A couple of weeks ago Deirdra and I drove up to Memphis to visit my parents for my mother’s birthday.  While we were there, we met up with some old friends for some gaming.  I hauled most of my indie games, but we ended up playing The Shadow of Yesterday.  I’d had an idea kicking around in the back of my head for a one-shot for a while, so I was happy to GM.

The setting was a melange of Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell Fairy-tinged England and (obviously) Pirates of the Carribbean, with some strong influence from Farscape, since I’ve been re-watching the whole series.  All but one of the PCs were convicted criminals on a prisoner transport ship being hauled off to an island prison.  The sole standout PC was the ship’s pilot, the only one able to control the living vessel.  We started the game with their escape and overthrow of the ship’s crew and captain.

We had a grizzled terror of a pirate who had got religion in prison and reformed, a gypsy witch imprisoned for striking down a corrupt bishop, a half-breed son of a noble fairy house with a grudge against both his heritages, an ambitious pirate captain who loves long odds, a noble lady-in-waiting framed for the murder of her mistress, and the sea-touched liveship pilot.

They avoided engaging with another ship flying the flag of the Church, navigated to a port on the Barbary Coast to take on supplies and a new crew, tangled with the locals, shipped out and sailed up to the North Sea to raid English shipping lanes, befriended Viking pirates, and eventually faced down a corrupted liveship with a voodoo priestess pilot and a captain driven mad.  It was pretty great.

I should be going back to Memphis in October.  I think next time we’ll probably play some Capes and/or some Primetime Adventures.  I’m really looking forward to it.

Tonight I’ll be running The Shadow of Yesterday for the first time. We’re going to be playing a swashbucklers and pirates kind of game, hopefully running weekly for the next two or three months.

We got together last Wednesday to figure out what system we wanted to use and what sort of game we wanted to play. We set aside Capes, Donjon, Inspectres and Primetime Adventures pretty quickly, settling on the TSOY Swashbucklers idea without any real argument from anybody. We were all excited about it. We went ahead and made up characters then and I’ve been working with players to tweak their concepts and backgrounds over the last week.

I’ve been preparing for the game using some techniques that are very different from the stuff that I usually do. Well, the stuff I usually do is really not very well-defined anyway, and is pretty strongly Illusionist/all-roads-lead-to-Rome anyway, with heavier Force used for one-shots to get them where I want them and less Force needed for ongoing games that have room to spread out. Either, way, though, it wasn’t a lot of fun for me to prepare for a game.

This time, though, I started out by taking all the supporting characters mentioned by the players during character generation and I drew up a conflict web. That was a tremendous help. In figuring out how NPCs knew each other and were connected by lines of power, duty, responsiblity, antagonism, and love, I was able to very rapidly establish a lot of backstory and motivation for each of these characters.

That was the biggest part of my preparation. I tried my hand at flag framing, but building the web was really quite a bit easier for me. I don’t yet have the hang of targetting Flags with situation. Hopefully I’ll get better at that as we go along.

Once the players have been exposed to all this prep I’ve done, I’ll post some pictures of my relationship map and conflict web, and probably notes on what I worked out before the game. I think this may be the first time I’ve prepared for a game in a way that I’m honestly willing to show to people. I’m pleased with what I’ve done, and that at the very least says to me that I’m having fun.

Yesterday while reinstalling Windows on my living-room media PC for the ninety-twelveth time to try to figure out a stupid crash/reboot issue (which I still have not resolved, thanks) I finished up the third Prince of Persia game. The Xbox version, natch.

I loved the first game, Sands of Time. It had a dreamy fairy-tale quality to it that really grabbed me. I liked the characters, the music, the visuals, and the gameplay was fantastic. Some people complained about the simplistic or repetitive fighting, but by the end of it I wasn’t bored with it. There were some frustrating fights, but that was mostly because I hadn’t taken the time to really learn the combat maneuvers very well. The ending was sad, but the way the story was tied together was fantastic.

The sequel, Warrior Within, was a rather different experience. Having read reviews I was prepared, but it was still more than a little obnoxious. The soundtrack was harder and modern, with a rock/metal influence. The storybook feel of the game was gone, replaced by a “dark” motif that did nothing for me. The whole characterization of the Prince was changed from the first game, for the worse.

