Hi all:

Well, we have jointly decided to put our Capes game on hold here in Ontario, after 5 sessions.  That does not mean we will not play Capes in future (I personally hope to play a lot more), but I do not think we will be returning to the story line as described in our Wiki site (which I will update with the last session, eventually).  I thought it was worth discussing our experience.  Its going to be fairly stream of consciousness, sorry, and its too darn long.  Oh well.

* How in Sam Hill do you get more than one scene in a night!?  We had 5 sessions, five LONG scenes.  One of the biggest problems we were having was that we really felt like we weren't getting anywhere.  The amount of story "events" that took place in those five scenes would have taken one night, tops, in a game like Primetime Adventures (more on this later).  But we spent a LOT of time getting around to them.  Admittedly, we were all learning the rules as we went, and no one ever called Capes a "rules lite" game.  However, sometimes it seemed as if we were spinning our wheels.  As an example: I made the mistake at one point of putting at a Goal that seemed, at the time, sort of a throw away.  However, both Liz and Josh ended up locked into deadly combat over this goal that neither of them really seemed to care much about (primarily because they were both trying to get rid of debt off of their character sheets.)  An inordinate amount of time was spent on narration associated with this Goal, when in reality it probably could have dealt with in a paragraph.

* Cleverness can be a bad thing.  Both Piers and I started scenes with "clever" ideas, ideas that in other games would have led to some interesting game play, probably.  In Piers case, he was interested in a scene about the formation of the super-powered task force, so it was essentially a group of people around a meeting table.  In my case, it was a scene travelling from said meeting table to the first mission, with a television playing in the background.  In both cases, our "cleverness" pretty much backfired.  We ended up with scenes that pretty much ended up going nowhere (although they took a long time to do it).  What we need was some freaking ACTION!

* Colour and situation, not setting and character.  What I realized after playing Capes in these sessions was that Capes is fantastic at colour and situation, but pretty much horrible for setting.  Character is sort of in between.  I realized this because I realized we had been trying to create a very "setting" rich game.  All of us, but especially myself, were trying to jockey for ways to introduce interesting stuff about "WHY" things were happening, while not enough of us (especially me) were trying to make things actually happen.

* Epic stories a bad idea:  Those of you who have read our wiki know that we were going for a "BIG" story; man, we were trashing out cities right and left, having alien invaders turn people all over the world into zombies, you name it.  But the bottom line, on reflection, was that all of this was just window dressing.  We spent an inordinate amount of time on all this stuff, and in the end it was just a distraction.  Hence, I am of the opinion that "BIG" stories are a bad idea for Capes.  (more on this below)

* Fractured narration.  There was one instance where the group of characters was in an airplane, heading straight for the city sized alien spacecraft on a crash course.  Three characters are of interest here; Johnny, Ms. Scarlet, and Top Gun.  Here is how things went.  First, Ms. Scarlet's player narrates Johnny as unconscious, and falling to his doom after people ejected from the plane.  Ms. Scarlet is narrated diving downwards to catch him.    Then, the next player (a little while later) narrates Johnny conscious, zooming up to grab Top Gun out of the airplane.  Then, a little while later, someone narrates Top Gun falling to his doom out of the aircraft, but stoping himself by magnetically levitating his own belt buckle.  Note the disconnect in those pieces of narration.  Is Johnny unconscious or not?  What happened to Ms. Scarlet?  Why did Johnny save Top Gun only to drop him again?  None of this was intentional.  Essentially, what was happening was that people simply could not keep track of what was going on in the story line.  By the time all the reactions had finished for one action, and that person had taken a 2nd action with their other character, the specifics of what had been narrated as part of the first action were sort of lost.  Hence, the narration often seemed choppy and incoherent. 

* Lead up to the resolution of conflicts hard to time.  Ok, so "Event: The airplane crashes into the ocean" is on the table, from the 2nd page.  So, everyone starts narrating various tidbits that are starting to bring the airplane closer to its eventual doom.  Then, just at the moment when we all think Liz (I think it was Liz) was going to resolve the conflict, someone happens to roll the unclaimed side slighty upward at the end of the page.  Meanwhile, the airplane has been narrated to be moments away from crashing, and now has to somehow survive another page.  So, we end up with what is probably the longest airplane about to crash scene since Randy Quaid took 20 minutes to fly into the big spaceship in Independence Day.  The bottom line is that it is very difficult to pace the narration on events such as this so that the end result is something that is satisfying.

