Round One of Playtesting Done!

Hi everyone! With some help from a few really special people, I’ve finished a few different playtest games of Capes in the Dark! I’ve taken the feedback from this experience and just finished a big reformat of the document (We’re up to a shocking 33,787 words in total now!).

I’m gonna give a quick overview of some changes I’ve made:

Connection Clocks

The previous implementation of connection clocks was leaving a little bit to be desired… But, I’ve updated the rules here so that the progress of the clock is linked between players – as your connection with another cape progresses, their connection with increases with you the same amount. The rules around this were consolidated a little bit as well to keep everything in the same place.

Read more about this on page 15 of the new document.

The Faction Game

The section on running the faction game was also updated to use Firebrands style minigames to progress the schemes of the various non-player teams throughout the city. I’ve always loved Firebrands games, and being able to make a game with them was a pleasure. Because of this addition, I’m gonna really quickly shout out the Mealtrain link for Meguey Baker right now as well – the Bakers have been super influential in the TTRPG space, and this is a great chance to show them some support.

Read page 65 in the new document for more information on how to run these.

Playbooks in the Rules Doc!

For some reason, I had decided not to put the playbooks in the previous rules document for Capes in the Dark. My reasoning at the time was that my working document was getting cluttered, but since I was reorganizing it, it felt like a good opportunity to merge those documents at this point. Gone are the days were the only way to look at the playbooks was to go to the Google Sheet!

Odds and Ends

I’m going to list off a few more things that probably don’t need their own headers:

• The Symbol got a new Special Ability: Solemn Vow. This replaces Public Appearance.
• The downtime action Lay Low was reworked, and a new downtime action Public Appearance was added.
• Downtime actions were generally reworded, explicitly allowing you to frame any downtime action as a scene! This specifically was after a great downtime playtest session, and it’s a change I’m really excited to see more of going forward.
• The Introduction was expanded to include some more general “TTRPG” information with a section on Safety Tools!
• The FitD list of distinct “plan types” were removed. I’ve found that they’re often more confusing that not. Just describe the plan you have and cut to the action, without having to decide on which “kind” of plan you want first.

But that’s it! The rest of this was a lot of re-organization steps to make the document feel cleaner (something that’s increasingly important now that this is 79 pages long!).

Next Steps

I’m going to start more playtesting soon to see how this feels over the course of a longer game, so stay tuned for more information about that!

Beyond that, I’m hoping to get a section on the Setting of Capes in the Dark done (just to give everyone some example teams to play with) and also a section on running the game (but I feel like I need a little more experience as Narrator before I can really properly write that section).

Thanks for reading, and have a good time in your games~!