Threatening vs. Enticing and its meaning for Capes

[Threlicus]

Sindyr's post in this thread got me to thinking. I'm a math geek (well, physics, but close enough) so I'm going to lay out something that's quasi-mathematical here.

First, for a given player assume that we have a utility function for the narrative. That is, just a measure of 'how happy' that player is with the narrative. Now, in general this is a very complicated function of innumerable variables, but it doesn't matter since I'm never going to write one down. :) Now, suppose someone in Capes puts down a conflict. For simplicity of explanation I'm going to assume a simple two-sided conflict in which only two players are interested, though I think the idea generalizes. For each side in a conflict, imagine a circle of 'possible resolutions' around each of two points (Yes or No on the conflict). Now, I'm going to define two things, using the terminology I threw out in the other thread:
1) Enticement is the *maximum* of the player's utility functions over those circles. This is the utility he gets if he gets to pick the narrative outcome.
2) Threat is the negative of the integral of the utility times the player's perceived likelihood of the other player choosing each other possible result. This is what he's likely to end up with if he doesn't win the conflict. (I probably would add additional Threat to cover the variance -- the more uncertain the value is, the more threatening it is -- but I don't think that's essential to understand what I'm saying).

I think these are somewhat meaningful names, except that the names imply some relationship to some average or null-case utility, which I have not defined. Thus, Enticement is the possible good that can come from a player winning a conflict; the Threat is the likely bad from the other player winning. On the other hand, if you do want to define a reference point (say, as the current utility) I think everything still works.

My theory is that a player's engagement in a conflict is a monotonically increasing function of Enticement + Threat (which must by construction always be non-negative). But, a player will feel more coerced into engagement by other players the larger the value of Threat, quite possibly diminishing his happiness with the game as a whole. Of course, both engagement and feeling of coercion are a function of individual players' nature and preferences.

Some implications:
1) A conflict with one very good result and a bunch of similar worse results gets the same engagement as a conflict with no outstanding result but a likely-to-be-chosen, very bad set of results; but the latter feels more coercive to the player.
2) A conflict where the opposing player is likely to pick the same result you would gets very little engagement, even if that result is very good for you.
3) One way to affect another player's engagement in a conflict is to say or do things which affect his perception of your likelihood to resolve. (E.g., making statements, either overt or implicitly through your narration, about how you intend to resolve should you win).
4) Making players worry about whether you will resolve things negatively against them (i.e., increasing the perceived likelihood you will resolve ways they don't like) will increase engagement but also the feeling of threat and is thus dangerous, at least for some groups.

Note that this emphatically does not address the question of players getting pulled into conflicts by the allure of winning resources for the future; but I think that that is a second-order effect. Once a player percieves a high degree of engagement on the part of another player, they may get involved and challenge the other player simply to see how far he is willing to go to win it; but that requires a high degree of engagement in the first place. There's also another second-order effect in that a resolver may want to deliberately not choose the result that gives him the highest utility, in order to affect another player's future perception of likelihood and therefore engagement in future conflicts. Still, I think these are perturbations of the base theory.

I have some thoughts for what this model of players' approaches to conflicts might mean for choosing conflicts and for suggesting ways to tweak Capes' rules to make them more hospitable to players like Sindyr who feel threatened by certain possible resolutions, but I'm going to save them until tonight at least, when I will have stewed on them a bit.

[Sindyr]

I need to read your reply more deeply, and I will.  Not sure you didn't want to post it on my thread unless having my name as the thread author is the kiss of death here, grin.

I just wanted to briefly mentioned that as I scan through your post, it seems to only cover the types of players to whom ultimately narrative play is the most important.  It seems to me from my observations that most of the Capes players I have experienced here in the forums really value the competitive side of Capes more highly.  That their primary concern is about proving themselves and participating in these ego wars, coutning coup, matters of bravado, and such like, and for these players, the narrative rewards and penalties come as a distant second (or third) behind the *competitive* rewards and penalities.

If you have four primarily competitive Capes players, you will find I think that elements of narration serving as tools for the competition, and I am not sure if what you are writing would apply to such a table.

Now, if you have a table of four primarily narrartive Capes players, then what you are saying may apply.

I hope to reread you post more deeply sometime soon.

[Vaxalon]

The idea that increasing threat results in diminishing satisfaction is an assumption that may not be true, especially for all players.

I agree that you can expect it to be so, but I can name examples where it is not.

