Capes is a superhero game with very broad abilities. Your Powers or Tropes can be pretty much anything that can happen. "God answers my prayers" is just as legitimate as "Laser-beam eyes".

This is great fun in play. But my experience is that this can be very intimidating and time-consuming for people who just want to make a character and start.

The system also has Exemplars, who are NPCs specifically linked to the heroes in specific moral arenas. So the love interest, or the police-man doggedly hunting your fugitive, that sort of thing. Exemplars must be shared with other players... so maybe the dogged police-man is also somebody's love interest.

Also very fun and very time-consuming.

I would like to create tools to help radically increase the speed of character creation. And when I say "radically" I mean taking it down from two hours for a group of four to... oh, say... ten minutes. I'd settle for half an hour, but ten minutes would be better.

I have two immediate recommendations/possibilities. I'd love to hear opinions or (even better!) ideas that do a better job than these.

First the one I thought of: Allow people to create a character by combining pre-drafted modules that are built to work well enough, and to work together. Specifically, I could see the following:

• A Power Set consists of three Powers, a level 2 Trope and three optional add-ons... a level 4 Power, a level 5 Power and a level 4 Trope.• A Personality consists of three Attitudes, a level 1 Trope, a level 3 Trope and three optional add-ons... a level 4 Attitude, a level 5 Attitude and a level 4 or 5 Trope.• Players choose two modules, combine them and then add three options.• They can then, of course, modify absolutely anything... this is just to quickly create a baseline functional character.• Power Sets would be things like "Speedster", "Martial Artist", "Invulnerable Strongman", "Gadgeteer", etc.• Personalities would be things like "Grim crimefighter", "Spunky beginner", "Hothead", "Psychotic Loner" and so on.

I have a feeling that the same modular approach could create Exemplars that can easily be fitted together with those of other heroes, but I need a bit more time to think about that before posting it.

My wife recommends a somewhat more radical idea: Play a first scene ("Origin?") that creates the character during play. I'm having a bit of a harder time getting my head around this, because I don't quite see how you would have the same mechanical system guarantee that you use/invent all of the Abilities that you'll need for the hero. But I do love the idea of diving in immediately, and I agree that there would be somewhat less paralysis about "What would be a good ability for me to have" in actual context. "The bad-guys fire a machine gun at you"... "I'm really, REALLY good at dodging bullets!"

Tony,

Let me just say that i really like both suggestions. So why not just use them both? HeroQuest has three accepted character generation options: Narrative Method, List Method, and Develop-thru-Play. I can see Capes using a "conventional" get everything together first, then play. That is probably the most time consuming. I can see develop-thru-play as you suggest below. Your character has a bunch of blank slots, need something? Write it down. Once it is written down it is stuck there... Even with this method i would suggest requiring at least one or two Exemplars before play since they really catalyze things.

As for pre-built (sort of) Exemplars i suggest something relatively simple. Write up a series of paragraph discriptions of Exemplars who are tied to two characters. Examples include: Love interest who is someone's sister (a classic), Villain who is the nemesis of two characters, neighbor who works with someone else... Or perhaps instead a list of relationships, how the Exemplar is tied to a character such as: Love interest, sibling, parent, long-time friend, coworker, nemesis, mentor, rival. Then each player just picks from that list. "Bob is my... coworker." "Well, Bob is my... neighbor."

Perhaps it does not entirely belong here, but i wanted to note that Player Characters as Exemplars does not seem to work very well... The fact that they can not necessarily be dragged into whatever the situation is seems to make them less suited to plot development than NPC Exemplars. I would consider adding explicit text to clarify that.

Thomas

I agree on PCs as Exemplars. Neither the player nor the Editor have enough narrative control over another player's hero.

On making Exemplars... heh... okay, I'll toss this idea out half-formed and see what people make of it:

I was thinking of making character fragments which link a relationship ("Charming Love Interest") to either a Personality of Power-Set.

Ideally, I would see people matching up quickly like this:

"Okay, I've got a Prince Charming Personality in search of a Power-Set"
"Really? I've got a Dogged Pursuer power-set in search of a Personality."
"So the cop obsessing on taking you down is the perfect soul-mate that I can't connect with because of my many secrets?"
"Hey, works for me."

