[Capes] Breakin' the rules

[LordSmerf]

So, we played Capes tonight at my local university RPG club.  The group was small (me and two others).  The club itself is decently sized, but attendence is pretty bad.  These are the two that regularly show up.  Anyway, I've been talking up Capes and Primetime Adventures for a while now and tonight one of the players said, "So, I was hoping we could play Capes tonight."  So we did.  Rules explainations, chargen, and playing through scene one took just under three hours.  Not too bad.

Since Tony has not (quite yet) finished the latest version of the rules I used what is on the Indie Design board and then tossed in a few ideas I wanted to try.  Here's what I did different from the rules and how I think that went:

[*]Instead of one die per side of a conflict, I had one "free" die per character.  It took an action to move that die from one place to another.  I liked it.  It allowed the heroes to gang up on the villains to increase their chances of victory.  It also provided an advantage when you sacrificed an Event or Goal since you could keep your personal die's value, but your opponents could not.[*]It took an action to claim something.  Bad idea, claiming became far more difficult and thus the game slowed down.[*]I let players decide which abilities were "Heroic" (stealing Sydney's term).  Still not sure.  I did like it, having a character with Heroic Sarcasm was fun.  However, one of my players has a non-heroic level five power which can really limit her abilities to roll high dice.[*]Instead of using Debt to split dice, you may take an action to move a point of Debt from your character to a Complication.  This Debt is there until resolution, but it gives you a die there starting at 1.  I thought this worked out really well, it made level 1 Drives useful and it prevented instant dumping of Debt (it took one action for each Debt, so if you were overdrawn by 2 it took two actions to get rid of it).  I really liked it[/list:u].Moving on...

Our heroes:

Melissa the Mighty
A telepathic teleporter with martial arts skills and the ability to shoot lightning from her fingers.  Her Exemplars are Carl the Newspaper Repoter, her boyfriend and Love Exemplar.  Her mentor, and older female hero weather witch and telepath, Duty.  And her role model, a mistress of the martial arts, Justice.

Blake Sniffington, III
A brilliant Sherlock Holmes type of detective crossed with Bruce Wayne (not Batman).  A playboy son of privilege who solves crimes for the "excitement".  Oh yeah, and he's a master of disguise.  Carl the Reporter is his Truth Exemplar.  Sgt. Hanson, the irratible policeman who wants to keep the amateurs off of his crime scenes is Justice.  Uncle Taff, who wants Blake to get a real job and work in the family business for Duty.

I gave each player (inluding me) 5 Story Tokens.  I explained the rules as the came into play.  This means I started with Goals and Events (one of each: Prevent Blake from getting on the crime scene, and Ninjas show up).  I then talked about introducing characters and brought Sgt. Hanson in to keep Blake away.  Blake's player brought Carl the reporter in to pester the Sgt.  We each used our action to put our character die on the Goal: Keep Blake away, but on opposite sides.  Then Melissa's player brought Melissa into play by calling Carl on his cell phone.  She put her personal die on Event: Ninjas show up, saying "Hey, do I hear ninjas?  Where are you?"  It was hilarious.

Blake's player then brought Blake in (for a Story Token).  He tossed his personal Die over on the Goal (which I, in my role as dice-master GM was winning with my one-roll six).  He then proceeded to use his two die advantage to mercilessly hammer on the poor Sgt.

Meanwhile I brought in the Shadowy Figure for Ninjas show up.  He started using Heroic abilities and then I started talking about Debt.  Everyone was cool with it.  Also around this time, I figured that the Sgt. couldn't win his Goal so I had him rolling up an Inspiration with his time instead, so that introduced Inspirations.

Melissa rolled up her die while the Shadowy figure put some Debt in for his side, then Carl joined Melissa, so the Sgt. joined the Shadow (sort of).  Then Melissa tossed some of her own Debt into play and Blake joined in.  With the heroes pretty much sure of victory, Blake decides to start his own little event and move over there.  He kicks off Goal: Blake makes it to the Warehouse (where we had previously determined a murder to have taken place).  In the end the Heroes won the Ninja event by a small margin.  What happnened?  The ninjas were all beaten unconcious by Melissa during the narrating of their arrival...  It was great!

