The Forge Archives

Okay, the new revision of Capes is online.  I've separated the action into two phases:  First is Monologue Phase for talking, invoking Attitudes and Powers, and playing with Debt.  Second is Wonder Phase, for rolling dice and doing stuff.  That, I think, is a tremendously useful division for speeding and simplifying gameplay.

But I've also formalized Facts and given a first shot at how to integrate them.  Which is giving me tremendous brain-cramps.  The current iteration is a simple "You win a Staked Conflict, you declare a Fact" manner, and it is not singing.  There's just no strength to Facts declared that way, by player or GM fiat.  You could get lucky, and people could really grow attached to what they thought up on the spur of the moment, but I'm not counting on it.

So here's a different idea:

[*]You win a Staked Conflict, that earns you the right to declare a Scene, later.[*]The rules for handling the Scene are such that it is likely (but not automatic) that it will generate a Fact of Strength roughly equal to the Stakes you put in.[*]The scene goes through a number of rounds equal to the combined Stakes of the Conflict.[*]At the end of that number of rounds the scene ends, whether anything has been resolved or (more likely) not.[*]Each round should offer progressively more emotional risk, and more potential reward, than the last[*]Each round of the scene is resolved using a Conversation mechanic.[*]Initial thought: The conversation and combat mechanics should share the same Monologue phase, but then use dice pools in a subtly different way... combat uses the Wonder Phase, and conversation uses a Discovery phase.[/list:u]Now what in tarnation should this Discovery phase be about?  That's where this gets a little hairy.

In the Wonder Phase of Capes, if you spend a number of Dice on something then you get to narrate the result.  The number of Dice spent (with some additional stuff) dictate the maximum level of outcome you can achieve.  Within those limits you are free to narrate what you want.

My thinking is that in the Discovery Phase, if you spend a number of Dice on something then you require another player (possibly the Editor, possibly someone else) to narrate the result.  The number of Dice spent (with some additional stuff) dictates the minimum level of information that the player so called upon must reveal about their character (or else forfeit any further benefits for themself from the conversation?).  Within those limits they are free to narrate what they want.

I know that I've got a lot of generalities here.  I apologize.  If people will bear with me, I'd like to hear some feedback about whether you think the general goal is a worthy one, or whether I'm haring off on yet another wild goose chase.  If the consensus is that this generally makes sense for the premise and genre then it will be worth brainstorming more detailed Discovery Phase rules.

I'm on the run here, and would like to comment more, since I've really liked watching this game develop, but:

1) I really like the new revision: excellent job!

2) I'm with you that developing new facts doesn't seem to be quite the mechanism it should be, but I worry a lot about the proposed solution exacerbating issues with players having downtime. I envision that you want debt to be something that is staked quite a lot: it's a cool mechanism. If three players win one staked bet each, that's three resolution scenes right there.

I'm going to go print this out, and think about it more on the train.

I'll be reading the newest rules momentarily...  First a comment on Facts.

I think you are right about making Facts matter to everyone involved, and the best way to do that (i think) is to make them rare.  I have a two part suggestion:

1. Starting heroes have X number of Facts when they are created.  Probably between 1 and 3.
2. The "Spotlight" character of an epsiode (session, issue, whatever) gets one more Fact.  I would say that the "Spotlight" character is whoever gets Page One rights...  It is probalby appropriate for that player and the Editor to have a brief discussion about what kind of Fact the player is interested in generating.

That should keep facts rare, but still allow them to accumulate.  There are some definate draw backs (Facts accumulate very slowly).  It is possible that conflict could arise over who gets to be spotlighted for any given session as well.  On the other hand the since Facts will be so rare players will have to make each and every one of them count...

Thomas

Thomas

Statistical:  Good point about the proliferation of scenes.

Maybe the better way to go is that each N-stake won gives the player N "scene points", each of which can be used to buy one round in a scene.  This can be used in a scene they create (i.e. "I'd like to buy round 1 of a scene investigating the ruins of Moscow") or to extend a scene they find interesting ("She insults him to his face and then walk away?  Oh HELL no... I'll buy another round of this scene just to run out and catch her by her arm on the landing!").