[Threlicus]

The idea that increasing threat results in diminishing satisfaction is an assumption that may not be true, especially for all players.

I agree that you can expect it to be so, but I can name examples where it is not.

I agree that it is not necessarily leading to diminishing overall satisfaction, and I didn't say so, I don't think (though I did imply it was a common case). It leads to a higher feeling of coercion, which many but certainly not all players regard as a negative.

I think it ties into what Sindyr has pointed out as the continuum of Capes play between pure competition and pure narrative (neither of which purity is achievable with the Capes rules as written, of course). A highly competitive player, who loves getting in other players' faces and when they get in his, may well be thrilled about the overall direction of play when high Threat happens, simply by getting into the competitive part of the game, even though he is less happy with the narrative outcomes resulting from him losing conflicts.

[TonyLB]

2) Threat is the negative of the integral of the utility times the player's perceived likelihood of the other player choosing each other possible result. This is what he's likely to end up with if he doesn't win the conflict. (I probably would add additional Threat to cover the variance -- the more uncertain the value is, the more threatening it is -- but I don't think that's essential to understand what I'm saying).

Do you expect this to be a positive number?  Specifically:  Do you believe that the worst case scenario of what a different player will choose to narrate is likely to be worse than never having had the conflict at all? 

That certainly doesn't match with my experience of the game.  IME, what with the way Story Tokens are assigned specifically counter-balancing the narrative importance of the loss, all conflict outcomes have positive utility to every player ... it's just that some outcomes are better than others.  They're all better than not having gotten into the fight in the first place.

[Threlicus]

Do you expect [Threat] to be a positive number?  Specifically:  Do you believe that the worst case scenario of what a different player will choose to narrate is likely to be worse than never having had the conflict at all? 

That certainly doesn't match with my experience of the game.  IME, what with the way Story Tokens are assigned specifically counter-balancing the narrative importance of the loss, all conflict outcomes have positive utility to every player ... it's just that some outcomes are better than others.  They're all better than not having gotten into the fight in the first place.

The sign doesn't matter; everything I've laid out is invariant if you add or subtract any number to every point on the utility function.

The utility function I've talked about is purely in reference to the player's satisfaction with the narrative, not taking into account Story Tokens or other resources and how they might impact future utility, so I don't think my theory is challenging your experience. Threat is essentially a measure of how bad things might be if the player simply concedes the conflict without fighting it, in which case he will get no resources.

That said, I certainly think it is possible that for some players, the negativity of some outcomes of some conflicts will outweigh the positiveness from the Story Tokens they might receive, even if it is not usually true or hasn't appeared in your experience. Lots of things operate to help prevent this, of course -- Comics Code and Social Contract factors, other players wanting to keep a player happy and engaged -- and hopefully they are enough (and if they're not maybe the player shouldn't be playing Capes, or not with that group), but I can't see any reason why it should always suffice theoretically.

[TonyLB]

The utility function I've talked about is purely in reference to the player's satisfaction with the narrative, not taking into account Story Tokens or other resources and how they might impact future utility

I could be so much more pithy if John Nash were dead.  There really is no phrase quite like "spinning in his grave" to get the point across.

I don't think that a utility function which views a given conflict as an atomic exchange, unconnected to any future outcomes, tells very much of the truth of the game.

[Hans]

The utility function I've talked about is purely in reference to the player's satisfaction with the narrative, not taking into account Story Tokens or other resources and how they might impact future utility

I could be so much more pithy if John Nash were dead.  There really is no phrase quite like "spinning in his grave" to get the point across.

I don't think that a utility function which views a given conflict as an atomic exchange, unconnected to any future outcomes, tells very much of the truth of the game.

To be more specific, George, I think that your idea of taking ONLY the narrative results as part of the utiltiy function is not valid from the evidence collected by people who have played the game; that is, it is not a valid model for describing the way people respond to conflicts.

Personally, I love your model, especially the way it treats Enticement and Threat as additive quantities.  But expressing these things strictly in terms of narration is simply not appropriate for Capes.  Capes is NOT a strictly narrativist game.  There are mechanical analogues to both Enticement (i.e. inspirations and story tokens) and Threat (i.e. the other guy gaining more, and more valuable at that moment, resources than you do), and my experience tells me these cannot be considered simply "second-order effects".  The relative weightings of each of these factors (one can think of them as a two way table) will vary tremendously from player to player, and even in a particular player from scene to scene and page to page and cannot be ignored.

