[Capes][DexCon] The impact of judgment

[TonyLB]

So, these days at conventions I play Capes in a competitive format.  I've actually got a formula (" ( ( Story Tokens * 2 ) - Debt ) * (Total Inspirations) " if anyone cares) that gets applied to the resources people earn over the course of the game.  It produces a number.

Last year I had a different formula.  The numbers it produced were ... well, pretty disconnected from what I think of as good play.  They weren't random, per se, but they were measuring something other than what we'd been playing to achieve.

So, this formula spikes the hell out of the reward mechanic.  Points you earn are, potentially, leading you to a real world prize (in this case gift credit at the IGE booth).  People pay attention to the resources when that's the case.  It drives them to engage more forcefully and intentionally with the system, and I think that's a massively good thing.  Makes for good gaming.

But at the same time I noticed that it has the potential to bring people into a wierd social place.  In the third game, person X (names changed to protect folks's privacy, unless and until they decide to name themselves) won on points, with person Y coming in a fairly close second.  Person Y later came up to me and asked, in my opinion, what he could have done that he didn't do.

That was a very uncomfortable moment for me, and I temporized pretty badly.  In unpacking it later, I've realized that we have this intense compulsion to pretend that there is no such thing as better or worse roleplaying ... that it's an unquantifiable art form.

This breaks down at extremes, of course ... we're all happy to say that the true greats are great, and the truly pitiful are pitiful.  But when you've got two people who are both really, really good, it is intensely uncomfortable to say (or even think) "Well, dude, you did a really, really good job ... but this other guy did even better."

I will admit that this scoring system pretty much exactly matches my personal sense of who's on their game and who isn't.  I think player Y did a real good job, but that player X was just a little more "on."  Once I've got an objective scoring like that out there, I'm not going to be able to avoid saying that exact thing, every time I run a tournament game.

That's unsettling to me.

[Bret Gillan]

I'm player Y.

I did get the sense you were extremely unsettled, but my goal in asking "What wasn't I doing?" wasn't a plaintive plea of "I was just as good as Player X! I should have won!" I was just trying to milk you for strategy and tactics so that I can win the next time, and I was wondering if you noticed anything in my play that could have been improved. I was trying to learn at the feet of the master.

And, assuming that the majority of people out there have the same response I do, I think this makes the scoring system a very good thing. I think scoring Capes game at cons can only urge people to learn how to engage the other players and play a much more intense game. The risk you run is people taking the scoring system personally and getting insulted, but I'm betting that's going to be rare.

[TonyLB]

I'm honestly not sure, however, that my feeling unsettled had much (if anything) to do with a sense that you were hurt.  Okay, yeah, there was some fear of that.  But a lot of my feeling was ... I dunno ... that I was violating taboo.

[Bret Gillan]

I'm not sure that taboo exists. People make value judgments about other people's gaming all the time. "So-and-so is a munchkin." There's even a Livejournal community called "Bad Roleplayers Suck" where people vent about experience with other gamers. Do you mean the taboo exists in the form of saying that between two good players, one is better than the other? That the violation is from moving good or bad gamer from a binary state to a matter of degrees?

[TonyLB]

I think the taboo is:

• (a) About saying it to their face.  I totally don't feel the same taboo about talking about people behind their back.  Which is wierd, but there you are.  And ...
• (b) As you said, about making a judgment about good play.  If somebody's roleplaying just sucks then it's much easier to say "Well, I don't owe them for a hugely enjoyable session, so I don't feel bad about giving feedback that is anything less than 'You totally rock!'"

[drnuncheon]

So, these days at conventions I play Capes in a competitive format.  I've actually got a formula (" ( ( Story Tokens * 2 ) - Debt ) * (Total Inspirations) " if anyone cares) that gets applied to the resources people earn over the course of the game.  It produces a number.

Interesting.  Before I comment further, is that "story tokens earned" or "story tokens remaining"?  (And for that matter, is that "number of inspirations", "total value of inspirations"?  Earned or remaining?)

J

[Hans]

So, these days at conventions I play Capes in a competitive format.  I've actually got a formula (" ( ( Story Tokens * 2 ) - Debt ) * (Total Inspirations) " if anyone cares) that gets applied to the resources people earn over the course of the game.  It produces a number.

Interesting.  Before I comment further, is that "story tokens earned" or "story tokens remaining"?  (And for that matter, is that "number of inspirations", "total value of inspirations"?  Earned or remaining?)