If that's combined with a Conversation mechanic that raises risk and reward as scenes go on then hopefully people will cut short the scenes they aren't enjoying, and spend more of their downtime budget on the scenes that interest everyone.

EDIT:  Added examples and corrected grammar.

Thomas:  I see two options to the proliferation of Facts.

One, keep them rare, but never let them go away.

Two, let them proliferate, but then require the players to periodically discard down to a quota determined by their Drives (encouraging them to buy up the Drives... a major reward mechanic, yet to be written).

I had been thinking fuzzily of option two, but I could certainly be persuaded otherwise.

QuoteFor each Drive you invent Facts of different levels, counting your way up from one to the value of the Drive.  So if your Truth Drive is three you will create three Facts for Truth, with Strength of one, two and three respectively.

Since i think that Facts are made more powerful in their scarcity i am a little uncomfortable with this...

Another thing that this does is it does not seem to allow for characters that are incredibly focused on a single issue.  What if i want Flying-Rodent Guy to be totally obsessed with the Fact that his family was gunned down right in front of his eyes.  There's just not much more to him at the moment...  Only this one thing matters, but it matters a lot.

I would suggest a pool of points (maybe equal to the sum of your Drives, so 9 to start with) which can be used to buy facts.  Each point buys a Level of Fact (i.e. 2 points for a Level 2) which is tied to a drive.  A Fact's Level can never exceed the value of the Drive itself (so if you have 3 in Love you can not have a Level 4 Fact in Love).  As your Drives increase your Facts can become more powerful...  That might work...

QuoteFirst, you can take any number of Debt tokens, so long as your total Debt (after taking these tokens) in the associated Drive does not exceed the Strength of the Fact. So if you had one Debt already, and reference a Strength 3 Fact you may take zero, one or two Debt Tokens. These tokens are placed on the Drive, on the Hero Worksheet.

This probably should be reworded somehow, but this is a really cool idea and i think it is a great illustration of how much strength you can draw from a Fact...

Overall, i like the rework (formatting included).

I also like your general thoughts on non-combat stuff...  It is just a question of getting things set up...

EDIT: Crossposted with both of Tony's posts.  Quick note, i like your idea about buying rounds in scenes...  That has a lot of potential...

Thomas

I see your point about how letting people distribute Facts any which way could encourage genre-appropriate monomania.

Two things though...

First, according to the current rules, a hero with no Facts in a given Drive will never be able to Stake anything in that Drive.  For all intents and purposes, that Drive will not exist for that character.  That's a fairly serious notion, and one I'm not really comfortable with.

Second, the system already promotes monomania, albeit more subtly:  A player who specializes in one Drive gets more Fact-points, total.

5-1-1-1-1 distribution nets: 5+4+3+2+1+1+1+1+1 = 19 points.
2-2-2-2-1 distribution nets: 2+1+2+1+2+1+2+1+1 = 13 points.

That's a pretty sizable gap, with the cost being that you're only going to be racking up Debt in one Drive, so the villains are going to get to know your attitudes on (say) Justice pretty quickly, and start using them against you.

Excellent point.  You definately want people to be able to Stake in any Drive...  I have some really nebulous ideas about that...  Give me some time to think about it and i will get back to you... :)

Thomas

{EDITED extensively because I hit "Submit" instead of "Preview" at a key point.}

I finally got to sit down and read the new rules (much of it with my baby on my lap) and I'm very pleased. They're so clear I even understand the difference between Wonder Cost and Wonder Level now. Some things I couldn't resist quibbling with or applauding follow:

Quote from: TonyLB, in the rules,Each player will need room to accumulate a stock of dice for their hero. This represents their power on hand, and will hereafter be called their Dice Pool.

"Power" implies, especially to old-school gamers, that you're Simulating some raw energy or amount of force. What you're really describing is something different -- and I'd say you should make that clear right up front. Perhaps "their current power to shape the story"? ("Narrative power" is rather highfalutin').

