So I had the first session of my face-to-face Capes campaign last night. Some good stuff and some bad stuff.

The good stuff: Once characters were created, they quickly lined up on opposite sides of a moral divide and had at each other. Specifically, an entrepreneur is trying to revitalize Millenium City. To do that she needs to clear squatters from a tent city on land she's purchased in order to break ground on a new building.

Two players jumped in with their heroes to protest the eviction of the squatters. One player had their hero as the lawyer supervising the eviction, and another player decided his hero didn't fit that scene and so played the police forces trying to maintain order.

With the sides so evenly split, the rules system says that the Editor (that's me) just sits back and kibbitzes, which is exactly what I did for the final hour of the session. Lots of fun, and it got everyone accustomed to the rules.

The bad stuff: Game-play only started in the last hour of a three hour session. Making characters is still daunting for folks. Abilities can be... well, pretty much anything. Which is a very broad field. How do you go about deciding whether you'd rather have "God answers my prayers" or "Panic attack"? And if you take both, which one should be prioritized with a higher numeric value? This is especially paralyzing when the player in question hasn't played the game, and therefore doesn't yet have a strong intuition for what they'll actually use and what they won't.

I'd be very interested to hear from folks who have played other systems that have this sort of broadness, how they break the character creation up into manageable chunks for players who haven't played the game yet.

Tony, i just wanted to comment briefly on the numerical prioritization of abilities.

Powers: because they are not blocked there is not a sense of "saving" your high-level Powers for later. This results in a skew towards using your higher-level Powers because occasionally you want to roll high valued dice.

Attitudes: since these are proactive and become Blocked i find that Attitudes are the easiest (and most important) to prioritize. Basically choose the way your character reacts under increasing levels of stress... You will almost always start the conflict using your lowest Attitudes and by the end you will ramp up to your highest. This results in a similar series of reactions and attitudes in every conflict a character is involved in which strikes me as incredibly genre appropriate.

Tropes: since these are blocked but reactive Tropes can almost be randomized in distribution. When rerolling your own dice you always want to use the lowest Trope available to you which quite often means that you end up rolling those low Tropes late in the scene rather than early in the scene...

Just my thouhgts on things, i am not even sure if they are entirely coherent...

Thomas