Sindyr:  I have to disagree completely with your implication that narrativist play is somehow the antithesis of competition.  Here is the reason; if you and I disagree profoundly as to how the story should go from this point forward, how are we expected to resolve this disagreement.  We have already tried negotiation, and there is simply no point of common ground.  Is this not a kind of competition?  In my own experience in playing other narrativist games (such as Heroquest, Dust Devils, Burning Wheel) it is exactly those moments in which you and I disagree about which direction the story should go that the most fulfulling and interesting fiction occurs.  Even in games with a very high level of common veto power (like PTA), there still has to be a conflict resolution mechanic.  Personally, I'm just about the least gamist player you could ever meet.  I do not value the competetive aspect of Capes because I like competition; I value it because it leads to good fiction.

[Threlicus]

I don't think that a utility function which views a given conflict as an atomic exchange, unconnected to any future outcomes, tells very much of the truth of the game.

Of course it is not all of Capes, it wasn't intended to be. It is a bit of theoretical thinking about one specific aspect of the game and one aspect of players' experiences with it.

As for the atomicity and connection, I was trying to keep it simple and understandable. Of course, in general, you've got to add all the terms from the player's anticipation of the likelihood of other future events and from the other elements of the game state as they stand, but that is a very straightforward generalization that merely adds complexity to the thought-experiment.

Now, the other critique -- regarding other resources gained in a conflict -- may be a more serious consideration. Let me try to explain why I did it the way I did. Consider the perspective of a player when another player has laid a conflict on the table. The first player is trying to decide whether or not to get involved in the conflict. If he doesn't get involved, he certainly will get no resources and may suffer the negative narrative consequences he anticipates. Thus, those negative narrative consequences are a stick, a Threat, encouraging the player to get involved. Conversely, if he does get involved, the positive narrative consequences are an enticement. These are surely not the only considerations a player will have when deciding whether to get involved -- all of the mechanics of Capes, the social contract, how bored the player is, how much the player wants to wrap up the current scene, whatever, all those will be there too. My hypothesis, though, is that a player's feeling of coercion brought on by that conflict will be related to the degree of Threat he feels, since one cannot forcibly take away resources for non-involvement. For some players that feeling of coercion is bad to a greater or lesser degree.

You do mention that not getting involved can lead to others gaining resources without you. I admit I hadn't considered it, and that may well be important in the final decision making, but I'm not so sure it's relevant to the feeling of coercion, because that particular threat is present no matter what conflict is put down, whereas the narrative utility can change drastically depending on what conflict is put down.

[TonyLB]

My hypothesis, though, is that a player's feeling of coercion brought on by that conflict will be related to the degree of Threat he feels, since one cannot forcibly take away resources for non-involvement. For some players that feeling of coercion is bad to a greater or lesser degree.

Okay.  It seems to me that, by the mechanics, Threat is also correlated with Enticement.  Does that seem sound to you?

[Threlicus]

Okay.  It seems to me that, by the mechanics, Threat is also correlated with Enticement.  Does that seem sound to you?

A narrative space which is flat in utility over the other player's expected choices is low-Threat. One which has at least one peak of very good stuff is high Enticement. I can easily make the same space have both. The converse is also true. So I don't think they are correlated. But you used 'by the mechanics', so I don't think this is exactly what you mean.

I think what you are saying is that, by the mechanics of Capes, whenever there is a high-Threat situation, there is additonally some positive, non-narrative utility for getting involved and possibly losing. (Or more precisely, the prospect of getting involved changes the set of outcomes so that you are likely to either eliminate the threat by winning the conflict or mitigate it by taking compensatory resources for the future.) This is absolutely true, and is IMHO the heart of Capes, and why it works in the first place. Still, I don't think it diminishes the Threat itself -- that is, the feeling that a player must get involved, or else things they don't want will happen.

I do think that you are right and we need to add non-narrative utility into the mix. The reason I didn't is that I was focussed on Threat and the fact that you get no rewards for not getting involved. But I overlooked a couple of factors -- one is that, by not getting involved, you cede resources to other players. I don't think this is too big a deal, unless you get other players playing off each other and ignoring you, since a conflict with only one player involved generates very limited resources. Still, it could well make a difference, and I was wrong to ignore it. The other factor is Gloating. Here, not getting involved means the other player involved will easily garner significant resources. This is a Threat just as much as narrative consequences are; if someone lays down a Gloatable conflict, you are coerced to get involved lest they garner resources by Gloating it.

