Conflicts are about what you *can't* do, not what you *can*.

[TonyLB]

Andrew:  Well said.  Saying "The conflicts don't matter because I can narrate the consequences away" is sort of like saying "Taking 98 of my fighter's 100 hit points in D&D doesn't matter, because I can laugh it off and say 'Tis but a flesh wound'!"  Sure, it doesn't matter ... until a goblin with a thrown twig comes along, and your guy falls down dead.  At that point those 98 points of damage turn out to have mattered very much.

[Hans]

Capes *could* have more rules added in order to fix this.  Instead, we do not add any rules and simply assign the Social Contract the task of making it all work.

Sorry, its a bit off topic, but I just have to say this...

The last thing Capes needs is more rules.  There are enough of the bloody things already.  It is by far the most difficult game I have ever had to learn, or teach, that didn't involve cardboard counters and a hexagon grid.  I would rather give up the whole thing and play Mutants and Masterminds then add any more to the rules.  And this is from someone who loves playing Capes, mind you.  

As to your original point, one purpose of conflicts is indeed that they prevent something from entering the fiction, at least for a time.  This is a very important role that they play in the game.   Related to that function is that they give a player a chance (through the mechanics of the game) to be the FIRST person to put something in the game about a subject.  You are not guaranteed this role, but at least you make it a role open to competition.  So if I play "Goal: Doc Ock defeats Spiderman" not only do I prevent Doc Ock from defeating Spiderman for a time in the fiction (allowing more narration of their struggle to occur), but I also give myself a chance to be the one who gets to narrate its conclusion.

In my own experience, though, neither of the above are the most common reasons for playing conflicts.  They are reasons, and good ones, but the most common reason people play conflicts I have seen is essentially just to organize play.  In a game with a GM, the GM organizes the play.  If the GM says my character is at a particular place, and is facing particular obstacles, I know where things are going.  As Capes has a table full of pseudo-GM's there has to be a way to organize the ongoing fiction, so that everyone knows what the point of it all is.  Conflicts are the mechanism used for this purpose.  I lay a conflict down, I am directing the fiction to some particular subject matter; as long as that conflict is on the table, some narration will at least be tangentially associated to what that 3x5 card has written on it.  

This is why, for example, the player of Doc Ock may play the above goal himself.  Sure, everyone knows that Doc Ock's player could simply narrate Doc Ock defeating Spiderman, but thats not the point.  Doc Ock's player wants to have FUN with the fight between Dok Ock and Spidey.  He wants that to be the subject matter (or at least a portion of the subject matter) of this scene.  He is going to WORD it in such a way as to challenge Spidey's player; that is, he is going to play "Goal: Doc Ock defeats Spidey" or even "Goal: Doc Ock humiliates Spidey" instead of "Goal: Spidey defeats Doc Ock" or "Event: someone is victorious" or similar.  That's a kind of mechanical trash-talk.  If Doc Ock's player would settle for nothing less than narrating the humiliation of Spiderman, he could simply narrate it!  The real point behind the conflict is to focus attention on the struggle between these two characters, and make it occupy at least a portion of the time spent playing.

Now, all my talk in an earlier post about "Oh Hell NO!" type conflicts feeds into this, because those kind of conflicts are BETTER at organizing the game than ones that don't make anyone say "Oh Hell No!"  If you play a conflict that doesn't generate any strong feeling about how it should be resolved, you only organize play insofar as someone is going to have to, eventually, claim a side and clear it off the table to finish the scene.  But if you play a conflict about which at least one other person at the table has strong feelings, then you really organize things for a while; people are going to really concentrate on the subject matter of that conflict.  In our [url-=http://www.indie-rpgs.com/forum/index.php?topic=19942.0]Capes in Mississauga[/url] game, everyone, but especially yours truly, ended up playing a lot of conflicts JUST to organize play, and while they succeeded at that purpose, they did not generate the intense, fun fiction that makes it worth playing.  If you want to bring a tsunami into the game "Event: The Tsunami strikes" will do the trick, but "Goal: your girlfriend escapes the Tsunami unscathed" will do it with a BANG!  

[Hans]

Good gad that was a long freaking post!  I need to remember to preview the darn things and shut up once I have made my principle point.

[Tuxboy]

Anyone that was enough of an asshat to constantly retcon conflict narration would rapidly find themselves without a gaming group.

In my experience the best way to deal with that kind of advanced asshattery is to show the offender the door...games are supposed to be fun, and conflict resolution is part of the game. Don't like the conflict result then use the mechanic to throw down another conflict to make the changes, don't use a lame-ass free narration route when you could be adding to the story and narrating some great plot.

