[AP] A slow start but they're interested in more.

[drnuncheon]

I'm putting this here rather than the AP forum because I'm mostly "just sharin'" rather than looking for help or advice.

Mel, John, and I have been gaming at our dining room table regularly for about five years now - he's a friend from high school, she's my wife.  (For anyone who also makes it to ENWorld, this is the crew from drnuncheon's Freeport Story Hour).  We rotate GMing duties among the three of us, and they're also my usual guinea pigs for anything different I want to try (last time I think it was Wushu).  Since John's been working late, he didn't have much time to prepare for his time-travelling Rokugan/D&D game, so we tossed around some ideas for the Wednesday night Iron Heroes game (where John is a player and Mel is not) and then I pulled out Capes for the "one hour demo".  We used the Lite version of the rules so I didn't have to explain about drives or Exemplars.

Mel heard it was a superhero game and picked the "Brick" and "Curmudgeon" clicks - she always goes for that type of character in a new supers game because they're usually easy to play. John picked "Homeless" and "Neurotic".  I threw out the Bank Robbery idea, grabbed "Hunter" and "Hotshot", and kicked off with the homeless guy running down the alley and the bow-armed hunter following in hot pursuit on the rooftops.  I was going to do a Most Dangerous Game but then I saw things like "Obsess" and "Rant" on John's sheet and I decided that he Knew Too Much.

So, "Goal: Kill the homeless guy" hits the table, and Mel brings in her character, who is walking down the alley the other direction after a disastrous date. When the homeless guy bounces off of him, he sees the hunter and proceeds to hit him with a fire escape.

John declined to roll the dice and instead introduced the Event: Homeless guy gets hit by a car.  He ran out of the alley and into the middle of the street, cars and trucks whizzing past him.

We went for about four pages, with four goals: "Kill the homeless guy" and "Hit by a car" resolved on the second page, but by then we had "Beat the crap out of the hunter" and on page three we got "Get to Dodger Stadium" - apparently what my target knew was that Major League Baseball was using orbital mind control lasers on the unsuspecting populace.

Because of "dice luck" I had to bend things a little - I got a 6 on the 'anti' side of "Beat the crap" on my first roll, and Mel's brick didn't have the debt to counter it, but I wanted to show splitting so I said "Let's just say you have a second tic-tac, er debt token."  I also flubbed up the Reaction rules, forgetting that the acting player goes first.

At first both of them were all "I try to..." until I told them that this game worked like Dan Bayn's Wushu - if they say it, it happens (as long as it doesn't conflict with a goal on the table.)  They caught on after that (which was about the time that I got clobbered with a fire escape).

For the record, Mel won "kill the homeless guy" (preventing it by interposing herself as a human shield) and "Beat the crap" (by throwing a bus that was formerly full of nuns at me), John won "Hit by a car" and "Get to Dodger Stadium" (which ended the page), and I got double debt (who cares? he was a throwaway character!) and two delicious spearmint story tokens.

We were all a little shaky but interested in playing again.  I sent John home with a copy of the rules (by the way, Tony, the copyright notice for Capes is possibly one of the coolest things I have seen in an RPG ever) and I'm sure we'll be returning to this in the future.

J

[TonyLB]

by the way, Tony, the copyright notice for Capes is possibly one of the coolest things I have seen in an RPG ever

And, see ... it's done it's work!  Poor John is sitting there, with the powerful infection that is Capes, staring him in the face.  He didn't even ask for it!  It followed him home, unbidden.

Spoooooky.