Moderation:  What I thought was going to be a momentary tangent on Bodiless, Persona-less character turned into a great big wonderful discussion in its own right.  I was too slow to realize that, and now we have an immense split into a new topic.  Hopefully it won't throw people off too much.

Sydney wrote:
Actually, you could introduce and win a conflict to eliminate poetic justice, or all living beings, or the color green, from the universe in any Capes game; either people would ignore it as soon as it was over or have some funky narration to do thereafter, but you don't have to have a specific character in the game representing a concept before you can attack it.

Sindyr wrote: Let's say you play such a goal, and win it, and narrate Poetic Justice being pulled into a corporeal form.  Let's say through further won Conflicts that body is put into a coma, shut down, isolated, locked up......And as long as I can use my character sheet abilities, I can always narrate a boy doing the right thing, getting a karmic reward, and slowly realizing that that wouldn't have been possible if the *real* poetic justice was on ice.

So if the way you portray your characters makes it dramatically easier for you and the people you're playing with to have fun with "Kismet" than with any of the other infinite possibilities, that's great; if you have more freedom playing a disembodied presence than a specific person, go for it.

But if this kind of character is about making it easier for you not to care about things -- and primarily I've seen you talking, as with Bret's "Anti-Poetic Justice Man," about your ability to avoid being engaged -- then it strikes me as perverse. Why spend all this energy roleplaying something you don't want to care about, especially when you clearly do care about the characters in games you're roleplaying? Why start multiple threads and write innumerable posts defending the idea of not being emotionally invested, when you are clearly emotionally invested enough to write the posts in the first place?

Sindyr wrote:
I think you are functionally wrong here.  For example, if you introduce and win a conflict eliminating all sentient and non sentient life (whether mechanical, artificial or biological) than the Capes story ends - for without actor's, there's no play!

What heroes?

You know!  The heroes!  Zak and Fistfire and Ransom and Kettridge (in his own way) and ... well ... Vanessa every odd Tuesday.  The heroes.

Just erasing the entire space-time continuum isn't gonna stop us from using our characters.  Why would it?  I mean ... who's in charge here?  The established fiction or the players?  Sheesh.

Apparently not logic.  And once you abandon that, anything goes.

Wanna buy a square circle?

Well hey, if you want realism to be a part of the game then play it.  I usually write it up something like this:

[tt]                    Actions have consequences    5
Limits       4      Cause must precede effect    4
Rules        3      A and B implies C            3     Remorseless     3
Implications 2      Newton's Laws                2     Whimsical       2
Imperfection 1      Force = Mass x Acceleration  1     Mean-spirited   1[/tt]

Otherwise "realism" is just an argument that you make in the social space, and will succeed only as much as everyone agrees that honor it.

Tony, you have a talent for reading what I say and then responding to something completely different.

I said "logic", not realism.

So, you want to assign powers and attitudes to "Logic"?  I find "Realism" the more useful character, but if "Logic" is more attractive to you then go for it.

Now, *you* want to, apparently.

Anyways, if you don't care if the Capes rules are followed at all, then I guess you don't care about this thread.

Sindyr wrote:
Anyways, if you don't care if the Capes rules are followed at all, then I guess you don't care about this thread.

Want any rule is an in principle agreement to the base presence of logic, consistency, and continuity between players in their use, implementation, and defense.  Your proposed action was illogical and inconsistent.  When shown that, your response was that logic's only place vis-a-vis your game was to act as a PLC.

Given that you are throwing out the necessity of lgoic *amongst* the players, you are also supporting an illogical action they take.  Such as purporting to play your game while useing and rule or not in the moment as they see fit.

Without a foundation of rational behaviour, rules do not work.  So if you abandon reason, you abandon all rulesets, not exempting Capes.

What a weird turn when the author abandons his own work and the author's most outspoken colleague does not.

Sindyr, have you ever actually read any superhero comics? Tony hasn't talked about anything that contradicts the "logic" of superhero stories.

I didn't say he did.  I say he is contradicting the logic of the players and his game itself, NOT the characters.

And how did he do that?