The gameplay involved a lot of going back and forth over the same terrain, often making it very difficult to figure out where exactly I was supposed to be going. I had to refer to a walkthrough at nearly every stage. I’d rather check gamefaqs for a hint than spend hours figuring out exactly what’s expected of me, but the constant need to flip back and forth was frustrating. The new fighting system was very overwhelming at first, but once I started paying attention and actually trying to use the combos rather than just button-mashing, the pay-off was worth the effort. Fights because a great deal of fun. I liked some of the new special abilities quite a bit, some others not so much. I liked that the save function was changed so that fountains not only restored your health, as in the first game, but were also save points.

The story was convoluted, but pretty decent. There’s a twist about 80% of the way through that I found particularly entertaining. Just when I thought I was done, a whole new aspect of the story opened up. I didn’t bother going for the alternate ending, as I’d missed several of the health upgrades that were necessary and really didn’t want to try to figure out where they were. Aside from the continuance of the storyline and the new fighting system, though, this was mostly a letdown. The bossfights were especially a pain.

The finale, The Two Thrones, was something of an improvement over the second. There was a marked attempt to restore the fairytale feeling, using some of the same techniques. The fighting system from Warrior Within was refined and improved, though many of the special abilities were removed. Or maybe I just missed picking them up. I know I missed at least power upgrade and several health upgrades, possibly more. The story tied the first and second games in very strongly and very well. I was quite pleased with the way that unfolded. The main premise of the game, though, the main character’s switching back and forth with his dark alter-ego, seemed tacked-on and unnecessary. I loved the way it was handled, but it just seemed like it was thrown in. It was mostly unimportant to the plot.

Again, the bossfights were a huge pain. A new feature to the game, the “speed kill” added a strange new facet, though. For normal bad guys, if you sneak up on them you can initiate a speed kill, a cinematic sequence that requires you to hit the Attack button at key moments to complete it. If you miss your timing, the speedkill fails and you get hurt.

For boss monsters, in some cases the speed kill is the only way to kill them. The cinematics trigger automatically and you have to hit that button at exactly the right moments, otherwise you die and have to start over from the last save point. That was a major pain.

Also, the way savegames were handled was really odd. Throughout most of the game, you save at fountains as in Warrior Within. At some points, particularly after long non-standard game sequences (like the chariot-chases through the city) the game just stops and asks if you want to save. Other times, particularly after cinematic sequences, if you die it will start you after the sequence rather then back at the last actual save point. I have to wonder why it bothered with save points at all. Code for auto-save at waypoints was obviously included, so why not just use that for the whole game?

I was also irked by exactly where some of those waypoints were placed. For example, for the last boss the auto-save was just before a long elevator ride. After the elevator, the cinematic for the boss-fight was triggered, then the fight starts. I’m not sure why I had to ride that elevator twenty or thirty times while I tried to kill that boss. Oh, and speaking of cinematics, in Warrior Within there was a nice feature where if you’d viewed a cut-scene once, you could hit a key and it’d rush through it on fast-forward. It was a very cool nod toward the central theme of the game, rewinding time. In Two Thrones, except for the final boss fight, you had to re-watch every cinematic every time you hit it. That’s a huge pain.

Anyway, the ending of Two Thrones was really great. It handled the “dark prince” alter-ego nicely, tied up the time-travel / alternate-past / can’t-change-your-fate / fixing-your-mistakes-just-makes-things-worse themes very well, got rid of a character I never liked, and then to satisfy me even more it completed a circle from the first game.

Last weekend Deirdra and I went up to visit my parents in Memphis (and fix their computers, natch). While we were there, we got to visit some very old friends of mine that I haven’t seen in years. One of them had a birthday and remembering his fondness for comic books, I picked up a copy of Capes from my Friendly Local Game Shop.

While buying it, I was thrilled to discover that a shipment from Indie Press Revolution had just arrived. There were copies of The Mountain Witch and Polaris and Inspectres and Dogs in the Vineyard and a bunch of other games that I’m fairly certain never would have made it to Jackson if I hadn’t been pushing indie games in people’s faces. That really makes me feel good.

