# RPG a Day 2023 - Day 30/31: Most Obscure RPG You've Ever Played / Favorite RPG of All Time?
tags: #thoughts/RPGaDay/2023
![[RPGaDay2023.png]]
Because I'm off to [[DragonCon]] tomorrow to do the thankless job of staffing, I'm going to roll up today and tomorrow's RPG a Day into one chunk. Frankly, it's the only sane way.
The most obscure RPG that I've ever played is also probably my favorite RPG of all time, so that makes this much simpler. I've written about it before and I'm sure I will do so in the future:
**[[Capes]]**.
It's a terrible shame that the game came and went in that brief, electric spark of time on the Forge once game designers settled down and realized they could do whatever they want but before Apocalypse World turned to the bulk of them into cargo cultists who just wanted to dance the same dance and hope for the same success. Once upon a time, there were some radically different game design ideas playing in the space.
**Capes** was one of those ideas.
Like many radical tabletop RPG designs, it was a superheroes game – but it never had to be. Superheroes is a fine genre for a game that wants to be a generic system because the medium is so large you have to be able to deal with multiple things at once which are very unlike one another and still express them within the mechanics.
**Capes** was GMless, largely before that was cool. It was both cooperative and competitive between players. Manipulating the dice was an important strategy.
By default, character ownership didn't exist – any player could play any character in the pool during any Scene, protagonist or antagonist. Severing the assumed ownership between characters and players was one of the most influential ideas that settled into my brain during that time and really helped me hone in on the things with gaming that are actually important to me.
The players were responsible for building their own Conflicts with the omnipresent caveat that the whole idea was to make a conflict so juicy everybody wanted to be involved with it and thus increase the potential for the creator to receive a greater story-token payout.
That is another extremely different idea that got lost in the ensuing years. The idea that you should get paid for helping everyone else at the table have fun.
So many cool and interesting moving parts in the game, but it never really caught on. I think I'm one of the few people who've ever not only played it but heard of it.
That's a shame.