I know that either Tony is seeing this and being willfully obstinate or that he can't see it no matter what I do, but for the rest of you that aren't like that:

When we created the Comics Code for our time-travel game, Sydney, Eric and I said "Hey, should we have a rule 'No destroying the entire space-time continuum and everything that ever existed or could have existed'?"  Our reply was "Nah, that would be a cool plot development.  That'd really put our heroes on the spot!"

Well, I think there is, in fact, a distinction between:

• Telling an illogical and inconsistent story, and...
• Abandoning logic in your actual life

But it certainly is a hoot watching Sindyr rail about it.  I'm sort of surprised that he limited his complaints to rules I could break at the game table.  Surely if I'm to have abandoned logic and reason entirely we could be more inventive than that.  In the absence of logic and rules, what's to stop me from murdering and eating my fellow players?  Indeed, what hideous crimes couldn't I commit with a mind so warped?

Heh.  I'm a super-villain!  Wheee!

I've read an awful lot of Sindyr posts by this point, learning about Capes through reading these forums.  I've never felt moved to post before since folks who know the game far better than I are more than willing to do so.  In this case, however, why not?

Sindyr, you can always one-up escalation.  If the most recent escalation is, "Everything in existence is destroyed," then you just have to go outside of existence.  "From beyond the walls of existence, where the cold wind does not blow but is no less cold, a mischievous entity creates a copy of the heroes in a bubble of non-time, curious as to how they would have reacted had they survived.  Just how resourceful are these little creatures of mere existence?"

Or wrap up the conflicts from the annihilation scene and then turn to a new one, with characters like "Entropy," "Spontaneous Generation," "Stagnation" in conflict to see what might become of the newly empty universe.  Heck, if I can come up with these two vague ideas off the top of my head, both of which accept possible meanings of the annihilation Goal, there have to be tons more.

I was inspired by the "oldest game" from Sandman (#4 I think) where Dream and the demon Choronzon do a sort of shapeshifting contest that escalates from things like wolves and hunters to "Anti-life" and "Hope."  

Jason
...and Tony, remind me to never fail to bring snacks to a Capes table if I make it to a con sometime to play with you.  ::grins::

R. wrote:
...and Tony, remind me to never fail to bring snacks to a Capes table if I make it to a con sometime to play with you.  ::grins::

TonyLB wrote:
Well, I think there is, in fact, a distinction between:

• Telling an illogical and inconsistent story, and...
• Abandoning logic in your actual life

But it certainly is a hoot watching Sindyr rail about it.  I'm sort of surprised that he limited his complaints to rules I could break at the game table.  Surely if I'm to have abandoned logic and reason entirely we could be more inventive than that.  In the absence of logic and rules, what's to stop me from murdering and eating my fellow players?  Indeed, what hideous crimes couldn't I commit with a mind so warped?

Heh.  I'm a super-villain!  Wheee!

R. wrote:
Sindyr, you can always one-up escalation.  If the most recent escalation is, "Everything in existence is destroyed," then you just have to go outside of existence.  "From beyond the walls of existence, where the cold wind does not blow but is no less cold, a mischievous entity creates a copy of the heroes in a bubble of non-time, curious as to how they would have reacted had they survived.  Just how resourceful are these little creatures of mere existence?"

Sindyr, you're tripping up on a fundamental misunderstanding of the rules of Capes -- which is understandable, actually, because you're assuming it works like most RPGs, in which the rules pretty explicitly say, "these rules are here to help you depict a realistic and logical world, but there's lots of room for judgment calls, and you should do what makes the most sense." Hence you get games that tell you, don't bother rolling for survival if a (normal human) character falls into a volcano, because it's impossible, and don't bother rolling to see if you hit a bound and helpless target, it's automatic; and even rules like HeroQuest's "maximum game fun" rule that say "if necessary, ignore all other rules." In these games, indeed, making rational arguments to convince the other players that such-and-such a course of action would work, or that such-and-such event would logically have certain consequences, is a big part of the game -- often, indeed, far more important than the actual die-rolling by the rules.

Capes is not like that. In Capes, while everyone has some of the traditional GM powers, no one has all of them: Specifically, no one can say "hey, the rules produce a nonsensical result in this situation, let's not follow them." You cannot appeal to the logic (or realism, or continuity, or whatever) of the imagined events to override the mechanical rules of the game.

