[Capes][Dexcon] Fighting about what we're fighting about

[TonyLB]

Ah, the DexCon Capes games.  This is the second of (probably) three AP posts about the third of these games.  It follows immediately after I don't save the people ... the people save me.

At the prison camp, we had established the rebellion against Earth-Prime dictatorship as an effort of the common people.  We moved straight on from there.  Almost too straight, in fact.  Dave (thank goodness people posted!  Now I can put names to faces) took up the ball and said "Well, I guess we're ... out in the street outside the prison-camp."  I guessed that as a "We have to do whatever the next thing is" reaction, so I mentioned that we could do that, or we could skip forward past a month of freedom fighting to some final attack.  Dave latched on to that instead, and we were assaulting the heavily defended lab where they kept the dimension flux relay that transported things to and fro between the two worlds.  Heady stuff!

Phredd decided to pick up Gangbuster ... I'd mentioned in an off-hand way that in the previous game, Gangbuster had gone over to the Earth-Prime side, and so he grabbed him (and, with a story token, a group of elite mooks) as the perfect defenders for the facility.  Other than that we had Gun Bunny, Hellion and Major Victory, fresh from the prior scene.

The scene that played out was great fun, despite ... no, because of the fact that we all knew that we wanted the heroes to get to the flux relay and mount their counter-attack on Earth-Prime.  That was (I thought) pretty well fixed in everyone's minds.  The question wasn't the "What?" of events, but the "How?" and particularly the "Who?"

We had a conflict about whether Gun Bunny or Hellion would be in the forefront of the fighting ... a conflict about whether the fight between Hellion and Gangbuster was a fists-and-feet fight or a romantic manipulation (or, as things went on, both) ... and my particular favorite:  "Event:  Someone is banished to an unknown dimension."  Not "What?" would happen, but "Who?"

Interestingly, I felt as if we were playing not merely one game, but six separate and overlapping games ... a game between each possible pair of people chosen from the four of us.  Phredd and I had a game (and thereby a story) going on about Hellion and Gangbuster, while Phredd and Bret had a game going on about Gangbuster and Major Victory, and Dave and I had a game going on about Gun Bunny and Hellion ... and so on.

That was a lot to take in.  I realized only after the game that I'd totally missed a chance to heartily zing Bret by introducing "Goal:  Major Victory sacrifices lives to gain his objective" or something akin to it ... I was describing the occasional burst of machine gun fire striking down troops in our Normandy-like assault, but without mechanical teeth it just drifted through the other battles like smoke.

So there's at least one down-side.  But the scene was also rich and complicated without losing focus on the characters.  So that's an up-side.  Have other people noticed these types of sub-games developing in games they play?  What kind of mileage do you get out of it, and what are the traps to be avoided?