lame mage productions

Sometimes in Microscope someone Pushes to change one of your ideas, but instead of disagreeing you think “hey, I do like that more, let’s do it!” By the rules you have to go through the finger-vote and find out what everyone else thinks, but sometimes that’s unnecessary work.

Here’s a faster option you can use. Consider it an official Microscope rule:

Push Concede

If someone Pushes to change something you said during a Scene and you prefer their version, you can just say “Concede” and automatically replace what you said with their idea. Play continues normally without stopping to vote.

If any other player prefers the original idea (or has another idea of their own) they can require a vote instead. If you do vote, follow the normal procedure just as though you had not used the Concede option.

Say Mike is playing the Space-Pope during the plot to poison him with the euphoric gases of the Holy Ones. Mike says “when the Space-Pope inhales the concentrated vapors he chokes and dies!” But Jem has a different idea. He Pushes to change the Space-Pope’s fate and have him go insane instead, because who doesn’t want an insane Space-Pope? Mike loves the idea so he concedes immediately. If another player wanted the space-Pope to kick the bucket they could require a vote, but no one does. This little wrinkle completely changes our opinion of the interstellar crusades we know are about to happen…

Eagle-eyed rules mavens will notice that this doesn’t change how the game works at all. It’s just a shortcut when everyone is in agreement. It’s nice because it means you can get back to role-playing the scene quicker.

Oh sure, you could use Microscope to make an epic history, defying chronological order and jumping back and forth to explore the moments in the history that interest you. Or you could hold up your glossy black book and yell “too easy!” and use it to do something else entirely…

• City Building with Microscope — Very clever idea for taking the three-level hierarchy of Microscope and using it to build and flesh out the neighborhoods and details of a city. Could you apply the same Microscope hierarchy to, well, anything? Yes you probably could…
• Microscope meets West Marches — No, seriously. The Bad Wrong Fun campaign is going to follow a West Marches model of play, but create the game world with Microscope and Dawn of Worlds. There’s also a discussion thread on rpg.net.

There’s a whole lot of clever in the air this month…

Late Saturday night at PAX, some folks drifted into the Indie Games On Demand room and were checking out all the books on the display table. Like a good host, I pitched a couple of games but they didn’t seem terribly interested.

I asked what kind of games they were used to. Party adventure stuff? “Yeah, party adventure stuff.” I asked if they wanted to play a game like that or if they wanted to try something completely different. “Yeah, something different.”

Different, you say? Yeah, we can do that.

I meant to write about this game a while ago but I never got around to it. I got a kick out of it for several reasons. For one, it’s always interesting seeing how a bunch of total strangers who’ve only played fairly normal role-playing games react to Microscope. Second, it was one of those games that really highlights how Microscope works: the unforeseen creative snowball. And third, well the game was just fun.

So we sit down and I explain the basic concept of the game. We decide on a futuristic industrial revolution with an alien invasion tucked somewhere in the middle. The world is transformed by fusion power, but not without some dire consequences. As we make the bookends our history begins with a literal revolution, a worker’s revolt, and ends when a fusion explosion spells disaster for the radical new technology.

When we’re going around doing the Palette, in addition to the aforementioned alien invasion, one player adds cloning. This seemed fairly minor at the time (particularly compared to an alien invasion) but little did we know it was destined to become the central theme of the session.

We’re ready to start play, but it’s late and I’m a little logy. PAX has already been an energy-draining whirlwind of fun and I don’t have any stunning ideas. But because I know it’s better to make something simple and roll rather than over-think it, for the first Focus I throw out an anti-fusion activist, a radical who we decide to name Sarah.

I have no idea why Sarah’s interesting or where this is going, but that’s okay, that’s how Microscope works. And just to demonstrate that chronological order is for suckers, I jump to the very end Period of the history, the disaster that heralds the end of the fusion age. I make an Event for the eponymous disaster, a meltdown at a fusion power plant, and then make a Scene asking “does Sarah’s daughter forgive her for causing the meltdown?” Yep, no beating around the bush: the Question establishes that our radical activist was behind the crisis. Investigators are interviewing plant staff (like Sarah’s daughter) to figure out what happened. I require Sarah’s daughter and an investigator, but I ban Sarah, just to make things interesting.