Quote from: TonyLB, in the rules,Comic books tell two stories at the same time, using the same events. There is the Adventure, which is the rock'em sock'em way that your superheroes kick butt and astonish the world with their abilities. And there is the Moral, which is the soul-searching, heart-rending emotional roller-coaster ride that infuses the Adventure with significance.

Beautifully put.

Quote from: TonyLB, in the rules,The invasion of earth by aliens might be a Strength 1 Fact for your hero, while the shy smile and wave the girl next door gave him as he went off to fight for Earth's freedom could be a Strength 4 Fact.

Perfect.

Quote from: TonyLB, in the rules,If a Drive has an Exemplar, they must have opinions on at least one of the Facts in that Drive.... Often it is, in fact, something they said...

Quibble: I think too many of your Silverstar examples of Facts are "something somebody said." Frankly this is one of my beefs with American comics generally -- they're too talky -- and one of the things I like about Japanese comics -- you can have four pages where the only dialogue is "Aargh! Hnnnng!" and still convey all the emotional force of a US superhero's soliloquy. I know it's American comics you're replicating, but even there the most powerful Facts are Things That Happened: Bruce Wayne's parents die, Uncle Ben dies, Superman's whole frickin' planet dies. What people said is usually secondary.

More quick thoughts, keeping in mind that it's beta.

The level/cost section is improved (again, I too  finally grasp it fully), but still has the feel of that you start running into rules, and then the actual purpose is explained.  I feel this happens a lot, both on small and large scales.

Speaking of cost/level, I think those terms should change: I understand why you picked them, but it doesn't help the player keep them in mind. Something like: every wonder point I spend gives me one Control, and then I calculate the Effect  based on wonder points+modifiers.

You use Clarity and Strength in reference to facts to mean the same thing.

I couldn't find what order players take their turn in in this one: maybe a good rule now that everybody goes is that the person with the highest successes gets to decide whether the order is lowest-to-highest, or highest-to-lowest. Really, the initiative system that might be neat is the Streetfighter one: People go lowest to highest, but at any point, a higher person can interrupt and take their turn. That's probably work to figure out exactly how to adapt it, but it might have a nice feel.

Strength Throguh Adversity is troublesome: it requires you to first, remember what the wonder cost of the last attack against you was, and also has the tricky adjucation of figuring out what's an attack against you, rather than what's an attack against the side in general. When Silverstar saves the chopper, is Smogzilla available to use this?

There's also this issue with complications, now that everything goes into complications: what do you do when no complications are out? This is probably related to a separate issue of, what happens if you have a superhero vs supervillain toe-to-toe fight without much external stakes?  Yes, I know that this is moving a bit away from the premise, but just going up and hitting the evildoer is a large part of superhero comics.

As far as non-combat and discovery of facts go: all the wonders effects work in non-combat situations, and they even work with mortals. A mortal is someone with attitudes, and tropes and facts, and that's all. You could very easily introduce the idea of Power Level (change this name!), and then be able to figure things off that. For example, you could say, that all heroes and villains are PL 5 to start (5/4/3, 5*2-1 = 9 points of debt/facts), and all mortals are PL 3 (3/2, 3*2-1 = 5 points of debt/facts).

Anyway, I got distracted there: I think that with all players going being a great step in the right direction to making sure players don't get left out, here's another: make discovering a fact about someone part of the normal play. You want situations where someone is doing the critical investigative work to figure out the flaw in the doomsday machine, at the same time that the other heroes are fighting the bad guy.

Complications seem a nice way to resolve this...the player describes everything that's going on in their subplot, and when the editor starts throwing Control at it, then various problems arise in the hero's way.  Maybe the best way to do it is that you can declare a complication to be about discovering a fact of strength X. If it resolves out for the discoverer, then you get the fact; if it resolves out for the discoveree, then they get nothing/some small token (you want to encourage the discovery of facts, since in this method, the player who is taking time to discover facts isn't generating VP)

If you go in this direction, you'll need to probably have more valuable uses for facts. It's also slightly changing the feel of facts: there's a difference between a personally meaningful fact and one that is just about the doomsday machine.

