Dead Characters

[Larry L.]

So in our recent game, I noticed something in Capes that's not immediately obvious. If your character is permitted by the Comics Code to be killed, and you don't have any story tokens on hand, you're effectively locked out of the rest of the scene by character death.

Yes, I suppose you can scrape by if you can figure out terribly creative interpretations of influence from beyond the grave, but uh, it just seems like something worth pointing out on the subject of "Things to keep in mind when you're drawing up the Comics Code."

(Amusingly, this is the status quo in other RPGs, but it seems astonishingly disempowering in Capes.)

[jburneko]

Actually, we had a discussion about this not too long ago and actually you're not locked out.  You just have to be more creative.

So you have this gageteer and he just died but you still want to affect the conflicts.  No problem.  You use your Ingenious Device (or whatever) Ability roll the die and Narrate something like, "...and that's when the bombs I set up earlier go off."

Jesse

[Mark Woodhouse]

Yah, Larry, I think we noticed this on Suday actually - remember how we suggested Nebulon could still be in the scene after he was destroyed, since he could still influence stuff? Or how I played Princess Kadama as influencing a scene she was never present for?

Death is not the end.

Plus, if you didn't gain a stack of Story Tokens from getting your character killed, something's Just Not Right.

[TonyLB]

Not to mention the various ways characters can have an impact through other people's memories of them, opinions of them and of course flash-backs.  Just to test it, I played a scene with Zak, while Zak was imprisoned, off-scene, on another planet.  I got plenty of actions and reactions in by way of other characters:

Eric:  "We can't risk dozens of people just to rescue Zak."
Me:  Reacting with "Trusting"... you know that Zak is out there, somewhere, and that he has complete faith that you won't let him down.
Eric:  Ouch!

But yeah, it's a heck of a creative challenge some times.  Particularly getting to any physically-based super-abilities.  Hard to do acrobatics with rigor-mortis.

[Anders Gabrielsson]

But yeah, it's a heck of a creative challenge some times.  Particularly getting to any physically-based super-abilities.  Hard to do acrobatics with rigor-mortis.

"But then you remember how Q-Man used to handle situations like this... maybe, if you tried really hard, you could pull off that triple-somersault high-jump! 'I'll have to try... it's our only chance!'"