[Role-Playing Games] Chargen From the Vaults - Sorcerer and Capes (Part II)

Part I of this article went up 20 minutes ago.

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Capes

(Yes, that is the literal interior illustration on the PDF cover of Capes.)

Setting Up the Environment

Rolling all the way back eight days ago, I had quite a bit of discussion about GM-less gaming and the systems that I think pioneered the way or best exemplified that style of play. There was quite a bit of discussion and a good chunk of solid conversation as a result of it (even if, as one re-steamer put it, "it was woefully under-rewarded").

Today I'd like to revisit Capes, the game that I talked about which has a very different kind of character generation system than you might be used to. Lucky for us, one of the online tools provided in the Downloads section of the old website is a shockwave flash character builder.

I mentioned that one of the simplest character generation processes involved taking two of the templates, snapping them together, crossing out a couple of lines, and away you went.

Let's try that. I've pulled up the character creator and we'll make at least one character one step at a time.

Character Generation

Welcome to one of the most interesting online character creation systems it's ever been my pleasure to share with people.

Luckily for us, this will not be complicated. If anything, the online system errs on the side of too little description and discussion. A case could be made that the actual book does likewise for a lot of gameplay.

Unlike previous character generation posts, this one for Capes will be relatively light on the mechanics. I'm going to save that for a future post if there's interest where I walk through, step-by-step, how gameplay actually occurs. (There is actually one of the best examples of step-by-step gameplay in this book and it's one of the write ups that I consistently return to when I want inspiration or motivation to write a good step-by-step anything. Never pass up the value of a good example.)

What about that blank sheet?

That is particularly blank.

What we have here is a blank sheet for a superhero at the top and for a super villain at the bottom. Each sheet is broken into two parts, the circles define the character's Drives and the slots below hold the character's Abilities.

Amusingly, Abilities and Drives are generated in the opposite order then they are listed on the sheet. There is actually a good reason for that, because the character sheet is intended to physically be present on the table and to have poker chips or markers placed on the Drives to represent when they've been powered up.

It's much better to not have to reach across poker chips to mark things available or not on your character sheet. Especially if they have dice on top of them.

The Deets on the Sheets

We aren't going to have a great time filling out a character sheet until we shakedown a few facts about what the things on it actually mean. It's certainly not the biggest or most intimidating sheet that I've ever faced (for that you need Aria: Canticle of the Monomyth), but filling in some of the blanks will be made a lot easier if we fill in some of the blanks.

Abilities

Abilities are the things that the character can be or do that will have an impact on Conflicts, and by extension on the world. They come in four flavors (though any particular character will have only three of them): Powers, Skills, Styles and Attitudes.

Powers and Skills are things the character can do, like fly, or shoot a gun, or integrate mathematical functions. A superpowered character will have only Powers, not Skills. A normal character will have only Skills, not Powers.

Attitudes are ways the character feels, like happy, or sad, or scornful. All character will have Attitudes.

Styles are the particular ways that a character often uses their other Abilities. So they might have "Fly" as a Power, and "High speed aerial maneuvers" as a Style. Or they might have "Confident" as an Atttiude and "Screw the rules" as a Style. All characters will have Styles.

Powers are super-powered. Skills and Attitudes are mundane. Styles may be either, as the player chooses when they create the character.

At first glance that seems unreasonably complex. If you're suddenly scratching your head and giving me a dirty look, I certainly wouldn't blame you.

Look back at the character sheet. Let's break it down the easy way.

As I've already mentioned, Abilities are all the things with a little question mark next to them. That's everything on the bottom half of the sheet.

Powers and Skills go in that first column. Superheroes have Powers and mundanes have Skills, and the only real difference is that superheroes can use their Powers more than once by powering a Drive and mundanes can only use a Skill once per scene.

Attitudes go in the right-hand column and they are pretty much exactly what they sound like: emotional traits and qualities which can be called on during a scene for narrative authority. Like Skills, Attitudes can only be activated once per scene.

In the middle are Styles. I particularly like the example that the text gives about combining the Attitude "Confident" alongside the Style "Screw the Rules." Something about that just makes me happy.

Drives

Drives are not codes of conduct. Two characters with high values in the same Drive are, in fact, more likely to argue about it than to agree. Drives are parts of the moral universe that the character thinks seriously about. They are questions, not answers.

An anarchist, who has strong opinions about the role of law and order in society, is just as much invested in the Justice Drive as a by-the-book stickler for the rules. What the Drive means to a
character is something that players will have to invent and, often, discover through play.

Drives should have a constant presence in the life of the character. The best way to assure this is by assigning the Drive an Exemplar. An Exemplar is another character whose relationship with the first embodies their issues with the Drive.