Thus if someone successfully resolves a conflict to destroy all of reality, that means... absolutely nothing in game-mechanical terms. Just as I can win the conflict "kill Sindyr's character!" without ever impeding in any way your ability to use that character's abilities and debt later in the same scene or in subsequent scenes. We figure out our Inspirations, Story Tokens, and vanished or doubled-back debt, and that's it. Nobody can subsequently appeal later on to the results of a past Conflict and say "but that thing happened that way! You can't do that thing now!"

Remember, the in-game events are fictional. They are imaginary. We can imagine whatever we'd like. In some games, we agree that we want a logical, internally consistent world and are willing to be swayed by argument. The rules of Capes do not require us to make such an agreement; we only have to agree to follow the written rules. You cannot make an argument about what "should" happen in the imaginary world that has any binding force over what the real people playing are allowed to say and do in accordance with the real written words of the rules.

If you want to make the consequences of a past conflict count, you can spend Inspirations from it, or, less obviously, Story Tokens and Debt earned during it, and narrate accordingly -- and then hope that the dice are on your side about what the significance of the past event really is. Maybe you're right: Maybe destroying all of reality does mean the heroes don't exist. Maybe you're wrong. You've got to fight to prove it.

Footnote: Also, there are Indie games where the results of conflicts explicitly change what's permitted for future narration -- e.g. Vincent Baker's Afraid, currently in playtest, requires a conflict to change whether a given character is "lost," "unprepared," "in trouble," or "alone." Again, not in Capes.

What you have said *is* my point.

You cannot simultaneously keep the meaningfulness of winning cinflicts AND what you describe.  They are contradictory.

If I fight for and win a Conflict that I explicitly crafted and defined to destroy eveything that could ever exist in the narrative world, you either have to ignore the conflict, retconning it; or you have to start a new game.  You cannot continue playing AND claim you are not retconning my narration.

That's my point.  One or the other.

My *second* point is if you choose option B, and retcon the victory, then you have no rational ground to object if and when I retcon anything you do.

The fundamental truth of the matter is nothing more than sheer popularity, which it what makes the Social Contract so important for Capes, more so than other games.  If I destroy everything, and you retcon it back, the players will be supportive of that and will not discipline you for it.  On the other hand, if you win a conflict wherein your character defeats mine (say I am playing a non PLC) and I were to immediately retcon it, there would be cries of "Foul!", my retconning would be reversed by the group, and I may be punished.

Both retcons were equally valid, or equally invalid.  It's just that one is popular and the other is unpopular.

In this way Capes is a canny clever game.  By relying on the Social Contract in this way, Capes allows popular retconning while preventing unpopular retconning.  By relying on the Social Contract so thouroughly, Capes becomes in many ways only superficially about the resources, tokens, and rules, and more about who can be most popular.  It's a popularity contest at the social level, of who can get away with what.

There's nothing wrong with that intrinsically, although is does give me pause - the latest popularity contest elected Bush, an unmitigated disaster in every way.

Food for thought.

No.

1) "The meaningfulness of winning conflicts" is in the game-mechanical resources it conveys and, more important, in your power that moment to shape the story -- in a way that is underlined and reinforced by the rules in a way that free narration is not. In some other games, the meaning of a conflict would also extend to permanently defining some feature of the imagined world, such that it would prohibit certain kinds of future events: This is not the case in Capes, and it is not a necessary feature for conflicts to have meaning.

2) Capes is not a "popularity contest" among individuals: It's a contest among ideas to see which is more popular among the people involved, incentivized and structured by the Story Tokens-Debt-Inspirations economy.

3) My "rational ground" for objecting to some free narrations (including "retcons") and not to others is not based (as in traditional RPGs) on any arguments about what would or would not "really happen" in the fictional world: It is based on whether or not I like the resulting story. That's a subjective criterion, not an objective one -- but "objective" arguments about imaginary events are usually subjective preferences masked in tenuous logic, anyway.

I have in fact seen at least one group of people where two strong personalities dominated as we sat around talking before play began, but once we started a game of Capes, the turn structure, debt economy, and other formalized systems for input and challenge to other's input allowed everyone to participate in a much more equal way. That is in fact the opposite of the "most popular person gets away with whatever s/he can" dynamic that you appear to be worrying about.