J

Same goes for debt, left on the sheet or earned during play? 

[phredd]

Player X reporting here.

First, to clarify the scoring: We dropped spent inspirations and story tokens into an envelope to take out later for scoring purposes.  Debt was what was left on any and all of your characters' sheets. 

I was pretty surprised at the end results with the scoring.  When I dropped into the game, I hadn't been reading Tony's posts in the MoF forums for a while, so I hadn't any idea about there being fabulous prizes or anything.  All I knew is that we were supposed to drop stuff into the envelopes as we spent them.  Didn't really think about it. 

I did play very aggressively during the session, but so did my fellow players.  I caught part of Tony and Bret's convo about the scoring system and got asked for my opionion on how things played out then and I didn't have much of any idea then and I still don't have a solid grasp now.

I remember my score though, so let me break it down.

I ended with 14 story tokens.  Some of those came from harvesting some gratuitous debt dumping (i.e. debt dumped into a conflict just to dump it.  The outcome was clearly not in question).  Some of those came from some hotly contested fights, of course.  Bret and Tony,
do you remember where you were on the token front?  If you were within 2-3 of my total, I'd
attribute the difference wholely to my benefitting from debt dumping.  My subjective impression is also that I was really dogged about some conflicts that I threw everything I could at and still lost.  That would have also given me quite a few tokens.

As for debt, I ended with 13 between Gangbuster and Glory Boy.  I was pulling in a good bit of debt all the way through so I could stake it.  I think I only ate my debt on losing a conflict twice though. 

And I had a sum of 22 for inspirations.  Some of that would be from conflicts that I won  without much opposition, but everyone got some of those.  Some more of it came from debt staked conflicts, where I lost, but the die matchups still provided me with an inspirtation.

Thinking about it for a bit, I think the recipe for success if you're going totally gamist and trying to win via this formula is to fight hard to win highly contested conflicts early on, more than you can expect to win, and reap the story tokens while doing so.  You have to watch your debt while you do this, but debt isn't that hard to manage, IME.  Then, shored up by the story tokens you've garnered, you can rack up your inspirations by leveraging the story tokens you got earlier and maintaining a dogged insistence on victory.  You'll probably manage to keep the story tokens rolling in while this happens, an added bonus.  This is not a recipe for tepid play, methinks.

Your bit about mutually exclusive subjective world views fueling comics conflict during our postgame conversation is also salient (your example was Hobgoblin vs. Spider-Man).  I was definitely hammering any conflict that could reify or refute the way I wanted to frame things.  That's what fueled my conflict with Major Victory. 

[Hans]

I ended with 14 story tokens...
As for debt, I ended with 13 between Gangbuster and Glory Boy....
And I had a sum of 22 for inspirations....

For a score of ((14*2)-13)*22 = 330? 

Tony, this is a neat system, if I have it right.  I like the way, because it is multiplicative, that it rewards a person for getting BOTH story tokens and inspirations, as getting both will usually end up with a higher score than pursuing one to the exclusion of the other.

I think there is definitely a problem with interpretation, though.  Does winning by score really mean a person "role-played" better than another person in those scenes?  I'm not sure it does, for several reasons:
1. I suspect, and I know from other things you have said that you believe strongly, that the resource aquisition in Capes is tied to the quality of the role-playing, either directly or indirectly.  But so far you do not have enough evidence to say your SCORING is tied to that.  This was the first time you used it, right?  As far as we both know, the next time you use it you could come to the conclusion that the winner WASN'T the best role-player (again, assuming we are talking shades of goodness, not good vs. bad).
2. The scoring is non linear.  A single story token or a single inspiration's effect on the score could be huge or trivial depending on what else is going on.
3. The scoring seems to be fairly granular, at least when only a few scenes have been played. 
4. The scores dimension (token*inspiration) is very hard to interpret and abstract.  It would be absurd, for example, to say that if you score 400 and I scored 200 you would have role-played twice as well as I did.  As another example, if I score 350 and you score 300, did I kick your butt, or was it close?

I would suggest one change to the scoring system, which is to divide it by the number of pages played.  I think it has to be pages, not scenes, because pages are more tightly correlated with the rate at which resources enter play (i.e. conflicts (which create inspirations) and debt (which becomes story tokens)).  This would allow for comparisons across, say, multiple tables, or multiple groups.

