Eric was playing two characters: Orobouros, a trans-temporal entity that masquerades as a God, and Saura Gul, his lizard high priest. He'd been playing these guys on and off for sessions and sessions. They had a pattern: Saura Gul Staked Debt so that Orobouros wouldn't have to. It was a lovely minion/master shield system, and worked like you would expect... Saura Gul constantly yo-yo'd from little debt to tons of debt (as victory and defeat dictated), while Orobouros rode an even keel, occasionally vestingin something and winning it due to Saura Gul's selfless efforts.

Now I don't know about Sydney, but this increasingly made me want to really get Orobouros. Ticking off Saura Gul was not the same sort of victory that really sticking it to the snake-god would have been. This desire started out minor, but grew slowly and surely. In last night's session it absolutely peaked. I went in with the definite intent of delivering a crushing defeat to Orobouros, no matter what it took. The result was that Saura Gul was hammered. He had a "Despair" drive of 4, and had 12 debt on it. Way, way overdrawn. He was a total failure, scolded constantly by his god. Orobouros, of course, felt fine... practically no Debt at all. He was utterly content with his place in the world.

Eric got to narrate the "True Nature of Orobouros." And he had Orobouros go into an absolutely classic shpiel of villainous hubris. "Foolish mortals! You have discovered that I am not what I claim... but it will do you no good! I still have the lizard-people as my pathetic pawns. Even knowing the truth, they don't have the backbone to defy me! What you've learned changes nothing!" As I was listening to this, I thought to myself "Man, this sounds very familiar. This is the kind of thing the overconfident master always says... right before a key minion turns on him and seals his doom." And suddenly it all made sense.

There's Saura Gul with this ton of debt. All he needs to utterly control the story is a conflict where other players (i.e. Sydney and I) will roll up the many low dice that staking Debt provides. He has absolutely no prospects of doing that as long as he keeps acting as a shield for Orobouros. Very literally, his misery comes from the loyalty he has shown. Orobouros has no debt. Which is absolutely peachy as long as he has Saura Gul to care about things on his behalf. But alone? He's toast.

Before the start of the next page I took all my remaining Story Tokens and sunk them into creating different Conflicts where Saura Gul could Stake his debt in defiance of Orobouros's wishes. And sure enough, Eric Staked on every single one of them before his first action. I really like how the system rewarded me for figuring out what Eric wanted and providing it to him.

Saura Gul defied his false god, and the thematic force of that decision sealed Orobouros's fate. It was a hard-fought battle, but only because every player was playing characters on both sides, and we had a vested interest in making it as big an achievement as possible. Orobouros managed to scrape together four debt of his own to Stake against "Destroy Orobouros". We rolled all four of those dice up to sixes. He still lost... and there was literally nothing more that he could possibly have done. Our characters cared so much more, and had suffered so much, that there was no stopping them.


So this is why I just don't get many of the arguments that folks have been floating in the Muse of Fire forum recently. They say that the system doesn't encourage thematic stories, or create consequences of past actions. But this experience (and many others like it) seem to me to be doing exactly that: Saura Gul was empowered to betray Orobouros to his doom precisely because of how he'd been treated in the many sessions leading up to this one. That's not Eric deciding to overlay some meaning on a system that doesn't support it. The possibilities are right there in the mechanics, for everybody to see. I saw them, and I wasn't even looking for them.

I think I queried about the setting in the last Actual Play post, but didn't get the info I was looking for. I'm still intrigued by this pseudo-fantasy setting. How did this come to be? Explicit prep or emergent?

I too do not get said criticisms. They do not seem relevant to my actual play experience.

I say this because I want to discourage the idea that the reason you don't see the problem is because of some "Tony Factor," i.e. you designed the game, so you have some secret ability to run the game correctly.

To all the hypothetical "flaws", for some reason I keep coming back to, "Sure it doesn't work -- if one of the players is being a total dick." There have, however, been a handful of Actual Plays where things didn't quite jive, so perhaps there is something to Capes that some of us just intuitively understand, which is not explicitly in the text.

(Eric here...)

I would just like to add a little bit from my perspective. Tony said "I saw them, and I wasn't even looking for them." Well, I wasn't looking for anything in particular myself. I never once thought to myself in terms of how the mechanics were leading me where I was going, but lead me they did. I was just doing what came naturally.

