I got a chance to play Capes, finally, and all I can say is...wow.  It's the best narrativist-supporting game I've played.  Still, and all, we had a problem with Conflicts, outlined in Actual Play.  We came up with a local fix...but wanted to get other Capes players' experience: have you experienced a similar issue with specificity in conflicts, and if so, how did you handle it?

The Actual Play post can be found <a href="http://www.indie-rpgs.com/forum/index.php?topic=18307.0">here.

Cheers,

Jason

This hasn't been how I have seen Capes played, during the game with Tony.  Ambiguous conflicts are supposed to be part of the fun.

The winner of the conflict has NO restrictions about how he resolves the conflict, except that his narration has to resolve the conflict.

Thanks for the kind words!

Fred is right:  the restrictions you are talking about are not built into the system.  Capes is different from many other games in that way.  It's not really surprising that your friend assumed that there were some restrictions ... and certainly, the way you handled it (explicitly talking through what kind of restrictions you want in future) is a perfectly mature and sensible way to do things.  Yeah, I don't love doing game-design (which is what you did ... congrats!) in an emotionally charged situation, but it sounds like you handled it with aplomb.

Believe it or not, I posted about this phenomenon (assumptions about rules) over on RPG.Net just yesterday.  So if you want my real carefully considered, but abstract, thoughts about the general issue you can read there.

But, specific to this actual play, I think it's worth recognizing that you are adding a House Rule to the game.  If you put it that way some of your players might say "Hey, actually, I'd prefer to play without that restriction, so long as we all agree what we can and can't do."

Tony:

You know, one of the things I love about playing Forge inspired games is that the game designer is more likely than not to answer questions like these.

Yeah, we recognized that the system in Capes was not designed with these limitations in mind, and as I said in response to Andrew Morris in my actual play post, I think this is local to our play group dynamics and who we are, rather than an overarching 'problem' with Capes.

I just wanted to see if anybody else had experienced this (and it seems from your comments, they have) and how they handled it.

From my read of the rules, the far reaching narration in resolution of a conflict is part of the game, and a potentially fun part of the game with the right attitude.  Someday, I may get to play with a group where such full-on freedom is embraced.

Still, adding the limits and specificity did amp the fun for the group as a whole, so, yeah, it worked for us.

Thanks for designing a great game!

Cheers,

Jason