# Capes tags: #game/rpg/capes ![[Capes (cover).png|300]] ## So You Want to Be a Superhero (But Mostly Argue About It) Let’s be clear from the outset. **Capes**, the 2005 indie role-playing game by Tony Lower-Basch, is not here to hold your hand. It’s not interested in your power fantasies, at least not without attaching a hefty invoice. The game’s central premise, stated with the kind of bluntness that defines its design, is a question that doubles as a dare: *"Power is fun… but do you deserve it?"*. This isn't some gentle, philosophical prompt for your journal; it's the core of a mechanical engine designed to put your character's moral and narrative agenda on trial, with the other players acting as a gleefully antagonistic jury. This is a game that looks at the wish-fulfillment inherent in superhero RPGs, nods politely, and then asks you to justify it. Repeatedly. With dice.   ### Welcome to the Thunderdome: The GM-less Experience One of the first things that might disorient a traditional role-player is the conspicuous absence of a Game Master.   **Capes** doesn't just fire the GM; it vivisects the role, scattering its rights and responsibilities amongst the players like so much confetti. The game is structured so that everyone at the table shares the burden and the power of narration. You won't just be playing your beloved hero, Captain Flag-Waver. In the course of a single session, you might also find yourself playing his arch-nemesis, the plucky reporter trying to unmask him, the terrified bystanders, and, should the mood strike, the structurally unsound building he just punched a hole through. The game provides rules for playing non-person characters like a 'Deathtrap', a 'Volcano', or even an abstract 'Mystery', ensuring that every part of the story is a potential pawn in the players' hands.   ### It's Not You, It's Me (and My Pile of Tokens) This distribution of narrative authority is not a gentle, cooperative exercise in communal storytelling. **Capes** is, by its own admission, a competitive game where players vie "to have the most influence on how that story turns out". This isn't a competition of who can punch the hardest, but who can most effectively manipulate the game's intricate resource economy to push their agenda. Winning, in   **Capes**, is about authorial control, and the path to that control is paved with some of the most counter-intuitive, yet thematically brilliant, mechanics ever put to paper. ### A Note on Identity: This is NOT the Video Game You're Looking For Before we delve into the glorious mechanical madness, a crucial point of order must be addressed. If you search for "**Capes**" today, you are likely to be inundated with information about a 2024 tactical video game of the same name. Let us be unequivocally clear: that is not this game. The video game is a turn-based tactical affair, often compared to  **XCOM**, featuring a grid, action points, and linear character progression. The TTRPG this report concerns itself with has none of that. It is a fluid, narrative-focused, resource-management game that predates the video game by nearly two decades.   The shared name is more than a simple point of confusion; it’s a commentary on the fate of many brilliant, niche indie games. A generic title like **Capes**, however fitting, struggles to maintain a unique identity over time, especially when a slicker, more visible product appears on platforms like Steam. This report is about the original, the 2005 artifact from Muse of Fire Games, a product of the heady, experimental era of the indie RPG scene. Be aware that there are also other, entirely separate TTRPGs with similar names, such as  **Capes and Crooks: A 5e Superhero RPG** and **Capes, Cowls & Villains Foul**, neither of which should be confused with the subject of this analysis.   ## The Engine Room: A Rube Goldberg Machine of Moral Accounting To understand **Capes** is to understand its mechanics. Not just what they are, but what they *do*. The rules are not a simulation of physics; they are a simulation of genre. They are a playable thesis on the narrative structure of superhero comics, and they are as complex, unforgiving, and brilliant as that sounds. One playtester quoted in the book perfectly captures the experience: "I feel bad about how much I get into the rules of the game. I don't understand how the stories turn out so good when we're letting the rules have so much impact". The answer is that the rules  *are* the story. ### Conflicts: The Index Cards of Contention The game's action is arbitrated through **Conflicts**. These are not simply fights; they are narrative questions that players introduce and then battle to answer. A Conflict is written on an index card and placed on the table, becoming a literal battleground for dice. For example, a player might introduce the "Goal: Get out of practice early" or the "Event: The bomb explodes".   