So anyway, we roll up to Mempho, fix computers, hang with the parents, and Saturday night we hook up with my old pals Davery, Jaime, and Jeff over at their place. I haven’t seen Davery and Jaime in about four or five years and even longer for Jeff. Another old friend, Aaron, showed up as well. It was a pretty great reunion. We talked comics and movies and television. We talked roleplaying games and video games. I gave Davery his copy of Capes and ran a demo for them and they all seemed pretty excited about the potential. I showed off some of the other stuff I’ve been playing and Primetime Adventures really seemed to grab their interest as well.

On Sunday we again met up with those guys and en masse we drove out to Horn Lake to meet up with some other friends, Jerm and Krissi and their friend Maddie. I’d been trying to introduce the two groups for a while and being able to do so in person was a real treat. We played through a quick hand of Fluxx, a card game that I keep forgetting to pick up, and then I pulled out my Capes demo again to show Jerm and Krissi.

Jerm cooked some burgers and brats on the grill for everybody and we spent the rest of the evening watching Sopranos, talking about games and gaming, and I’d have to say that it was a fine old time.

My one regret is that I didn’t actually get to really play a game with any of these people. Some of my fondest roleplaying memories are with these folks, and I’m really eager to sit down and play some of these cool new games with them. I’m really hoping that I’ll get to go back to Memphis soon and make this happen.

While reading The Forge, I ran across a post from Ron Edwards that managed to neatly summarize one of the main reasons that I started looking for new games to play, new gamers to play with, and eventually just stopped roleplaying entirely. It’s long, so I’ll pick out the most relevant portion:

OK, now I want to talk about this trend (and as you can see, it’s definitely not the only way to play Champs, or even a textually-supported one, but it is very common): very formal rules-specific fight scenes, embedded in totally dialogue-driven, totally GM-verbally-managed interaction and “go here do this” scenes.

Although Ron’s talking about Champions, my big frustration was with D&D. In any case, what he describes is utterly familiar. Fights were conducted like a tactical miniatures wargame. Everything outside of fighting was “just roleplay it” and the GM ultimately decides what happens. It was understood (though never spoken aloud) that you were never to try to diverge from the GM’s plan.

I want to emphasize that I was a master of such GMing. The players could say “we do X” and “we do Y,” and wouldn’t you know it, because I could frame the scenes and because I could run the NPCs as reacting how I wanted, the scenes would proceed one by one … and we’d always end up at the set-pieces that I had planned.

When I was running Feng Shui, I quickly learned how to do this. My preparation method for a session pretty much required it. Games were built around three or four set-piece fights, so it was absolutely mandatory that players move from A to B to C to D. I didn’t realize that by setting things up this way I was removing any opportunity for the players to make meaningful choices about the events occurring in the game. I was under the impression that what I was doing was “how it should be done.”

And you know what? It didn’t matter either what happened in each fight. Maybe they’ll beat on someone, maybe they’ll get beaten on. Champs is wonderfully predictable for combat, as combat mainly involves grinding down opponents’ considerable resources. And here’s the dirty secret of such GMing … if the heroes do manage to pull off a cool combination and knock out someone important, you can always transfer the “important stuff” (the secret of the master plan, etc) to someone else who got away.

So the fights become set-pieces which are just plain fun to run when everyone knows the rules, and players can work out little grudges against this-or-that villain, and buildings can get blown up. But the story or sequence the GM is working through can proceed as planned, pretty much no matter what. With a GM this experienced, he will never have to worry about stomping the characters into the dirt, except when he wants to, or about them totally stifling the Master Plan too early. You guys get to play your characters, he gets to write/present his story, you get to appreciate the story, and … and, that’s it.

This was the feeling that led me to write reams of forum posts about how I never wanted to play fantasy games again because I was tired of them. I’m just now getting to the point where I can stand to consider playing a fantasy game, as long as it’s miles and miles away from D&D or anything else remotely traditional.