I remember the point where a light went on over Tony's head and he said "I know where this is going!" It was at that point where I looked at the debt piles and realized the mechanical implication of what I was already planning to do for merely thematic reasons. Once again, the system worked and in a way I had never seen before. It had been pushing me to go for the thematic knockout blow without my even realizing it.

Capes is rapidly becoming my new religion, and since I don't argue about religion...

Larry: The only things that were explicit prep were: Six spotlight characters (Lord Ronan Ransom, Fistfire, Zak, Vanessa Faust, Minerva Danaan and Lincoln Kettridge) with one paragraph each, three "key" time periods (1980s, Victorian era and Pretopia of the lizard people and robots) with about three paragraphs each, and the notion of a time-travelling organization led by an absent figure, "Tempus".

Everything else has emerged during the game. Saura Gul was created because Sydney got a kick out of my one-sentence blurb about the Seergassa lizard people, and fleshed them out hugely. I think Orobouros was mostly created because Eric wanted to torture Sydney. But in the course of the torture, Saura Gul clearly became as much Eric's character as Sydney's.

And now, frankly, I am very tempted to play him (after an appropriate cool-down period), because I'm quite fascinated by the position that he is in: Having oppressed his people for so long in the name of a false God, he's got to have guilt (or, more likely for him, despair). And they probably hate him, for their various reasons. But is giving them their freedom any sort of answer? Don't they need him to guide them now more than ever, even if they don't know it yet? How far will he go to maintain the authority he needs in order to save his people from even worse tyranny? When push comes to shove, are the enemies of his one-time God (i.e. our spotlight characters) worse enemies than those that will arise from his own people? Who will he look to for help?

TonyLB wrote: ....explicit prep ....Saura Gul was created because Sydney got a kick out of my one-sentence blurb about the Seergassa lizard people, and fleshed them out hugely. I think Orobouros was mostly created because Eric wanted to torture Sydney. But in the course of the torture, Saura Gul clearly became as much Eric's character as Sydney's.....

Sydney,

Wow. That was a great write-up of how Capes actually works in play. The way it encourages this sort of "competitive" creative collaboration is very difficult to explain based on the rules alone. But I've been there.

Religion indeed. Can I get a witness?

Oh, and Tony reminds me he had an agenda for getting high-tech and specifically androids involved, which was to give his character's love interest -- a computer -- a body to download into for more romantic possibilities, or interesting thwartage thereof. Which of course was a completely different agenda from mine, but happened to knock it in a very different and intriguing direction I'd never thought of. (Huh? They're all robots?).

So if you really mapped out the flow of ideas, you'd get not one relatively tidy progression like the one above but actual multiple lines of story ideas that intersect, bounce off, recombine, and diverge.

(Which is one reason why a "Goal In:Goal Out" system, while cool in theory, might be painfully restrictive in practice, by the way).

And now, frankly, I am very tempted to play him (after an appropriate cool-down period), because I'm quite fascinated by the position that he is in: Having oppressed his people for so long in the name of a false God, he's got to have guilt (or, more likely for him, despair). And they probably hate him, for their various reasons. But is giving them their freedom any sort of answer? Don't they need him to guide them now more than ever, even if they don't know it yet? How far will he go to maintain the authority he needs in order to save his people from even worse tyranny? When push comes to shove, are the enemies of his one-time God (i.e. our spotlight characters) worse enemies than those that will arise from his own people? Who will he look to for help?

Miskatonic wrote: Religion indeed. Can I get a witness?

Miskatonic wrote: To all the hypothetical "flaws", for some reason I keep coming back to, "Sure it doesn't work -- if one of the players is being a total dick."

Tony, Eric could you go into a little bit of detail about how this exchange of events was encouraged by the system. The initial post is rather light on those details. It reads to me more like a case of players grooving on each other's vibe socially with very little to do with the mechanics.

Eric roleplayed Ouroboros in a manner that made Tony want to take him down a peg. Eric roleplayed Ouroboros's treatment of Saura Gal in a way that allowed other players to see Saura sympathetically and pick up on the opportunity to engage in a standard genre trope of minion betraying master. The betrayal and eventual defeat of Ouroboros was then handled through resolution mechanics.

Nothing in the text so far points to any specific system support for any of this. The same roleplaying and genre tropes could have led to this outcome in any game...only the resolution mechanics of running through the betrayal would have been different, but any game would have rules for handling the big climactic fight scene (some less entertainingly to be sure). Highlighting some areas where the these events were specifically tied to the mechanics of Capes would be quite helpful.


