Saturday night I finally got to play some Capes. In addition to myself, we were maxed out with four other players: Jake and Joseph, who have each played a couple of times before, Margaret, who’s played once but has had no other prior experience with roleplaying games, and Rob, who was new to Capes.

In preparation for the game I’d printed out the Click and Locks on heavy cardstock and slicked them up with some self-stick laminating sheets. BTW, I recommend OfficeMax over Office Depot. Cutting out the pieces was a pain and I’m not even completely done trimming them, but the result was worth it. I like having semi-permanent modules to play with so that I don’t have to worry about printing up fresh modules every time I play. Of course I could just have people write down their stuff on a sheet of paper like every other roleplaying game on the planet. Even if we did that, a Capes character is still less writing than most of the rpgs out there. I’d rather have the clicks, though. They’re fun!

The first thing I did was to have Rob and Joseph (who volunteered since we didn’t have another person with no Capes experience) play my minidemo so that I could see if it really ran as short as I hoped and what sort of stuff I could expect. It clocked in at about twenty-four minutes rather than the fifteen I was hoping for, but we did have some distractions and I did go into some details that I’ll be leaving out in real demo practice. I was also preparing Rob to play in an actual game, so I covered some stuff that wouldn’t necessarily be needed in a real minidemo.

I was really satisfied. The characters and goals I’d written up went over well, I figured out a couple of tricks to get people invested as early as possible, and play went quite fast. One BIG thing I neglected to do was to point out that though I was running the demo, I wasn’t acting as a GM. I just happened to go first because I could show (not tell) how it was supposed to work.

Once that was done, we moved on to the actual game. Jake and I had prepped characters beforehand, so we helped Rob click and lock one for himself while Marg and Joseph put theirs together. I think Margaret had some trouble coming up with a character concept she was happy with due to her lack of experience with roleplaying games in general and in retrospect I think that the rest of us kinda dropped the ball on helping her prepare for that aspect of play. Happily, the next day she and Jake put together another character for her so that when we play again she’ll have something that she’s had time to think about, something she likes and is interested in playing.

The actual play experience was tons of fun, though a little rough. Everything I’ve heard from the Capes forums indicates that this is very common in a group of people who are new to the game. The lack of a GM to focus everyone in a particular direction combines with the power to freely narrate in any direction and is amplified by an unfamiliarity with the mechanical aspects of the system and a general unfamiliarity with the concepts of the game. The result is that there’s an interval where things are kinda wacky and fractured while everyone is learning not just how the system works but also how to work the system. When you’re familiar with the game, you can start to really get down to business. Oh, and I’m told that it’s always better when people have accrued some resources in the form of Story Tokens and Inspirations and Debt. At that point everybody has the narrative power to really throw their weight into the things that interest them. That’s when it gets really fun.

We ended up dragging out the first scene really long and so nobody felt up to playing a second one, which I thought was really a shame. Our first scene was a fairly typical fight-in-a-city except for some interesting social stuff that Marg introduced and I was going to ask for the next scene to be set at the party that she had her character mention. I think it would have been pretty cool. Hopefully we’ll be able to get several folks from this group together again and start a semi-regular game. It’d be awesome to have a casual sort of environment where a player can miss a session without the rest of the group having to skip the game.

Next Saturday I’m running my minidemos at Dragon’s Lair in Pearl. Hopefully I’ll have plenty of interested people.