[OrcCon][Capes] Eight People!

[jburneko]

Hello,

This is the second actual play post from my experiences at OrcCon this weekend.  I ran a session of Capes.  When I originally sent in the event I capped it at four participants.  However, the con orginizers are really pushy about having events be for six participents.  When I sent in the event I was still pretty bitter about my past con experience and figured there would be no harm in pleasing the organizers by raising the cap to six because I was only going to get two or three anyway.  I got seven.  Yup, seven plus me that's eight.

Dear god.

What I came prepped with was a "graph" of superheroes and villains linked together by shared exemplars.  Four Heroes, Two Villains and about seven secondary characters, all exemplars of the heroes and villains.  I did demonstrate the Click'n'Lock thing and the majority wanted to put their own characters together and a few pulled from the pile.  Only one exemplar pair was represented and despite me pointing it out the free conflict never came into it.

On the opening move I set the scene at a hospital and explained that my villain was putting the hospital under seige.  That scene lasted the entire game, not surprisingly.  Part of that was that in the first round, I don't think people grasped the idea of participating in other people's conflicts so the majority of the players put down their own goals on the table.  So by the end of Page 1 there were six different goals on the table.

As a testament to the strength of Capes's system, despite the noise created by having eight players the scene really was about only one thing: The assassination of a foreign diplomat.  It was just long and loud and ended with a dead foreign diplomat.

Also, after about an hour or so, I could tell there was a percentage of people who got into it and percentage of people who did not.  At that point the game was a little bit like the titanic with the weight of those who simply stopped caring kind of draging on the rest of us.

And that's all I can really say about that.  I'll be happy to answer questions if there are any.

Jesse

[Josh Roby]

What "grabbed" the guys who bought in, and do you have any idea what the guys who didn't buy in were missing?

[jburneko]

I think the people who got into it liked the fighting over goals.  They liked watching the die go up, the die go down, the bad roll.  Some liked the freedom of narrating whatever they wanted along with the die roll.  Some I think, even enjoyed the humor of the chaos.

The people that didn't get into I think found it confusing and too much work.  They wanted to "just roleplay" and couldn't.  They'd start to narrate something or launch into dialogue and I'd say, "Great, are you affecting a conflict, how?" and they'd look kind of irritated and pissed off, like I'd totally broken their flow.

Jesse

[Hans]

I wanted to mention that I posted a very similar experience to Jesse's here after Pandemonium in Toronto on the weekend:

http://roleplayers.meetup.com/261/boards/view/viewthread?thread=1698428

I post this not to hijack your thread, Jesse, but to point out the incredible similarity of our two experiences.  I too had many more people show up than expected (11 instead of 5, enough for two tables going at once).  I too had a group really into it (the "anything goes" table) and a group that was floundering a bit (the "serious" table).  I found the exact same comments (about "just roleplaying" and "too much work") among the people who did not find the experience rewarding.  And the ones who enjoyed it the most were the ones who REVELED in the chaos.

I have actually come to two conclusions regarding Capes, based on my experience so far and my reading of other's experience:

1) Capes is a game that must be TAKEN seriously (in terms of learning the rules, paying attention, playing with discipline), but is probably incapable of developing what many would call serious stories (of the "Dark Knight Returns" or "Sin City" variety). 
2) Capes has been described as a game with no GM, but I would argue it is better described as a game where everyone is a GM, and hence must put prep work in to be invested enough in the game to enjoy it for anything more than a chaotic romp.

Jesse, did you get a sense as to whether those who did not enjoy the game were four-colour comics fans or not?  I have a theory that if you are the kind of person who finds four-colour comic storytelling meaningful (even if not serious), you can enjoy Capes, but if you do not consider four-colour comics capable of real meaning, then Capes will always leave you dissappointed.  In other words, the fascination with the narrativist/gamist breakthrough that is the Capes rules will only carry you so far, and only a real desire to role-play super-hero stories will keep you playing. 

[jburneko]

Hello,

Totally not a thread-jack, no worries.  I've been following Tony's time travel game for some time and there's some pretty deep stuff in there.  You're not going to get something as focused as The Dark Knight Returns (is it telling perhaps, that I don't *like* The Dark Knight Returns?) but something like The No Mans Land saga or say, the current Justice League cartoon I would say is totally within the realm of Capes.

I can't comment on whether the people who were into it were particular fans of comic books or not.  I think one of the guys playing a villain was.  He was very into the description and was particularly into *exagerated* description; making it very clear that his actions were drawn and expresionistic.  He was also the first one to introduce the idea that there was a foreign diplomat at the hospital who he was trying to assassinate.

There was another guy there who was clearly a major super-hero fan.  He showed up a little early and this was the guy who's played every super-hero RPG published since superhero RPGs began.  He could also cite individual issues of comics.  Very much a Marvel/X-Men fan.  He was a hard read though.  I couldn't tell if he was into it or not.  It might be interesting to note that the conflict he put on the table was a Goal but involved a character that wasn't represented by another player.  I think it was something like, "Get passed the bossy administrator trying to usher me out of the hospital."  I think he put this down before he realized that conflicts last many rounds and many pages, it kind of locked him out of other conflicts via the "Not yet..." rule since almost anything he came up with would require him to have gotten past the administrator.  I did point out that his actions could indirectly affect another conflict, such as him stamping his foot in frustration with the adminstrator causing a minor earthquake that somehow upset the villain trying to assassinate the diplmat.  But that never really seemed to sink in.

Jesse

[Sydney Freedberg]

Capes definitely has a learning curve, and it's easy to get muddled stories, or silly stories, if a bunch of people leap in without prep or experience. (It doesn't take much prep and/or experience, but it's not as little as it appears!). Once you get up that learning curve, though, and accumulate a bunch of Story Tokens and Inspirations, you can really get some genuine gut-check moments. (Witness that time-travel campaign I'm in with Tony, which isn't even particularly superheroic). But, yeah, it's a particular taste and not for everyone.

It sounds like at least half your group had a hell of a lot of fun, starting from cold zero at a con, so I'd be slapping myself on the back pretty hard now if I were you, Jesse.

[TonyLB]

Plus, y'know, eight people.  At one table.  As far as I know, that's a record.  I'm amazed you could hold it together.  Serious self-back-slapping is in order.

[jburneko]

Oh, the chaos, of this game was no surprise to me.  As Tony says, eight people!  The way I think I kept things running smoothly is that I pretty much stood up the whole time and kind of partially leaned over the table and gestured a lot like a dealer or croupier in Vegas.  "Your action, sir"!  "Last call for reactions!"  "You gonna stake that debt?"  "Page is over, settle those claims!"  and so on.

Jesse

[epweissengruber]

1) Capes is a game that must be TAKEN seriously (in terms of learning the rules, paying attention, playing with discipline), but is probably incapable of developing what many would call serious stories (of the "Dark Knight Returns" or "Sin City" variety). 

Even if you have supers with mixed heroic and villainous drives.
Bringing those drives into play seems the key to satisfactory multi-session play. And it could be conducive to angsty vigilante stuff.