This opens up some thinking about Gloating and the Comics Code. One (I want to emphasize -- One, not the only) point of the Code, I think, is that it removes from the narrative space certain outcomes, presumed to be strongly negative for at least some players, and replaces the Threat from those outcomes with a ceiling of how much can be gained by Gloating it. This is great, except that a player may well feel a strong Threat somewhere not protected by the static Code. So, (brainstorming now) how about permitting dynamic Gloating? If a player feels strongly threatened by a particular outcome of a conflict, they may suggest that it be Gloatable instead. Since such a suggestion doesn't take any resources, a player can always protect themselves from the Threat.

Another line of thinking has to do with a narrative space which is mostly okay, but has a couple possibilities which are unlikely but very strongly negative. In this case, the Threatened player is fine with most resolutions, but wants to be able to restrict the space somewhat. Here a player already has a recourse in Capes -- slapping down another conflict that puts the undesireable outcomes under the Not Yet rule, and fighting (probably not very hard, unless other players really want those specific outcomes) for that conflict. However, these conflicts are not connected directly by the Capes rules and it might be worth thinking about ways to make such conflicts tied together better (though I've got nothing but vague thoughts at the moment). Another way of addressing it might be to allow players to make binding statements about how they might resolve the conflict, and let people ask for such statements. Such constraints could be used by other players to reduce the amount of Threat the threatened player feels.

A third category has to do with outcomes that the player doesn't desire -- YET. For example, you may well want Harry and Sally to sleep together eventually, but you think that them sleeping together at this early point in the narrative is highly undesireable. Unfortunately, putting down 'Goal: Harry and Sally sleep together' as a conflict now, while it prevents them from doing so for at least another page, can't have much long-term impact, and may in fact increase the likelihood of other players actually resolving it the way you don't want (when they weren't planning on doing it before). I'm thinking that maybe a mechanism for longer-term conflicts would be useful. My thinking is that perhaps these longer-term conflicts are controlled only indirectly, by winning and losing other, ordinary, Capes conflicts; they can't be resolved until a certain amount of sub-conflict effort has been put into them. But that's just the shell of an idea; there's lots of detail work to flesh out how such conflicts are played and how they might interact with the rest of Capes' mechanics.

An important point I want to emphasize is that, in this theory, no matter how you go about reducing Threat, there is an impact -- reducing Threat means necessarily reducing a player's engagement with a conflict. How strong the Threat has to be before the tradeoff is worthwhile is clearly player-dependent; for some players (Tony?) the answer may well be 'never.'

[TonyLB]

I think what you are saying is that, by the mechanics of Capes, whenever there is a high-Threat situation, there is additonally some positive, non-narrative utility for getting involved and possibly losing.

Actually, that wasn't what I was trying to say.  You want to discuss this without reference to the game currency, and though that's hard for me I'm trying.

But yeah, "by mechanics" is a tricky phrase.  Let me try to be more explicit.

There is a balance of risk and reward that people do naturally, because of the way we are wired as story-telling creatures.  Because the mechanics of the game give both sides the opportunity to declare the meaning of the conflict, people will (in my experience) balance out that risk and reward on their own.

If we something like WGP's "pencilling" phase, this would be a lot more clear.  For instance, in WGP you could have the following conversation:

Player:  Okay,

if I win then I get a clue as to the villain's master plan.
GM: Fine, but if I win then you get no clue, and moreover the villain learns that you're searching for him.[/list]

That's basically the kind of thing that is happening implicitly as people narrate their way toward a resolution in a Capes conflict.  It's sub-rosa, but when the villain player narrates ways in which failure on the goal could lead to the villain learning things, they're setting up those stakes as part of the potential consequences.  They're ramping the Threat, in your terminology.

What you will almost never see in WGP (at least I am hard pressed to conceive of it) is an exchange like this:

Player:  Okay,

if I win then I get a clue as to the villain's master plan.
GM:  Fine, but if I win then Millenium City is destroyed in a nuclear fireball, and only the people specifically mentioned in your Aspects survive.[/list]

There's a case where Threat is wildly uncorrelated with Enticement.  But ... it's wacky.  That never happens.  Never in all my play of many stake-setting games have I ever seen a lopsided set of stakes like that.

