way to fish for story tokens, etc. don't make conflicts. Let the scene end, and let somebody come up with a fresh new one. I've been in games like this where a scene was taking forever, nothing was happening, and I had to say, "Guys, this scene is boring the Hell out of me, and it seems like you're making pissy little conflicts that aren't going anywhere. Let's wrap these up and move on."

And I think you guys as a group will get better at knowing when this is happening as you play more.

* Cleverness can be a bad thing.  Both Piers and I started scenes with "clever" ideas, ideas that in other games would have led to some interesting game play, probably.  In Piers case, he was interested in a scene about the formation of the super-powered task force, so it was essentially a group of people around a meeting table.  In my case, it was a scene travelling from said meeting table to the first mission, with a television playing in the background.  In both cases, our "cleverness" pretty much backfired.  We ended up with scenes that pretty much ended up going nowhere (although they took a long time to do it).   What we need was some freaking ACTION!

I think there's a lot of room for action in those scenes, but it's all about creating conflicts that will piss the other people off. The super-powered task force formation scene? I got a conflict already: Event: A superhero is named leader of the task force. What sort of Conflicts did you have in these scenes? In addition to my "know when to stop making conflicts" advice, I'd add that you need to make Conflicts that make the other players say, "Oh no you didn't!" and do that head-bob, fingerwag thing. Try and figure out what the other players want, and then shut them down. That's where the action is.

* Epic stories a bad idea:

You're onto something here, but I think it has nothing to do with whether the story is epic or not. *All* stories, epic or not, are window-dressing to Conflicts between characters. I just think that with epic stories, the tendency is to make conflicts that don't really matter to the players or the characters. "Goal: Blow up a city." Big whoop. We see cities blow up in movies and comics all the time. Sure, the superhero doesn't want that to happen, but neither he nor the supervillain have a personal stake in this. Now, if the superhero's girlfriend is in the city, that's a different story. The stakes are raised and there's major consequences to what's happening.

* Fractured narration.

Sounds to me like you guys just need to keep better track of who's saying what and speak up when things get weird. I've had this problem spring up in games, and sometimes you have to be like, "Dude that doesn't make any sense. Johnny was just unconscious and Ms. Scarlet was trying to save him. That makes the story pretty weak."  Sometimes you need some outside-of-narration conversation to make sure things make sense and flow.

* Lead up to the resolution of conflicts hard to time.  Ok, so "Event: The airplane crashes into the ocean" is on the table, from the 2nd page.  So, everyone starts narrating various tidbits that are starting to bring the airplane closer to its eventual doom.  Then, just at the moment when we all think Liz (I think it was Liz) was going to resolve the conflict, someone happens to roll the unclaimed side slighty upward at the end of the page.  Meanwhile, the airplane has been narrated to be moments away from crashing, and now has to somehow survive another page.  So, we end up with what is probably the longest airplane about to crash scene since Randy Quaid took 20 minutes to fly into the big spaceship in Independence Day.  The bottom line is that it is very difficult to pace the narration on events such as this so that the end result is something that is satisfying.

Don't know what to tell you here. There's tons of examples in fiction, movies and comics, of planes crashing for way too long. Are you looking for realistic pacing? The way Capes works, Conflicts can go on indefinitely as long as people still care about them and are willing to do things like roll up the opposing, unclaimed side of the Conflict. And really, you just have to learn some tricks. The plane was narrated as seconds away from crashing? Okay, the pilot manages to pull the plane up into the air at the last second but holy crap a wing gets torn off it's still going down! Or Superjoe used his Time Ring to freeze time just before it crashes but the Time Ring only works temporarily! etc. etc. Capes doesn't do the "satisfying narration." You do.

* Primetime Adventures vs. Capes:  The final realization I had, as I was driving home from our last session was this...we had been trying to do a TV show instead of a comic book.  The story we were telling was pretty much an anime; even the way we described things happening was from a cinematic, not comic perspective.  And on reflection, I can now see where this was a bad idea.  We were essentially using the wrong tool for the job.