What I didn’t realize was that I wasn’t tired of fantasy, or even tired of D&D, really. I was tired of being railroaded and tired of the thin illusion of control. I was tired of watching while the GM’s story plays out in front of me while I have no real impact on what happens. Tired of a situation that I can’t really win or lose because the outcome is already written up in the GM’s notes.

Two things are crucial to preserving this sort of play, over time, which I used to do and which you guys are obviously doing as well.

1. Out-of-combat, interactive skill use is flat out. The GM uses these features on your sheets as fiat methods, period, and if they can’t work because it doesn’t suit his plans, he ignores them. Your character is smart? Oh – well, not that smart. The master illusionist is just smarter, OK?

This is crucial because this approach to play requires managing those out-of-combat scene framing events, managing the necessary interactions (“they’ve gotta really hate this guy”), and managing the information flow from scene to scene. All this must be under one man’s helm, or all will become chaos.

2. In-character dialogue, “if you say it he said it,” and character-only knowledge are also crucial, not because of any aesthetic values they have (the usual justification), but because they fiercely limit your (the real person’s) ability to influence these scenes either. “Wait, doesn’t that mean Bat-Shriek is really Killjoy’s brother?” “Hey! You’re not there!” The flow of information, revelation, insight, and judgment is under that helm too. You guys, you’re there to appreciate the SIS through the GM, and such interjections smack too much direct contact with it, and contact with each other about it.

These techniques were not only common, they were considered to be the correct and proper way to play. Suggesting anything outside these practices was written off as “rollplaying, not roleplaying” or “metagaming” or some other similar dismissal.

All right, I’m not really trying to bust on your GMs. I do understand the kind of play that’s going on … but long experience leads me to think that you, right this minute, are at the cusp of realizing that somehow … everything seems to be becoming …repetitive. Are you really having a blast with each spotlight? You qualified it, when you said so. Is warping the very fabric of space and time actually as fun as stopping a bank robbery was, back when your character had only 272 points? I mean, you guys are turning to alternate futures and pasts … what next? When do the situations collapse under their own escalating weight?

This sums it all up. Repetitive was my watchword. Every game felt like every other game. I no longer had fun even when the spotlight was shining (on me or on us as a group) because I felt like though the dialog wasn’t scripted, everything else was. All roads lead to Rome. The only part where I really felt free to do something interesting was during combat, which grew more and more cumbersome as we increased in levels and added on more modifiers and equipment and conflicting spells and abilities.

At the time I didn’t quite know what the problem was, I just knew I was getting bored and tired and unsatisfied.

With the help of guys like Ron over at The Forge, I understand now what was making me so unsatisfied and what it was that I wanted instead. I know how to get it. Right now my biggest limiter is trying to find the time for a regular game.

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.

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.

I’ve been trying to get a Capes game going for more than two weeks now and without fail, every single time I’ve made plans, the other players bail on me. I don’t think I’m going to get to play at all until I run demos at the local game shop on Feb 18th, and even then that won’t really be playing, just showing off the system.

Despite having so much trouble finding people who’ll actually play these newfangled hippie rpgs with me, I’m convinced that there’s no turning back. To this end, I’m getting rid of all my old gaming crap. Yesterday I started pulling books off shelves and taking inventory. If I can’t sell it, I’m giving it away. If nobody will take it, I’ll donate it to Goodwill or something. I dunno. By the end of February, these books will be out of my house:

AD&D2 Dark Sun Revised & Expanded Box Set (Including Dune Trader)
AD&D2 Ivory Triangle Box Set for Dark Sun
AD&D2 The Complete Thieves Handbook

Dungeons & Dragons 3E Player’s Handbook
Dungeons & Dragons 3E Dungeon Master’s Guide

Fantasy Flight Games Traps & Treachery
Dragonstar Starfarer’s Handbook
Dragonstar Guide to the Galaxy
Call of Cthulhu d20

Alternity Player’s Handbook
Alternity Gamemaster’s Guide
Alternity Beyond Science: A Guide to FX
Alternity Starships
Alternity StarDrive Arms & Equipment Guide
Dark*Matter Sourcebook