Freeform has its place in gaming and can be lots of fun, but when you have a rule set why not use it?

[Sindyr]

That;s my point. 
1) Capes games are broken without the use of the Social Contract.  D&D for example, is not. (Although personally I hate that game)
2) Capes seems to intentionally leaves gaps where it could employ rules.  In other words, where broken play could be highly ameliorated or fixed with a simply rule addition, Capes seems to choose to be as light a framework as possible, eschewing extra rules and putting the burden on the Social Contract to make Capes work.

I am not saying the above things are wrong, they just are.

[Sindyr]

As to your original point, one purpose of conflicts is indeed that they prevent something from entering the fiction, at least for a time.

This is in fact what I noted as one of the two things that they do.  The other thing that they do is establish an event in the moment - but do not make that event a semi-permanent accomplishment.

If Doc Ock's player would settle for nothing less than narrating the humiliation of Spiderman, he could simply narrate it!

In theory he could, but in reality he can't:

Anyone that was enough of an asshat to constantly retcon conflict narration would rapidly find themselves without a gaming group.

So while Capes find retconning to be valid play, almost no gaming group woulc actually permit it.  Which makes my point that Capes is incomplete, or at least, the Capes that is played is almost never the Capes that is written.  The Social Contract makes a played Capes game *completely* different than one *in theory*.

And this is directly because:
1) Conflicts only have meaning when in play.  Before being played or after being resolved, Capes assigns them NO meaning or function.
2) Yet within the Social Contract *players* assign resolved Conflicts meaning socially, and will attack anyone that goes against the *implied* but never *stated* meaning of a resolved Conflicts.

The fact that a Capes game would I think dissolve into chaos if the players ONLY required each other to follow the explicit Capes rules for Conflict's is in a way what I would call "Cape's dirty little secret", put simply:

You cannot have a meaningful non-chaotic game of Capes without the players agreeing to assign meaning to Conflict's even after they have been resolved, despite the fact that the rules do no such thing.

Again, there is nothing wrong with a rule-set being imcomplete in this way, as long as we all understand and accept how it must be used in practice, as long as we agree on the social contract we overlay on Capes to make it functional and not result in broken play or people being shown the door.

However, a different way Capes might have addressed resolved conflicts could have been that somehow the resolution of a conflict create a semi-permanent Fact, which all future narrations cannot contradict without removing it.  One could create a set of rules for Capes that would cover how future narration must take into account past conflict resolutions.  I do not intend to do that now.

Capes chose the simpler approach.  Capes chooses to make no rules contraining narrations to be contrained in anyway by past resolved conflicts.  This was I think a very shrewd choice, because rule or no rule, no player is going to let another narrate away or retcon the effects of the conflict he fought for and won, no matter how valid the play is.

So despite the fact that Capes has not protection for the results of winning a conflict, human nature rushes in to fill the gap.  If Spidey's player winfs a "defeat doc ock" Conflict after pending much resources and emotional energy, he is not going to permit Doc Ock's player to reverse that in free narration the very next turn, even though Capes does.

In this way, a game of Capes becomes more than a game of Capes played by the rules.  The intolerbale to most spaces that Capes seem to intentionally leave get filled in immeditately and implicitly.  Capes thereby becomes Capes+, and *that's* the game we play.

We don't play Capes.  Apparently, no one can bear to.  We play Capes+.

[TonyLB]

Sindyr:  You're really, really not qualified to use the word "broken" in this context.

You don't even understand, despite dozens of people explaining it to you in thousands of pages, what Capes is built to do.  I shall humbly defer, in analogy, to the great Mark Twain, in Innocents Abroad:

The coffee had been steadily growing more and more execrable for the space of three weeks, till at last it had ceased to be coffee altogether and had assumed the nature of mere discolored water--so this person said. He said it was so weak that it was transparent an inch in depth around the edge of the cup. As he approached the table one morning he saw the transparent edge--by means of his extraordinary vision long before he got to his seat. He went back and complained in a high-handed way to Capt. Duncan. He said the coffee was disgraceful. The Captain showed his. It seemed tolerably good. The incipient mutineer was more outraged than ever, then, at what he denounced as the partiality shown the captain's table over the other tables in the ship. He flourished back and got his cup and set it down triumphantly, and said:

"Just try that mixture once, Captain Duncan."

He smelt it--tasted it--smiled benignantly--then said:

"It is inferior--for coffee--but it is pretty fair tea."