The Drives for both superheroes and villains are what allow them to activate their Powers. Philosophically they are the core issues which concern the character in the context of the setting. Unmentioned in the text here but definitely possible is a character which possesses Drives from both the superhero and super villain sides of things, creating a character with a particular set of moral quandaries (or which escaped the 90s relatively intact).

For the purposes of character generation, the only additional thing you need to know is that Drives are numbered one through five and must total to nine.

(You can have characters which are both superpowered and the lack the particular set of Drives, and their essentially assumed to have a single Drive which doesn't really have a name and a maximum Debt of five. This is an important to us right now, but it is one more flexibility in the rules.)

Exemplars are outside the scope of what will be dealing with, but the very short version is that they are characters who represent that Drive in the world of the setting. The Hulk might have Betty Ross as his Hope exemplar. When she's in a scene, one way or another the Hulk's relationship to Hope is going to be on the table.

That's for another day.

Click and Lock

The particular method that we're going to use to create a character for Capes is called "Click and Lock," for soon to be very obvious reasons.

Character fragments are presented as Power (or Skill) Sets and Personae. Power Sets include a list of Powers and some Styles. Personae include a list of Attitudes, and some more Styles. To make a character with these, you do the following:

• Choose a Power (or Skill) Set.
• Choose a Persona.
• Combine the Styles of the two parts into a single list.
• The character now has five Powers, five Attitudes and five Styles. Cross out the three you like least (but not all from one column).
• Number each category from one up, depending on how you value the abilities. Note that low-level abilities will be used most often for raising your own dice in the early stages of a Conflict. High-level abilities will often be used later, or defensively, reacting to a good roll of your opponent.

Building a character in this way is called the Click and Lock method. Once you have that base character you are (as always) free to change any of the Abilities as much as you want. The Click and Lock method is not a rule, as such. It is a mental tool to help players get past the writer's block associated with the Freeform method. So remember that the Power Sets and Personae are just starting points, meant to inspire your creativity.

This is pretty straightforward as character generation goes. As always, let's go one step at a time.

Choose a Power Set

Let's take a look at the list.

It looks fairly short, but with the ability to change any of the Abilities that you want to, inspired by what's there now, it's actually a surprisingly flexible means of characterization.

I've been watching a lot of The Flash lately so let's put together a Speedster.

Will go ahead and select that particular Power Set and suddenly…

Look at that. We've populated half of our Abilities at a go.

All of the Powers seem to be appropriate for a speedster, so we have that going for us. The Styles in the middle really go toward defining how we use our powers rather than what those powers are. All kinds of things should be coming to mind just looking at this sheet already.

Choose a Persona

The Persona is the pulldown section on the right of the character sheet. These are the attitudes and mental state that are character expresses most of the time.

Let's take a look at those choices.

If some of these choices seem a little odd, keep in mind that this is a system designed to generate both heroes and villains – but it wouldn't be the first time that a superhero was a psychotic loner (Wolverine, anyone?) or a super villain was an ex-victim.

The traditional speedster personality profile is "hotshot," but I want something a little more interesting. How about an older, bitter, cynical superhero who has been there, done that, and has the battle scars to show it? Let's go with Older but Wiser.

Now we have a very different mix of personality traits that will actually have a manifest mechanical difference in play. In fact, just looking at this character sheet as a whole creates a different impression of what character it's describing – and we've only clicked together a couple of components!

Cross Out the Three You Like Least

Now the customization kicks in.

I'm not really fond of trail of disruptions so I'll just take the? Out of that square and – presto. It's crossed out. Also I'm not really crazy about playing yet another Judgmental character so that one is off the list, too. Stylistically, I think moving people out of the way is boring and it pleases me not. Off it goes.

Things are looking a bit different.

Number Each Category From 1 Up

The step-by-step guide gives you an important pointer here. You are not assigning a level of power to each of these traits. Instead, you're defining where in the narrative of individual scenes this Power, Style, or Attitude comes into play. Is it something that tends to come out near the end of the conflict, and needs to be built up to? Is it something that you can pull out at a moment's notice?

It can take some time with the system before you really get a feel for how an individual number of facts when and how an Ability makes itself felt on the tabletop.

For now, I'm going to make some fairly arbitrary selections.

I definitely want super-speed to be something that comes out early in the scene, so that's going to be number 1. Rapid recovery seems like something that should come along later in the scene, so that was going to get the 5. Dire predictions, again, seems like something that should come early in the scene so it's going to get the 1. And frankly, I don't like preachy at all – so I'm going to change it into disgusted.

A little scribbling later and…

Drives

Interestingly, what's not on the Click and Lock checklist is to finish up by putting the Drives on your character. All we need to do is to assign a strength between one and 5 to each of the Drives.

Martin here is older, grizzled, and most of what drives him on is a sense of duty to his city and to the other heroes. He has little hope and no expectation of justice after a long career watching the bad guys go free only to torment good people time after time.