Vampire: The Masquerade 2nd Edition
Vampire: The Masquerade Players Guide 2nd Edition
Mind’s Eye Theater The Masquerade 2nd Edition
Mind’s Eye Theater Antagonists
Mind’s Eye Theater Laws of the Night
Mind’s Eye Theater Laws of Elysium
Clanbook Ventrue
Prince’s Primer

Shadowrun 3rd Edition
Seattle Sourcebook

Cyberpunk 2020
Cyberpunk Eurotour
Rifts Japan
Delta Green
GURPS Space
Vampire Hunters
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
West End Games’ The World of Necroscope Box Set
Shades of Nightfall

Some of these I don’t remember buying. Some of the things I know I bought seem to have disappeared. That doesn’t really matter, though, because I’m ditching everything I own except for Feng Shui. That one gets to stay on the shelf. Oh, and the new stuff, of course. Primetime Adventures, Dogs in the Vineyard, and Capes. All that other crap? I’m done with it.

So after buying the Capes book (and pdf), I read through it exhaustively and then posted to the Jackson-Area Gamers mailing list saying that I’d like to hook up with some folks and play some Capes on Saturday afternoon at a Friendly Local Game Store. Three folks replied with interest and gaming ensued.

Dragon’s Lair is primarily a cards and collectibles shop, with tons of the usual knickknacks: pewter and crystal dragons, t-shirts, gag gifts, stuff like that. There was a very small selection of AD&D and D&D 3e books, some Xbox games, some used game consoles and games, and a wide variety of collectible card games. Snacks and cold sodas were also available, and it’s only block away from a Little Caesar’s Pizza.

In the back were about half a dozen tables for gaming, with two televisions and Xboxes set up for head-to-head play. While we were gettting started, a four-man Halo deathmatch was going pretty furiously and the whole time we played Capes there were a ton of folks playing Pokemon, Magic, and stuff like that. Aside from our Capes stuff, another JAG member involved in a miniatures strategy game, and the Xbox guys, I think all the other gaming going on was CCG. I’m not completely sure, though, because I was focused pretty strongly on our game. Anyway, it was a very welcoming atmosphere for gaming. The owner, Brian Brock, was really nice to us and seemed genuinely glad we came in to hang out and game.

Everybody seemed to really dig Capes. My only regret is that I didn’t get to show off the game to some of the *many* other people who expressed interest in what we were playing. At least half a dozen people came over to the table now and then to see what was going on. Half of those even asked if they could play in the next round. Unfortunately, we spent longer than I’d anticipated on the first scene and I had to leave rather than play another.

I talked with Mr. Brock about coming in again on a Saturday to demo the game for more folks. This time I’d be doing ten-minute “this is what the absolute core of the game feels like” demos rather than the much longer “learn to play by generating characters and playing a whole scene using the Capes Lite ruleset” that I did last time. He’s looking into getting some Capes books to sell to anybody who’s interested, and seems really excited about expanding his store into the rpg side of gaming, as well as trying out Capes himself. Right now I’m thinking at February 18th, starting around 2pm.

Saturday night we had a couple of friends over for dinner and afterwards the four of us sat down to try out the free version of Capes available from the Muse of Fire Games website. We had a few difficulties because the free ruleset has some vagueness about exactly when certain things can be done, but despite those problems we all had a blast.

Capes is a comicbook supers roleplaying game with a structure that’s significantly different from a traditional rpg. First and foremost, there’s no GM and it uses a turn structure that’s similar to a card or board game. Honestly, the mechanics are all strongly reminiscent of games that nobody would consider an rpg at all, and so going into it I was concerned that this would seriously diminish the roleplaying aspects of the game. As it turned out, that wasn’t the case at all.

I’d have to say that Capes Lite was hands-down the best experience I’ve ever had with a supers game. Character generation is fast and easy, allowing for players to jump into the game with both feet and
start playing with no preparation at all. One of our players had never played a roleplaying game of *any* kind before and even she had no trouble grasping the rules and playing just as strongly as everyone else.

After playing the Lite version, I went ahead and bought the book (and got the pdf version for free). I’m really looking forward to playing this again.