Last weekend our friends Lora and Jon came to visit. Jon’s into gaming but wasn’t familiar with any of the indie games that I’m all about these days, so over Indian food I ran down the particulars on Capes, Dogs in the Vineyard, and Donjon. Deirdra jumped in with InSpectres and Primetime Adventures. Jon seemed intrigued by the shared narrative responsibilities and stuff, so I (of course) offered to demo Capes for them.

The next night we sat down to play the quick demo scenario I’ve been using. Lora and Jon picked the two villains I wrote up so Deirdra and I took the heroes. I ran down the basics, and had each player pick one of three prewritten Goals that we’d all fight over, then took my turn first to show them how it’s done. I picked on Lora. The Goal that Lora chose was targetting my character, but more importantly it let me get her involved from the first moment. I knew that she had very little tabletop roleplaying experience, so I wanted to engage her immediately.

I narrated some stuff to set the scene, then launched into a brutal narration of my hero attacking her villain and cutting off her hand. There was some other stuff as well, but that was really my selling point.

Now I’ve run this demo (or ones like it) dozens of times. Somebody’s always getting sliced up. One of the heroes has sword handed down from his ancestors, a sword that was stolen by his clan’s enemies and reclaimed recently, a sword that one of the villains wants to break. You say “sword” that many times and it’s guaranteed that somebody’s getting cut.

I’ve seen legs and arms hacked off. I’ve seen people cleft in twain. Typically it’s no big deal, as most of these characters have accelerated healing factors or regeneration or something like that. Usually somebody gets a limb severed and then on their own turn they just narrate it regrowing. In this case, though, Lora didn’t. She used her character’s superhealing to close the wound, but spent the rest of the fight waving around a nub, which I found fascinating.

In my experience running Capes demos, giving people complete narrative freedom has some pretty predictable results. Some people want to narrate away everything you do. You say “I knock you down and take away the gun.” They say “I get back up and take it back.” “I cut off your hand.” “It grows back.”

Some want to narrate things that you can’t undo. Kids especially will say things like “And then I cut off your arm, um, and then your leg, um, and then your other leg, and then I kill you and throw you into space and you burn up in the sun.” Of course this doesn’t really work in Capes. This tactic is especially amusing/frustrating when combined with the guy who immediately overwrites. “I come flying out of the sun, whole and unharmed.”

On the other hand, some people consider prior narration to be something that should not be negated. They recognize that the best story comes from accepting the contributions of the other players rather than rejecting them. What I find interesting that this attitude comes most naturally from people who have very little or no experience with roleplaying games. It’s the people who have gamed for years who are most likely to try to “win” by riding roughshod over the fiction that’s being created.