Then things get strange. We’re going around picking characters and the very first player decides to be the husband of Sarah’s daughter’s clone. That’s right: there’s a clone of Sarah’s daughter (apparently) and this is her husband. Or was her husband anyway, because we rapidly find out she (Sarah’s daughter’s clone) died in the crisis. She (the clone) sabotaged the plant for Sarah. Sarah didn’t bring her daughter in on the plan, she was in cahoots with her daughter’s clone instead.

As we play the scene we get the uncomfortable impression that Mom loves (loved) the clone more than her own daughter. Or does she? After all, she sent the clone on what was basically a suicide mission. But then again it was a suicide mission that she (Sarah) apparently thought was essential to the good of humanity and she trusted the clone to carry it out rather than her daughter.

And why the heck is there a clone of her daughter anyway?

This launches a round of scenes jumping backward and forward in Sarah’s life. We see an elderly Sarah presiding over her eco-terrorist cell, deciding whether to strike again and precipitate an even more calamitous meltdown. We see a young Sarah first decide that the fusion technology (acquired from the aliens, Periods ago) is destructive and should be stopped.

Another player jumps waaay back to Sarah’s birth, only to reveal that Sarah isn’t Sarah at all: she’s a clone of the real Sarah who died as a baby, raised discretely by her bereaved parents to avoid the societal stigma that haunts clones. This little shocker suddenly casts our first scene in a whole different light: Sarah did have a reason to have a deeper bond to the clone of her daughter than her actual daughter, however strange that seems.

By now everyone has jumped on the clone bandwagon. Ostensibly the scenes are about Sarah’s attitude towards fusion tech, but really they’re about clones and their place in society. One player uses the Legacy phase to look back at an earlier Period and establish how cloning was originally popularized to provide a cheap if dubious work force of second class citizens, explaining a lot of the dehumanizing stigma.

But before that the ball’s back in my court to wrap up the Focus of Sarah. And just like everybody else, I’m all about the clone theme now. In early scenes, when Sarah was an old women, we had already heard about her estranged husband Lowell, so I jump back to the halcyon days and make an Event for their wedding. And as the happy young couple are coming together to take their vows, I make a Scene asking “is Lowell disgusted when he finds out she’s a clone?” I ban Sarah again and let the best man break the news to him. We already know the wedding happens (because the Event description was them getting married, not them failing to get married) so if he is horrified he’s probably going to be bottling it up deep inside, which is even worse.

Like a lot of Microscope games, we wound up creating something none of us foresaw. We didn’t sit down to make a history about cloning and its civic and interpersonal consequences, but that’s what most of the session was about. But the critical bit is that we did it together. Even though one player put clones on the Palette in the first place, it only became so important because each of us chose to keep exploring it. Each of us used our turn to bring it back in. Anyone who wasn’t into clones could have stuck to the Focus but explored some other facet of Sarah’s life. We built on each other’s ideas, which is exactly how Microscope is supposed to work.

If we’d played late into the night, would we have gone back and explored the dying alien race we got the magnificent fusion technology from in the first place? No doubt. But for the moment all of us were interested in the same thing, so that’s what we explored. The Focus kept our attention on Sarah, but we voluntarily Focused even more tightly on this one aspect of her life.

And the wedding scene? Despite some rough moments it turned out Light. Their marriage may wind up a shambles later on (in fact, we already know it will) but on this Spring day they get to be happy…

The fine folks of RPG Geek invited me to talk about a game I knew a lot about. Are you thinking Microscope? I’m thinking Microscope.

Share A Game: Microscope

It’s turning into a truly epic Q&A thread. If you ever wanted to know something about Microscope, this is probably the place to look. And yeah, I’ve been meaning to do a Microsope FAQ since about five minutes after the game came out and I realized that a lot of people who hadn’t read it were confused about the concept (“So it’s a time travel game?” “Where’s the role-playing?”).

The results from the Gaming Genius Awards are finally in, and I’m happy to report that Microscope has won Most Innovative New Product for 2011!

Not bad, right? But hold the presses because the slate for the 2011 Golden Geek Awards is up and Microscope has been nominated for RPG: Game of the Year!

Whew. Pretty exciting.

The other finalists include some great games, so Microscope is up against some stiff competition (I’m looking at you, Apocalypse World!). Voting is open until the end of October, so if you want your voice to be heard, now’s the time to VOTE!.

I got a couple of questions from Polish gamer Maciej Sabat and I thought the answers might interest you too, gentle reader. Maciej has been running a summer RPG camp, deep in the forests of Poland and he’s unleashed the kids on Microscope.

