The rulebook includes an extended example of play from pp. 43-65.

Intro

Power is Fun…

Superheroes soar through the sky and leap across city landscapes. They reshape the course of mighty rivers. They dance untouched when the bullets fall like rain and sift moon-dust through their bare fingers.

It’s the ultimate thrill ride. Don’t let anyone tell you differently.

… But Do You Deserve It?

You’ve been given a gift the rest of the world cannot share. No matter how often you save the city, or the world, you still owe a debt you can never repay.

Playing Capes you take on the role of a superhero. You’ll tell a story and pursue two goals. First, enjoy your heros powers….

…Second, show that your hero deserves them.

What you’ll do

Who’s in charge?

How the rules help you

The rules help us agree on what we can narrate:

The rules also determine when you narrate:

You’ll get Story Tokens in the course of play:

Some terms

Rules overview

Scenes

A new scene is declared by the player to the left of the one who declared the previous. Starting with that character, going clockwise, players choose a character to play for free. They may then buy more characters for a Story Token each.

Most games most of the players play a single character throughout and the GM plays everybody else. Capes is different:

Scene creation also rotates around:

Pages

At the start of each Page, going clockwise around the table, players may add Free Conflicts and Claim one side of a Conflict. They may add or Claim more Conflicts for a Story Token each. In the same order, they get an action for each of their characters. Players may then buy more Actions for a Story Token each.

Each Page tells a distinct chunk of the story.

The structure of the page is:

  1. Claiming conflicts/adding new Conflicts/Characters
  2. Free narration
  3. Actions
  4. Resolving conflicts

At the start of the Page:

Before or after Claiming, you can introduce new Conflicts.

After the Claiming phase, there’s some time for free narration. Anybody can narrate whatever as long as it doesn’t need to be arbitrated with the rules. This is good for things like conversations that can fit awkwardly in the turn order.

The Starter ends free play whenever they want by taking Actions for their characters:

Actions

At any time in their Action a player may spend an Inspiration to raise a die to the Inspiration’s value. Before using an Ability a player may Stake Debt and Split Dice. One time in their Action they may either use an Ability or create a Conflict.

For each Action: you can either create a Conflict or use an Ability, but not both.

Immediately before/after/both creating a Conflict/using an ability, you can do a few things:

You can do these things in whatever order you like and as many times as you can afford to. But you can’t do them during the Action or any Reactions.

Conflicts

Conflicts start with a die for each side. These start at 1 and change through play. The highest side controls and narrates the Conflict.

A Conflict is a situation that could turn out at least two different ways and different characters are trying to control the outcome.

When you narrate about the conflict, there are two rules that constrain you, the Not Yet rule and the And Then rule. Other than that, you can narrate whatever you like, your character (or others) can do anything you want them to, but they can’t necessarily achieve any goal you want them to.

There are two types of Conflicts: Events and Goals.

Events

By declaring an Event you say what will occur in the future. The Resolver narrates how it happens, when it Resolves

Goals

By declaring a Goal you say some characters are trying to do something. The Resolver narrates whether they succeed.

A Goal is a Conflict where a character or group of characters are trying to make something happen in the story.

You can only veto a Goal in two cases:

Resolving

After actions, once again in turn order, players look at the Conflicts they claimed. If the side they claimed Controls the Conflict then they Resolve it. Losers get back double the Debt they Staked. Winners give away their Stakes as Story Tokens to the losing characters. Claimant matches winning and losing dice and gains an Inspiration equal to the difference for each pair or excess die.

Debt Staked by the winner of a Conflict gets distributed to the losing players as Story Tokens.

The Resolver gets Inspirations based on the differences between the winning dice and opposing losing dice. Inspirations can be spent as part of an Action to increase a die to the value of the Inspiration.

If a Conflict is tied, and there’s no possibly way to break the tie in future Pages (nobody can spend more Debt and all dice are sixes), then it is Deadlocked:

Drives and Debt

Debt Tokens go on Drives. Each Drive has a numeric Strength. If it has more Tokens than Strength it is Overdrawn. At the start of each Page, for each Overdrawn drive, the player rolls the highest die the character owns, accepting only lower rolls.

The Premise of Capes is “Power is fun, but do you deserve it?” Debt measures a character’s need to prove they deserve their power:

Heroic Drives

Villainous Drives

Staking

Players Stake by moving Debt onto Conflicts. Each character may Stake one Drive per Conflict, no more Debt than Drive Strength.

As a reminder, when a Conflict gets Resolved: the winning side transfers any Staked Debt to the losers as Story Tokens, and get back any Debt that they Staked, doubled.

Giving away your Staked Debt if you win a Conflict represents feeling vindicated when your philosophy gets borne out by actual events. Doubling your Staked Debt when you lose represents your doubts being redoubled when your commitment to Duty, or seeking Power, or whatever, doesn’t work out for you.