There are two fundamental types of Conflict :   - **Goals**: These represent something a character or group is trying to achieve. If the side pushing for the Goal resolves it, they succeed. If not, they fail. Simple. - **Events**: These are things that *will* happen in the future of the story. The fight is not over *if* the event occurs, but *how* it occurs. The winner gets to narrate the details and consequences. This distinction is the first layer of the game's narrative control system. By framing a situation as a Goal or an Event, players are already shaping the future possibilities of the story. ### The Currency of Story: A Deep Dive into the Resource Economy Herein lies the heart of **Capes**, and the source of most player confusion. The game runs on a closed loop of three resources, and the flow between them is everything.   - **Debt**: This is the engine of the game. You gain Debt tokens primarily by using your super-powers. Want to fly? Take a Debt. Use your laser eyes? Take a Debt. This Debt is placed on one of your character's **Drives** (more on those later). If a Drive accumulates more Debt than its rating, it becomes **Overdrawn**, which imposes a significant mechanical penalty where you might be forced to accept a lower die roll, representing your character's self-doubt and irrational behavior. Debt is the tangible cost of being super.   - **Story Tokens**: This is the currency of narrative control. You spend Story Tokens to take extra actions in a round, play additional characters in a scene, or introduce new Conflicts outside of your normal turn. How do you get these precious tokens? Primarily by *losing*. When you lose a Conflict where you have Staked Debt, the winner gives you their Staked tokens, which are converted into Story Tokens for you to spend. This creates a beautiful, paradoxical incentive: the best way to gain the power to control the story is to have your character get beaten up. A lot.   - **Inspirations**: These are your reward for winning. When you win a Conflict, you gain Inspirations, which are essentially vouchers for future die rolls. An Inspiration has a value (e.g., a "4-point Inspiration for Captain Liberty") and can be spent later to raise a die on that character's side to that value. It's a way of banking a victory to overcome a bad roll in a future, more critical moment.   This intricate cycle of gaining and spending is the game's core loop. It is a system of moral accounting where using power creates a debt that can only be paid off by engaging in high-stakes moral conflicts, and where narrative failure is rewarded with the resources to ensure future narrative success. |Resource|How It's Gained|What It's Used For|Strategic Value & Snarky Take| |---|---|---|---| |**Debt**|Using super-powers; Losing a Staked Conflict (you get double back).|Staking on Conflicts to enable die splitting.|The game's moral credit card. Using powers is fun, but the bill always comes due, forcing you into morally charged situations to pay it off.| |**Story Tokens**|Losing a Staked Conflict (winner gives you their Stakes as tokens).|Buying extra actions, playing extra characters, introducing Conflicts.|The currency of authorial power. The best way to control the story is to get your hero beaten up a lot. It's a beautiful, paradoxical system.| |**Inspirations**|Winning a Conflict.|Increasing a die's value to the Inspiration's value.|Your character's "I told you so!" moments, weaponized for future arguments. A high-value Inspiration is a get-out-of-jail-free card for a bad roll.| ### The Dice Roll: An Exercise in Applied Metagaming An action in **Capes** is a multi-stage affair. A player declares they are using an **Ability** (like a Power or a Skill) to affect a die on a Conflict. The Ability's rating must be at least as high as the die's current face value. The player rolls a single six-sided die.   Here's where it gets interesting. The player narrates what their character does and then decides whether to accept the roll. If they roll a 1 when they wanted a 6, they can simply narrate their failure and turn the die back to its original value. But if the roll is accepted, the floodgates open for   **Reactions**. Any other player at the table, in clockwise order, can then use one of their own Abilities to re-roll that same die. This can trigger a chain of reactions, with multiple players re-rolling the same die, each narrating their character's intervention, until everyone passes.   