Also, keep in mind that pretty much all of the issues being floated in the MoF forum are in no way saying that Capes doesn't allow cool stuff to happen. Rather they are suggesting that Capes doesn't do anything to filter crap stuff from happening. So none of the concerns raised in the forums are really addressed by this post because this is an example of introducing cool stuff that everyone agrees is cool stuff.

If you want to address the concerns raised in those other threads with an actual play example you'll need an example where cool stuff was introduced and only some of the players thought (honestly) it was cool stuff while other players thought (honestly) it was utter drek...and then show how the mechanics helped resolve that in a way other than relying on social contract pressure.

Absolutely: Saying that disagreements about narrative content don't happen would be silly. Or, rather, if you did achieve that in a game, I'd be very sad to hear it. Those disagreements are precisely the times that Sydney is talking about when one player grabs a story line and takes it in a new direction.

Now it's been a while since I've seen anything with this group that would qualify as "drek." And I don't want to go beyond my normal group to single out anyone with that label. So we'll have to use a less violent disagreement for discussing Actual Play, sorry:

Sydney clearly thought that Minerva being responsible for Orobouros's creation would be really cool. Honestly, I thought that we could do better (both in terms of making Minerva less of a one-dimensional "I live for angst" character and in terms of making Orobouros a more interesting villain). I don't know what Eric thought, but he can chime in.

Eric created "Event: Orobouros's true nature is revealed," and claimed a side of it (threatening to narrate what Orobouros's true nature is). They promptly fought each other up to fairly spectacular levels. Eric and I both Staked Debt on his side (though I was mostly just lending literal moral support), which meant that Sydney was outmatched in the long term. The only way he could win was to ramp it up too quickly for us to respond to. But we were all flush with Story Tokens (as a result of having shown ourselves capable of accepting someone else's narrative direction in the past), so we were able to take enough actions to shut him out.

As generally happens with our group, Sydney saw that he was trying to shout down the rising tide. Eventually, much as he wanted to control Orobouros's true nature, he decided to give rather than throw good resources after bad. So, poor, poor Sydney, he had to content himself with a mere six Story Tokens that he won off of the heavily contested conflict. You can check with him, but I don't think he was too disappointed, all told.

So there's one exchange that highlights how the resolution mechanic slants toward the people who care most (collectively) about an issue. Is that the sort of example you were hoping for?

I will suggest that there is some kind of "Garbage into gold" effect occurring here. In other words, while there is nothing to prevent a player from introducing "crap stuff" into SIS, there is also nothing to prevent another player from augmenting that "crap stuff" into something he finds a little more satisfying. This feedback cycle of continual "upgrading" the quality of SIS elements results in an end product in which crap is filtered or ignored. No one is remembered for introducing crap, because they share in the credit for seeding an idea which later became cool. The creative challenge of how to "trump up" other players' ideas becomes the real satisfaction -- shared satisfaction -- of the game.

Sadly, I cannot directly translate this into mechanics. I bet if you actually produced a transcript of table talk, you'd spot a number of originally lame ideas that were "starved to death" by the mechanics, de-emphasised in the SIS, and forgotten.

I'm still hoping that some unexplained assumption, which known makes the difference between a rockin' Capes game and a wonky Capes game, will emerge.

Miskatonic wrote: I'm still hoping that some unexplained assumption, which known makes the difference between a rockin' Capes game and a wonky Capes game, will emerge.

See, Larry, ask and you shall receive. I think we've just seen the flawed assumption that undermines good Capes play:

Players should strive to be on the same wavelength about what they want in the game.

Which is simply wrong. That's not how this game works. Here's the corrected assumption:

Players should be committed to seeking out or manufacturing conflicts at every opportunity.

Tony: what mechanics does Capes employ so that Players A and B, who passionately want to tell a film noir Batman story about ordinary people, can reach an agreement with Player C, who wants to tell a story about an extra-terrestrial battle between Thor and Galactus and hates that gritty Batman stuff?

I have been asking this question, in one form or another, for ten days now, and I have not received a satisfying answer.

James, there are no mechanics to do that. It's not something you want to do in this game. If you reach consensus on what is happening in the game then you no longer have anything fun to have conflicts over.

As I was saying "Players should strive to be on the same wavelength about what they want in the game" is a false assumption.

On the contrary, the actual game implies that "Players should be committed to seeking out or manufacturing conflicts at every opportunity."