[Hans]

1) Capes games are broken without the use of the Social Contract.  D&D for example, is not. (Although personally I hate that game)

ALL role-playing games have a social contract.  D&D MORE so than other games, since there are so many different ways to play it that are mutually incompatible.  Every time someone accuses someone else of being a rules-lawyer or a munchkin, every time there is a total party kill and the DM cackles while the players get pissed off, every time someone gets frustrated with the DM for ignoring a rule that would have helped their character at that moment just to keep the "action" going, you see the social contract in action in a D&D game.  

As part of the social contract in Capes, perhaps a higher level of trust between players is necessary than in D&D, and also perhaps a mutual agreement to not sweat details of narration and not get too worked up about specifics.  But that is not the presence vs. absence of a contract, that is simply a different type of contract for a different type of game.

[TonyLB]

You cannot have a meaningful non-chaotic game of Capes without the players agreeing to assign meaning to Conflict's even after they have been resolved, despite the fact that the rules do no such thing.

Well, the rules establish the framework in which players are consistently rewarded for assigning such meaning.  To my mind that's a much more powerful way of structuring their attitudes than saying "Hey!  You gotta assign meaning!  Uh ... or else!"

There's no rule in Chess that says "You want to dominate the center of the board."  If you can win without doing that, great ... but by and large you can't.  And so, people contest the center of the board.  Do they do this because there's a vast unspoken Social Contract that has nothing to do with the rules?  No.  They do it because they see enough of the implications of the rules (either by raw insight, from hearing the advice of others, or from having had the experience of being beaten because of dominant positioning) to see how important it is.

Is it possible to have a game where people blow off those inherent reward structures?  Sure.  In Capes or Chess, beginning players make such rookie mistakes all the time.  But as both games are absolutely savage in punishing such mistakes, experience usually teaches them better very quickly.

[Sindyr]

Sindyr:  You're really, really not qualified to use the word "broken" in this context.

Again, for the record, I disagree.  And actually, I am perfectly fine with you and I not seeing eye to eye on this, or any matter.

[Sindyr]

1) Capes games are broken without the use of the Social Contract.  D&D for example, is not. (Although personally I hate that game)

ALL role-playing games have a social contract.  D&D MORE so than other games, since there are so many different ways to play it that are mutually incompatible.  Every time someone accuses someone else of being a rules-lawyer or a munchkin, every time there is a total party kill and the DM cackles while the players get pissed off, every time someone gets frustrated with the DM for ignoring a rule that would have helped their character at that moment just to keep the "action" going, you see the social contract in action in a D&D game. 

As part of the social contract in Capes, perhaps a higher level of trust between players is necessary than in D&D, and also perhaps a mutual agreement to not sweat details of narration and not get too worked up about specifics.  But that is not the presence vs. absence of a contract, that is simply a different type of contract for a different type of game.

Either I am a really bad explainer, quite possible, or the mindset of some here cannot take in what I am saying, also possible.  I *do* feel like I am repeating myself a lot though.

-All games, in fact all social activities have a Social Contract.
-What makes D&D not broken ultimately is that D&D assigns ultimate authority to resolve all issues to a single individual.  This takes ANY hole in the system and patches it with that single rule.  Of course, as much as possible, D&D's authors try to avoid making you use it by trying to have fewer holes.
-Capes has no central authority and proposes absolutely no mechanism for what to do when things break down.  Because the Capes rules allow as valid play nigh instant retconning of any won conflict, the Capes rules alone would tend to result in continual and never ending break-downs - which is what I mean when I say it is "incomplete" as it stands and if used only as written would result in "broken play"
-Capes could "fix" this in different ways, including rules for challenging and ruling on valid play that some in the group nevertheless don't like, or rules for creating constraints on future narrations based on the conflicts that have been won in the past.
-Or Capes could simply have no fix for this problem, forcing the players to fix it themselves within the higher level of the Social Contract. (Or with house mods, which of course drifts Capes.)

Here's an analogy which I think is very accurate.
Imagine a version of basketball without any written rules concerning dribbling.  Still, a group of friends play and always dribble the ball, just like regular basketball.  A new guy moves into the area, and joins one of the teams.  He reads up on this game, reads all the written rules, and start to play.  Immediately everyone is pissed at him - he runs with the ball to the hoop and shoots, never dribbling.  "Why aren't you dribbling?" they ask him.  "Why should I? It's nowhere in the rules." he counters.  The players, angry with him and upset at how he is playing refuse to play with him.

Whereas maybe what they should do is simply add the rule about dribbling to their set of rules.

Same thing.