This makes me raise an eyebrow - I don't see why Capes couldn't do anime or cinematic things. Manga blends over into anime, movies take a lot of inspiration from comics. I guess I'm not sure how a roleplaying game is "comics, not cinematic" or "cinematic, not comics" since those are mediums, not styles, and the overlap with how a game gets run doesn't seem to be that clear-cut.

"Superpowers are fun, but do you deserve them?"  That is the premise of Capes, and that is what we need to hit hard.  Spandex, fire blasts, tall buildings lept in a single bound, girlfriends hanging from suspension bridges, etc.  Keep each narration short and highly focused, preferably described like they were actually panels in a comic book.  Make sure that the scenes are situation heavy, and keep setting and other backstory stuff to a minimum.

I think you're onto things with this. Narration to accompany a dice roll should be short and punchy to keep things moving. And hammer those Drives!

[drnuncheon]

To expand on this part a little... Playing Capes, I never felt like I had a good grasp on how, mechanically, to "get what I want". Talking with Hans about this that night, I think I decided this should be better phrased as "I can make things happen if I plan for them way, way, way in advance, but if the ground shifts a little, I don't feel like I have the tools -- no matter how large my toolbox gets -- to seize control."

"No battle plan ever survived contact with the enemy." (aside: I was looking to attribute that but I can't find the original source - I've seen it attributed to Napoleon, von Clausewitz, and Helmoth von Moltke among others...)

Anyway, I think that if you go into a Capes game with a predetermined plot or idea of how things are going to go, you are likely to be disappointed, because each of the other players as just as much control over what happens as you do.  If the ground shifts a little, you have to change and adapt your plans.

Point is: We each had the resources to max out our dice, but my two-way split was never going to beat her three-way, no matter how many tokens and inspirations I threw at it.

The thing is, I'm not sure what you'd see as an acceptable outcome here - and what would still be acceptable if you were the person on the other side.  To me, it looks like both players were interested in the outcome, but it was more important to one character than it was to the other (higher Drive staked on the conflict), so that character won.

I had a situation very similar happen in our last game, but I was able to use it to draw the other player's resources away from another conflict that I wanted to win.  If you have all kinds of story tokens, why not spend one to create another goal? A goal that would either minimize the effects of the one you're going to lose, or one that would divert your opponent's attention?

J

[TonyLB]

I think what he's saying is not so much "I can't get the plot to go where I want" but rather "Oh man, I just made a decision that has consequences that I did not foresee, and which hamper me."

For instance, a common move from new players is to distribute their first five debt tokens, one on each drive.  Then when they want to split dice, they suddenly realize "Oh, man!  I needed to be thinking about this before-hand!  Now I'm screwed!"

[Sydney Freedberg]

Yeah, there're definitely some crunchy tactical rules that even I get tripped up by, and I've played literally dozens of sessions.

And yeah, having played a campaign of each with (almost) the same group of people, Capes and Prime Time Adventures are about as far apart from each other as character-focused thematic ("narrativist") games using fortune-in-the-middle resolution can be. PTA is very much in the mode of "the group roleplays stuff freeform until we hit a conflict point, then we talk over alternative stakes free-and-clear, then engage cards/dice, then back to freeform." Capes is very much "I have various mechanical options, on my turn I take one of them unilaterally and narrate it as punchily as I can, everyone deploys one of their mechanical counter-options, repeat." PTA can easily give you 5-10 minutes of everyone narrating per die roll/card draw; Capes breaks down with more than 30-60 seconds of narration per die roll/card draw. Even more profoundly, PTA gives the players, working mainly through consensus, a tremendous amount of control over where the story is going to go; Capes relies on competition among players to drive the story in directions that none of them could have possibly foreseen.

Some brief advice, mostly rehasing what others have said:

1) Narrate one die roll as one panel of a comic or one shot of a tightly-edited action movie. You should normally be saying only one or two sentences per die roll. This will not only help with speed of play, it'll make it a lot easier to keep track of what's going on and keep everyone's narration consistent.