Wait, did you say “pics or it didn’t happen?” Oh you internet:

Anyway, the questions:

What is the purpose of deciding the Tone of the Scene? Is it a leftover from previous editions, where the players to had to keep Tone balance or something like that?

In earlier versions of Microscope there was a complicated “rise & fall” system. Having Light things happen in history that we already knew was Dark (or vice versa) would create dramatic debt that pushed things back the other way later. Which sounds very cool, but playtesting showed it didn’t work in a non-linear game like Microscope. Think of it this way: because you’re playing out of order and perhaps never seeing everything that happens in a particular Event, enforcing a dramatic arc on just the pieces you see looks rather strange. Plus there were many, many cases where the players had a better sense of what was dramatically interesting. They could play contrasting Tone when that appealed to them, or match it when they liked that. They could see the fiction so they knew what fit. The mechanical enforcement just got in the way.

But in the process I discovered the real value of assigning Light & Dark, which was having the players discuss what they thought mattered in the fiction (as I describe in the book). For Scenes particularly, it plays an even more critical role: it’s the one time during play that everyone is encouraged to talk and discuss what’s going on in the game. It’s a crucial chance to huddle and share what you think about what happened.

Why are Legacies so underused? I have one or two ideas how to expand their rules (they could serve like ‘aspects’ in Archipelago for example).

Legacies went through a lot of evolution. Originally, a player would create a Legacy during a Scene to take control of what happened in play. If the king was surrounded by enemies and about to be slain, someone could suddenly narrate that in fact he has the legendary blade Gravehammer, which lets that player take over narration and describe how the sword helps him win (or causes something else entirely — it’s up to the player).

On paper it looked good. Great, in fact. But in play Legacies wound up being flat and uninspired. Why? The creative process was backwards. You weren’t making a cool Legacy because you thought of one, you were coming up with a Legacy on the fly because you wanted to make something else happen in the Scene. [It's no accident that in the final version you can do exactly the same thing (invent the sword and describe how it saves the king), you just aren't required to make up something to have that authority. If you invent the sword it's because that's what you wanted to do.]

Now Legacies serve an entirely different, but very critical, purpose — really, only the name is the same. In the short-term, the Legacy phase lets a single player branch out in a totally different direction, without being restricted by someone else’s Focus or by having to be concerned that what they’re picking is interesting enough to be a Focus for everyone else for a whole round. If you think of the Focus as being the chapters, the Legacy is an intermission where we may get to look at something else entirely, or go back to something they wanted to say more about from earlier in the game.

In longer-term play, usually multiple session history, the Legacies become reminders or themes players thought were interesting. One player’s choice of a Legacy makes other players to come back to that idea much, much later.

If there’s a lesson, that’s it: know what the point of your game is and kill your sacred cows when they aren’t serving that vision.

I really liked both old Legacies and mechanical Tone enforcement, but I had to admit that they didn’t do what I wanted. By clinging to them, I was putting the cart before the horse. Killing them (or transforming them into something entirely different and actually useful) was a painful process, but it made the game better.

It has been decided. Internal playtesting of my next game starts in two weeks.

Which is about time, since I started working on it in November. What can I say? Releasing Microscope has been very distracting. In a good way.

More later.

Sitting around the campfire at CozyCon last night, talking with Ross about crazy ideas for strange game spaces, larger groups and weirder things.

Case in point: Microscope LARP. For use at cons or other large group & large space settings. Each Event in the history is mapped to a physical space, like a room or a marked area. Want to play a Scene in that Event? Walk over there, grab the other players in that area and pose your Question. Play it out just like normal. Be the captain of the submarine and find out what terrible secret made him scuttle his boat in the North Atlantic…

I’m envisioning some system where as each Scene gets played, the Question/Answer synopsis is physically posted in the space (in chronological order, on the wall or something) so more players can drift in and create more Scenes before or after. Likewise, you would want options for spawning more Events or Periods, so probably you would want to start using only part of the available game space. You could throttle the rate of new Event or Period creation so you didn’t run out of room: maybe only one new Period or Event every X minutes. If multiple people have ideas, draw randomly to see who gets to make one. And the Focus? Oh yeah, it applies to everyone in the game until the clock strikes whatever.

Yes, it would be crazy having thirty+ people crawling all over the history, fleshing out and exploring details simultaneously, playing the same characters other people played in other Scenes but they only heard about (or perhaps stood and watched from the sidelines). Crazy, unwieldy awesome.