[Hans]

-What makes D&D not broken ultimately is that D&D assigns ultimate authority to resolve all issues to a single individual.  This takes ANY hole in the system and patches it with that single rule.  Of course, as much as possible, D&D's authors try to avoid making you use it by trying to have fewer holes.

I believe this is fundamentally flawed, but it is also off topic, so I will take it to a new topic.

[Sindyr]

-What makes D&D not broken ultimately is that D&D assigns ultimate authority to resolve all issues to a single individual.  This takes ANY hole in the system and patches it with that single rule.  Of course, as much as possible, D&D's authors try to avoid making you use it by trying to have fewer holes.

I believe this is fundamentally flawed, but it is also off topic, so I will take it to a new topic.

I think it is quite accurate.  Depending on your reframing for the new thread, I may or may not participate, depending on how it relates to our previous discussion.

[Tuxboy]

-All games, in fact all social activities have a Social Contract.
-What makes D&D not broken ultimately is that D&D assigns ultimate authority to resolve all issues to a single individual.  This takes ANY hole in the system and patches it with that single rule.  Of course, as much as possible, D&D's authors try to avoid making you use it by trying to have fewer holes.
-Capes has no central authority and proposes absolutely no mechanism for what to do when things break down.  Because the Capes rules allow as valid play nigh instant retconning of any won conflict, the Capes rules alone would tend to result in continual and never ending break-downs - which is what I mean when I say it is "incomplete" as it stands and if used only as written would result in "broken play"
-Capes could "fix" this in different ways, including rules for challenging and ruling on valid play that some in the group nevertheless don't like, or rules for creating constraints on future narrations based on the conflicts that have been won in the past.
-Or Capes could simply have no fix for this problem, forcing the players to fix it themselves within the higher level of the Social Contract. (Or with house mods, which of course drifts Capes.)

Bur Sindyr, D&D doesn't have rules for dealing with asshattery!!!

I've never in 28 years of RP ever seen a game with specific rules on dealing with disruptive asshats in game...that is what the social contract is for.

I think I know why you are failing to understand this concept...you have gone on record in one of your earliest posts as saying that you are immune to the popcorn throwing that goes along with behaving like an asshat...and I think you might be assuming everyone else is too...IME this could not be further from the truth. This is a major part of the social contract and if you can't grasp its importance and prevalance then it is no wonder you see the need for rules to cover every aspect of social play.

Not everyone is an asshat!!! Not everyone retcons things they don't like...do you understand this?

Do you seriously believe that players of whatever game cannot control other player by the simple enforcement of the social contract?..Ask them to behave, if they don't then exclude them...couldn't be simpler.

Here's an analogy which I think is very accurate.
Imagine a version of basketball without any written rules concerning dribbling.  Still, a group of friends play and always dribble the ball, just like regular basketball.  A new guy moves into the area, and joins one of the teams.  He reads up on this game, reads all the written rules, and start to play.  Immediately everyone is pissed at him - he runs with the ball to the hoop and shoots, never dribbling.  "Why aren't you dribbling?" they ask him.  "Why should I? It's nowhere in the rules." he counters.  The players, angry with him and upset at how he is playing refuse to play with him.

Whereas maybe what they should do is simply add the rule about dribbling to their set of rules.

What? Worst analogy EVER! Removing an existing rule and then stating it should be reinstated is spurious at best...

This is not a situation where a required rule is missing from the ruleset but that an opinion that the social contract cannot be enforced without a rule.

Better analogy for this situation is:

A group of friends play  regular basketball.  A new guy moves into the area, and joins one of the teams.  He reads up on this game, reads all the written rules, and start to play.  Immediately everyone is pissed at him - he runs with the ball to the hoop and shoots, never dribbling.  "Why aren't you dribbling?" they ask him.  "Why should I? It's way easier this way." he counters.  The players, angry with him and upset at how he is playing refuse to play with him.

The guy is an asshat and should either play by the rules or not at all.

The players reserve the right to refuse to play with asshats...it is the only statemement that is needed.

[Sindyr]

OK, tux, I don't know why, but you just are not hearing me.

I don't have the stamina for retyping the same explanation again and again over and over.

I invite you to pm me your phone number if you want to continue this coversation, or I can pm you mine.

Suffice it to say, you still aren't getting it, and not because there's nothing to get.

Unfortunately, I no longer have the patience to try to show you that through hours of typing - I don't have the energy or time when it seems that a LOT would be required - assuming that it is even possible to show you.

I apologize, and hope you take me up on the idea of a phone call, or if you are outside US/Canada/Western Europe (which my vonage covers), a skype conversation.

Cheers and good luck.