Maybe the following rules tweak for this issue:
When you force someone to stake debt because you know a fact, and they lose, and their drive now runs over the limit, you have broken one of their drive.  That player can choose to either:

Take a -1 Effect penalty for each extra token on the drive (ouch!)
or
Replace that drive with a drive one step closer to the person who won. None of the facts on the old drive may be used to force staking.

There's a bunch of other rules that would have to be built around this, but this makes finding facts very valuable, because you can force someone to either become ineffective or you get to convert them. Maybe a better way to visually organize the drives you had before is just have 5 simple lines:

Good - Neutral or Neutral - Evil

This useful? Great work again.

Oh, and one more thing. The game as written now and the actual play hints at basically, one long scene . Given how most comic books work, this isn't a terrible idea t o run with. Maybe, when the Editor section comes around (no rush, not important), the idea of making scenes with large victory point totals, but with goal points, makes sense.

For example:

Overall goal: 30VP
0-10VP: Villain robs several banks of all their unused $2 bills. Heroes investigate.

At 10VP, if the Villain is ahead, introduce complication: Villain terrorizes local shopkeepers with confusing $2 bill with 2 Control.

10-20VP: Villain tries to capitalize on fear of strange US currency by printing counterfeit new bills: $7, $34.

At 20VP, if the Villain is still ahead, introduce complication: Riots at local banks with customers demanding new $34 bill with 2 Control.
If Heroes are ahead, introduce new complication: Liberty Mint Public Service Announcement  with 2 Control

20VP-30VP: Villain tries to destroy the Liberty Mint and make his money the only money around.

Edit: You'd need some way of refreshing heroes, either through effects, things written into the scenario, or general rules.

Post-putting-baby-to-bed thoughts.

Quote from: TonyLBYou win a Staked Conflict, that earns you the right to declare a Scene, later.... you require another player (possibly the Editor, possibly someone else) to narrate ... The number of Dice spent (with some additional stuff) dictates the minimum level of information that the player so called upon must reveal about their character...

This idea, as I understand it, boils down to "fact points I win and spend = fact points you must reveal." (Bearing in mind that a high-strength Fact may be worth may be worth many points, like "Flying Rodent Man, as a child, saw his parents gunned down" being worth 5 Justice; and you will have to play with the exchange rates to make sure Facts don't accumulate too fast). I'm not sure the intermediary mechanism of rolling dice is necessarily necessary.

I like this idea -- as long as you can do it to yourself, to make yourself reveal a bunch of backstary or have a bunch of B-plot (although this might shut out other players a bit; perhaps they can all double-up by taking on NPCs in your scene?).

Quote from: TonyLBeach N-stake won gives the player N "scene points", each of which can be used to buy one round in a scene. This can be used in a scene they create (i.e. "I'd like to buy round 1 of a scene investigating the ruins of Moscow") or to extend a scene they find interesting...

This idea I also like, seen as an amplification of the idea above. Presumably you could even buy a "discovery" scene right at the end of an action scene: e.g. you smash up the bad guy's base, winning 10 Fact Points in the process, and spend them on a convenient evil minion lying pinned in the rubble who spills his guts when you rescue him; or the villain you defeated drops some Secret Evil Plans; or the abandoned wharehouse where you fought Dr. Unpleasant turns out to be The Place Where Something Happened In Your Past that triggers a convenient flashback.

Quote from: statisticaltomfooleryAs far as non-combat and discovery of facts go: all the wonders effects work in non-combat situations, and they even work with mortals. A mortal is someone with attitudes, and tropes and facts, and that's all.

Yes! The thought's been rattling around in my brain every time LordSmerf / Thomas says "we need non-combat rules" that "these are conflict rules and with a little tweaking all Wonders could be non-violent." But Statistical Tom here hits a nail on the head I hadn't even seen: how to deal with non-supers.