Another possible change would be to have the score be the proportion, somehow, of the the total score earned by all players.  This would make the scores more comparable within the group, so that if I get a 50%, and you get a 25%, I can truthfully say I kicked your butt, since I got 50% of the available stuff in the course of the game.

[Asperity]

Last year I had a different formula.  The numbers it produced were ... well, pretty disconnected from what I think of as good play.  They weren't random, per se, but they were measuring something other than what we'd been playing to achieve.

Last year I ended up multiplying by zero.  It was extremely amusing, but, uh, glad you changed the formula.

I would suggest one change to the scoring system, which is to divide it by the number of pages played.

I dunno about that one.  In the second DexCon game, I was at the slow table.  We were so slow that I think one of us might have come out on top with this metric.  Which would've been a bad thing, considering how much less nifty our roleplaying was than that of the other table that morning.  I guess we could've been slow for reasons other than grogginess (like listening to the other table!), but it's Capes.  Fast-paced game, right?  I'd rather have the incentive be to keep the story a page-turner, assuming everyone's playing for the same amount of time.

-Elizabeth

[Hans]

I would suggest one change to the scoring system, which is to divide it by the number of pages played.

I dunno about that one.  In the second DexCon game, I was at the slow table.  We were so slow that I think one of us might have come out on top with this metric.  Which would've been a bad thing, considering how much less nifty our roleplaying was than that of the other table that morning.  I guess we could've been slow for reasons other than grogginess (like listening to the other table!), but it's Capes.  Fast-paced game, right?  I'd rather have the incentive be to keep the story a page-turner, assuming everyone's playing for the same amount of time.

I think any scoring system will be difficult with low page/scene counts, though.  But you make a good point that dividing by the page might actually make it worse, not better, with those low counts.  I guess it depends on exactly what Tony is trying to reward.  It strengthens my hunch that some kind of proportional scoring system (where your score is some kind of proportion of the total resources gained in the game) may be a good way to go.

[TonyLB]

Hans ... one quick thing to bear in mind:  The system is not really meant to be fair.  It's meant to express a preference, in order to encourage certain behavior.  Part of the preference is that people do a lot of pages, so that's rewarded.

For instance, when I'm playing at one of two tables I will frequently say "C'mon people!  Let's pick up the pace!  That other table is going to play faster and beat us!"  I sorta like that.

As to how much evidence I have linking high scores to good play ... I did run three sessions using this mechanic, and so far the correlation's pretty damn high.  For me, of course.  I think part of that is that the scoring is an outgrowth of a system that is deliberately and carefully playtested to reward the precise behaviors that I, personally, find enjoyable.  It's always going to be a metric of "How much Tony likes this" more than anything else.

[Hans]

It's always going to be a metric of "How much Tony likes this" more than anything else.

As it should be, especially if you are the one footing the bill for the reward!  The only concern I really have is short term reproducibility...that is, how much of the final actual numeric score is due to real game play, and how much is due to chance and/or other factors, in games that last 4 hours or less (i.e. convention play).  It sounds like you are pretty confident in that area, so, there you go.  You feeling bad about actually telling someone they were worse than someone else is simply misplaced, although well intentioned. 

[TonyLB]

I'm quite confident that the numbers correspond to how well the results people got match up with what I like.

I will say that I'm substantially less confident that the playing field is inherently even.

Like, after the session with Bret, we talked about things and one of the things I realized was that I, myself, had missed some opportunities to try to stick it to Bret in a way that would have profited us both.  And I missed them not so much because he didn't entertain me as because certain gears in my brain didn't mesh at just the right time ... I didn't see a place where Major Victory could be strongly challenged ("Goal:  Major Victory finds the strength to keep sending loyal men to their deaths for this cause.")

If I had thought to play that goal then Bret would have had a higher score than he did.  So his opportunities are (as always) dependent upon the other people at the table.

It's sorta wierd.

[Bret Gillan]

I can totally see that in the play though. Not only was Fred agressively engaging us in Conflicts that were meaningful to us, I think, knowingly or not, he was playing his characters in a way that was almost begging us to engage in Conflicts with him. Add to that a helping of, "Oh, you want to play a Conflict like that about Major Victory? Take this Conflict about Gangbuster! Haaiiiyah!"

I am totally getting a better understanding of why Fred won, and I think it involves aggressively challenging everyone at the table, which then begs you to challenge him in return, in addition to playing characters in ways that makes you desperately want to thump them. ;)