Splitting

Players may evenly split any die they own into dice totaling the same value. A side may split to as many dice as it has Stakes.

The advantage of Staking Debt is you get to Split the dice.

You can also Split off from a side you’ve previously been supporting to form a new third (fourth, …) side of your own to the Conflict.

Abilities

A super-ability earns a Debt Token each time it is used. Other abilities are used only once per Scene, but effect no resources.

Each ability has a cost:

You can put the Debt in whichever Drive you want and don’t need to justify or explain it.

The ability either raises an Inspiration by a point or rolls any one die on a Conflict. The ability score must be at least the value of the Inspiration or die. If they roll a Conflict die then they choose whether to accept the roll or turn the die back to its original value.

Whether you accept the roll or not, you narrate what happens.

Reaction

Any time a roll is accepted, any player (not just the acting one) may roll that die again by using an Ability of equal or greater value as a Reaction. No player may React twice on the same action.

Reactions let players try to fix a roll that didn’t go the way they wanted it to.

Gloating

If Resolving would violate the group Code the Claimant instead Gloats. Starting with their highest die on the Conflict they may turn dice to 1. For each die turned the Resolver earns a Story Token.

You should narrate your character gloating in some fashion too.

Building Characters

These rules are on pp. 67-77 of the rulebook.

Characters have up to three parts:

You don’t have to use all of this detail for every character you create. Sometimes you just need abilities. Sometimes you want some Drives but don’t need Exemplars.

You can go back and fill in additional detail later on existing characters if you need it.

You can also change any character however you want between sessions as long as they still adhere to the character creation rules.

Abilities

Abilities come in four types:

Powers are super-powered. Skills and Attitudes are mundane. Styles can be either, as chosen when creating the character.

Super-powered abilities have a different cost from mundane ones so they need to be clearly marked as which they are. When using Click-and-Lock, the abilities from a Power-Set are always powered, while Personas and Skill-Set abilities are always mundane.

Abilities don’t determine what your character can or can’t do. Your character can do anything you want; the rules instead constrain what you can achieve (and that’s determined by the resolution of conflicts).

Abilities have numeric ratings. A higher rating makes you better able to win control of Conflicts, which means you get to narrate how things go well for the character, without somebody else getting to narrate something going wrong.

There are two options for defining your abilities: the freeform method and the click-and-lock method.

Abilities: Freeform Method

The Freeform Method is pretty minimal and flexible. Here’s the rules:

Drives

A super-powered character that’s going to play an important role should have Drives defined.

To do this:

  1. Choose five Drives, all Heroic, all Villainous, or a mix.
  2. Assign each a Strength between one and five, totalling exactly nine.

For characters that are playing a more minor role, it might not be worth out detailing out specific Drives (yet). You can leave the character Undifferentiated:

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

Exemplars

(see p. 75)

Drives should have a constant presence in the life of the character. Assigning an Exemplar to the Drive is the best way to do this: an Exemplar is another character whose relationship with the first embodies their issues with the Drive.

Any character with Drives gets to create one Exemplar for free. For a second (or third, or so on) Exemplar, two players must collaborate on sharing the Exemplar.

There must be a “root conflict” in the relationship between the character and their Exemplar:

Characters create minor conflicts when they can’t address the root conflict of their relationship.

Sharing Exemplars

To have more than one Exemplar, a character needs to share them with another character. The characters should have been made or mostly played by different players.

A good way to quickly create a shared Exemplar is for each player to choose a Click-and-Lock module, then combine them to create the character.

The Shared Exemplar can represent the same Drive for each character, or different ones for each.

Click and Lock

Click-and-lock is a way of quickly putting together characters by combining a pre-prepared Power-Set or Skill-Set and Persona.

Power Sets and Skill Sets each have 5 powers or skills and 3 styles. Personae have 5 attitudes and 2 styles.

Here’s how to do it:

  1. Choose a Power Set for a super-powered character or a Skill Set for a mundane character.
  2. Choose a Persona.
  3. Combine the two sets of Styles into a single list.
  4. You now have 5 Powers/Skills, 5 Styles, and 5 Attitudes. Cross out 3 of them (but not all from one column).
  5. Number the abilities in each column from 1 up in any order. Lower-rated abilities are usually used for raising your own dice early in a Conflict, while higher abilities are often used later or defensively in reaction to other characters’ actions.

There, you’ve got your abilities. This creates characters that do match the free-form rules, so feel free to tweak the character further; it’s just meant as an inspiration tool.

If appropriate you can go on to define Drives and possibly Exemplars.

Non-person characters

TKTK non-person characters pp. 101-111

TKTK

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