Overseeing all this narration are the two golden rules :   1. **The "Not Yet" Rule**: You cannot narrate the final outcome of a Conflict until it is formally Resolved by the rules. If someone tries, any other player can gently say, "Not Yet…" 2. **The "And Then…" Rule**: This is the game's stinger. The player who has **Control** of the Conflict (the highest total on their side's dice) gets the final say in any narration. If a player on the losing side narrates a cool action, they must eventually say, "And then…" and cede the floor to the controlling player, who then gets to describe how that cool action ultimately soured or failed. For example, a character swings heroically from the rigging to fight ten sailors… "And then…" he falls through a trapdoor into the ship's hold. This rule ensures that mechanical advantage always translates into narrative advantage.   ### Staking and Splitting: The Art of Turning One Problem into Many Smaller Ones So how do you get more dice? You can't just roll more. Instead, you must **Stake** Debt on a Conflict. A player can move Debt tokens from one of their character's Drives onto a Conflict that is morally relevant to that Drive.   Staking Debt serves one primary, crucial purpose: it allows you to **Split** your dice. A player can take any single die on their side and split it into two or more dice whose values sum to the original (e.g., a 5 can become a 3 and a 2). The catch is that you can only have as many dice on your side as you have Debt Staked there. This is the main way to gain a statistical advantage and is the entire reason for the "Breeding Debt" tactic, where a player will intentionally lose a conflict to get double their staked debt back, fueling future splits.   ### Resolving and Gloating: How to Win by Losing (or at Least Not Winning *Too* Hard) At the end of a round (called a "Page"), players look at the Conflicts they have **Claimed**. If a player controls a Conflict they've claimed, they can **Resolve** it. They narrate the final outcome, calculate their Inspirations by matching their dice against the loser's, and then hand their Staked Debt over to the losing players as Story Tokens.   But what if resolving the Conflict would break the story? This is where the game's most elegant piece of design comes in: **Gloating**. Every group playing   **Capes** is encouraged to create a **Comics Code**—a set of absolute rules like "Heroes don't kill" or "The world will not be destroyed". If a villainous player wins the "Goal: Kill the Hero" Conflict, resolving it would violate the code. Instead of narrating the hero's death, the player can   **Gloat**. They take their highest dice on the Conflict, turn them down to 1s, and collect one Story Token for each die turned down. The Conflict remains unresolved, still on the table to be fought over next round.   This mechanic is pure genius. It allows villains to be truly, epically villainous—to build the death ray and aim it at the Earth—and get mechanically rewarded for it, while ensuring the story doesn't actually end. It perfectly simulates the comic book trope of the villain who has the hero at their mercy but stops to monologue, giving the hero a chance to escape. It incentivizes players to attempt the forbidden because the system provides a safety net that converts game-breaking actions into resource-generating opportunities.   ## Building Your Hero (or Villain, or Both): The Click-and-Lock Lego Set Given the fluid, often adversarial nature of the game, character creation needs to be fast. **Capes** provides two methods: a **Freeform** system for those with time and a vision, and the much more common **Click and Lock** method. The Click and Lock system is a modular, mix-and-match affair that allows a player to generate a character concept in minutes. You simply choose a **Power Set** and a **Persona** and smash them together. The results are often wonderfully evocative and perfectly suited to the game's tone. You might end up with a   **Godling/Angsty Nice Guy**, a **Martial Artist/Psychotic Loner**, or a **Master of Natural Force/Seducer**. From the resulting list of Powers, Attitudes, and Styles, you prune a few and assign numerical ratings.   ### Drives and Exemplars: The Engines of Angst The final layer of a super-powered character is their moral core. Each character has five **Drives**, chosen from either the Heroic list (**Justice, Truth, Love, Duty, Hope**) or the Villainous list (**Obsession, Pride, Despair, Power, Fear**). These Drives are rated from 1 to 5, and they serve as the pools where you place the Debt you accrue from using your powers.   