* Story control, who has it?:  At the end of our last session, Josh said something that I thought was very interesting.  Josh said that he felt like he had had very little control over what had happened in the game.  Now, some of this was due to some VERY bad luck on his part (I think at one point he rolled four or five ones in a row).  And some of it was due to all of us having overestimated the power of story tokens; story tokens are really only valuable in so far as you have more of them than other people.  But this comment was especially interesting to me because I felt I had had a LOT of control over how the story had gone.  Not all for the good, mind you; many of the problems I am describing here (such as the concentration on "setting" and the "big" events, which turned about to be bad news) were directly a result of my manipulation of things.  But what this told me is that I had taken a lot of control in the story seemingly from Josh.  On reflection, I realize that I had been, in essence, acting as an unofficial GM for the game.  How was I able to do this?  Well, a couple of ways.  First, I was the rules expert at the beginning, and understood the tactics better than anyone else.  Therefore, while I TRIED to be impartial about telling people their tactical options, I am certain that I was biased in doing so.  Second, I relied on my fellow players good natures to NOT veto many of the conflicts I played, and purposely wrote them to ensure that I got my way in the end.  I do not think this was effective, in the end, because while I was trying to be the GM, I didn't have the powers of a GM, so a lot of things that I was desparate to have in the story ended up being fought over, simply because they were what was on the table. 

* Panels of comic = action/reaction.  One thing that became clear to me was the following; Capes is a game that tells stories in the same way a comic book tells stories.  Each action/reaction bit of narration is essentially a "panel" in the ongoing story.  One of our problems was that we were treating these "panels" as mini-scenes, in and of themselves.  The amount of narration associated with the actions/reactions was incredible, sometimes.  But what this really means is that if the story you want to try to tell can't be chopped up into panels very easily, then don't use Capes to tell it.

* Primetime Adventures vs. Capes:  The final realization I had, as I was driving home from our last session was this...we had been trying to do a TV show instead of a comic book.  The story we were telling was pretty much an anime; even the way we described things happening was from a cinematic, not comic perspective.  And on reflection, I can now see where this was a bad idea.  We were essentially using the wrong tool for the job. 

So, what next?  Well, first, we are going to all experiment with the Burning Wheel for a while.  But my personal hope is that we, or at least some core group up here in our larger Toronto area indie-RPG group, comes back to Capes in the future, but in doing so commits to doing it like, I think, it was meant to be done.  "Superpowers are fun, but do you deserve them?"  That is the premise of Capes, and that is what we need to hit hard.  Spandex, fire blasts, tall buildings lept in a single bound, girlfriends hanging from suspension bridges, etc.  Keep each narration short and highly focused, preferably described like they were actually panels in a comic book.  Make sure that the scenes are situation heavy, and keep setting and other backstory stuff to a minimum.  If you NEED a darn wiki, then you are probably not doing it right. :)

I hope that Josh, Liz, and/or Piers pitches in on this at some point, to give their own perspectives.  But that is my take on things.

Hans

Hans wrote: * Story control, who has it?:  ... Josh said that he felt like he had had very little control over what had happened in the game.  Now, some of this was due to some VERY bad luck on his part... And some of it was due to all of us having overestimated the power of story tokens

* How in Sam Hill do you get more than one scene in a night!?

* Cleverness can be a bad thing.  Both Piers and I started scenes with "clever" ideas, ideas that in other games would have led to some interesting game play, probably.  In Piers case, he was interested in a scene about the formation of the super-powered task force, so it was essentially a group of people around a meeting table.  In my case, it was a scene travelling from said meeting table to the first mission, with a television playing in the background.  In both cases, our "cleverness" pretty much backfired.  We ended up with scenes that pretty much ended up going nowhere (although they took a long time to do it).   What we need was some freaking ACTION!

* Epic stories a bad idea:

* Fractured narration.