Why would I choose to include mechanics that would undercut that fruitful process?

EDIT: And, to draw us back to the Actual Play: Can you see how the conflicts between players informed and improved the story of this particular session and the campaign leading up to it?

TonyLB wrote: James, there are no mechanics to do that. It's not something you want to do in this game.

EDIT: And, to draw us back to the Actual Play: Can you see how the conflicts between players informed and improved the story of this particular session and the campaign leading up to it?

Sounds like fun! See you then!

James_Nostack wrote: Tony: what mechanics does Capes employ so that Players A and B, who passionately want to tell a film noir Batman story about ordinary people, can reach an agreement with Player C, who wants to tell a story about an extra-terrestrial battle between Thor and Galactus and hates that gritty Batman stuff?

James_Nostack wrote: Relying solely on an unspoken social contract isn't good enough in a game where everyone has this much power.

TonyLB wrote: As I was saying "Players should strive to be on the same wavelength about what they want in the game" is a false assumption.

On the contrary, the actual game implies that "Players should be committed to seeking out or manufacturing conflicts at every opportunity."

Why would I choose to include mechanics that would undercut that fruitful process?

Yeah, Victor, I get that he's saying that. He is saying that there are times where the players are in conflict about the whole entire situation-as-stated, and all of its ramifications, and that they would reject it wholesale if they could.

And I gotta say... this example with the gritty noir people wanting street-level conflict and the one guy wanting world-spanning threats, and them constantly fighting tooth and nail to get their vision realized beyond the (to them) raw dreck the other person is offering? I want to play that game.

I don't want the game where everyone talks it through and makes a compromise (as Nate seems to suggest). I'm sure it would be a worthy game, but it doesn't really excite me. I want this specific game that is being listed as obviously dysfunctional. Similar to Sydney's rundown of how Actual Play emerged from the moderated collision of different creative visions, I offer this fiction:

Darkshade wants to be patrolling the gritty streets. He asserts that a strange new drug is making the rounds, and tries to track down its source.

Freya, norse thunder-goddess asserts that this drug is created by the H'kotrh, insectoid invaders bent on enslaving earth to the will of their all-powerful Hive Queen.

Darkshade asserts that the Hive Queen hegemony is like an alien mafia, and counters the drug-invasion by revealing evidence that Kr'rrrk, the insect in charge, was skimming profit off the top. Kr'rrrk ends up wearing cement shoes in orbit around Tycho.

Freya asserts a single gigantic entity (Titanos) coming to destroy the earth, incorruptible, unstoppable, completely void of moral ambiguity.

Darkshade creates a summit between his forces and the H'kotrh. Though they are deadly enemies (from the past events) they now face a common intrusion upon their turf. There are extremely nervous negotiations to work together, made all the worse because the H'kotrh don't want to make any admission that humanity might (in Sam Spade fashion) have something to offer despite their bedraggled surface appearance.

James_Nostack wrote: Tony: what mechanics does Capes employ so that Players A and B, who passionately want to tell a film noir Batman story about ordinary people, can reach an agreement with Player C, who wants to tell a story about an extra-terrestrial battle between Thor and Galactus and hates that gritty Batman stuff?

Victor Gijsbers wrote: Like, if I'm playing a Universalis western game, one of the players says: "There is an alien hidden behind the rock, and he shoots John!" Now, I may wish to ensure that Joh is not killed by the newly introduced alien, and thus start a Complication. But I can also think that aliens are crap, that there should be no reference to our aliens in our story, and that therefore the entire conflict is crap - and I'll Challenge.

Conflict of artistic vision is not the grit that slows down the engine of creativity... it is the engine. "Garbage into gold" (Larry's phrasing, but a good one) really works. But you need the garbage. You need something that you disagree about... the more strongly, the better.

Ralph, do you have any Actual Play posts about Universalis that describe the play experience you had?

I just have this nagging suspicion that you've never seen violent functional disagreement in action, and therefore conflate disagreement with dysfunction. But I could be totally wrong about that, of course. Actual Play would help me to judge.

TonyLB wrote: ...violent functional disagreement in action...

I do color narration of bad guys mowing down innocent civilians; Tony throws in a preventive goal "Hurt humans," banishing carnage from the scene until resolved.

Lxndr: Just stopped further mowings. I discovered (to my immense surprise) that I was cool with that in practice. In theory I would have said that it was a problem. Funny old thing, the human mind.