This has the benefit of creating the link and the Exemplar-character at the same time. In the absence of some really quick way of creating mechanical statistics for Exemplars, I fear that they will never get done in most games, which would be a loss.

Hmm... on the surface i guess i just have to say that that is brilliant. No, i am dead serious. It ties itself in perfectly with the Power-set/Personality stuff (which i already consider to be a good idea).

While i am thinking about it, the Power-set/Personality stuff is also a great way to build website traffic. Just put up a new pair every week and i am sure that a number of people will keep stopping by. Provide somewhere for people to post their own? You have your own little online Capes community right there...

Thomas

Mix & match modularity is good; I've recommended a Monster Manual approach -- i.e. big books 'o stock characters -- as ideally suited for Capes before. But... your wife is right.

It's actually not too difficult to come up with a cool "high concept" for a character: "I'm a skate-punk activist werewolf"; "I'm an energy being in a robotic body"; "I'm a traumatized ferrokinetic street kid"; "God answers my prayers, uh-oh" (all real Capes characters from last night's playtest, in which I gather character creation took longer than you wanted). What is hard, especially if you're new to the system (let along RPGs in general) is filtering that high concept through the framework of Powers, Attitudes, and Tropes.

One approach is to hand people a bunch of modules to Lego-snap together to enact their high concept. ("Okay, you plug the"punk activist" module into the "werewolf" module; you plug the "energy powers" module into the "robot body" module). But you will never, ever, ever come up with enough Lego blocks for everyone, no matter how many cool submissions end up on the Capes website and get collected into glossy supplements that make you millions of dollars. (Ideally).

The path to success is not to try. (Yes, now I'm a Taoist, or at least Yoda). Or at least, don't try too hard. Allow a new player to start with a "high concept" -- and remember in Hollywood terms a high concept is usually "model A combined with model B" (or cliche A with cliche B), so it inherently has both accessibility and a bit of complexity. Then whenever the player wants to make a roll, allow them to fill in a Power/Attitude/Trope slot with anything that (a) fits the situation and (b) fits their high concept. Within a few scenes, you'll have (1) nicely fleshed-out characters that (2) exploit the mechanics well but (3) aren't just random "I manifest this useful skill now without regard for coherence" because of the limiting power of the High Concept.

You might even be able to adapt something like this for Exemplars.

EDIT: By the way, this models much better the way comic-book writers come up with their characters, I'd imagine. And it also means your character advancement system is simply a continuation of your character creation system -- "here, you got a bunch of [XP equivalents], have another slot to fill in that fits your High Concept."

Also I have never used so many BBCode formatting features before in my life. Fun!

I'd like to add my support for 'stock' Power and Personality templates. This is a very nice idea, especially for players who are coming in from other genres of game (D&D *cough*) and aren't necessarily comic otaku.

However, do you need to specify the numbers? The 'core' three Powers may be 1/2/3 for a 3-Powered Character, but they may be better placed at 3/4/5 if the character takes two 'optional' powers. Same for Personality and Attitudes - I think the list is sufficient

If this doesn't make sense, let me know and I'll write up an example.

Also, if you want to generate traffic, how about a series of paired Heroes and Villains? You could write up a Hero character, his 'nemesis' Villain, and explain how the two can interact through their Exemplars.

Oh, and IMHO characters who are used as examples in the rulebook (such as Zip and Chief Mannelli) should be statted somewhere in that book, either at the end or in a sidebar. This will help to reinforce the Actual Play examples.

EDIT: Cross-posting with Sydney, the "high concept" idea is also very good, I think it proves that there is more than one way to skin this particular cat. Why not use all of them?

For example: a player may have a great concept, but can only think of two powers, three attitudes and a single Trope. Fill these in, fill in the blanks during play, allow the character to 'reallocate' the numbers at the end of the session to accomodate the new abilities. I suspect that this is even closer to emulating the style of the books - the Heroes still start with some Powers etc. but these develop during the story.

And Sydney - I think the Yoda quote you're missing is 'do or do not.. there is no try.' <g>

Okay, I think Sydney's got a better handle on the develop-through-play idea than I do. So I'm going to ask him (or anyone who thinks they have a good answer) the thing that's most weighing on my mind: Will a character created through the circumstances of one scene be likely to be effective in another type of scene?