* Lead up to the resolution of conflicts hard to time.  Ok, so "Event: The airplane crashes into the ocean" is on the table, from the 2nd page.  So, everyone starts narrating various tidbits that are starting to bring the airplane closer to its eventual doom.  Then, just at the moment when we all think Liz (I think it was Liz) was going to resolve the conflict, someone happens to roll the unclaimed side slighty upward at the end of the page.  Meanwhile, the airplane has been narrated to be moments away from crashing, and now has to somehow survive another page.  So, we end up with what is probably the longest airplane about to crash scene since Randy Quaid took 20 minutes to fly into the big spaceship in Independence Day.  The bottom line is that it is very difficult to pace the narration on events such as this so that the end result is something that is satisfying.

* Primetime Adventures vs. Capes:  The final realization I had, as I was driving home from our last session was this...we had been trying to do a TV show instead of a comic book.  The story we were telling was pretty much an anime; even the way we described things happening was from a cinematic, not comic perspective.  And on reflection, I can now see where this was a bad idea.  We were essentially using the wrong tool for the job.

"Superpowers are fun, but do you deserve them?"  That is the premise of Capes, and that is what we need to hit hard.  Spandex, fire blasts, tall buildings lept in a single bound, girlfriends hanging from suspension bridges, etc.  Keep each narration short and highly focused, preferably described like they were actually panels in a comic book.  Make sure that the scenes are situation heavy, and keep setting and other backstory stuff to a minimum.

jaw6 wrote:
To expand on this part a little... Playing Capes, I never felt like I had a good grasp on how, mechanically, to "get what I want". Talking with Hans about this that night, I think I decided this should be better phrased as "I can make things happen if I plan for them way, way, way in advance, but if the ground shifts a little, I don't feel like I have the tools -- no matter how large my toolbox gets -- to seize control."

Point is: We each had the resources to max out our dice, but my two-way split was never going to beat her three-way, no matter how many tokens and inspirations I threw at it.

I think what he's saying is not so much "I can't get the plot to go where I want" but rather "Oh man, I just made a decision that has consequences that I did not foresee, and which hamper me."

For instance, a common move from new players is to distribute their first five debt tokens, one on each drive.  Then when they want to split dice, they suddenly realize "Oh, man!  I needed to be thinking about this before-hand!  Now I'm screwed!"

Yeah, there're definitely some crunchy tactical rules that even I get tripped up by, and I've played literally dozens of sessions.

And yeah, having played a campaign of each with (almost) the same group of people, Capes and Prime Time Adventures are about as far apart from each other as character-focused thematic ("narrativist") games using fortune-in-the-middle resolution can be. PTA is very much in the mode of "the group roleplays stuff freeform until we hit a conflict point, then we talk over alternative stakes free-and-clear, then engage cards/dice, then back to freeform." Capes is very much "I have various mechanical options, on my turn I take one of them unilaterally and narrate it as punchily as I can, everyone deploys one of their mechanical counter-options, repeat." PTA can easily give you 5-10 minutes of everyone narrating per die roll/card draw; Capes breaks down with more than 30-60 seconds of narration per die roll/card draw. Even more profoundly, PTA gives the players, working mainly through consensus, a tremendous amount of control over where the story is going to go; Capes relies on competition among players to drive the story in directions that none of them could have possibly foreseen.

Some brief advice, mostly rehasing what others have said:

1) Narrate one die roll as one panel of a comic or one shot of a tightly-edited action movie. You should normally be saying only one or two sentences per die roll. This will not only help with speed of play, it'll make it a lot easier to keep track of what's going on and keep everyone's narration consistent.

2) Never introduce a new Conflict "just because." If you can't figure out anything else to do with your turn, roll up a level-1 Inspiration to a 2, or just pass; tossing out a Conflict that you don't find exciting is a sure way to get those interminable scenes everyone complains about.

3) Remember you can spend Story Tokens to claim more than one Conflict at a time, which makes it possible (especially if you spend a few more Story Tokens on roll on each of them) to shut down a scene, hard and fast. Again, if you forget this mechanic, it's very easy to end up with an interminable steady-state scene of new Conflicts being introduced as fast as old ones are resolved.

4) Never dump Debt on a Conflict "just because." If you invest mechanical resources in something, you're going to give it more screen time, which means you'd better be interested in it -- or, use your immense narrative authority to make it interesting. (E.g. turn "Event: the City explodes" into an intense back-and-forth about one little girl and her adorable kitty rushing through the flaming ruins).

