Capes at GenCon - D-Day Capes Style

[LemmingLord]

The best two hours of the best four days of gaming was playing out an alternate D-Day.  Many thanks to Tony for showing me how the system works in practice. 

The good guys won all the conflicts...BARELY... which is as it should be with three players playing good guys and two playing the bad...

My favorite part of the scene was probably when the O.G.R.E. sized Nazi AI Tank took a running leap and used the allied fleet as stepping stones, crushing them as he went to get to the command ship...  Beautiful!

[TonyLB]

In retrospect, the only thing I'm kicking myself for about that session is that I flubbed my evil nazi villain name.

What I came up with on the spot:  Herr Doktor Pure
What I came up with later:  Herr Doktor Verdammt

But man ... playin' a nazi.  Yow.  All of the made-up insane ideologies about "Let's kill the world to save it!" pale in the face of their real world villainy.  One of the heroes was "Valiant," a virtuous, upright, Godly boy from Utah.  I posited (without any noticeable disagreement) that this American hero was blond of hair and blue of eye (to contrast markedly with our other, black, American super) ... and man, it was on.  Every time the Doktor complimented Valiant on his strength, or his speed, or like that (which he did a lot) it had these really nasty layers of meaning ... like, if the 1940s comics guys were so very against the whole pure-race ideal, what the heck were they doing making (on the one hand) Captain America who is about as blond and blue-eyed as they come, and on the other hand a character who is actually called "The Superman"?

Twitch.

[LemmingLord]

Yep - two hours and we got to run through an epic battle with both deep individual emotional elements and look at some hypocracy of the era.  I was playing Valiant and although his original conception was by my brother in law to be more of the brown hair variety, I thought the blonde blue eyed made the scene so much more poignant.  I think that's a tribute to what Capes has to offer.

I was also amazed by Chapman, our player with a wonderful Brittish accent who played Lectric (or is it Le Tric?) the french resistance romantic gadgeteer.  Choosing the goal "break the evil doctor's heart" was just an incredible choice.  His scene involving the doctor realing the superior nature of French cuisine made me feel victiorious even as Dr. Pure was gassing the allied forces landing on the beach...

[LemmingLord]

Oh - and I believe the fellows name was Graham - not Chapman.  I had been discussing Graham Chapman earlier in the day and had used it to try to remember his name...(Sorry about that!)

[TonyLB]

I had assumed that Graham was playing "Electrique", and just de-accenting the first syllable into breathy near non-existence.  But it's ... y'know ... ambiguous.

The cuisine thing was a killer:  plus he also STOLE DOKTOR'S GIRLFRIEND.

Have we not learned the peril of stealing the girlfriends of mad geniuses who start with "Doctor"?

We just couldn't begin to defend both fronts.  As it turns out, our bad-guy side couldn't defend either of those two fronts, but we at least made a really scary showing on the whole "Kill every non-super allied soldier dead, dead, dead" conflict.

[LemmingLord]

Now I'm curious - if you had won the kill all of them dead dead dead goal, woud you have narrated that they all had died or would you have chosen to use your earned narrative power concerning the matter to describe a different kind of complete defeat? 

[TonyLB]

Dude ... Field.  Of.  Corpses.

Then Herr Doktor would turn to Valiant and say "This was between you and me.  Why did you bring these young men to this place?"

Why on earth would I have settled for anything less? :-)

[LemmingLord]

Well in a full length game with a comic code it may have been gloatable (?) 

Sure would make for a depressing comic book!!!

[TonyLB]

Sounds like The Authority to me.  Bunches and bunches of dead people, every time two supers pull out the stops.

But hey, man, it was D-Day.  Bunches and bunches of dead people is par for the course.