lame mage productions

For the last few months playtesting Microscope I’ve been focusing on how Legacies work with taking control of scenes. Fixated, actually. Borderline obsessed. I’ve chased different ideas around, probably a lot more than was necessary, leading to some gentle but firm raps on the head from my wise playtesters.

But while I was doing all that, in the back of my mind I was getting less and less satisfied with the basic structure of the cards on the table. After playing for X hours, a history would get so crowded that you couldn’t really absorb it. You’d look at all the cards spread across the table and your eyes would just blank. Information overload. In your mind you still had a picture of what happened, but the cards were not helping, at least not at a glance. This never happened in short games, but if you kept coming back to a history for three or four sessions it was almost inevitable.

The problem was clearly Events. Periods were easy to read and seemed to stay sensible, but the long columns of Events would spiral out of control.

In addition to the sheer sprawl, there were two other things that bothered me:

1) Related Events, like two battles in the same war, didn’t look more connected on the table than Events that had nothing to do with each other. I’d long wondered if I needed to add another history element, a “cluster” to group blocks of Events, but I was never so thrilled about the idea that I ever bothered playtesting it.

2) Since the early, early days of playtesting, I’d always disliked “monotasker” Events, places where the Event was clearly just made to host a single Scene, or where the description of the Event was really more like a Dictated Scene. Usually the description of the Event didn’t have any more info than the Scene — both were the same “size.” It wasn’t technically wrong, it just led to a lot of clutter, which fed back to the original problem of the cards being visually overwhelming.

So I’m thinking I have three problems I need to solve, but in a “birds, meet stone” moment I realize there’s one solution that solves them all: wider Events.

Instead of creating a separate Event for every discrete thing in time (the King declares war against his neighbor, the royal army marches, the army is caught in an ambush), many problems are solved if you create a single Event that encompasses a larger spread of time and action (war between the two kingdoms).

When we played it clicked immediately: you wind up with fewer Events and a lot more Scenes stacked underneath each, meaning the structure of history is a lot easier to see at a glance. The description of each Event (like “the death of the last Star Emperor”) becomes a placeholder for all the separate Scenes that happened within it, like seeing the title of a book and remembering what happens in all the different chapters. It also makes it easier to mentally “put away” all the other Scenes in Events when you aren’t interested in at the moment. It’s a mental chunking trick: there’s the same total amount of information, but it’s stacked in a way that’s easier to absorb. Details you don’t need to see right now are pushed deeper.

Crowding reduced? Check. Related ideas clustered? Check. Extraneous Events zapped? Check. Triple win.

The icing on the cake is that Scene creation is more fluid, because there are fewer “heck, I want this Scene but I don’t have an Event that would contain it and I can only make one thing!” moments. Players have more freedom to throw down Scenes anywhere in the bigger Events.

If you’re playtesting Microscope, definitely try this change and tell me how it goes. It may have less of an impact if you’re continuing a existing (and already cluttered) history, but for new histories it should make a big difference. I’m pretty sold on it already, but more feedback is good.

Panning for gold in the used bin at Gary’s Games, we found a tattered copy of Traveller Book 1 1977 for $2. I had always been curious about “classic” Traveller, especially since I had heard characters can die during creation. So, we whipped up a bunch characters and here are the final results: 5 of our 9 characters survived the service and mustered out to PC-dom leaving the other 4 dead in character creation. Of the 5 survivors, 4 were one tour wonders, not making their re-enlistment roll.

Of the dead, the most tragic was San Holo, the space rogue who wanted nothing more from life than to have his own ship. Enlisting in the Scouts as a pilot, he turned into a serious renaissance man (Jack of all Trades-4). After his 4th tour, he started to feel the effects of old age, but decided to re-enlist just one more time. Oh, San Holo, 5th time’s not the charm. You should have listened to your creaking bones and quit while you were ahead and gotten your ship. DEAD.

The most successful character was JTK, Captain Janelle T. Kinser, Queen of Space. Gifted and an ambitious social and professional climber who survived five tours in the Navy and mustered out with some serious skillz (Int-B, Edu-F, Soc-F). A highly trained physician (Medical-4) but with some serious military experience to boot, she retired with a nice little pension to rule the universe.

Basically, it felt like we were creating real characters, not ones that just popped straight out of Zeus’ head fully-formed and god-like.

Here we have Ryan kicking all sorts of concise-ass about making awesome characters.

The whole discussion is about political intrigue, but this bit is solid gold. I snipped the quote a little to be even more concise, for I tamper with greatness:

That said, I can boil down the advice to two questions I ask of each character:

* What does he or she want?
* Why can they not just have that?

And point to another character when answering these questions (either or both of them).

It doesn’t get much tighter than that. Kneel before Zod.

We just launched the new Go Play NW web site, and it does look pretty nice if I do say so myself.

Go Play NW is about as dense as fun gets. Last year I played Microscope with a ton of people (which was awesome) and got to try my first jeepform game.

The only downside is that it only happens once a year (except in 2008, when we were so excited we got together for a reunion con a few weeks later). So, y’know, one more reason why it would be unwise to miss it.

Another question for Microscope playtesters: are there parts of the rules that you ignore? Things you just don’t use, or say “hmm, that wouldn’t really work for our group, so we’re not going to do that.”

Every game gets played a little differently by different groups, so tell me about your rules drift.

We just played the second session of our “Doom of the Gods” Microscope game. It’s an age of myth stretching from the creation of the World of Men to the very death of the Gods. Very Ragnarok, very Norse.

We probably would have played it again sooner, but we couldn’t get the right four players together at the same time, and if there’s one thing that Microscope hates it’s adding changing the player roster. Because everyone has such a high creative involvement, you really have to be there from the start, so adding people is rough. Leaving someone out of a history they started is even worse. Players hate that, and rightly so. It’s not like having your character sit out for a session, it’s like being the GM and being told you’re going to miss your own game for a session.