2) Never introduce a new Conflict "just because." If you can't figure out anything else to do with your turn, roll up a level-1 Inspiration to a 2, or just pass; tossing out a Conflict that you don't find exciting is a sure way to get those interminable scenes everyone complains about.

3) Remember you can spend Story Tokens to claim more than one Conflict at a time, which makes it possible (especially if you spend a few more Story Tokens on roll on each of them) to shut down a scene, hard and fast. Again, if you forget this mechanic, it's very easy to end up with an interminable steady-state scene of new Conflicts being introduced as fast as old ones are resolved.

4) Never dump Debt on a Conflict "just because." If you invest mechanical resources in something, you're going to give it more screen time, which means you'd better be interested in it -- or, use your immense narrative authority to make it interesting. (E.g. turn "Event: the City explodes" into an intense back-and-forth about one little girl and her adorable kitty rushing through the flaming ruins).

5) Forget about consensus or "control." Be prepared to fight for what you want to see in the story, but also be prepared to enjoy losing that fight and being pleasantly surprised by your fellow players' imaginations.

[Hans]

Some brief advice, mostly rehasing what others have said:

Sydney, this is just about some of the best Capes advice I have ever read; I wish I had seen it months ago.  Thank you, sir.

[Hans]

4) Never dump Debt on a Conflict "just because." If you invest mechanical resources in something, you're going to give it more screen time, which means you'd better be interested in it -- or, use your immense narrative authority to make it interesting. (E.g. turn "Event: the City explodes" into an intense back-and-forth about one little girl and her adorable kitty rushing through the flaming ruins).

I like this bit so much, I am even going to double post on it.  This is some good advice.  I would say at least half of our problems could have been solved if we had just followed this one point.  While being overdrawn is not a good thing, I think Eric said elsewhere it isn't THAT bad a thing either, certainly not worth bogging down over a conflict just to get rid of it.

[Hans]

* How in Sam Hill do you get more than one scene in a night!?

 

Hans, based on what you've written - that one scene takes a whole session and you feel like the scenes are going nowhere, my suggestion is: STOP MAKING CONFLICTS.

On reflection, I don't think it was that we were making too many conflicts.  In fact, in most scenes the only conflicts that would hit the table were the ones made in the first or second pages. 

I think the problem was that we were saying to darn much with each action/reaction.  If we had stuck to Sydney's one or two sentences per narration, things would have gone MUCH faster. 

I'd add that you need to make Conflicts that make the other players say, "Oh no you didn't!" and do that head-bob, fingerwag thing. Try and figure out what the other players want, and then shut them down. That's where the action is.

I do think we needed more practice at doing this.

I just think that with epic stories, the tendency is to make conflicts that don't really matter to the players or the characters. "Goal: Blow up a city." Big whoop. We see cities blow up in movies and comics all the time. Sure, the superhero doesn't want that to happen, but neither he nor the supervillain have a personal stake in this. Now, if the superhero's girlfriend is in the city, that's a different story. The stakes are raised and there's major consequences to what's happening.

This is the gospel truth.  I can think of at least two almost completely worthless; "Event: The world changes forever", and "Event: The tsunami strikes".  This is what I was getting at when I said that Capes does situation well, but setting not so much.  These are both setting events, and don't really involve the characters at all, or at least indirectly.  What I think my mistake was was in trying to engage the imagination of the players in building up the backstory of the game.  Thats all well and good in some other games (and might work in your own Gods hack, which I am still processing), but it is a bad idea in Capes.

This makes me raise an eyebrow - I don't see why Capes couldn't do anime or cinematic things. Manga blends over into anime, movies take a lot of inspiration from comics. I guess I'm not sure how a roleplaying game is "comics, not cinematic" or "cinematic, not comics" since those are mediums, not styles, and the overlap with how a game gets run doesn't seem to be that clear-cut.