Poor Shadowy Figure is now overdrawn.  I spent my free action getting the Shadow's free die over on the only remaining Goal, then I spent two Story Tokens (which I had just gotten from Melissa) to dump two Debt back onto it (no longer Overdrawn) and then one more Story Token to Claim it.  Then I spent a fourth Story Token to introduce Hench Men with Guns.  that gave me 4 dice, all at 1, to 1 die at 1.  Then Carl jumped in, and so did Melissa.  The Gun-toting henchmen rolled their one to a six, the Shadowy Figure claimed the Goal.  Dice were rolled, Blake dropped some Debt, the Heroes gained control of the Goal.  Then the Henchmen rolled one last time, taking up one of the Shadowy Figure's ones... and it was a one... reroll, last chance... five!  The Shadowy Figures turn came up with a one point lead on the Goal, Resolved in his favor.  Story Tokens were awarded (dumping two Debt) and then we called the scene as he escaped and blew up all the nearby vehicles.

I try to ask a two questions after every session of anything I play: What worked?  What didn't work?

What worked: Both players felt that using the Frame/Panel structure for narration was super-cool and made it easier to handle.  I liked the way they got into narrating stuff, especially since I get the impression that this was a level of freedom that neither of them were used to.

What didn't work: One player mentioned that it was sometimes hard to figure out what to do with your free action (sometimes you don't want to introduce a new Event/Goal, and Inspirations can get old).  The other player mentioned that it was somewhat difficult to think of enough things to narrate when you rolled high (I think this was probably a good thing since it encouraged her to narrate more stuff, to provide more detail).

I had some pretty interesting thoughts about the structure of the game (system), but at the moment I am too tired to do much about them.  I'll be back after some sleep.

Overall, it was fun.  We want to recruit another player in order to put some more ideas into the mix.  But they do want to play again, and that's a good sign.  I had fun too.

Thomas

[Vaxalon]

Is there an uptodate version available yet?  I'd like to give this a try too, but collecting the most recent rules together is very confusing.

[LordSmerf]

Last I heard from Tony, he is pushing himself really hard to get something in print by Dreamation 2005 in January.  He feels he needs at least an initial draft of the final rules by the middle of this month.  If things go as he plans then we should be seeing something then...

Thomas

[TonyLB]

Three hours for a total of one scene, face-to-face?  Yowch!  Sounds incredibly frustrating to me.  Lots of questions...

Where was that time spent?

How many Pages were in the scene?

Did you use Click and Lock character construction?

What was your motivation for giving people five Story Tokens, rather than one?

Was the Goal that the Shadowy Figure won the "Blake gets to Warehouse" goal?  If so, how did he prevent Blake from getting to the warehouse?  Kidnapping, I hope?

[LordSmerf]

Good questions.  I'll answer them and then get on to that extra commentary I promised.

Time: No click and lock for us...  They wanted to get down and dirty with the system.  I think we spent about an hour or so doing chargen.  I think what people found most difficult was filling in all 12 of their abilities... They could get most of them, but then they were kind of stumped.  I think next time I will have them assign what they know they want, and leave the others blank to fill in during play.  We did that with Carl the Reporter: we decided what his first three Abilities were in every category and left his 4s and 5 (and where they went) blank.  He ended up getting all of that filled in during that one scene.

I think we had somewhere between 8 and 12 pages.  With five characters split among three players almost the entire time.  It didn't exactly feel slow, but it did feel unfocused.  I'm not sure that any of us knew where we wanted to go with it...

Story Tokens.  I hadn't really used them before, and I couldn't remember how many you were supposed to start with.  I wanted to encourage people to use them.  We all did to some degree, but not as much as I had hoped.