To make these abstract moral concepts concrete, the game uses **Exemplars**. An Exemplar is another character who embodies a particular Drive for your hero, creating a "root conflict". For example, a hero with a high Justice Drive might have a police chief who thinks they're a criminal as their Justice Exemplar. A character with a high Love Drive might have a romantic interest they can't be with as their Love Exemplar.   This isn't just flavor text; it's a plot-generating machine. The relationship with an Exemplar comes with a permanent, free, repeatable Conflict that can be introduced into any scene where both characters are present. This ensures that the personal drama—the hero's struggle with their own moral code—is always a mechanically relevant and accessible part of the game. It brilliantly solves the common RPG problem of personal subplots feeling disconnected from the "main" story. In   **Capes**, the personal drama *is* the main story, and it's all tracked with dice and tokens. ## A Tale of Two Printings: Editions and Digital Ghosts The publication history of **Capes** is straightforward, despite the confusion caused by time and similarly named games. There is only **one edition** of the **Capes** TTRPG. It was published in 2005 by Tony Lower-Basch's Muse of Fire Games imprint.   [A "second printing" was made available in August 2006 via the print-on-demand service Lulu.](https://www.lulu.com/shop/anthony-lower-basch/capes/paperback/product-18nz454.html?srsltid=AfmBOooAzeO5bL6txXdWXWyh9t12uXdZY_vmyZWMMZLbUVidPq_e-Zy5) This was not a revised or second edition; it contained no rules changes and was simply a new print run of the original book. Any discussion of a "second edition" of  **Capes** is likely referring to a different game entirely. ## The Verdict: A Glorious, Convoluted, Unforgettable Mess So, what is **Capes**? It's a "very unusual new role-playing game," as the RPGnet review aptly put it, that "actually makes a game out of the role-playing itself". It is a competitive storytelling game that feels, at times, more like a strategic board game or a collectible card game, where players manage resources and vie for board control—only the board is the narrative itself.   The game's reception has always been polarized, and for good reason. Its greatest strength is also its greatest weakness. The design is praised for its thematic integrity and its innovative approach to emulating the superhero genre. Yet it is simultaneously criticized for being "horribly confusing," with "obscure rule-speak" and a steep learning curve. It is a game that demands a high level of buy-in from its players, not just to the premise, but to the complex, metagame-heavy mechanics that enforce that premise.   Who should play this game? **Capes** is for the group that has read game design theory for fun. It's for players who find the idea of a "Spiteful Schism" or "Breeding Debt" to be compelling tactical options. It is for the group that will delight in the paradox of gaining narrative power by orchestrating their own character's defeat. It is a game for people who want to argue, both in character and out, about what a story should be, and to have a robust mechanical system to arbitrate that argument.   It is not for the faint of heart, nor is it for the player who wants simple, escapist fun. It is a challenging, demanding, and intellectually rigorous game. **Capes** is a landmark of a specific, heady era of indie game design—a beautiful, brilliant, and gloriously convoluted mess. It may not be a game you play forever, but it is a game you will never forget playing. ## References ### Where to Buy - [Capes (Paperback) - Lulu](https://www.lulu.com/shop/anthony-lower-basch/capes/paperback/product-18nz454.html) - ([https://www.ebay.com/itm/146601616765](https://www.ebay.com/itm/146601616765)) ### Reviews and Community Discussion - ([https://web.archive.org/web/20240811072644/https://www.rpg.net/reviews/archive/11/11175.phtml](https://web.archive.org/web/20240811072644/https://www.rpg.net/reviews/archive/11/11175.phtml)) - ([https://www.geeknative.com/1418/capes/](https://www.geeknative.com/1418/capes/)) - [Capes (role-playing game) - Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capes_\(role-playing_game\)) - [Official Homepage of Capes - Muse of Fire Games](https://www.museoffire.com/Games/about.html) - ([http://indie-rpgs.com/reference/index.php/welcome/browse?ref=19894&fromaround=19894&board=52](http://indie-rpgs.com/reference/index.php/welcome/browse?ref=19894&fromaround=19894&board=52)) - ([https://heterogenoustasks.wordpress.com/2014/08/15/gpnw-danger-patrol-capes/](https://heterogenoustasks.wordpress.com/2014/08/15/gpnw-danger-patrol-capes/))