Let me elaborate; its the difference between a camera shot and a comic panel.  In a comics panel, you may have a fair amount of dialogue, but you have essentially one physical action taking place.  Thor smites the Hulk with his hammer.  Galactus flips the switch on his world eating machine.  Spiderman swings across from building to another.  Therefore, the action is always in chunks.  By contrast, a camera shot can conceivably include any amount of action; think of that long tracking shot at the beginning of Robert Altman's "The Player" where the camera sort of meanders around the studio lot.  Even in a tv show, the camera shows action flowing from one thing to another.  Now, I admit, people like Frank Miller brought a very "cinematic" fell to comics; Miller would have a whole series of interconnected pseudo-panels of, say, Iron Fist and Daredevil mixing it up, that felt more like a camera shot than a series of comics panels.

A good example of this is the manga and anime of Akira, by Katsuhiro Otomo.  For those of you that have seen the movie and read the comic, think of the motorcycle fight between Kaneda's gang and the other gang.  In the comic, the action is divided up into panels.  We see Kaneda racing ahead, then flip to his opponent, then to Tetsuo swinging a hammer onto an opponent, etc.  In the movie, it all flows...we see several seconds of Kaneda racing at top speed, lights flying past reflected in his helmet, then we see the opponents racing up behind him with some dialogue, etc.

So I guess what I am getting at is that while Capes may be able to do the story of Akira, it will end up doing it like the manga, not the anime, if that makes sense.

[jaw6]

"No battle plan ever survived contact with the enemy."... Anyway, I think that if you go into a Capes game with a predetermined plot or idea of how things are going to go, you are likely to be disappointed, because each of the other players as just as much control over what happens as you do.  If the ground shifts a little, you have to change and adapt your plans... The thing is, I'm not sure what you'd see as an acceptable outcome here - and what would still be acceptable if you were the person on the other side.  To me, it looks like both players were interested in the outcome, but it was more important to one character than it was to the other (higher Drive staked on the conflict), so that character won.

I think it's more an issue of "all dressed up and nowhere to go". Elsewhere in this thread, we're talking about creating conflicts that push character/player buttons ("Now, if the superhero's girlfriend is in the city...") If my buttons are being pushed, I begin to see conflicts that I want to win. Its even possible that the stakes have been raised in intra-conflict narration (Conflict: The city is going boom". Yeah, sure, okay, mildly interested... Narration: "And, look, isn't that your girlfriend?" Geez, now I wish I'd spent from a different drive!)

I think what he's saying is not so much "I can't get the plot to go where I want" but rather "Oh man, I just made a decision that has consequences that I did not foresee, and which hamper me."

I think this is a good summary of my sense of things. I don't have a good, intuitive-level grasp of Capes risk/reward exchange, which makes it hard to foresee mechanical hangs. Add to that the ability to narrate additional consequences during play, and I get all confounded.

Random other thought: Play in Capes often feels counter-intuitive, in general. For example: Sometimes the best way to get what you want, is to be relatively in-active ("stop making conflicts" is the big advice here, right? "Don't spend debt on minor conflicts", etc.) I think, for me, at least, I was creating or participating in conflicts out of a sense of obligation to participate. In other games, certainly, being a wall-flower is discouraged, so there seems to be a bit of un-learning to play Capes. (Makes me wonder if Capes is more intuitive for those completely new to rping, anyway...)

Or: Sometimes you actively want to lose conflicts. Story tokens are nice, I hear. It takes a bit of mind-warping to get myself in the mentality where I want to lose a conflict. And, in actual play, I found these two non-intuitive elements running against each other: I spent debt to get on the losing side of a conflict ("I'll get some story tokens!"), then found myself maxing out a drive and suddenly motivated to win ("Hey, maybe I should stake some of this on something...")