Preventing Blake getting to the warehouse was indeed the goal that was thwarted.  It almost ended up begin a kidnapping, but instead the Shadowy Figure's goons raked Blake's car with automatic fire.  This was especially appropriate since one of Blake's Powers is "Really cool car".  It didn't actually do too much, but Blake was complaining "Man, I just got that thing painted!"  When Carl kindly offered to drive Blake to the warehouse in his own car, that car promptly blew up.  Another thing I like about Blake is his "Lucky" Power.  He used it to trip and see the ninja planting a bomb under his car, his response was "Is that a ninja under my car?  Oh well."  All in all the session was a lot of fun.

Now, onto my personal commentary.  I had two major problems, one was systemic, one was personal.  The systemic one was that I still couldn't figure out when a scene ends.  We kind of had an unspoken group consensus to stop introducing new stuff until we managed to close out everything on the table which is why there were so many dice (like 8 or something) stacked on the final Goal.  A clear definition of Scenes would be cool.

The personal problem was lack of direction.  I could totally feel that my two players were pretty much unfamiliar with the degree of control that Capes hands players.  In such situations the Editor (or someone at least) needs to have a solid idea of where the story is headed and how to challenge the players and their character's Drives.  I didn't.  So, next time, more focus...  I started off with some ninjas mainly because I think ninjas are fun.  I didn't really threaten any Exemplars...  Next time Gadget!

Thomas

[Vaxalon]

I started off with some ninjas mainly because I think ninjas are fun.

Next time you need monkeys, pirates, and robots.

[TonyLB]

Interesting.  I have more questions.  

What proportion of the Events and Goals did the other players create?

How much Debt did they accrue (net) by the end of the scene?  

Was this Debt in the Drives that had Exemplars present in the scene?

Related to all of the above (and my main question):  How aggressively did you frame scenes?

[LordSmerf]

We had two Goals and one Event in the scene.  I kicked things off with one of the Goals and the Event, Blake's player kicked in the second goal sometime after we resolved the first Goal but before we resolved the Event.  That was it for introduction.

Debt...  Blake had two or three Debt at the end, most of it was in Truth (of which Carl is his Exemplar).  Melissa had, I believe, one or two in Love (also Carl).  Melissa was also able to dump some Love on the Event "Ninjas Appear" when she won that one.  The Shadowy Figure was also overdrawn in Pride (4 over 2) at the end of that Event, so I immediately dropped 2 Pride on the last goal in play.

Scene Framing...  Aggression was low.  I pretty much lobbed the one scene we did at them...  No real good reason to be involved.  It is sort of an interesting situation, I am still feeling my way around with these people.  I've only ever played an RPG with them once before (Great Ork Gods), and I have only known them for a few months.  I guess I was sort of feeling my way into things, and I wasn't really doing them any favors...

Thomas

[TonyLB]

You had only three conflicts, and they lasted eight (or maybe twelve) pages?  Wow.  I've seen that many Conflicts resolve in a single Page (often).  Do you think this was an effect of charging someone an action to claim, or something else?

On the scene-framing, let me make a recommendation.  If your intuition screams "this won't work with these players" then you're probably right, but I'll toss it out anyway:  Don't frame the scene yourself.  Tell one of the other players to do it, and then pick your character in response, to best create Conflicts in the scene as they've defined it.

For instance, if Blake's player says that he is racing toward a crime-scene, you can immediately say "Okay, I'll play some ninjas whose attack will delay him."  But if the player says he's already at the crime scene then you know that you want to play Sgt. Hanson, and be obstructive instead.

You may end up with exactly the same scene you'd have defined yourself, but the early player input goes a long way toward framing directly to the right moment for them, the moment when the conflict they're most interested in begins.

[LordSmerf]

I think that requiring an action to claim definately contributed to the low number of conflicts.  It was difficult to win since you would essentially give your opponent(s) an entire round to beat you out without increasing your lead at all...  So, I won't be doing that again :)

As to allowing the players to frame the scenes I might try it.  I just don't know these people well enough yet to know how they would handle it.  Blake's player seemed pretty self motivated, he set himself an agenda and then worked toward it.  Very proactive.  Melissa's player was more reactive, but still fun to play with.  Both of them are old Champions hands, so this was definately a different kind of Supers game for them.

Thomas