[GenCon Capes] Family under a magnifying glass

[TonyLB]

At GenCon I gladly succumbed to requests that I play in a Capes game (I do not accept the notion that I "run" such events, for the obvious reasons).  So, to my surprise, when we gathered at table there were (including me) eight interested parties.  That's too many for Capes.  But, luckily, one of them was Andrew Morris, whose understanding of the rules may well exceed my own.  So we happily split off into two groups, each with an avatar of rules certainty to lend confidence.

The result of that, interestingly, is that when I decided to do something unusual I actually had a control group at the table next to me.  This group was as close to identical as you're ever likely to see:  Three jazzed, tired GenCon gamers who were picking up on Capes for mostly-kinda the first time, and one old hand.

My experiment wasn't anything terribly radical:  When people sat down, and were immediately reaching for the Click-n-Lock folder to start making characters, I said "Hey ... let's talk about what we want to do with the game.  Personally, I'd like to see some people who have a recognizable human relationship other than 'We're all super-beings together.' "

Half an hour, from the table to our right, Shawn took a break from using his character's thick french accent to fight Mr. Roboto.  He looked over and said "You guys are still making characters?"  Yeah, yeah, laugh it up!

Meanwhile, we had decided on a family of superheroes.  Jasper played the son of arch-hero Jack Diamond ... an angry martial-arts hero named Nightstrike.  Alexander played Lucy (yes, Lucy Diamond), the psychedlic psychic sister.  I played Sarah, the federal agent who had been assigned to the team, and fallen in love with widow Jack Diamond.  Witt played das Kinder, the fascist-raised by-blow of good old Jack by way of a nazi superheroine.

(At least I'm pretty sure that's what people were playing ... I'll be embarrassed if I've misremembered)

Oh, did I mention that Jack Diamond was recently dead?  Yeah.  That was our fun twist.  We created a family that centered entirely around one guy, then we said "So, it's a year after his spectacular funeral."

So Jasper had Nighstrike totally acting out.  As in, during the past year he'd manipulated a super-villain into modifying him with a deadly many-armed exoskeleton.  He spent much of the game tearing through things on his way to try to rip Kinder's head off.  Alexander played Lucy as permanently shell-shocked.  Not merely occasionally disconnected from reality, but unable to recognize changes in anything like a timely manner.  "Oh!  That plummeting helicopter could have hit me.  Why didn't I notice that?"  And I played Sarah as just desperately throwing herself into keeping the other two alive and trying to help them through ... in complete denial of the fact that she was hurting too.

Into this, Witt played das Kinder's plan to steal Jack Diamond's body.  It was awesome.

A high point, for me, was a little digression that we got into when we described the tomb we were fighting over.  I commented on ... I don't even know ... oh yeah, the notation on the tomb citing Jack as the only man to win the Medal of Valor and the Nobel Peace Prize in the same year.  And then everyone totally went off on his achievements.  He was the first man to orbit the moon, having built a rocket only he could pilot (because of his first-hand knowledge of G-Forces and the mysterious G-Zone) ... when the rocket crash-landed in the Mojave desert he walked unharmed from the flaming debris.

We'd never seen this character in action, but we had that spectacular little exchange, and during it I was thinking "Oh my God ... this is a wake.  This is the players mourning the loss of this character in the act of creating their own memories of him."

Having everyone so clearly on the same page made it really easy to figure out how to tweak people.  I knew that I could create a conflict "Nightstrike controls himself" and that he'd fight hard to not let that happen.  We knew that what we were going to be doing was portraying grief, and that was clearly his path, so I knew he'd fight for it.  Pretty much every conflict that hit the table was hotly contested, because we all had the tools (from that half hour of early discussion) to know exactly where to focus our attention.

Anyway, Nightstrike went ballistic, Sarah couldn't control him, Lucy couldn't engage, and Kinder made off with dad's body.  For our second scene, Alexander swapped Lucy out in order to play Kinder's nazi-bitch mother, and her magical plot to reanimate and possess Jack Diamond's olympian frame.

Which ... yeah... nobody was happy about that.  I looked at it from the point of view of "Okay, this is a family ... what does this mean in family terms?" and then laid down a conflict saying, roughly, "Goal:  Kinder gets his mother to reassure him that she'll still love him even when daddy is back."

I mean, kid's been raised entirely by his mother, and now daddy's coming back?  That's ... that's a situation therapists drool about.  I figured I should highlight it, and I was right.  I totally beat him down on that conflict.  Kinder ended up completely convinced that his mother would abandon him in favor of his father.  And when Witt asked "Why?  Why do you love him more than me, when I love you so much more than he does?" I reminded him of all the cool stuff that Jack Diamond had done, and said "Has it ever occurred to you that she loves daddy more because he deserves it more?"

I like to think that was the moment when Witt decided that Kinder would kill his mother.  Which he did.

And then we explained in narration that this matricide was all part of her plan ... that she needed to be killed at the ultimate moment of the ritual, in order for her spirit to migrate into Jack Diamond's body, so that they could be together forever in an unholy, undead union.

I made sure to point out the obvious implication:  That she'd been deliberately raising Kinder to be full of such insecurities, so that he would play his role properly in her villainous plan.