Sydney: I can point out far more fundamental player-disagreement issues.

Eric wants the secrets of Tempus to be central mysteries. Sydney wants the secrets of Minerva to be central mysteries. They fight over it constantly, each of them winning in some places and losing in others. Hence the way that Tempus is interwoven as a shadowy figure into the past of Minerva Danaan, and Minerva is interwoven as a shadowy figure into the past of the Chrysalis time-station. And now that we've got incarnations of Minerva from multiple ages popping about, I anticipate that this will only get more fun.

Sydney wants magic and symbolism. I want technology. We fight over it constantly, each of us winning in some places and losing in others. Hence our wonderfully evocative Iconic-Tech.


Now I intellectually appreciate (for instance) Sydney's contribution of magic. I think we're getting better stuff than I would have created on my own. But I'm not a convert to magic and symbolism, myself. I'm going to continue to fight for a more technologically-based vision. And he will, I presume, also continue to fight for his vision. And so we will continue to be super-cool.

Tony: Interesting. I'd not even thought of those as "disagreements," and they're not stark incompatibilities on single inputs, but they're also things that could be campaign-killers. Except they're not, because (a) our group works well and specific to Capes, (b) if you really care about something, you can burn resources to make sure it happens and (c) you're encouraged to sell your ideas to the other players.

TonyLB wrote:

Lxndr wrote:

Sydney Freedberg wrote: I do color narration of bad guys mowing down innocent civilians; Tony throws in a preventive goal "Hurt humans," banishing carnage from the scene until resolved.

Did this retroactively remove the mowing down of innocent civilians, or did it just stop further mowings?

Just stopped further mowings. I discovered (to my immense surprise) that I was cool with that in practice.

TonyLB wrote: Ralph, do you have any Actual Play posts about Universalis that describe the play experience you had?

I just have this nagging suspicion that you've never seen violent functional disagreement in action, and therefore conflate disagreement with dysfunction. But I could be totally wrong about that, of course. Actual Play would help me to judge.

That's interesting. Universalis has arguably a much stronger "no, don't do that" mechanism in Challenges -- which anyone can bring at any time, right? -- compared to vetoing Effects and using Preventive Goals in Capes. Yet SIS-degrading input still got through in the Guadelupe the Pirate game.

I'm not saying "it's impossible to preserve the integrity of the Shared Imagined Space, therefore there's no point to mechanics to block disruptive input." I'm just saying that even adding more such mechanics Capes does not eliminate the problem -- so, at some level, you have to just trust the players and let it go.

[EDIT: Well, maybe the Guadelupe the Pirate game's not the best example, since it seems everyone was on board for the silly there. But I've read other sessions of Uni -- and Unsung and other distributed-GM-function games, Capes being just one among many -- that seemed to suffer severe SIS disruptions. So examples abound.]

Not quite. It didn't get in "in spite of Uni's additional mechanics". It got in because we weren't using Uni's additional mechanics...it was just an initial demo at GenCon late in the day. The Pregnant Pope on the other hand was an actual full game with friends who were fully using those mechanics.

So from my perspective Pope is an example of successfully using those mechanics to prevent "SIS-degrading input" (good turn of phrase) while still allowing for lots of "oh wow I'd never have thought to do that moments".

While Guadalupe is an example of what play looks like when you don't use those mechanics to prevent "SIS-degrading input". Which is why Capes worries me, because Capes doesn't HAVE any mechanics to use. Which strikes me as making Guadalupe-type games much more likely than I'm comfortable with.

Here's the basic issue, as I see it: You claim that without constraints to keep narration in check, the only thing any GM-less rules system can encourage reliably is a certain light-hearted silliness. If any other outcome occurs, it is either a rarity or the result of great effort by the players, unsupported by the rules. Right?

So how do you explain the Actual Play that started this thread? Are we deluded in thinking that the rules system gave us useful tools for supporting these choices? Are we just on an astonishing run of amazingly good luck?

How many sessions, how good a story, do we have to achieve before you admit the possibility that something is going on here that you do not understand? Something that (GASP!) Universalis isn't capable of?

Ralph, what about a Guadalupe situtation in Uni in which one player has a huge advantage in coins. The Challenge mechanic essentially guarantees that the bigger-coin-pile player will get his way, totally, fully within the rules structure. Thus cementing his odd contributions even further.