5) Forget about consensus or "control." Be prepared to fight for what you want to see in the story, but also be prepared to enjoy losing that fight and being pleasantly surprised by your fellow players' imaginations.

Sydney wrote:
Some brief advice, mostly rehasing what others have said:

Sydney wrote:
4) Never dump Debt on a Conflict "just because." If you invest mechanical resources in something, you're going to give it more screen time, which means you'd better be interested in it -- or, use your immense narrative authority to make it interesting. (E.g. turn "Event: the City explodes" into an intense back-and-forth about one little girl and her adorable kitty rushing through the flaming ruins).

Bret wrote:

* How in Sam Hill do you get more than one scene in a night!?

 

Hans, based on what you've written - that one scene takes a whole session and you feel like the scenes are going nowhere, my suggestion is: STOP MAKING CONFLICTS.

I'd add that you need to make Conflicts that make the other players say, "Oh no you didn't!" and do that head-bob, fingerwag thing. Try and figure out what the other players want, and then shut them down. That's where the action is.

I just think that with epic stories, the tendency is to make conflicts that don't really matter to the players or the characters. "Goal: Blow up a city." Big whoop. We see cities blow up in movies and comics all the time. Sure, the superhero doesn't want that to happen, but neither he nor the supervillain have a personal stake in this. Now, if the superhero's girlfriend is in the city, that's a different story. The stakes are raised and there's major consequences to what's happening.

This makes me raise an eyebrow - I don't see why Capes couldn't do anime or cinematic things. Manga blends over into anime, movies take a lot of inspiration from comics. I guess I'm not sure how a roleplaying game is "comics, not cinematic" or "cinematic, not comics" since those are mediums, not styles, and the overlap with how a game gets run doesn't seem to be that clear-cut.

drnuncheon wrote:
"No battle plan ever survived contact with the enemy."... Anyway, I think that if you go into a Capes game with a predetermined plot or idea of how things are going to go, you are likely to be disappointed, because each of the other players as just as much control over what happens as you do.  If the ground shifts a little, you have to change and adapt your plans... The thing is, I'm not sure what you'd see as an acceptable outcome here - and what would still be acceptable if you were the person on the other side.  To me, it looks like both players were interested in the outcome, but it was more important to one character than it was to the other (higher Drive staked on the conflict), so that character won.

TonyLB wrote:
I think what he's saying is not so much "I can't get the plot to go where I want" but rather "Oh man, I just made a decision that has consequences that I did not foresee, and which hamper me."

So, Hans, Joshua et. al., are you concerned by the fact that it's not intuitive yet (i.e. when you've played only one session and are still feeling your way into the rules)?  Or are you concerned that it is so fundamentally foreign to your nature that it will never become intuitive?

TonyLB wrote:
So, Hans, Joshua et. al., are you concerned by the fact that it's not intuitive yet (i.e. when you've played only one session and are still feeling your way into the rules)?  Or are you concerned that it is so fundamentally foreign to your nature that it will never become intuitive?

- Excuse me, is everybody gone ?
I thought, although I am neither Josh nor Brad nor Bill, I could add something about focussing goals by pacing the beginning of a game session (if nothing as obvious as "X goes out and buys the pizzas the others like most" is already available). As an epilogue, you know.

YOU CAN JUMP THE LITERATURE DIRECTLY TO MY OFFER
(And for those who wonder when I will stop fussying around about addressing someone on the forum about an old topic which doesn't matter anymore, I'll say : when I will be invited to express myself on a fresh one, or after I manage goal setting a bit more)
WHY THE POST
I had this idea about pacing down the "confrontational" nature of conflicts, which can crumble into what you have described : goals that create conflict without constructing anything in the not-so-long run. I felt it had to be done using the goal mechanics. So I have had this abstract theory about SG, but I had not yet seen where to put this in practice. Then there was you, Hans, who most simply, maybe as a beginner, pointed out a major flaw of many an "experienced" game :  "a good fight without a cause". Brett Gillan's answer to it seems to me really right, but somehow incomplete. Mine is too late, but I hope will be of use. (Do I need to say : "rolling dice on Hans side with 'experiment' " ?)
Also, it so happens that I roleplayed AND GMed a "captain of the team election" in a Champions game and it was absolute fun and left room for romance and plenty more issues to be played on later on. Actually, each player knew the others well, played two characters, GM included, who played City Mayor and Chief of Police as well as their own supers, two "non"PC which had slightly opposing interests, and the point was forming a team after a classical first "casual" encounter. The way we "double-played" it (with so many possible antagonizing directions) was very close to a diceless form of Capes, yet it lacked all the neat mechanics to dig on in it. Maybe that's another reason why I was interested by the present thread.

