[Capes] [DexCon] Sin City (Capes goes dark)

[Andrew Morris]

So I finally got around to running a fun, but non-funny Capes game at DexCon. I set the comics code to "nothing that wouldn't appear in a Sin City comic."

Unfortunately, I was not in top form at that time, not by a long shot. I'd had almost no sleep the past two nights and I could barely keep my eyes open. In addition, I was suffering from sickness of some kind, or perhaps a strong allergic reaction to something in the hotel – it seemed to go away after I left. Either way, I decided to simply observe and keep things from slowing down, by keeping track of reactions and such.

It turned out to go better than I'd feared, but not as good as I'd hoped.

It was certainly dark, with violence, torture, vengeance, and cannibalism. But it was also fun, and we laughed at several points throughout the game. We violated some of the Sin City source material (having Manute working for "the Bishop" instead of Ava Lord or Wallenquist, for example), but that didn't really get in the way.

If you know the Capes mechanics, you'll appreciate the sensation of seeing "Goal: the prisoner gets out alive" and "Event: the prisoner is tasty" hit the table at the same time, even if the event did get vetoed down to a goal. A real "eww" moment.

Bret takes the cake for giving us the most disturbing event in the session, though. During the course of torturing an innocent for information, he said something like, "Can we get this over with already? I need to get laid." There were several possible interpretations of this, and none of them were pretty.

This was a really fun session, and I hope I can run it again when I'm not feeling so out of sorts. I'm satisfied that Capes can do things other than just supers. I just wish I had a better recollection of all the details.

[Madheretic]

A Sin City inspired campaign of Capes is a project that I've been wanting to take a crack at for a while now (actually since I stepped out of the theater). Great to hear how it turned out for you.

If you can get access to someone else involved who maybe had more sleep or less physiological harm done to them at the time and get them to give us some more details on the session I'd be really grateful.

Of particular interest to me is how you choose to write up the characters and how you treated the concept of powers. Not that I'm unaware of the the precedent for non-superhumans already established, but I'd like to know what sort of abilities struck you as being super-powered in the context of Sin City.

[Bret Gillan]

Andrew, I'm not sure what you were hoping for because that was one of the best Capes sessions I've been in. I was actually going to make a post about your game, because this moment baffled me:

Bret takes the cake for giving us the most disturbing event in the session, though. During the course of torturing an innocent for information, he said something like, "Can we get this over with already? I need to get laid." There were several possible interpretations of this, and none of them were pretty.

In the midst of the torture scene I say, "I'm rolling up the die using 'Horny'," and the reaction is immediately repulsed and universal. Now, the amazing thing to me is that we're in the midst of a scene about torture, cannibalism, and murder, but what gets the most intense reaction at the table? My character mentioning his sex life. What made this disturbing? Was it the context in which the statement was made? Was it, as Tony says, the fact that it made my character human which made his actions more difficult to deal with? Or was it just that culturally, sex makes us squirm?

[TonyLB]

I played in that, and I'm not sure I agree with Andrew's assessment.  I think that the story was unremittingly grim.  It's just that the game ... the process by which we created the story ... was absolutely hilarious.

In the story people were being ground down by inhuman forces entirely beyond their control.  In the game, we were being rewarded and engaged by other people who we met on an equal footing.  I don't think you can possibly avoid having a disjunction there.  Maybe if you played Sin City using My Life with Master (the City itself is the Master, of course), but even so ... MLwM is, finally, an empowering game.  There's going to be a break.

Honestly?  I think a lot of the fun of the game was playing with that dissonance.  We were doing "bad things" but we weren't actually doing anything wrong.  It's fiction.  Certainly I, as a person, was having fun teasing people about how they were terrible, awful, sinful, horrid people for thinking up a story that wasn't Clarence the Cheerful Goblin.  It was only fun because I knew they knew I was joking.  If there had been any risk that they'd take my nonsense seriously, and actually have their feelings hurt?  I couldn't have commented on their play at all.

