Between Sessions

[Garth]

I'm a little curious how people handle things in a continuing campaign ("story arc"?) of Capes.

I assume that all Debt, Story Tokens, and Inspirations carry over between sessions.  Since the seating order (and even the number of people) need not be constant, I presume that there's no attempt to carry over the turn order.

One thing I wonder about is what happens when a character racks up a massive amount of Debt - say a villain who then gets locked up.  It could be problematic to play him again...  I wonder if there should be a way to "work it off" - maybe every session in which a character doesn't appear, they lose X Debt, or something.  Or perhaps the slate should be wiped clean every now and then - sort of like a new author taking over the book?

[JohnUghrin]

I'm a little curious how people handle things in a continuing campaign ("story arc"?) of Capes.

I assume that all Debt, Story Tokens, and Inspirations carry over between sessions.  Since the seating order (and even the number of people) need not be constant, I presume that there's no attempt to carry over the turn order.

One thing I wonder about is what happens when a character racks up a massive amount of Debt - say a villain who then gets locked up.  It could be problematic to play him again...  I wonder if there should be a way to "work it off" - maybe every session in which a character doesn't appear, they lose X Debt, or something.  Or perhaps the slate should be wiped clean every now and then - sort of like a new author taking over the book?

I guess that would depend on what happens during each of your sessions. If you end up completing a decent portion of the "arc" or a mini-arc, then I don't think you'd need to carry Debt forward. Heck, some villains in comic universes seem to erase all debt the minute they are imprisoned.  Also, it might depend on how much time the characters experience between sessions. If you jump 10 years at a go, its conceivable that major characters might shift quite a lot (at which point, I'd say they should drop their old debt.)

[Andrew Cooper]

One way to get rid of the super-high debt on a character (not just a villain) is to rewrite them.  All that debt should change a person in some tangible way.  Simply think about the character and how the debt affects them and then rewrite the character to the new mould.  I'm not just talking about changing their powers but also about changing them as a personality.  Perhaps changing their Drives and Exemplars.  Once you've done that you have essentially created a new character that starts from a clean slate debt-wise.

[TonyLB]

Another fun way to get rid of the debt is to stage a conspiracy.  I like this one because (a) it happens fully within the rules as written and (b) it makes sense of some comic tropes that are hard to handle otherwise.

Basically, if your villain has a lot of debt, what he needs in order to turn that into power is a bunch of inspirations to go with it.  With debt and inspirations together, he can kick ass.

So you (maybe even secretly!) create some minions, and you have them undertaking small, inoffensive conflicts in order to generate inspirations.  They plant a surveillance bug in the team headquarters in one conflict, they get a DNA sample in another conflict ... nothing that's going to get a great deal of attention while people are bandying about the fate of the world, but things that will make sense when you later play them in one big heap, along with the huge pile of debt on your villain, to make their heinous secret plan into a reality.

The funny thing about this is that everybody always starts cashing in on their inspirations too soon.  They get enough to win conflicts with the debt they have, but they forget to stockpile enough to win the follow-up conflicts with the debt they'll create winning the first conflicts.  And so the villains come on like absolute gangbusters for the early stages of their conspiracy, and then the story tokens start flowing against them, and their planning inspirations run short, and they falter at the goal-line.  I see it happen all the time.

[Hans]

I assume that all Debt, Story Tokens, and Inspirations carry over between sessions.  Since the seating order (and even the number of people) need not be constant, I presume that there's no attempt to carry over the turn order.

In the long term games I have been a part of, we did intentionally keep the same seating order and turn order.  At a minimum, I would ensure that at the end of a session the players who will be starting the next two scenes know who they are, so they can have a chance to think about what they might do, what new characters they might introduce, etc.

Also, there was another thread on getting rid of debt that you might find worthwhile, here:
http://www.indie-rpgs.com/forum/index.php?topic=21365.0