SALESMAN SPEECH
Brett Gillan's "captain of the team election" is in my experience a nice "setting goal" (not "goal setting", mind you)
A clever setting goal gives time to wrap together fractured narration (much the same "post-modern" approach to narration as your "panel" issue, don't you think ?), epic as it be. It gives not much story control, maybe, but to hell with it : the very game may be chaotic in nature (is "rolling the die" a clue ? What about " bringing a number of people to speak in the same place" ?). I will propose one more "setting goal" to your scrutiny, not knowing in what situation it would be of use. I hint at a "can't keep player(s) from arguing on anything even if they don't care" scenario.

MY OFFER TO HANS
The goal would be "everything is fine" and you just narrate what a peacefull day it is, maybe sending each character in his (secret ID if any) daily life. After all, that's how it all began. I already think of one result : each player trying to break this (after all, they wanna play, don't they ?), and doing so giving an hint at what he is after (the others just have to grab the theme in his narration, and let it go, as it doesn't matter right now). Then you have another player, and it's time to get to weave the themes (three seems easy at first), and you've got at least one page to find a good way of putting all of them supers or normals together. Actually, I think it can also go pretty wrong, with one(+) player(s) not wanting his(their) character to join on the others', but then, as the place is "the city", there may be some big signs in the sky or, well... something. Let me know if you can use this and what would eventually come out.

Calliclès wrote:
MY OFFER TO HANS
The goal would be "everything is fine" and you just narrate what a peacefull day it is, maybe sending each character in his (secret ID if any) daily life. After all, that's how it all began. I already think of one result : each player trying to break this (after all, they wanna play, don't they ?), and doing so giving an hint at what he is after (the others just have to grab the theme in his narration, and let it go, as it doesn't matter right now). Then you have another player, and it's time to get to weave the themes (three seems easy at first), and you've got at least one page to find a good way of putting all of them supers or normals together. Actually, I think it can also go pretty wrong, with one(+) player(s) not wanting his(their) character to join on the others', but then, as the place is "the city", there may be some big signs in the sky or, well... something. Let me know if you can use this and what would eventually come out.

I guess some introductory narratives (heard in early childhood ?) has produced unalterable damage on a very specific location of my brain. I meant "wrong". But this won't hurt my point too much (only make it longer, which I must apologize for). Also, I should say "event" and instead I say "goal" because I take bona fide for granted around the table as well as in this forum.

1° If everything is too fine, something bad will happen. Stereotypical yet efficient impending disaster.

2° Well then, if everything IS wrong, it makes the scene a tiny bit harder to picture, I admit. Apocalypse is a poetic genre.

As a gaming group, we had to blow out of our living rooms some bad habits, first "all combat action", then "incongruous gregarism on behalf of the characters", and then "players confront each other on every doorknob" (goal : "the door opens").
Then, scientific progress just went "BOINK".
You all know what's next : "physical violence is resorted to", "any character gets in touch with any other", and last "there is a conflict" created as events (and yet named goals;) They were easy to come up with intuitively. We saw they threatened specific assumptions we had made about the game and they have given us a tool for getting closer to what we like and want to HEAR.

Anyway, the result in my experience was that everyone was thinking (So much for having fun...) "How do we play this ? ", "How do we get out of this ? ", mostly following the set direction when prompted, looking at the others in disbelief, discarding prepared goals if any, and trying his best to be constructive after that. Be it only because it is difficult enough to find a "way back to the world as we knew it" (1° as players or 2° as characters).

POSOLOGY : Make sure every one of the players is fine. Spend an action.

CAUTION : It can all go awefully wrong ("no physical violence" some players pictured as Disneyland...). You don't want to do this in real life. It smells like terrorist action.