My experience is that it takes some pretty serious forethought to make a hero who can meaningfully participate in both foiling a bank robbery and discussing a proposed mutant registration law. My fear is that if you start them off in a bank robbery then you've committed yourself to do nothing but foil violent crimes from here on out. But as I've said, my understanding of the dynamic is very limited, so my fears may well be groundless.

Doug: What you're saying about a loose grab-bag of abilities that can be ordered any which way makes good sense. Better sense than specifying the levels. Consider that simplification stolen.

EDIT: Or... hrm... I may just recommend that re-ordering the powers is the most obvious possible modification. I still like the idea that people can go "Pick A, Pick B" and have a default character they could play with, but which may beg for customization.

TonyLB wrote: Okay, I think Sydney's got a better handle on the develop-through-play idea than I do.

TonyLB wrote: it takes some pretty serious forethought to make a hero who can meaningfully participate in both foiling a bank robbery and discussing a proposed mutant registration law. My fear is that if you start them off in a bank robbery then you've committed yourself to do nothing but foil violent crimes from here on out...

More good points from Sydney.

Let's play Devil's Advocate - does it matter if a hero has different powers for different scenes?

Or to put it another way, can a hero have a 'bank' of Powers (and possibly Tropes or even Attitudes) that they can call on during a scene, which they only need to place as they are used? This would only work with a unifying 'high concept', and may be a Scary Change of Direction, so I'm not going to shout for this - I just want to know what y'all think about it.

One advantage is that heroes can gain extra attributes as their character develops, without unbalancing the game (still limited to deploying 3/4/5 during any Scene.) Another advantage is that it allows for more flexibility between different scenes - I think this solves Tony's problem as posted.

The main disadvantage is that it may result in too many attributes to keep track of, and a 'blurring' of the initial character concept, but I think there are ways to keep this in check.

Wow... yeah, these are some major possible changes. Until I'm more sure that I've got my head around it I will restrict myself to small, straightforward comments and questions.

I see having different banks of abilities on a single character as being very similar to having different characters in a troupe who bring different sets of abilities to the table. Essentially they are both ways to minimize the impact of a "wrong pick" by diluting it in a larger pool of total abilities, yes?

Doug, an interesting suggestion regarding the "bank" of powers, but i just do not believe that it would work. You touch on it briefly, but i believe that the incoherence of character will spin out of control.

Sydney's point on specialization is well taken. Consider a classica example... Wolverine does not get involved in Mutant Registration Debates... And looking at his Powers, Attitudes, and Tropes shows us why.

To address the issue of on-the-fly character generation i have two points:

1. As Sydney said, you can always choose to hold back and save some slots for later. And since you should be talking to the Editor about scenes the players should be playing in the scenes that they want to play in...

2. Once i as the Editor see a character, and what he is specializing in, clearly i craft my scenes to him. Take our actual play for example, the Gray Ghost does not get scenes that place him in the courtroom, he does not have to deal with guarding villains he has captured. He does not have to maintain or manufacture his special equipment. This is because it is clear from his list of Powers, Attitudes, and Tropes that you as a player are not really interested in him doing these things. The result here is that i will not start such a scene without a specific request since circumstantial evidence indicates that you do not want to play in those types of scenes...

EDIT: Oh, and one more thing. Part of the fun is finding ways to make your Abilities work in a given situation. I point you to the Gray Ghosts encounter with Dorian Wise. The Ghost had to get creative in order to utilize his Abilities. Consider also "Ignore the pain", it is cooler because you use it in different ways, displaying new facets instead of new abilities.

Thomas

I have no problem with specialization. But there's a difference between specializing and just painting yourself into a corner. One is conscious, the other is the outcome of untrained system manipulation. Untrained system manipulation is going to be the norm for players who are just starting in Capes.

Some players know the system well enough to develop and follow a strategy for how they need to play in order to create workable characters. These players also know the system well enough to write up a character from scratch in five minutes or less.

Is there a way for Develop-through-play to be made obvious for the players who don't yet have this level of system insight? Or is it inherently a more advanced method of character generation, for experienced players only?

