Wordpress Entry
So, since I'm mucking about with L-Space these days, this post is actually influenced by the next post, which is yet unwritten, that post, and by proxy this one as well, will deal heavily with personalities and how they affect games. I'm going to mention Tony Lower-Basch quite a lot, he's the 'other' exemplar of CSI Games, he published Capes, a quite well known CSI Game, when the other CSI Game I'm going to make use of in our examples is obviously Cranium Rats, simply because I'm rather intimate with it, more than anyone else at this point. Tony and I also have such personalities that make it fun or at least interesting to bring them up(just look at the Muy Macho thread on Story-Games to see what I mean). I am going to contrast Capes and Cranium Rats, compare and mull over things, I will also speak of Winning and Losing and somewhat of how a Game is a personal outgrowth of its writer. Ready?
The following is a PM reply from Tony to myself, reposted with permission:
"Quote from: Thunder_God
What elements of competition exist between the Players in Capes?
Well ... there's the game, and pretty much every single one of its facets in whole and in part. So, yeah, quite a bit actually.
Quote from: Thunder_God
What brought on this desire for competitive play?
'cuz I like beatin' on people."
Tony said the following on here on The Forge: "First thought: What does the losing player get when the conflict resolves? Do they get some sort of payout for the many tokens that they accumulated on their way to defeat? That would make me more willing to take a chance: either I'm close enough to close the gap (in which case I've got a lot of tokens, and the reward if I lose will rock) or I'm so far out of the running that it's a foregone conclusion, and I want my loser-tokens as quickly as possible."
He also said the following on Story-Games: "Or perhaps it's just a question of having a genre that gets a large number of people on the same page. Like, with Capes, I could basically say "superhero stories, like Spiderman and Superman" and people immediately had thoughts about what was important and how to do it. But with Misery Bubblegum the best I can say is "stories of misunderstanding and relationships, like Pride and Prejudice and Nine Princes in Amber" and people reasonably say "What? What do those two things have in common?" It doesn't give them the same confidence that they know what high-points need to be hit, and how to hit them."
So now we have several quotes by Tony, which show us quite a bit about him, Capes and his Capes, and now we're going to address and contrast with these. Yay for us.
So there we have Tony, talking about how Capes is all about Conflicts, yet the promotional teaser is all about Super-Heroics. When Capes originally came out I didn't buy it because it was just another Super-hero game with the Click-and-Lock Gimmick to me. I didn't need just another superhero game. I recently bought Capes after getting the above PM from Tony, which showed me what the game was actually about was Conflict. See, that's one place where Tony and I differ, he sells his game as a Super-hero game, not espousing the conflict in promotion, where I don't pay much attention to colour in CR and focus almost entirely on the conflict.
I think Tony could benefit from putting a little bit more focus on what his game is made almost entirely of, and I know I should put more focus on colour/setting.
When it comes to mechanics, I advise people to think before putting in "Flavour of the Month" just because it's cool and it works. It should work for you, in your game, and as we will soon see, follow your personal philosophy of how a game should go.
Case in point, I took the "Sweet in the Middle" from Tony, where if you have too much or too little of a resource you're not that well off, but there's some optimal spot to be in. This creates another axis to make decisions on; once you reach the sweet spot, if you do nothing, then what good do you get? Also, if you have some mechanic that keeps pushing you to the edges then the struggle keeps going on. This mechanic is present in Capes in the form of Debt and was inserted into Cranium Rats in regards to Dice in your Die Reservoir.
However, look at Winning and Losing, which seem to show our personal philosophies, and how Tony may not be as Muy Macho as he claims(desires?) to be. Tony believes that if you "Lose" you should get some "Loser Benefit", where in Cranium Rats it's more "All or nothing"(though it's more like "Increment or nothing" with the need for multiple increments for "Much" and various "Much" for "All"). I understand where Tony comes from, but it doesn't strike my fancy. In Cranium Rats, if you lose, you lost an opportunity, resources and/or chances of victory(at least in the near future). In Capes, and it seems that it's his general design goal, you don't "Lose" when you lose a conflict; it depends on your goals. You may have wanted to lose in order to gain or get rid of specific resources, the only real way to "lose" in Capes is not to get the outcome you desired, if you "Lost" while you got your goal, then it's not really losing.
End-game is an issue tied to losing and winning, in the form of "Victory". Capes does not have end-game, whereas Cranium Rats does. Mike Mearls would say CR is not even an RPG based on that.
Maybe he's right. It's an CSI Game.
Finally, if this comes off as harsh and all sorts of baity, then it's because both Tony and I are Muy Macho, though I'm more of the Muy Bastard/Sadistic sub-variety, and because Tony acknowledges this is the way to get someone to get reactions.
Ok, that was crap, I post like this because that's how I write. You may have noticed by now. I posted this notice at the end because I want you getting all worked up while reading it, that gets the neurons rubbing!
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