Capes fun; superpowers appear!

[Hans]

I have started a wiki here (http://wiki.rpg.net/index.php/Capes_in_Missassauga) to track the ongoing Capes sessions we are running here in Ontario.  In the very first session we had such diverse conflicts hit the table as:

Goal: Cynthia hides the keg so Jason's Dad can't find it
Goal: Jason's Dad gets those partying kids out of his house
Event: The meteor shower begins
Event: Bobby Smiles, Johnny's brother, is about to detonate in a thermonuclear blast.

Josh got 4 story tokens from me off that last one, because I was DESPERATE to win it.

As general background, one of the ideas we started with was the idea that all persons who would have super powers would gain them, somehow, during the first scene of the game.  This was the result. 

Evil Alien Overlords, underage drinking, intergalactice police, skateboarding, green rays, and young love destroyed by thermonuclear fire...what more do you want from Capes?

[Kintara]

This sounds like it would make for a great cheesy 80s movie.

[TonyLB]

I'll be very interested to see whether people come to the second session with ideas in their heads for laying down plot threads, or if they're content to continue running the conflicts and seeing where they go.

[Hans]

I'll be very interested to see whether people come to the second session with ideas in their heads for laying down plot threads, or if they're content to continue running the conflicts and seeing where they go.

Could you expand a bit on this, Tony?  Which of the above, "laying down plot threads" or "content to continue running" is preferable, from your point of view?  You have the most experience of anyone on the planet, I suspect, at involvement in long term Capes play, so any suggestions you have are greatly appreciated.

[TonyLB]

I have a prefer a mix of some prepared plot and some creative chaos over too much of either in its pure form.

I think that pure creative chaos does pretty much the things you've seen so far.  Digging into Chapter 8 and putting those techniques into action results in Capes play with more deliberate direction.

I think that pure pre-plotted threads puts people into a spectator position where they're trying to guess what's prepped.  Playing more to the opportunities that are presented by the moment results in Capes play with more spontaneity and passion.

Does that make sense?

[Hans]

Does that make sense?

Perfectly!  Just to let you know, I think that the mix you find preferable is exactly what happened in our first scene.  There was a bit of "preplotting", in that I had a story goal, from the get go, of having Bobby Smiles explode and destroy Southern California, and that we all agreed that one thing would come out of play, which was the development of super powers.  But all the other details (meteor showers, green rays, beer kegs being hidden, Jason's Dad) came out of the creative chaos.   It was incredibly satisfying.  Also, while I had a story goal in mind, I had to FIGHT for it tooth in nail, handing out story tokens galore and using up my own in the process.

[Hans]

In case anyone is interested, we are up to three sessions of the campaign up here in Mississauga.  I'm not sure if anyone else has done it before, but I can report that Capes is an great tool for the anime-style storytelling we seem to be indulging in.  In tone, the game is probably closer to Akira than Justice League.  Fourth session coming up this week. 

The wiki is here.

I think my personal favorite example of Capes in action from this campaign is the fact that Piers continued to play actively and with great enjoyment and creativity for two+ hours with a character that was DEAD!  Try to do that in any other game...go ahead, try.  Ok, try to do that in any other non-Vampire game...

So far, the "gritty" pseudo-comics code we are using (found on the wiki) seems to work fine; a lot of that, though, is people are pretty in tune about what they want from the game.  It really hasn't gotten a work out, because no one has yet seen fit to either a) gloat instead of resolve a conflict that has major story fact consequences or b) lay a conflict to change previously established story facts. 

As to Tony's idea of "mix of some prepared plot and some creative chaos" served us very well in the third session.  Both Piers and I came with a set of pre-planned story stuff (characters, goals, etc.) that we were going to introduce (either that night or later), and it turns out that those things ended up parallel to each other, instead of in conflict.  Both of us felt a great sense of satisfaction at the end of the evening because we had been able to get some important stuff (to us) into the storyline.  Heck, I was happy I got to get the following bit of conversation:

Hans: "The micro servants of the message pod swarm around Cynthia's head.  Suddenly, Cynthia perceives what can be best described as a certified thought from the Intergalactic Police Force, sealed with the offical thought signature of the sector police chief, deputizing the receiver of the certified thought as an agent of the IPF.  Does Cynthia accept?"

Liz: "Yes!"

Hans: "Suddenly, data poors into Cynthia's head..."

That whole "certified thought" thing...worth the night for me.

But Josh was able to come up, on the spur of the moment, with the character of Col. Mustard and his super-powered military task force, which pretty much grabbed everyone's attention and looks to be the center of the story for at least a few sessions, I'm guessing.

One thing that has helped is that the scene framer for the next scene has been posting on our Ontario Indy games meetup (the link is on the wiki) a brief blurb about the scene so that people can think it over between sessions.  It lets people bring in that "some prepared plot" with them.

Which leads me to the only problem we have...we can't seem to get through more than one scene a night!  Some of this is unforeseen difficulties, and some of it is learning pains on the rules on the part of those who haven't played so much.  Hopefully we can pick up the pace a bit, but now that people are getting a good supply of story tokens I find it hard to believe scenes will get much shorter.

[Sindyr]

We ran into that problem and used 2 different solutions on 2 different sessions.
1) Every conflict, including goals, is vetoable on page 4 or later.
2) Starting the fourth page, during the claiming phase,  people can claim an unlimited number of conflicts.

We used the first method the first session, and the second on the second.

Both seemed to work fine.