We'll just fill these Drives in.

You know what? Let's get rid of Love and replace it with one of the villainous Drives, Despair. It's actually Martin's hopelessness which provides him part of his reservoir that he can dig into and pull out a little heroism in the darkest moments.

Sometimes you just need to be a little creative.

Exemplar and Exemplar Conflict

Exemplar

Drives should have a constant presence in the life of the character. The best way to assure this is by assigning the Drive an Exemplar. An Exemplar is another character whose relationship with the first embodies their issues with the Drive.

Any character with Drives may choose or create one Exemplar for free. For a second (or third, or so on) Exemplar, two players must collaborate on Sharing the Exemplar (see page 77)

There must be a "root conflict" in the relationship between the character and her Exemplar. This is some fundamental way in which they are forever at odds. That, in turn, spawns many trivial, solvable, conflicts. It is often easiest to invent the root conflict by creating a sentence of the form "This good thing, but that bad thing."

The presence of Exemplar characters in Capes is a critical emulation of the source literature it draws from. In a moment it creates the engine for thousands of characters which exist in comics only to highlight a primary emotional drive of a protagonist character.

Comics are full of these characters. Sometimes readers don't understand why they continue to hang around in a story, but Capes makes their purpose in the narrative clear and gives you a reason for wanting them yourself: they highlight an essential emotional conflict between the world at large and a protagonist, acting as both a flag to other people that this person will get you to engage with conflicts at the table and as a highlight to a particular Drive, reifying them in the world.

Back to Martin.

He is essentially worn down by his history as a superhero. By taking despair as a Drive, we have indicated that we want to put a spotlight on the fact that he is a superhero who has lost some portion of his hope for the future and, as a result, is willing to do objectively terrible things in the pursuit of those things he still believes in.

Let's introduce Dr. Valerie Jarrett, Martin's Despair Exemplar.

Their root conflict could be summed up as: "I want to let myself love Dr. Jerrett, but I've been to the future and I know when she dies."

(This could have also been a summary of a Love Drive, and it would have taken a very different meaning without changing the text at all if so.)

Since Dr. Jerrett is going to appear in the narrative quite a bit, let's go ahead and throw together a character sheet for her. We'll do it with a fairly minimally modified click and lock.

Exemplar Conflict

The idea that these same Conflicts keep arising in slightly different forms isn't just subjective. It is written into the rules. Each Exemplar has a permanent Free Conflict attached to their relationship to the primary character. That Free Conflict can be played once in any Scene where both characters appear. Either the player of the character or the player of the Exemplar may
play the Free Conflict. It may be played many times, in many Scenes, in the same story. Although it must remain the same Conflict each time, it can be resolved in many different ways.

There's a lot of character mechanics laden in that text, but your big take away is that any time that a character and their Exemplar are in a scene together, someone can introduce the Free Conflict which is attached between them.

Peter Parker can't just tell Aunt May that he's Spider-Man. Robin is (often) seeking the fatherly approval of Batman. Batman is seeking the fatherly approval of Alfred. Superman (classic edition) is always showing up just in the nick of time to save Jimmy Olsen.

Now comes Martin.

It makes sense that the Free Conflict between he and Dr. Jerrett is something that comes up on a regular basis when they're together. He wants to be closer but he can't commit because he knows when and how she dies. What's the precipitating action that will always put that on the table?

Free Conflict: Krash and Dr. Jerrett move emotionally closer.

The interesting thing about this Conflict is that either side might be supported by a villain or a hero. Maybe a villain wants them to get closer together to cruelly play on Martin's despair. Maybe a hero wants to protect both of them as his friends and keep them apart. In that sense it's a very fruitful void from which interesting storytelling can emerge.

Completed Sheet

Dr. Valerie Jarrett, Martin’s Despair Exemplar

“I want to let myself love Dr. Jerrett, but I’ve been to the future and I know when she dies.”

Free Conflict: Krash and Dr. Jerrett move emotionally closer.

In Closing

I hope you have enjoyed following along with me as we've created a couple of characters in two very different systems with very different methodologies – but ended up with characters who have real emotional depth and the potential to be woven into stories with other people at the table who will become just as invested as we are with what becomes of them.

That is ultimately where we want to end up – with everybody engaged and having fun (for a broad spectrum of things which qualify as "fun").

If you've enjoyed this, if you want more of it, let me know what you think and what you're interested in. Is it more discussion of GM-less role-playing? Is it more talk about narrativism and focusing on the story first? Do you want to see some more character construction step-by-step, ground up?

As they say on YouTube, let me know in the doobly-doo and I'll do my best to provide you with what you're looking for.

Until next, if you can't keep it in your pants, keep it in the family.