Two vignettes from the first session, both during the very ominous sounding “Well of Fate” focus:

An outcast Dwarven prince and his followers have come to the Well of Fate, seeking to learn how the Gods can be slain.

But that’s not the Question of the scene. The Question is: what price was the Dwarven king paid long ago for selling his people into slavery to the Gods? The dwarves have labored for the Gods for ages, ever since that dark day, and the rebel prince wants to free his people.

The answer? In exchange for making his people the slaves of the Gods, the Gods gave the king the gift of artifice, making him a craftsmen beyond compare. He thought to trick the Gods by teaching this skill to his people, but this only served the Gods’ purposes: the price they paid they got back redoubled, because their new slaves could now forge them fabulous weapons and tools. Tricky, tricky gods…

The Gods are locked in battle against the Colossi, and the mysterious Father of the Gods has gathered his brethren to reveal his new creation turn the tide of war: Man. But the All-father is renowned for his secretiveness, and rarely does he reveal the true depths of his plans.

That’s the Event, but then another player creates a scene in it with the Question: why did the All-father imbue men with the mist from the Well of Fate? So now we know what the All-father did, but not why.

The suspicious gods learn from a humble squirrel that the All-father exhaled a strange breath into Man when he made them, which the Gods recognize as the mist from the Well of Fate which the All-father inhaled and hid in his mouth.

The answer? Being born from the mist of the Well of Fate means that unlike the Gods, Men carry their Fate within them. The Gods present don’t realize it, but in a Postscript the trickster god Crow recognizes this means the All-father has made Man capable of destroying the Gods themselves, since they are not bound by Fate…

“How do you know when you are taking enough risk?

- Brian Moriarty, “The Point Is” (1996)

(don’t read it, listen to the audio)

Game two of our excellent StarCraft-analog Microscope game.

In the first game we established that along with the humans and the Swarm, the third race were the mysterious Wan, sometimes called the Voi. In keeping with StarCraft tradition, while the Swarm are a horde of monsters, the Wan are a highly advanced species, technology far ahead of humanity and the inheritors of a proud and ancient culture. In their minds they are the chosen race of the galaxy. Shades of racial messianism. They’re ten feet tall, have four legs, and skin like marble.

Ping throws down the first focus of game two: the Swarm on Earth. During the initial game setup, Haskell made a period where humanity makes first contact. Unfortunately, it comes in the form of the Wan showing up and utterly overwhelming the newly space-faring humans and subjugating the entire race. We know that later on the Wan first encounter the Swarm, and it’s their vicious attacks on Wan-space that weakens Wan control over Earth and the human colonies, allowing mankind to break free after a bitter guerrilla war against their alien overlords.

Ping starts us off with an event in that Alien Occupation period, the 10th birthday party of little Olivia, the daughter of one of the human collaborators. Because nothing says brutal alien occupation like a child’s birthday party. She then makes a scene with the question “does Olivia reveal her father’s sympathy for the rebellion?”

There’s a “hey, wait a second, I thought you said Swarm?” moment, but Ping is ready: Olivia has a family dog, and that dog has been secretly taken over by the Swarm. We’ve already had scenes later in this period where we see Swarm-animals skulking around on Earth, but it’s clear the humans don’t even know the Swarm exists, and there’s no indication the Wan know about them yet either. They’ve infected Earth without anyone being the wiser.

We pick characters and wind up with Olivia’s father (me), his nervous social climber wife (Ping) clinging to the material benefits of collaborating with the enemy, and one of the alien overseers (Haskell) making an formal appearance to show official favor for the cooperative human. Yes, the Swarm are the focus but no one opts to play the Swarm-dog, because it’s not in a good position to answer the question. Olivia clearly is, but hey, we like a challenge, so no one plays her.

Thoughts reveal pretty quickly that the father isn’t just sympathetic to the rebels, he’s up to his neck in it. He’s feeding the overseers information to set them up for a rebel ambush, hoping to wipe out the upper echelons of alien leadership in this zone. He knows if it goes wrong he’s screwed, and he’s put his whole family in danger, so he’s on edge when speaking with the aliens. I use Drama to establish a fact: we’ve already seen that the Wan have language translation devices (creepy looking collars), but I add that even though this gives them literal verbal translation they can’t interpret subtler human signals, like emotion or facial expression (and vice versa). So they can’t pick up on things like nervousness or outright fear, like the father is showing right now. He’s terrified, but he knows the alien can’t see it. If his lies hold together, he’s okay.

I immediately use NPC control to have Olivia peek out from her bedroom (where she was sent on a time-out after getting cranky in the middle of the party), and spy on her father talking to the overseer. The alien can’t tell her father is agitated, but innocent little Olivia can see it clear as day, even if she doesn’t understand why.

Doom is about two steps away. I sit back to see what the other players do — I just used Drama, so I couldn’t use it again if I wanted to. Haskell has the satisfied alien walk away, but before he’s out of earshot Haskell controls Olivia to have her come out and sulkily ask her father awkward questions. The alien turns around ominously, and we cut scene, because we know the jig is up.

The answer: yes she does, without realizing the repercussions her childish actions will have. The rest is just unhappy detail. The party ends before anyone gets cake, and someone’s Dad is going to the re-education camp. Happy Birthday!

Poor Olivia. On the bright side this gives us lots of reason to make her a fanatic yet guilt-ridden rebel years later.

And in the background the creepy dog lurks in the shadows, watching everything, and waiting…

So far so good with the new Drama rules. Knowing that Drama will be available every scene seems to have drastically reduced our hesitation using it. Scenes feel even more decisive, even when Drama doesn’t get used at all, because you know it’s an option.