I've seen massive coin discrepancies in Uni many times. It has never been a big problem for us, but it could be. Once one player has more coins than the rest of the table combined, that player can get away with anything and no one can "stop" them with the mechanics*.

Do you see that as the same issue with Capes? Is Capes play like Uni with each player having the most coins when it's their turn to narrate? How would you deal with that situation within the Uni mechanics?

*(Aside: Someone once jokingly suggested a rules gimmick where they would be the only player allowed to spend coins from now on. The other players didn't have enough coins combined to Challenge this gimmick.)

That's an excellent question John.

It does take a little bit of work for a person to get that large of a Coin lead...that or some incautious spending on the part of the other players. But it could happen.

So it is conceivable that such a situation could occur and the player with the Coins do something dastardly with them. I won't try to claim uni is bullet proof in that regard.

But worst case...if there was really a problem that you couldn't solve with the Negotiation phase there are a couple of solutions.

1) Facts double your Challenge Coins. So if as a group you do a good job defining the Tenets up front there's a good chance that many of the worst violations another player could do would violate one of those Tenets or, if not a tenet, a fact that had been previously established.

To use an earlier example: a player trying to introduce Aliens into the western could do so if all of the other player agreed that sounded cool. But if someone didn't they could challenge with the weight of the "Its a Western Tenet" backing them up.

It would be pretty hard to wind up with an amount of Coins DOUBLE those of all of the other player combined in order to become immune to Challenge.


2) If that still wasn't enough, and players were fairly unified in their opposition there's always the Fine mechanic. Fines don't use any Coins, they're Levied by straight vote. So if more players thought that idea was absolute crap than were willing to accept it and they weren't willing to resolve the issue with negotiation...then the other players could unite to Fine you into oblivion. Repeated Fines would then bleed their Coin advantage down to where they could be Challenged normally.

Ideally the threat of this possibility would bring that player to the negotiation table long before they lost all of their Coins in that manner. Once they became willing to negotiate then its likely that the remaining players would not longer be unified in a desire to keep levying a fine and so the fines would stop (because there is a backfire mechanism to fines that help prevent them from being called for frivolously).


So I think that Fines offer the last resort protection against that sort of occurance.

Capes is exactly like that situation, however...without the safty net.


That's a pretty funny Gimmick by the way. If they were to seriously try it, however, you'd just fine them repeatedly until they repealed it.

Ah yes... Fines. Forgot about those. We have yet to use them. But your points are well taken. Thanks for answering the question.

I think the Comics Code and Vetoes in Capes go a long way towards providing a safety net in this instance, very similar to Tenets and Challenges in Uni.

I agree that Capes doesn't go as *far* as Uni does (by design), which is maybe what you meant by "without a safety net."

Victor Gijsbers wrote: Would I do your position justice, James, were I to say that you point out that there is an equivalent of Complications in Capes, but not an equivalent of Challenges?

daMoose Neo wrote: I'm wondering why the *frell* you'd just sit down and go without any kind of direction. From initial character creation, you should be able to see where Players A (Multi-millionaire playboy/inventor/vigilante) and B (gritty, hardened Police commisioner) want to go. Player C (God of thunder & lighting on a quest to destroy a devouer of worlds) would obviously be right out.

Miskatonic wrote: This is the sort of stuff that gets sorted out in Capes when the group decides on the game's Comics Code.

TonyLB wrote: ..This example with the gritty noir people wanting street-level conflict and the one guy wanting world-spanning threats, and them constantly fighting tooth and nail to get their vision realized beyond the (to them) raw dreck the other person is offering? I want to play that game.

How many sessions, how good a story, do we have to achieve before you admit the possibility that something is going on here that you do not understand? Something that (GASP!) Universalis isn't capable of?

Well, Ralph, I'm sorry if a bit of frustration is showing through. I'm trying to figure out some way that you could possibly be satisfied at the end of our lengthy, lengthy discussion. I find it... difficult. You seem pretty committed to being unhappy about this.

Are you really holding out for me to say "Oh, I see! Ralph doesn't think that the game system can support what I've seen, so it must all be in my head. I'll rewrite Capes the way he wants"? I don't really think I can go that far to have a meeting of the minds with you.

Me, personally, I'd be perfectly content with you saying "You know what, Tony, I don't see how any game system could possibly do what you claim. But doing what was previously thought impossible is, after all, the nature of innovation, so I'll hold off judgment until there's more evidence about whether it works with other groups."