There was a lot of other stuff in there (I hope, for instance, that Jasper will tell about the sorta-romance plot between Nightstrike and Sarah).  However, I'm going to sum up with two points.

One is obvious:  A little before-session communication goes a long way, even in a game which, like Capes can function in the absence of such prep.

The other is a bit more subtle:  Capes is a game which magnifies conflicts.  It draws your attention to them, and makes them flourish and grow under your tender (or brutal) care.  If you come in with an ideological conflict ("No, Iron Brain, I will bring you ... to JUSTICE!") then you get the ideology magnified and expanded.  But if you come in with a murky, human situation then you get the conflicts in that magnified and expanded.  The end results (betrayal, moral stands, horrifying decisions) are the same in either case, but it hits harder when the initial seed is something that we, as players, are closer to.

Frankly, I don't have a lot of real-life experience in defending the abstract notion of Justice.  When I talk about it I am talking about a fiction from which I can comfortably detach.  But all of us have a lot of real-life experience in navigating the currents of a family.  When I talk about that I end up saying things that get under my skin ... things that I can't turn away from, even when the game is over.

[Jasper the Mimbo]

the best words to describe this game session are "emotional roller coaster"

First, take family conflict. Then, blow the roof off of what is actually possible. This makes everything bigger, so easy to see.
I think that discussing what you want before you game is -essential- to a memorable experience, and this game will stand out to me as -the- example of why this is true.

So, while we were brainstorming, I decided that Nightstrike would be in love with Sarah, an would have been for a long time, but when Dad was alive he was able to ingnore it because Dad was a great man, and deserved to be happy. Now though, Dad's dead and he feels like he's not a good enough or strong enough person to fill Dad's role in her life, and feels guilty about his feelings ing the first place. He's depressed and self destructive, but every time Sarah is in danger he goes off the deep end trying to protect her.

She has no idea an thinks that his self destructive nature is because of grief.

I don't quite remember exactly what the scene was. Nightstrike was trying to get himself captured by his brother and her mother in order to get Sarah away safely, basicly sacrificing himself to save her. She kept running into the fight between the psychotic Nightstrike, an emotionally stunted Godling, and the world's most manipulative mother who happens to be a magical powerhouse. 

Eventually the question was asked.

Sarah: "Why are you doing this"
NS: "You have to live, that's what Dad would wave wanted! Go!"
Sarah: "Your Dad's dead! I've come to terms with that, why can't you?"
NS: "It's not about Dad, it's about you!" Go, damn it!"
Sarah: "What?"
NS: " When Dad was around, you were happy. That was enough for me, but now he's gone You haven't smiled in a year. I wish I could make you smile like he did, and protect you like he did, but i'm not him. I'm not strong enough...
Sarah: "But.."
NS: "I'm sorry."

Then Nightstrike shoved Sarah out of the burning compound and dove back in as it began to collapse.

A little cheezy, but very comic book. Awesome.

[Lxndr]

Tony, you definitely don't "run" Capes, but someone most certainly "hosts" it, and it was you for this game (and Andrew for the other). 

That said, we were sitting and talking about what we wanted about the game while the split was still happening.  By the time you sat down, we already had the skeleton of an idea to throw at you.  You brought in the family element, and it all went from there.  I forget which one of us killed Jack Diamond, but that was totally all we needed to put the final nail in our story skeleton.

I imagined Lucy (Morning Star was her heroine name, if I remember right) was always somewhat detached, being as she was a mind controller with the switch almost permanently set to "on".  The death of her father just exacerbated that, and she walked around the battlefield like a ghost.  The family was definitely treating her with kid gloves, keeping important secrets (like das Kinder being her half-brother) from her.

(Heck, the only truly proactive thing she did - in some ways the only proactive thing she can do, was when she walked out of her body and just let her rage out on Das Kinder's escape route by mentalling taking over the vehicle and slamming it into him... the poor pilots didn't have a chance.)

That said, I didn't get a good handle on her, and when everyone jumped on my suggestion that, instead of bringing Morning Star in, I brought in Das Muter, I was totally for it.  Of course, establishing that Kinder worked for her, the responsibility (so to speak) for coming up with why the body was stolen rested on me.

Of course, first we had the big showdown.  I happily bilked story tokens out of people while I was Das Muter by threatening first Nightstrike's death, and then Sarah's since I couldn't actually kill them, and by doing so made her not just more villainous, but more hated.  The gloating mechanic definitely encourages villainous extremes in a subtle way that I just totally got into.

And then, after that was done and we retreated into the lab to to what we were going to do with the Patriot's dead body, Jasper put the screws on Witt by putting down "Kinder kills das Muter" as a goal... that was awesome.  Witt had to weigh in then, with Tony pushing hard on the 'deserves it' plan.  It was even better because our comics code only said that the original four characters were immune from death, so when Das Muter died, she died.

I was a teensy bit sad we didn't do one more scene, where I'd take over both Das Muter and The Patriot and play them, and have a showdown vs. the whole family (with Kinder, I'm sure, switching sides several times during the final fight, weighing in on opposite sides of conflicts).  Like any good comic book, though, that was left for the next issue, which might never be printed.