What I have seen in Capes (where the stakes "float" a bit more than WGP) is an escalation:

Player #1:  Okay,

if I win then I get a clue as to the villain's master plan.
Player #2:  Fine, but if I win then the villain tracks you back to your secret hideout.
Player #1:  Oh man!  But if I win then, in addition to learning his master plan I totally foil it.
Player #2:  Yeah?  But if I win then, in addition to finding your hideout, he destroys it.
Player #1:  Not.  Gonna.  Happen.  Let's go![/list]

Now personally, I'd prefer to see those as separate goals, because I think it's a better way to game the system.  But I've seen it happen all on one conflict.  Again, the mechanical power to expand the narrative consequence leads people to balance Threat and Enticement.  It fulfills our sense of what a story should be.  Great risk for great reward, and all that jazz.

Does that seem sound to you?

[Threlicus]

Alright, that's easier to understand. I'll try to restate it in my own terms to prove I understand it. ;) You're saying that, when player A puts out a conflict which is high-Threat to player B, player B, by narrating his response to A's Threat, naturally tries to steer the narrative space to where he can justify, if he wins, a resolution which is high-utility for him, and thus high Threat conflicts provoke high-Enticement situations. And, probably (though you don't really mention it), narrating in such a way so try to keep A's possible narrative resolutions, if A should win, away from the things he most doesn't want.

That seems likely to be true, fits my own limited Capes experience, and I'm perfectly happy to accept it. Certainly it seems like a natural response by player B. I'll even agree that it seems likely to increase the overall fun of the game for most players. It also works  to some extent if B's response to A's high-Threat conflict is to lay down a different conflict of his own, saying 'sure, I'll let you have that one, but then you'll have to let me have *this* one'.

But, I don't think that that changes the feeling of coercion from having a high-Threat conflict put down. You're still being coerced to get involved in *this* conflict right here, that I put down. I think that that is the feeling of coercion that Sindyr has been trying to find ways to minimize, because he doesn't like it (or at least, doesn't think he'll like it). Do you disagree with that?

[TonyLB]

And, probably (though you don't really mention it), narrating in such a way so try to keep A's possible narrative resolutions, if A should win, away from the things he most doesn't want.

Uh ... so this is saying that you think Threat and Enticement aren't correlated, right?  You think that (in the extreme case) everyone's going to be cool with something that turns out as "Okay, if you win then you get a potato chip, but if I win then I rule the cosmos for all time"?

But, I don't think that that changes the feeling of coercion from having a high-Threat conflict put down. You're still being coerced to get involved in *this* conflict right here, that I put down. I think that that is the feeling of coercion that Sindyr has been trying to find ways to minimize, because he doesn't like it (or at least, doesn't think he'll like it). Do you disagree with that?

I'd rather we not go building on Sindyr's posts about coercion as if they're a foundation for further development until they've survived a bit more enquiry.  Let's talk about your take on its own merits, 'kay?

[Threlicus]

Uh ... so this is saying that you think Threat and Enticement aren't correlated, right?  You think that (in the extreme case) everyone's going to be cool with something that turns out as "Okay, if you win then you get a potato chip, but if I win then I rule the cosmos for all time"?

Clearly the answer is no, they won't be cool with it, and the other players' responses will end up trying to both mitigate the Threat and increase the Enticement from that conflict, precisely because that is a high-Threat, low-Enticement conflict. But that's not what my model is trying to get at. What I'm trying to get at is the feeling of player B when player A lays down "I rule the cosmos for all time," as a conflict (assuming the popcorn isn't thrown). B cannot ignore the conflict, because if he does, the narrative will go somewhere he doesn't like. That's the coercive power of the Threat. In contrast, if someone lays down a high-Enticement, low-Threat conflict, the player can choose to follow it for the rewards it offers, but if he thinks he has better things to do with his time and resouces, doesn't feel compelled to do so.

Now, I think you're saying that, if someone lays down a high-Threat conflict, there are unspoken rules at play -- basically, "Hey, if you're going to try to rule the cosmos for all time if you win, you'd better have a lot at risk if you lose" kinds of metarules -- that imply Threat and Enticement generally end up correlated. That seems to me a feature of good, functional Capes play -- players willing to put stuff on the line to get what they want -- and I'm sure it mitigates some of the negativity players might get from feeling coerced; but I don't think it diminishes the coercion arising from Threat.