By contrast, a lot of traditional RPGs boil down to "whoever can talk over everyone else and get the GM's attention gets his/her way because whatever the GM says goes," or "whoever can keep arguing and arguing and arguing and arguing and refusing to concede the point and arguing and arguing and refusing to admit that the other side has made a better case and arguing and arguing eventually gets his or her way because everyone else will give in to let play continue."

The first of these behaviors is simply impossible in Capes: if you talk over everyone else, they can't take their turns, and play halts, so nothing happens, including what you wanted to impose.

The second is difficult to do, and when it is possible, it is self-defeating. As long as a Conflict is underway, the other players can simply refuse to listen to your argument and point to the dice and debt on the table: You cannot say "because of this conflict that happened before, this character can or cannot do this" in Capes any more than you can say "because of this and that, this particular pawn can move three squares a turn" in chess, or "in this case, because of special circumstances, your Straight Flush does not beat my unsuited King, Jack, Four, and Ace" in poker. Outside of a conflict, in free narration, you can badger people into doing things your way -- as long as they don't resort to a conflict in response -- but at the price of losing their interest in what you do next, which means losing Story Tokens.

Sydney wrote:
No.

1) "The meaningfulness of winning conflicts" is in the game-mechanical resources it conveys and, more important, in your power that moment to shape the story -- in a way that is underlined and reinforced by the rules in a way that free narration is not. In some other games, the meaning of a conflict would also extend to permanently defining some feature of the imagined world, such that it would prohibit certain kinds of future events: This is not the case in Capes, and it is not a necessary feature for conflicts to have meaning.

2) Capes is not a "popularity contest" among individuals: It's a contest among ideas to see which is more popular among the people involved, incentivized and structured by the Story Tokens-Debt-Inspirations economy.

3) My "rational ground" for objecting to some free narrations (including "retcons") and not to others is not based (as in traditional RPGs) on any arguments about what would or would not "really happen" in the fictional world: It is based on whether or not I like the resulting story. That's a subjective criterion, not an objective one -- but "objective" arguments about imaginary events are usually subjective preferences masked in tenuous logic, anyway.

This is incorrect.  At least in one way: If winning a conflict is to have meaning, it must create at least in the moment a truth.  The truth in the moment MUST extend forward OR if it doesn't then you have a game that permits retconning.

Ralph is a very smart chap.

I not sure I can believe I'm going to say this...

Although I don't agree with the vast majority of what Sindyr posts, for a variety of reasons, I  personally I feel that Sindyr has made a giant leap forward in his grasp of the Capes ethos with his acceptance that whatever happens to a PLC under his control doesn't actually have to affect his playing of that character.

Maybe this is the stepping stone to the playing of a standard character in the same care free manner. and maybe from that to the concept that Conflicts are not character destroying but character building no matter how the Conflict is phrased.

One small step for Man, a giant leap for Sindyrkind... ;)

Valamir wrote:

This is incorrect.  At least in one way: If winning a conflict is to have meaning, it must create at least in the moment a truth.  The truth in the moment MUST extend forward OR if it doesn't then you have a game that permits retconning.

I spent many long and tedious posts making exactly this argument.  This argument is pretty much the core of Universalis...a game that in many ways is very similar to Capes, but in this crucial way it is not.  All of Universalis is predicated on the idea that the "truth in the moment must extend forward to have meaning".  That's why Universalis play establishes Facts, and gives players a mechanical advantage when defending those Facts in the future.

But thing is, I've since come to realize, Capes doesn't work that way.  You've correctly recognized that Capes doesn't have a mechanic that establishes "truth extending forward".  Your mistake however (as mine was) is in assuming it needs one.

Sindyr wrote:
The reason it is irrefutable is this:
If I win a conflict in which spidey defeats doc ock, and then soon after that defeat is made to *have never happened*, that is a retcon.  If it does not happen, then the truth of spidey defeats doc ock stands.  There is no thrid option.

TonyLB wrote:

Sindyr wrote:
The reason it is irrefutable is this:
If I win a conflict in which spidey defeats doc ock, and then soon after that defeat is made to *have never happened*, that is a retcon.  If it does not happen, then the truth of spidey defeats doc ock stands.  There is no thrid option.