SIDE NOTE: The click-and-lock modular system, as outlined above, would permit people to make a character with four Powers, four Attitudes and four Tropes. Does this strike anyone as a problem?

For me... it's not the way I would make a character, but I don't see that it's going to break anything or be radically less fun than the other possible allocations.

LordSmerf wrote: Doug, an interesting suggestion regarding the "bank" of powers, but i just do not believe that it would work. You touch on it briefly, but i believe that the incoherence of character will spin out of control.

TonyLB wrote: SIDE NOTE: The click-and-lock modular system, as outlined above, would permit people to make a character with four Powers, four Attitudes and four Tropes. Does this strike anyone as a problem?

TonyLB wrote: Some players know the system well enough to develop and follow a strategy for how they need to play in order to create workable characters. These players also know the system well enough to write up a character from scratch in five minutes or less. Is there a way for Develop-through-play to be made obvious for the players who don't yet have this level of system insight? Or is it inherently a more advanced method of character generation, for experienced players only?

(My High Concept is Forum Lurker; forgive me for violating that concept, but the Develop-In-Play aspect to this thread really got me thinking.)

Perhaps the players could focus their Develop-In-Play experience not only by establishing a High Concept, but also by contributing an introductory scene?

If your High Concept is "skater-punk activist werewolf," you might also contribute an introductory scene of "I have to escape the cops after spray-painting my politics on the side of City Hall."

That way you have some control over the kind of situation you're in when you first establish those Powers and whatnot. The Editor might even extrapolate a whole story-arc from those introductory scenes alone.

Okay, sorry for the delay in response. The reason was that I was having trouble dealing with this in the wholly abstract. So I spent a few hours to write up a solo playtest.

I'm going to base my further opinions on the experience of that actual play. If folks want to argue with me that the actual play is not representative of what Develop In Play would actually look like in the real world then we'll at least have some specifics to talk about, rather than saying "I think it will work" versus "I have worries".

Here's the executive summary of the solo playtest:

I went in with three things that I firmly knew would go on the character. They were three of the first four things I played (Big Guns, Invulnerable and Massive Property Damage), and I had no problem at all getting them into the character. Yay!

High Concept may or may not actually contain a description of personality. If it doesn't then there is no real restriction or guidance for what Attitudes you create. This led to incoherent Attitudes in the example of play. Boo!

Subjectively... well, let's leave the subjective out of things for the moment. I'd like to hear what people think about the example before I go too much further.

TonyLB wrote: High Concept may or may not actually contain a description of personality. If it doesn't then there is no real restriction or guidance for what Attitudes you create. This led to incoherent Attitudes in the example of play. Boo!

I'm not sure I get what you're recommending. Are you saying that the player should create a power high concept and a personality high concept? Or that they should select from a list of power high concepts and personality high concepts? Or something else?

Sorry, I'm again using Hollywood-speak (as with "B-plot" in an earlier thread) without making it clear what I mean. A "high concept" is almost always expressed in terms of "clearly established model A combined with clearly established model B," or "cliche A meets cliche B," e.g. "This new movie script is Jaws meets Friends." Often the dynamic tension between clashing cliches is the fun part.

So a true High Concept for Silverstar, for example, is not just "massively armed android," it's "massively armed android with the personality of an anxious teenage girl"; the tension is between physical power and emotional vulnerability. Magneto from X-Men is not just "a villain with magnetic powers," he's a "villain with magnetic powers who seeks to prevent a new Holocaust against mutants"; the tension is between noble ends and evil means. Part A is Power, Part B is Personality, and the tension between the two is the source of story.

Huh. I think my idea just evolved while I wrote it.

Yeah, I got that. Now are you proposing that people invent these high concepts, or choose them from a list?

TonyLB wrote: Now are you proposing that people invent these high concepts, or choose them from a list?

My first thought is that more examples would be helpful. Right now, the only example of a complete character that the rules give is Silverstar. There's a few more bits of characters in other examples, but giving three or four example characters seems to me like it would be a great help. They don't all have to be in the "main text" -- you could throw them in the back as just "sample characters" rather than narrating their creation the way Silverstar's is done.

