Capes was, if I do say so myself, a wildly successful experiment at reproducing the over-the-top action of serial superhero narratives by encouraging the sort of deliberate antagonism of the best super-villains. I remain deeply proud of how its currency system and incentives guided players to play excellent antagonists without ever feeling antagonistic toward the other players at the table.
Particularly, the negative feedback loop at the heart of Capes (players who win conflicts give resources to the players who lost those conflicts) was both self-regulating (over the long term) and consistently evoked a cooperative approach to oppositional stories at the table. It’s one of the first big examples I dealt with of a mathematical structure reliably guiding people in the creation of a particular type of narrative.