I'd be ecstatic if you said "You know what, Tony, I don't see how any game system could possibly do what you claim. That's very exciting! So I'm going to get some people together and play Capes straight by the rules, exactly as you wrote it, to see if we can reproduce your results."

TonyLB wrote:
Are you really holding out for me to say "Oh, I see! Ralph doesn't think that the game system can support what I've seen, so it must all be in my head. I'll rewrite Capes the way he wants"? I don't really think I can go that far to have a meeting of the minds with you.

Me, personally, I'd be perfectly content with you saying "You know what, Tony, I don't see how any game system could possibly do what you claim. But doing what was previously thought impossible is, after all, the nature of innovation, so I'll hold off judgment until there's more evidence about whether it works with other groups."

Guys, for those of you in this fray, this might be a frustrating thread. But I just want you to know that I think it's a great read. My experience with Capes is only three sessions and we had no problems of the sort reported, but that might not be meaningful because...we had no problems of the sort reported. Hmmm. Maybe we should set up a game where we intend to push our agenda strongly -- enough to strain things a bit.

James_Nostack wrote: Let's say you want to add something to the Code that I absolutely detest. Who gets their way, and how?

Ralph:

Valamir wrote: I would hope, however, to at least get the concession that maybe there's something there you'll keep an eye out for as actual play reports roll in.

Valamir wrote: But keep in mind I'm not suggesting the game can't do what you claim...it clearly CAN. The question is whether it will do that reliably and whether the game mechanics are actually helping or hindering that result.

I think I've finally figured out what's been bothering me about the issues people have been raising about free narrations and avoidance of the system. Granted, if all you want to do is narrate stuff you want to happen happening, then yeah, you can do that, just like Tony says.

But then you're not really playing Capes.

If I'm in a game of D&D and I'm told that the point is to survive, then there is NO WAY I'm actually going on the adventure down into the deep dark hole where all the nasty things with sharp teeth live. I'll get a job as a farmhand and give up adventuring right now.

Is that within the rules? Sure! I could play out getting hired, maybe courting, raising crops, all of it. But I'm not actually playing D&D.

I think that to truly PLAY Capes, you have to want more than to just say what happens, you have to be willing to step into the deep dark hole and set up some conflicts. If you engage with the system, and the other players do the same, then the system will help all of you to better engage with one another and add to the excitement and fun. Conversely, refusing to engage in the system leaves everyone disconnected, each in turn narrating whatever they want, with no connection to anything else. Nobody seems to honestly think that would be fun.

Now, about the propsed rule of spontaneous conflicts, I get the idea that Tony very deliberately set up Capes to allow you to narrate cool comic book stuff without all the baggage that Champions would require. Since this rule seems to be in response to behavior that appears jerk-ish (Maybe it isn't, but it feels that way to me), what if we inject similar behavior into a game using the new rules?

Andy: Okay, Captain Heroic shouts "You won't get away that easily!" He grabs an I-beam from the construction site and...

Bob: Wait, Captain Heroic isn't THAT strong. I mean, sure, he's stronger than normal, even super strong, but those beams are really, really heavy. I call Goal: Captain Heroic picks up the beam.

Andy: Umm, okay, I guess I can try to win that...

Wow, now everyone's a critic AND a gamemaster. Sure, everyone could play in good faith and avoid that mess, but then they could all play in good faith with the original rules and avoid THAT mess as well.

Anyway, I figured I should drop my two pennies while it seemed clearest.

Aaron was spot on there.

I like this example:

Andy: Okay, Captain Heroic shouts "You won't get away that easily!" He grabs an I-beam from the construction site and...

Bob: Wait, Captain Heroic isn't THAT strong. I mean, sure, he's stronger than normal, even super strong, but those beams are really, really heavy. I call Goal: Captain Heroic picks up the beam.

Noon wrote: Aaron was spot on there.

Noon wrote: So what happens when you get a bunch of players who want to explore if they can pick up the I-beam, start playing Capes?

My personal take on what a group should do when they want to explore "if" Captain Heroic is able to pick up the I-beam is that they should be playing Champions, Aberrant, or M&M or something where "if" is the question being answered by the system. If System does matter (as is generally a given around here) then Capes probably isn't the system for that type of play. Just like all those other games really aren't the games you want if you are exploring "why" Captain Heroic picked up the I-beam. At least, that's my opinion. Yours might be completely different.