[TonyLB]

So, Hans, Joshua et. al., are you concerned by the fact that it's not intuitive yet (i.e. when you've played only one session and are still feeling your way into the rules)?  Or are you concerned that it is so fundamentally foreign to your nature that it will never become intuitive?

[Hans]

So, Hans, Joshua et. al., are you concerned by the fact that it's not intuitive yet (i.e. when you've played only one session and are still feeling your way into the rules)?  Or are you concerned that it is so fundamentally foreign to your nature that it will never become intuitive?

I have played more than enough now that I would say I am just about as familiar as anyone else other than you, Sydney and Eric with the rules themselves, so I don't think that is an issue anymore.  What I am still feeling out is exactly what kinds of stories and play styles work with Capes vs. what don't.  For me, I view the experience not as "Capes doesn't work for me" and more as "What I tried to do with Capes was a mistake, lets try something else".

However, I still have one outstanding concern about Capes that I have yet to be able to completely resolve in my mind, and that is "Can Capes give me the long term play satisfaction that I have gotten from other games in my life, or will it always be a one off, every once in a while kind of thing?"  Our sessions were an experiment along those lines, but I am unable to interpret the results clearly to answer that question.  That is because I skipped a step; instead of testing the game in its intended setting (it is called Capes, after all) and proceeded to uncharted waters. 

I do know what the features of my next long term experiment with Capes will be, though:

* strictly four-colour super-hero stuff, probably basing off of, but not directly using, an existing comic book series
* play with a group of people who love four-colour super-hero stuff as much as I do, and want exactly that (not Dark Knight Returns, not manga, not the Amazing Carrot, just guys and girls in tights kicking bad guy butt and getting melodramatic)
* keep the narration simple and to the point, focusing on the "comic panel" metaphor
* Concentrate heavily on the drives, and connect them into the narration

That 2nd pt comes across a bit like I am blaming others for the way our Missassauga experiment ran; far from it!  If anything, I was the primary mover away from the four-colour aesthetic into other territory. 

[De Reel]

- Excuse me, is everybody gone ?
I thought, although I am neither Josh nor Brad nor Bill, I could add something about focussing goals by pacing the beginning of a game session (if nothing as obvious as "X goes out and buys the pizzas the others like most" is already available). As an epilogue, you know.

YOU CAN JUMP THE LITERATURE DIRECTLY TO MY OFFER
(And for those who wonder when I will stop fussying around about addressing someone on the forum about an old topic which doesn't matter anymore, I'll say : when I will be invited to express myself on a fresh one, or after I manage goal setting a bit more)
WHY THE POST
I had this idea about pacing down the "confrontational" nature of conflicts, which can crumble into what you have described : goals that create conflict without constructing anything in the not-so-long run. I felt it had to be done using the goal mechanics. So I have had this abstract theory about SG, but I had not yet seen where to put this in practice. Then there was you, Hans, who most simply, maybe as a beginner, pointed out a major flaw of many an "experienced" game :  "a good fight without a cause". Brett Gillan's answer to it seems to me really right, but somehow incomplete. Mine is too late, but I hope will be of use. (Do I need to say : "rolling dice on Hans side with 'experiment' " ?)
Also, it so happens that I roleplayed AND GMed a "captain of the team election" in a Champions game and it was absolute fun and left room for romance and plenty more issues to be played on later on. Actually, each player knew the others well, played two characters, GM included, who played City Mayor and Chief of Police as well as their own supers, two "non"PC which had slightly opposing interests, and the point was forming a team after a classical first "casual" encounter. The way we "double-played" it (with so many possible antagonizing directions) was very close to a diceless form of Capes, yet it lacked all the neat mechanics to dig on in it. Maybe that's another reason why I was interested by the present thread.

SALESMAN SPEECH
Brett Gillan's "captain of the team election" is in my experience a nice "setting goal" (not "goal setting", mind you)
A clever setting goal gives time to wrap together fractured narration (much the same "post-modern" approach to narration as your "panel" issue, don't you think ?), epic as it be. It gives not much story control, maybe, but to hell with it : the very game may be chaotic in nature (is "rolling the die" a clue ? What about " bringing a number of people to speak in the same place" ?). I will propose one more "setting goal" to your scrutiny, not knowing in what situation it would be of use. I hint at a "can't keep player(s) from arguing on anything even if they don't care" scenario.

