I'm planning on introducing Capes to my campus gaming club this Tuesday, and I'd really like it to be a success. In that vein, I decided to go with the Capes Lite beginning scenario. To aid in this goal I put together some High Tech Mooks. After that, I began to realize it might be an idea to have a pool of characters on hand so that people could grab them as they came up with ideas, to avoid getting to bogged down by character generation and to supplement anyone running low on creativity.

Is there any kind of characters that anyone would suggest to have pre-generated for the game? Note that I have no idea what characters anyone will be playing yet.

Any other advice would also be appreciated.

What are you, personally, excited to play in the setting?  If you weren't running things, if you were just a player, what would you dream of doing?

A rookie hero of moderate power, because this is one of the few times I feel like I can actually play this concept and benefit from making mistakes while being able to push to win when it counts. Probably take an older, wiser character as an Exemplar.

Not sure on powers yet, but for now those feel secondary. I'll probably choose those at the session.

BTW, if write down some actual play reports, would you want them here or in the Actual Play section for the Forge?

When we first started playing Capes everyone wanted to be a major character (either hero or villain) so the first thing I'd suggest is having a couple of back up characters ready to go: a hoard of martial arts mooks, a group of killer robots, a couple of boy wonders or Captain Insaniacs Army of Rubber Chickens. Next would come some really typical heroes and villains based off character in movies, if you're trying to start really quickly, like a hero that was bitten by a irradiated bug of some sort, or an angsty loner with really sharp fingernails. Do a couple of the villain side, although starting villains could benefit from being big dumb brutes (Brick Click is good for this).

Tonys answer above hits an important point though, that Capes works best in my experience when everyone buys in, and that's harder to do if you've just picked up a random character.

Thanks for the responses. We got a chance to play yesterday, and some pre-made Ninja mooks worked out pretty well, along with an evil Martial arts master I had generated earlier. I posted the game up in Actual Play under Brawl at the Taffy Factory, though I'm not sure if there is anything useful in it.

Still, I think the game generated enough interest that I'll be able to get them to sit down and try another game, preferably one without random generation and some exemplars. I've already created a sheet or two of characters I plan on introducing when we have time for another round.

I may have to make a few killer robots though, just to be on the safe side.