The Forge Archives

The Big Playtest of Capes finished up last night.  Wacky, wacky stuff.

I had originally had ambitions to do a "villain of the week" each week, starting with an attack by the Red Queen on week one.  We never got past her.  Turns out she was married to the retired-crimefighter Chessmaster, mentor of one of the heroes, and therefore we got into a  tangled interpersonal mess, which made it clear that she was in fact the creator of one of the heroes ("mommy!")  We ended up on a first-name basis with her... at least all the players were calling her "Clarissa" by the end, rather than her pseudonym.  

And then the wheel-chair-bound Chessmaster had to go talk to our reluctant religious prophet hero, who could (it is said) make the blind to walk and the lame to see... or something like that anyway.  But Chessmaster is so obnoxious that his demands just fuelled her toward control of her own destiny by asserting that she could choose not to heal him.  

Then two heroes got dragged in on the villainous side, when the young street-kid they had befriended (and who was explicitly "doing things that are illegal", but nobody cared) turned out to be affiliated with Clarissa, planning a jail-break and in need of superpowered help.  But the young werewolf activist finally realized that rebelling against The Man was not enough to justify releasing criminals who had no concern for the common people, and so changed back to the side of justice.  The alienated, mute young mistress of magnetism had grown to trust and like the werewolf, and so was willing to follow his lead, where before she'd been a complete loner.

So those two ended up betraying the kid they were trying to help, and he ended up in prison.  A duplicate of the synthesized hero (created by Clarissa to be more easily controlled) ended up taking his "No Free Will" problem to its ultimate extent, ordered by the escaping supervillainess to detonate in a nuclear explosion to cover her escape.  Atomaton (the de facto brother of the "victim-bomb" as they started calling the detonating minion) weighed his respect for life against his desire to help his brother and ended up throwing his weight behind the effort to get the exploding villain into the upper atmosphere where he could detonate without destroying the city.  For all intents and purposes the minion died in his brothers arms... luckily his brother is ridiculously well armored.

At the very end, Chessmaster tried to form them into a team, which they agreed with, and tried to lead them, which they threw back in his face.  Atomaton, the hero who owed Chessmaster... well, almost everything... ended up being the one to deliver the final blow, gently explaining that they all respected his skills but that they had to make their own way.  That stung, in a way everyone really enjoyed, especially me as I got to play his reaction.

By the end we'd spent all four sessions on Clarissa, Chessmaster, their tangled, dysfunctional relationship (as played out and accentuated by players controlling those characters... I practically never got to play them), and the resulting chaos in the lives of everyone they touched.

I loved running it, and people seemed to enjoy playing it.  I thought we were going to need more than that handful of characters, but the power of well-established relationship networks (and the ability to deepen them) makes for all sorts of intriguing complications once events actually start occurring.

I did manage a little bit of my own story contribution (an area I still need work on):  The doomed angst of the two supervillain-minions (one imprisoned, one destroyed) was pretty much (though not entirely) my idea.  The Event structure makes it almost criminally easy to say "This is an element I'd like to add to the story, so let's do it".  Folks who have played with me for a while seemed surprised that I had obviously prepared ideas on how things might turn out, but I don't think they were displeased... it's just not the kind of thing they're used to seeing me do.


Now rules jargon, for those following the Design Effort:

The rules we hit by the end seemed solid.  Story Tokens and Debt flow in the amounts and directions I'd like them to.  Victory prepares you for defeat, and vice versa.

A few rules never got explicitly used.  Recurring Events would have needed to be prepped in char-gen, so I couldn't test them as such (though we did have a few Events that kept occurring with the same players interested... notably "Revelation" for the truth-seeking Atomaton and "Bonegrinder decides the One True Moral Path" for our activist werewolf).  So I think that works out if made more explicit.

I never got to Gloat, because any time I got even remotely near doing so the players achieved laser focus and slapped me silly on the Event (often losing other critical, but not gloat-worthy, Events to do so).  For instance, it probably would have taken me four or five story tokens to get "Iron Minion Explodes" to villain-control in order to Gloat on it.  But because they were ramping that Event up so much I got to walk away with "Red Queen Escapes", practically without effort.  My intuition, from that, is that the rule fits in the right place, and that its place is often indirect, creating behaviors by the threat of Gloating rather than its application.