Giving some examples of how things that don't fit the "standard superhero RPG" mold of powers and such can be useful would also be a good idea. Not to be a glory-hog, but I've gotten a lot more use out of "ignores the pain" and "other people's equipment" than out of "makes a whirlwind", even though the latter seems like it ought to be a much more powerful ability going by the SSRPG way of doing things.

Lastly, on the topic of DIP superheroes -- for my own off-and-on superhero RPG project, I wanted DIP to be well-supported. To keep things consistent with a theme, though, I wanted players to supply both a basic "powers theme" description and a "character's philosophy" description.

I also intended to use the character's philosophy in another way -- for creating nemeses for the heroes. A hero's nemesis should have a philosophy that somehow reverses or twists the hero's. To give some classic comic book examples:

Batman: "The world only makes sense when you make it. I will make it."
Joker: "The world makes no sense at all, and I will prove it."

Superman: "Truth and Justice are the highest callings."
Lex Luthor: "Truth and Justice are outmoded concepts; Power is everything."

Spider-man: "With great power comes great responsibility."
Green Goblin: "Those with power should rule as they wish."

Charles Xavier: "Humans and mutants can live together."
Magneto: "Humans and mutants cannot live together; humans must be destroyed or enslaved."

Tony, as i read your example of play i thought i saw Debt being incurred for Trope use. Am i hallucinating? Did i miss something important?

Thomas

Thomas: As of the Sept. 17 revision, you can declare Tropes to be either powered (in which case they cost debt but can be reused in the same scene) or not (in which case they don't cost debt, but block). We're playtesting with that, and we have a hero who has chosen to have five powered tropes, so I think the rule will get about as extreme a workout as could be imagined. I'll report.


Efindel: I've been thinking (in general terms) of making a large (but not ludicrous) stable of pre-made Power concepts and Personality concepts. I may also end up doing a Philosophies set, but that's going to take a bit more thinking, because it's tricky to figure out how to select a fragment of an Exemplar that will work well with their philosophy. It's easy to represent them (using the Power/skill-sets and Personality-sets described above) but it's hard to get a good match to philosophy that will work much of the time.


Anyway, again I waited to post until I had something more concrete than earlier abstract discussions of these click-and-lock sets. I've got a first example page up online.

With just three power-sets and three personalities, my best estimate is that I can get to within a few minutes of fiddling and rewrite separating an initial click from each of the following comic book characters: Hulk, Kid Flash, Flash, Green Lantern, Swamp Thing, Magneto, Storm, Jenny Sparks, Captain Marvel and some personality-phases of Superman. Frankly, that strikes me as pretty good for a first effort, especially as possible combinations rise geometrically with more modules.

No combination is likely to make a perfect match for anyone's well thought out hero. I want to make clear, before people try to judge the idea on those grounds, that it is meant to produce a playable baseline from which people can progress by modification. In my play experience I have found that taking an existing, functional character and changing it is much easier, faster and less scary than starting from scratch. With an empty 3x5 card writers block rears its ugly head.

The more I look at these things, the more I think they're brilliant, actually.

Hey Tony, i was just wondering if you had done anything more with the click and lock stuff. The reason i ask is that i had a guy in the local gaming club express interest in playing Capes. The local group is not really all that experienced with RPGs so i thought that having something to ease character design might allow me to get a short campaign running.

Thomas

Well, actually, I'm at work on a demo package, complete with a set of click-modules, the Drive/Exemplar version of click-and-lock, stripped down rules-explanation and my attempt to actually create a scenario that people can present. The Event structure has made rough scenario-building feasible once more (yay!), without crippling the flexibility of the Editor or ignoring the input of the players.

That's not getting a huge amount of my time today (since I'm prepping for tonights face-to-face) but I'll be back on it during the week. Hopefully I can have a rough out by the start of next week. In the meantime, all I can offer is another set of Click-modules that I wrote up last week and didn't remember to post.

Every time I come back to Capes, it's like x-mas morning.

Holy cow, Tony. Click and lock! Amazing. I love it.

Now kindly sit still while I steal your brain and place it in this convenient jar.

Great!

Erm, where can I find click-and-lock 1?

Go back six posts and you'll find where I posted the link.