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The writing is good and inspiring, but the way the rules are structured and broken up makes for a very bumpy ride. Text boxes constantly break the flow, and every time a key term is mentioned, a bullet shows the page number where that term was first defined. That makes sentences like "Literally, since he gets back twice the Debt Tokens (32) if the Conflict (26) is Resolved (30) against him" hard to read.
Play goes like this:
Players take turn starting scenes. In each scene, they may choose among all available characters - so if you played Captain Shazam in the previous scene, someone else may be playing him now.
Each scene is divided into pages. Each page, players can claim sides in existing conflicts or create new ones. Their characters get to act, influencing their side of the conflict; and at the end of the page, some of the conflicts get resolved.
This is just the basic flow. However, there’s a lot of cool interacting stuff in the rules.
When your character uses powers, he can get Debt Tokens on some of his personal Drives. Later, you can stake those tokens on conflicts that are connected to those drives. If you lose the conflict, you get back double your debt - and if you win it, you give the debt away as story tokens to the losers. So you can get rid of your debt by winning conflicts the character cares about - but it’s a risk, because if he loses those conflicts, he’s in double trouble.
There’s a lot of opportunities for tactical play. In fact, there’s a separate chapter on strategy tips, with focus both on using the rules efficiently, but also on the psychology of the game. Want those story tokens that give you more control over the game? Start conflicts that other players care strongly about, so they stake a lot of debt on’em - then lose those conflicts, so you get their debt as story tokens!
Capes has a lot of nifty design. One of my favorite things is the click-and-lock system, which lets you create characters by selecting two pre-defined sets of traits and fitting them together. It’s extremely simple, and gives you a lot of possible permutations and opportunities for customization.
Now, here’s the thing. I just don’t get Capes. I’ve tried playing it with a group of friends, and we just ended up confused. Not because of the rules, but because I didn’t get how they made for fun role-playing. I feel like there’s some sort of assumption, some kind of play philosophy that I just don’t share. We didn’t make a cool story, and we didn’t understand why. We followed the rules, dammit!
I believe this is because, while we’re used to tactical games, we’re not used to this kind of tactical thinking. Sure, we all know how to tweak a point system to make effective characters, and we know how to outwit eachother in Diplomacy, but we’re definitely not used to using tactics to influence and control the flow of a story. It’s a weird experience, and it is very much what the rules are about.
In Universalis, the mechanics for story control are fairly straightforward and transparent - once you’ve learned them, you know how to take control if you really want to. In Capes, however, you need to grok the rules on a much deeper level. You have to play it several times to understand how it works, because it’s just such a different way of thinking from most games. It’s as if you’re used to being a vassal in a feudal state, and then suddenly you have to run for president in a f*ed up democracy: All of a sudden, the focus isn’t just on running stuff smoothly on your little piece of land - you have to learn a whole new set of political rules to determine who actually gets to run things at what precise time, you have to fight off the bastards who want to run the stuff you want to run, and you have to do it both by sly and efficient use of the rules and by understanding your competition better than they understand themselves.
Now, this isn’t my kind of game right now. It requires too much rules control and, especially, too much thinking at different levels for my kind of play. I want to be able to focus on the story - situation, setting, characters - and not have to be offensive and defensive in my use of the system. I understand friendly competition, but I really don’t like it in role-playing games. I’m like, “why can’t we just agree who controls what, and then get on with the role-playing?”
It’s quite possible that I need to play it more to really get what the fun is all about in Capes. Right now, however, I don’t get it. The rules are, in a way, really great - they do what the designer wants them to do, and do so elegantly and smoothly. However, I don’t like what they do.
