Hello there,

I'd like you to post the Comics Code you use in your Capes games, and to comment on it. What have gone wrong, what have proven to be super fun, what have no impact ?

If you have used several Comics Code, it's okay, post them all.

I'll begin by writing the one we have in our long term Capes game, set in a government conspiracy setting, where official cells use powered people to fight other countries' agencies.
- Protagonists cannot die unless everyone agree that they have developed all their personal stakes
- The masses cannot become aware of the existence of powered people

The first one was our invention, because we discover that even super-heroes or super-villains need to die to make a good story, sometimes, but not when some players still have something to say through them. So it need the approval of everybody to make such a character die.
We handle this by putting a mark of "protagonism" on the character sheet. Anyone can write it or delete it when he wants (between scenes) and the one who wants to write one has precedence over one who wants to delete it. So it's not deleted until everyone want this.

The second one was required to make the game more White-Wolfian, with secret agencies, dark conspiracies and covert operations.

Out of interest:  Does your group respond to your comics code by avoiding it, or by using it to Gloat a lot?  I've seen people go both ways.

Personally, I think I'd like a game where both of those goals got gloated on a lot:  Heroes are constantly in danger of dying, and the conspiracy is constantly on the edge of unravelling, but somehow it always works out at the end that the characters survive and the public continues in ignorance.

In fact, it's neither, and it's both. :-)
In fact, we are often exploring situations where protagonists get in danger of dying, and one character had the motivation of revealing everything to the world. But we never put Conflicts driving specifically to such extremities, it was just the flow of the game. And because it's in the Comics Code, nobody break it when free narrating or making a character act.

When we played on the Conflict "Event : The Duke is up to close down the Sensory Isolation Tank onto Zimmermann who he forced in", we describe another character, The Hydra, that was pursuing Zimmermann and trying to kill him, and it appeared that the Duke put Zimmermann in the Tank to protect him. Zimmermann were several times endangered by The Hydra, but he always find a way out, thanks to the Comics Code.

When we played on the Conflict "Goal : The Duke try to prevent Das Agentzia, his employer, to learn about the Prophecy", we described Ludwig trying to reveal the Prophecy and the existence of powered people to the whole world, and he was pretty much close to succeed, but there were always a complication, thanks to the Comics Code.

All that were very similar to Gloating, but outside the mechanical rules.

In our group, we see the Conflicts as points of interest, or zooms into the fiction, to show to the other players what you want to explore, and try to make them develop this with you. And we never wanted to discuss the death or life of Zimmermann, it was pretty clear that his time was not finished in the story. Similarly, what we wanted to discuss with the second one was wether The Duke would succeed at betraying his employer, not if Ludwig would succeed at revealing the truth to humanity, it was pretty clear that he would fail.
But nothing prevent that one day, revealing the truth might become central, or that the life of a character might become in central danger. At this time, Conflicts would certainly lead us to Gloating.