Well ... does it matter whether the defeat has any consequences?

'cuz, yeah.  Of course it happened.  As people have pointed out, even if someone goes back and changes the past, it has still happened in the story.  You narrated it, it happened.  But if it Doc Ock goes into complete denial and says it wasn't a defeat ("It was a DRAW!  A DRAW I TELL YOU!") and he doesn't go to prison, and the Daily Bugle runs a story about Doc Ock's defeat of Spiderman (because, seriously, they would) ... it still happened, but it hasn't had any consequences.

If I kill someone, and then they come back to life, that doesn't mean they weren't killed.  I totally killed them.  It just didn't stick.

If I destroy the timestream for ever and ever, and then the next scene is in our headquarters ... well, the timestream was still destroyed.  That happened.  It just didn't have any consequences.

You cool with that?

That's consequences.  That's you saying "The universe was destroyed and it has to stay destroyed."

TonyLB wrote:
That's consequences.  That's you saying "The universe was destroyed and it has to stay destroyed."

So your objection is to "committing a retcon," no more and no less? I can see why in other genres this might be a sticking point, but this is the comics, for cryin' out loud: retroactive continuity is all over the place.

Sindyr wrote:
No, I am not.

I am saying"The universe was destroyed and it has to stay destroyed or you will be committing a retcon."

Just in case people were wondering where this big new RetCon thread came from, I just split it off of Bodiless, persona-less character.  This new shoot is fascinating enough in itself that it was unfair to leave it grafted to the trunk of the previous conversation.  I usually split a bit quicker, but this struck me as a tangent at first, and I thought it would eventually return, rather than pick up steam on its own.  My bad!

Sindyr wrote:

Valamir wrote:

This is incorrect.  At least in one way: If winning a conflict is to have meaning, it must create at least in the moment a truth.  The truth in the moment MUST extend forward OR if it doesn't then you have a game that permits retconning.

I spent many long and tedious posts making exactly this argument.  This argument is pretty much the core of Universalis...a game that in many ways is very similar to Capes, but in this crucial way it is not.  All of Universalis is predicated on the idea that the "truth in the moment must extend forward to have meaning".  That's why Universalis play establishes Facts, and gives players a mechanical advantage when defending those Facts in the future.

But thing is, I've since come to realize, Capes doesn't work that way.  You've correctly recognized that Capes doesn't have a mechanic that establishes "truth extending forward".  Your mistake however (as mine was) is in assuming it needs one.

Sorry, no.  Nothing you have said in this reply I feel contradicts the irrefutable logic:
The truth in the moment MUST extend forward OR if it doesn't then you have a game that permits retconning.

To expand on Ralph's point:

Traditional RPGs place a great deal of discretionary power in the hands of the GM. Most importantly, this power operates without resource constraints, in that the GM does not have to "spend" anything to make his (more rarely her) judgments stick: Therefore imposing a GM judgment has zero cost (in game-mechanical terms; quite possibly not in social terms) that impedes the GM's ability to impose additional judgments in future. Further, this power operates without a resource economy, so that the GM's use of power in one instance does not transfer power to other people to use in other instances, so the (im)balance of power remains static. Given that imposing judgment requires "zero cost, zero change," it is relatively easy for the single person in the GM role to impose and enforce certain kinds of constraints on the story. E.g., "no retcons ever" or "sure, whatever, let's retcon, no biggie."

Less obviously, both traditional strong-single-GM RPGs and freeform "commie" roleplaying without a GM rely fairly heavily on the participants' judgment of "what should happen" according to some standard of realism, logic, fidelity to the source material, proper story arc, whatever. Again, this operates without resource constraints and without a resource economy, so once an individual has convinced the group as a whole to make a decision, there is "zero cost, zero change" in terms of resources and balance of power (respectively) that might reduce that individual's ability to do the same thing again and again. Therefore, as a result, these groups are relatively vulnerable to domination by a single strong personality, often but by no means always the "GM" -- a person possessing what Sindyr calls "popularity" --  who can impose his (rarely her) standards on the ground. They also vulnerable to being constrained by the forceful objections of an individual "spoiler," who lacks the charisma and/or force of argument ("popularity") to bring the group along to his (rarely her) vision, but who is sufficiently persistent in making objections (usually in the guise of reasoned argument, but generally mere assertion, ad hominem, and passive-aggressive "if you disagree with me you're a meanie" gambits) that the rest of the group concedes the point from sheer exhaustion, just to keep play going, and stays away from doing whatever the spoiler objects too.