This was our second session playing with explicit Events, and the first one where we had a major-league direct combat.  Events alone confused the heck out of people in this.  We wanted to be able to say "The Red Queen wants to get her armor from the prison armory", but we couldn't imagine what contestable Event that was.  There wasn't room to elegantly say "This is what will happen at the moment that we know whether she has or has not succeeded at that goal".  That will be addressed in the Polishing thread.

I tested the removal of Prominence and its replacement by a system where any character in the scene gets one action per turn, and extra actions cost a Story Token each.  Everybody thought it worked more smoothly, and I observed that turns went much faster, with less instances (predictably enough) of people saying "Oh, it's my turn, but I have no idea what to do..."  There is, however, some mutual fiat involved in when the Editor or a Player decides not to spend another Story Token trying to contest an Event further.  There were situations where I clearly could have won something, but at a cost that would have made the victory pyrrhic... still, the idea that I could have won it and didn't felt strange.  Not unpleasant, just takes some getting used to.

I also tested adding a cost for players (or the Editor) to add a new Event:  Specifically, it is one of the things you can do with your action.

This is almost like the recommendation we had doing the rounds about charging a Story Token for introducing an Event (since you can get an action for an ST).  But it is ameliorated in non-combat scenes by the fact that you get a free action each page.  In our jail-break players were very hesitant to add new Events, since it meant forgoing an action on the very critical, tightly contested Combat events.  In our meeting after the jailbreak the entire first page was dedicated to the Editor and players using their free actions to add a huge flurry of five Events, four of which resolved in the second Page.  That's pretty much the sort of action I think is appropriate for each type of scene, so that works for me.

After the prison-break I was hurting for Story Tokens, bad.  I had about four, and the players (combined) had something like twelve.  Then I noticed how much Debt they had accumulated.  So I tossed them into a non-combat situation, largely against non-powered opponents.  They dumped Debt wildly, winning five Events very quickly.  Since I was the only one opposing them, all that Debt got paid to me as Story Tokens.  I ended the game with fourteen (14!) STs to their summed six.  I said "You know a stack this big would mean that next session starts off with a single massive, unstoppable villain slapping you all silly", to which everyone nodded agreement.  An interesting end, rules-wise.  Taught me something about non-powered mooks (i.e. they are there to help convert player Debt into Editor Story Tokens by letting the heroes beat on them mercilessly).

I was the "alienated, mute mistress of magnetism" (I'm also male; I posted my reasons for cross-gender play overe here if you're desperately curious). I enjoyed myself thoroughly. Some non-system thoughts -- saving system ones for the Design threads:

I'm very glad Tony as GM and Capes as a system were responsive enough to player interest to abandon "villain of the week" (which has never done it for me) in favor of what was essentially a triangular soap opera -- Clarissa "the Red Queen" vs. her ex-husband Brent Bishop "the Chessmaster" with the player heroes in the middle, trying to protect the city without being made mere chess pieces of the city's self-appointed protector (Bishop). One of my favorite scenes was when Bishop tried to bully "Saint Jane" into using her healing powers to help him, revealing his domineering dark side, and got thoroughly slapped down without a single punch thrown or laser blasted.

I frankly would have enjoyed even more "B-plot" stuff. We didn't get around to making much of our Exemplars (NPC connections of emotional signifcance) for lack of time. And rather than the last big fight's climax being the "time bomb" problem, I'd have preferred it be a confrontation between Clarissa and Brent with the heroes having to choose to join Brent or form their own side to slap both feuding ex-spouses down -- and if I'd really understood the power to create Events I had as a player, I'd have thrown that in there.

Another aspect of the system that I really enjoyed was that it allowed me to put something about my character at stake and then leave it entirely up to the other players to decide it. In the most extreme example of this, the skatepunk werewolf was trying to talk my character into helping him with dangerous illegal rebelliousness, the saintly lawyer (contradiction in terms?) was trying to talk her out of it -- and I deliberately did nothing the entire scene except describe her reactions as first one and then the other gained the upper hand. In fact my character wasn't even in the scene, in games-mechanics terms -- she was just the battleground, by my deliberate choice. I've occasionally experimented with not being entirely in control of my characters, e.g. "do I act like a big jerk as usual or hold my tongue for once? Oh, I'll roll Charisma"; but usually systems don't accomodate this well and other players look upon it as poor roleplay. I really enjoyed being able to do this.