MY OFFER TO HANS
The goal would be "everything is fine" and you just narrate what a peacefull day it is, maybe sending each character in his (secret ID if any) daily life. After all, that's how it all began. I already think of one result : each player trying to break this (after all, they wanna play, don't they ?), and doing so giving an hint at what he is after (the others just have to grab the theme in his narration, and let it go, as it doesn't matter right now). Then you have another player, and it's time to get to weave the themes (three seems easy at first), and you've got at least one page to find a good way of putting all of them supers or normals together. Actually, I think it can also go pretty wrong, with one(+) player(s) not wanting his(their) character to join on the others', but then, as the place is "the city", there may be some big signs in the sky or, well... something. Let me know if you can use this and what would eventually come out.

[Hans]

MY OFFER TO HANS
The goal would be "everything is fine" and you just narrate what a peacefull day it is, maybe sending each character in his (secret ID if any) daily life. After all, that's how it all began. I already think of one result : each player trying to break this (after all, they wanna play, don't they ?), and doing so giving an hint at what he is after (the others just have to grab the theme in his narration, and let it go, as it doesn't matter right now). Then you have another player, and it's time to get to weave the themes (three seems easy at first), and you've got at least one page to find a good way of putting all of them supers or normals together. Actually, I think it can also go pretty wrong, with one(+) player(s) not wanting his(their) character to join on the others', but then, as the place is "the city", there may be some big signs in the sky or, well... something. Let me know if you can use this and what would eventually come out.

Hi Nicolas:

I admit that I had a hard time figuring out exactly what you were getting at in your post.  It seems like you were mostly being supportive of my experience, in which case, thanks! 

In the last bit above, you seem to be suggesting a scene in which the very first conflict played is:

"Goal: Everything is Fine"

or perhaps

"Event: Everything is Fine"

Frankly, these tickle me pink.  I have no idea how they would actually work in play, but at the right moment, they could be a lot of fun.  The interesting thing about them, to my mind, is the fact that before they resolve NOTHING CAN BE FINE!  Not even the weather...

[De Reel]

I guess some introductory narratives (heard in early childhood ?) has produced unalterable damage on a very specific location of my brain. I meant "wrong". But this won't hurt my point too much (only make it longer, which I must apologize for). Also, I should say "event" and instead I say "goal" because I take bona fide for granted around the table as well as in this forum.

1° If everything is too fine, something bad will happen. Stereotypical yet efficient impending disaster.

2° Well then, if everything IS wrong, it makes the scene a tiny bit harder to picture, I admit. Apocalypse is a poetic genre.

As a gaming group, we had to blow out of our living rooms some bad habits, first "all combat action", then "incongruous gregarism on behalf of the characters", and then "players confront each other on every doorknob" (goal : "the door opens").
Then, scientific progress just went "BOINK".
You all know what's next : "physical violence is resorted to", "any character gets in touch with any other", and last "there is a conflict" created as events (and yet named goals;) They were easy to come up with intuitively. We saw they threatened specific assumptions we had made about the game and they have given us a tool for getting closer to what we like and want to HEAR.

Anyway, the result in my experience was that everyone was thinking (So much for having fun...) "How do we play this ? ", "How do we get out of this ? ", mostly following the set direction when prompted, looking at the others in disbelief, discarding prepared goals if any, and trying his best to be constructive after that. Be it only because it is difficult enough to find a "way back to the world as we knew it" (1° as players or 2° as characters).

POSOLOGY : Make sure every one of the players is fine. Spend an action.

CAUTION : It can all go awefully wrong ("no physical violence" some players pictured as Disneyland...). You don't want to do this in real life. It smells like terrorist action.