Quote from: Sydney Freedberg

Quote from: statisticaltomfooleryAs far as non-combat and discovery of facts go: all the wonders effects work in non-combat situations, and they even work with mortals. A mortal is someone with attitudes, and tropes and facts, and that's all.

Yes! The thought's been rattling around in my brain every time LordSmerf / Thomas says "we need non-combat rules" that "these are conflict rules and with a little tweaking all Wonders could be non-violent." But Statistical Tom here hits a nail on the head I hadn't even seen: how to deal with non-supers.

I am not so sure that it is that simple.  Let us look at the example of Silver Star.  She has a "Cold Ruthless Terminator" Attitude, in many social situations activating this Attitude would be fairly inappropriate...  I am sure that there is a very simple solution to this problem, possibly even within the rules as they are written...  Reversal perhaps?  But you would want a way to automate this.  I am trying to get a game set up for early this week, maybe we can do some testing...

Additionally, there is a good point about the potential Strength From Adversity Wonder.  In a small game (2 players, maybe 3) this probably will not be much of a problem, but if you get more players it might become a signifigant issue.

Thomas

Quote from: statisticaltomfooleryAnyway, I got distracted there: I think that with all players going being a great step in the right direction to making sure players don't get left out, here's another: make discovering a fact about someone part of the normal play. You want situations where someone is doing the critical investigative work to figure out the flaw in the doomsday machine, at the same time that the other heroes are fighting the bad guy.

Yes!  Full agreement here.  The Fact system is too clunky and separate from the rest of the events.  If I need to build another system to resolve it in scenes, I'll do that, but now that you mention it... how much nicer it would be to have it all working in a unified system.

QuoteComplications seem a nice way to resolve this...the player describes everything that's going on in their subplot, and when the editor starts throwing Control at it, then various problems arise in the hero's way.  Maybe the best way to do it is that you can declare a complication to be about discovering a fact of strength X. If it resolves out for the discoverer, then you get the fact; if it resolves out for the discoveree, then they get nothing/some small token (you want to encourage the discovery of facts, since in this method, the player who is taking time to discover facts isn't generating VP)

Now that's a darn good thought.  I'm not sure whether you're saying you discover a Fact of someone elses (like the villains cunning plan) or a Fact about yourself (What is the dark history of my mystic artifact, and why was it called the "Hand of Fear" in rennaisance Venice?)  And I'm not sure it really matters.

I'm confused though:  Why wouldn't somebody who is discovering facts be generating Victory Points?  Under the (in no way sacrosanct) current-rules, any Complication that gets resolved generates Victory Points.  And I sort of like the notion that the heroes can as easily complete their defeat of the villain by discovering something crucial about his past as they can by beating him over the head with a lead pipe.  But it's late and I could easily be missing something.

Now for a concrete contribution, on top of (I think) what's been said already:  I think that if you're actively trying to discover something about your opposition, the result of your failure shouldn't just be that you don't discover anything.  Symmetry almost demands that they should discover something about you.

This has fun consequences against the villains, but it's much more fun when contesting with non-supers in straightforward conversation.  For example, Peter and MJ's awkward conversations (in Spiderman... haven't seen SP2 yet, don't hand me spoilers!) are largely about each side trying to suss out the feelings of the other, while not risking revealing anything unambiguous about their own feelings first.

Now clearly, to handle something like that, you don't want Complications that would be resolved at the end of a scene.  I'm going to posit (at least for the moment) a different class of things called Issues, which are like Complications, except that they don't automatically resolve at the end of a scene.

I'm not sure, really, when they should resolve though.  Does the ordinary mechanic seem adequate?  I guess it would keep the contests close in control, if they're important, precisely so that people could jump in to regain control if it were in danger of being resolved against them.  Maybe I just need to have more faith in the system... or maybe there need to be more stringent rules for how to resolve Issues.

Side note that's been rattling around my head all day:

What happens if you start a scene off with a lowish Victory Target (say 5), and then raise the Target by some set number of points for every token that anyone Stakes on a Complication?