Note that in either case, the GM or non-GM dominant player is almost certainly expressing his (rarely her) arguments as "objective" (or "logical," "fair," etc.). This may even be true. This is also beside the point. Because the game-world is not real, it itself is not "objective," "logical," or "fair" in any way: It is the consensus product of the participants' imaginations, mediated and integrated by their discussions ("shared imaginary space"), and therefore meets the definition of "subjective" about as perfectly as is possible. Whether the dominant participant's arguments are "objective" or not in their content, the process by which he gets the rest of the players (and possibly a weak GM) to accept them is highly subjective, i.e. discussion.

In fact, the only "objective" element of a roleplaying game -- that is, the only element that exists at least potentially outside the participants' own minds -- is the text of the rules, and (at a stretch) the formal procedures ("game mechanics") that are spelled out in those rules. In most RPGs, however, the rules-text quite explicitly defers to the subject judgment of the participants -- usually the GM, but often the group as a whole -- in saying something to the effect that the rules should be overlooked when they give a patently illogical result (as decided by the subjective consensus of the players), or when the process of using the procedures in the rules is too cumbersome, or when the outcome is not fun/dramatic/fair/realistic/whatever (again, according to the players' subjective judgment). Most "indie" games, by contrast, are fairly strict in saying their procedures are actually to be followed, and Forge discussions often emphasize that players should "play it as written" and, rather than override the rules as soon as a problematic result arises, adhere to the rules regardless and trust that that non-obvious emergent effects intended by the designer, which they may not perceive at this moment of discomfort, will in the long run provide far greater satisfaction. Capes is a particularly strong example of this trend.

As a result, Capes, for all its imperfections, is structurally highly resistant to both forms of the "single dominant participant" problem. This resistance has very little to do with "GM or no GM?" It has everything to do with the resource economy. Any individual, no matter how forcefully charismatic ("popular") or persistently obstreperous ("spoiler"), cannot obtain his (rarely her) desired results at "zero cost, zero change" merely by verbal argument. Any such verbal effort can be blocked by game-mechanics (assuming the rules are followed), simply by having another player put down an appropriately worded conflict (usually in this case, a preventive conflict) and engaging the conflict resolution system. At this point (assuming some minimal courtesy prevails), the popular/spoiler individual must expend game-mechanical resources to impose his will -- it is no longer "zero cost" -- and his expenditure of resources, even if successful, will end up giving more resources to the other players to constrain him later -- it is no longer "zero change" in terms of the balance of power. If the popular/spoiler player persists in this approach regardless, each subsequent attempt to impose his will becomes more difficult -- because the balance of power keeps shifting against him -- and therefore more costly -- making his expenditure of resources ever-greater for the same results -- until he loses all ability to impact the game, or changes his approach.

Conversely, a player who is neither "popular" nor a "spoiler," but who successfully understands or intuits what the other players find exciting and engaging, will tend to come out of conflicts with more resources gained than expended. This reward system gives this player more power to shape the story, and if s/he continues to do so in a way that is engaging and exciting for the other players, s/he will continue to get more resources, in a virtuous cycle.

Given these positive and negative feedback loops, if a given group of players has a strong shared desire for strict continuity, the emergent dynamic will strongly militate against "retcons," without any need for further rules. (Likewise if the players prefer "no sex scenes" or "no graphic violence"). But if only one player has a strong desire for strict continuity (or whatever), and the other players are not particularly interested one way or another, that single participant has relatively little ability to impose his (rarely her) desires on the group -- relative, that is, to a traditional RPG without a resource economy.

I strongly suspect Sindyr is personally used to play being either dominated or disrupted by "popular" and "spoiler" players. I would like to reassure him that both my own experiences playing Capes, and the many experiences of others I have read in Actual Play threads, show such problems are much rarer in Capes than in more traditional, less structured RPGs.