I'm planning to run a Capes game at a roleplaying society event in a couple of weeks.  However, it'll have to stick closely to a four-hour slot, and I can expect three to five other players, none of whom are likely to have heard of the game, let alone played it.  And while I've read up on the book and the support material, I've never played either.  So here are some house rules I'm considering, to make the game easier to learn and play.  I figured it was worth getting comments from those more experienced with Capes.

1. I'll be creating a couple of dozen pregenerated characters before the game starts.  Obviously, more can be added on the fly if needed.

2. Everyone will get a spotlight character, either a superhero or a supervillain, who only they can play.

3. All supers use the undifferentiated debt rules - one pile of debt, maximum stake of three, five gets you overdrawn.

4. No Exemplars.

5. No non-person characters.

6. A conflict cannot be split into more than two sides.

7a. Story tokens cannot be spent for extra characters.
or
7b. Story tokens can be spent for extra characters, but you still get one action per player, not per character.

Thoughts?  6 and 7 are the ones I'm least sure of.  Is anything likely to break horribly?

These don't break anything.  They only limit.  You can have a perfectly fine game under these house rules.

I think the thing I personally would miss the most would be the lack of drives and exemplars.  The relationship web is what really makes the game shine in my opinion.  But if your purpose is to demo the conflcit mechanics, that seems reasonable.

Oh, I'll still be bearing the drives in mind when creating characters, and they'll still have relationships that bring these issues to the fore.  They just won't have mechanical effects, and I won't use the game terms.

Well, the game is today.  In a couple of hours, in fact.  Wish me luck, and I'll report back later.

Mission successful!

We only got through two scenes, but then we only had a few hours including explanation time.  But we managed some nice straightforward superheroism, with NextGen members foiling a museum robbery (easily) and an attempted kidnapping (barely).  Everyone seemed to have fun once they got into it, including a couple of players who really aren't into non-trad games.