It's sorta like trash-talk in Jungle Speed.  You can crow about how someone is too slow, getting old, etc., because you know they know it's not serious.  The more intense the game gets, the more powerful the trash-talk gets, the less serious it can possibly be.  You aren't judging these people.  You're having fun with them.

In the same way ... exactly as the story got more intense (and I adored the story!) and the play got more engaged, the trash-talk about how terrible we all were got worse and worse and funnier and funnier.

I mean, I played the guy who got eaten and then killed (and then eaten some more).  You sick bastards ... LOL!

The Victim

Slump    5
Gurgle   4              "For the love of God!"        4
Sob      3  Bargain  3  "Please, please, I'm sorry!"  3
Beg      2  Panic    2  "I didn't mean to"            2
Scream   1  Wheedle  1  "Oh God, oh God ... "         1

[Andrew Morris]

Bret, it wasn't the sexuality that made me squirm, nor was it that your character then seemed more human. It was that I could only see three interpretations of his comment:

1. Torturing people turned him on.
2. Torturing people was so everyday, that it was just like being stopped at a red light ("C'mon, c'mon....gotta get moving already").
3. He wanted the guy tortured and dead so that he could have sex with the victim.

The first is pretty sick. The second more so. But the third....eww.

It wasn't the comment about getting laid at all that made me squirm (and, as Tony pointed out, all in a good way), it was the context and what it meant about your character. If we'd been, say, breaking into someplace and you were like, "Hurry up and pick the lock already, I wanna go get laid," I'd have barely even noticed it, other than how you managed to tie "Horny" into a lockpicking scene.

At no point was I truly uncomfortable. It was just like playing "Grosser than gross" as a kid. And you won.

[Marhault]

The Victim

Slump    5
Gurgle   4              "For the love of God!"        4
Sob      3  Bargain  3  "Please, please, I'm sorry!"  3
Beg      2  Panic    2  "I didn't mean to"            2
Scream   1  Wheedle  1  "Oh God, oh God ... "         1

That character is awesome!

[TonyLB]

The first is pretty sick. The second more so. But the third....eww.

Well ... for me?  The third one is less appalling than either of the others.  It's just another wierd, fetishistic ritual, completely disconnected from anything I feel inside my own gut.

But the idea of being so inured to violence that I'm already thinking about my evening plans?  I recognize that possibility in myself.  The idea that violence can get you jazzed, and that that's visceral in a way that could easily link with sex?  I see glimmerings of that in my own psyche.

I'm less terrified by the other than I am by myself.  Does that make sense?

[faust_D]

I'm with Tony on this.  Mind you, I wasn't personally offended or uncomfortable with the moment, but it was an impressively creepy feeling because it was so human.  The kind of chill people want to get out of a good horror flick.  A room full of inhuman monsters is ultimately more splatter than horror.  It was left to the one normal guy to be truly creepy.

Anyhow, in regard to the darkness of the game, part of the issue is that the Capes mechanics present such an elastic reality, it's hard to become attached to the outcomes as a player.  The characters were taking things very seriously, but the players were somewhere in the gray area between light and intense reactions.  But Andrew did an admirable job of presenting the possibility, and I think with a bit more effort and commitment, Capes could be a very serious game for the players.  There may be other games more naturally suited to that (all the White Wolf angst-fests, for tasteless example), but this was a nice challenge.

[TonyLB]

In retrospect, I think it would have been a lot darker if we'd realized the import of the "Comics Code:  Nothing that wouldn't happen in Sin City."

I had a conflict "The Victim makes it out alive."  Yesterday (yeah, I'm that far behind the curve) I realized "Hey, that's gloatable!"  I could have gotten story tokens for getting a bare inch from freedom, only to be reeled in like a fish on a line, tortured, cannibalized and killed.

I could have gotten story tokens for creating a blazing beacon of hope that "just this once" things would turn out okay, and then letting the rest of you squash it.

I feel like a chump for not having realized it at the time.  Ah well, live and learn.

[Andrew Morris]

Right. Or putting out "Goal: An evil person is defeated without a hero and/or innocent dying or suffering horribly."