...and now for
something completely different!
Over the last year
and a bit, I've joined a bunch of my mates for a weekly run of the roleplaying
game "Exalted". It has been an epic tale of tragic mistakes,
sacrifices, and hard won victories. But we finally reached a spot in the tale
that prompted a break, and even though we felt invested in the characters, we
decided that it was time for something different.
But that is the real
question - how can we continue the magic? Well, we identified the things that
allowed us to keep the game's story going for so long, and took a look at what
other genres they would work in. Eventually coming to the conclusion that if we
wanted something different, then lets go as far from Epic magical heroes in
medieval land as we could… A science fiction story of people struggling to make
a living. So we were looking at the "BSG" and "Firefly" end
of the spectrum now. But here is another problem for a bunch of gaming geeks -
not all of us have the same depth of knowledge about these stories, and
creating our own might get problematic if we keep bumping our heads against
'canon'. So time to roll our own!
So enters the game
of Microscope - a fractal game of
epic histories. This seems tailor made to create our own setting. But to be
honest I approached this with some measure of trepidation. While reading the
rules spiked my interest, there seemed to be way to much scope for crazy
shenanigans to make everything go off the rails and ruin the fun of everyone.
And even worse, it was scaled for 2-4 players, and we would have 6-10
(depending on who showed up on the day).
Thankfully, Ben
Robbins (author) has setup a great little Microscope
community on G+ which was able to answer a whole lot of my questions, and
give some suggestions for easing into a session for so many people. The biggest
worry that others raised about my group was that the gameplay would slow to a
glacial pace with so many interacting. So instead of the basic rules of
"Scenes", we used the optional rules for "Dictated Scenes"
and allowing the rules for "Push". Overall I think this kept play to
a decent speed while keeping everyone interested!
The basics of the
game are simple. We co-operatively setup some ground rules on what story's
genre rules are, define a start and end point, and then start taking turns
making history. Each round a player defines the focus - what is the common
thread of all the history in that round. Then every player can add a Period,
Event, or Scene. As long as the new thing doesn't contradict established fact,
and fits the defined genre, no other player can say no. And these added things
can happen at any spot on the timeline.
A bit scary, eh? No
one has real creative control! But it worked amazingly well!
I think that one of
the key reasons this worked so well was the initial co-operative fiddly bits.
And they were fiddly! It took a long time for everyone to get their heads
around what they were doing here, as it amounts to defining the "series
bible" and theme/genre of the whole game. First up we had to define the
"Big Picture". We were all remembering the wonderful movie from last
week "Guardians of the Galaxy" and had been talking about Firefly,
Farscape, Babylon 5, and other similar sci-fi series. We wanted the feel of a
struggling crew flying around space. A sense of exploration and hidden dangers.
To have this as an end point we needed something with a suitable scale. The
initial scene from Firefly - the ships streaming away from "the earth that
was" - inspired a lot of us, which led to us defining our big picture as:
Mankind
flees from a dying earth to end up scattered among the stars.
We liked it. Then
the game tells us to define our "palette", the elements that we want
included or banned from our history. This took a little explaining, as it
didn't mean those things were in the game, but was just a list of things that
were different from expectation. This perhaps was the biggest time sink as we
went around and each person proposed an addition to the list. Each addition
needed to be discussed, weighed up, and agreed upon. With seven players sitting
around the table this meant a lot of discussions. But while this is a time
consuming endeavor that can be easily seen as "not playing the game",
I noticed that as we moved further along there was less discussion as each
addition seemed to make more and more sense. This list was only brought up a
few times to reign in later Events and Scenes, but every time it proved its
worth.
The final bit of
setup was to define the start and end periods of the game. Our starting period
was easy - The Dying Earth, a dark time for humanity. The end period was nearly
as easy to come up with as we wanted the travelling widespread feeling common to
many science fiction epics - Humanity scattered among the stars. These points
serve the important task of focusing our imagination on what lies between. We
were not thinking about how, exactly, the earth came to be dying, only that it
was and that humanity had to leave. Similarly we were not too concerned about
the eventual outcome, but were happy to know that humanity had ended up
scattered among the stars.
Then the real magic
began to take shape. The game is split into rounds. Each round a player picks a
focus, creates a nested pair of things (Period, Event or Scene), then all the
other players take turns adding one thing to the timeline, linked by the focus.
Sounds pretty simple, and it is. There are only a few things to remember -
Don’t contradict anything already established; Use only things allowed by the
palette; Stick to the focus; No co-operation!
It’s the last one
that pushes this game into awesome territory! When it isn't your turn to add,
you can only ask questions or clarifications. You are unable to change what
another player put into the timeline if it is valid. Since you cannot
contradict anything that comes before or after, there is a strong push to keep
your good ideas close to your chest before making the sudden reveal on your
turn. It was hilarious to see the expressions on people's faces as they
listened to an addition, and suddenly thought of a cool twist or addition that
they would use on their own turn. So many times someone would exclaim "oh
wow, we should now…" and then bite their tongue. As the turns built up and
the story twisted and turned everyone got more and more excited and colorful in
their descriptions.
On the Sunday we
played, we were only stopped because we had forgotten a charger for the laptop
being used to skype in our distant players. But everyone was so charged up that
we set another session for the very next day after work.
Final Thoughts
This is less of a
game, and more of a co-operative storytelling game. But because you can jump
around to any point in the timeline, at any moment, makes the reasons 'why'
change from moment to moment. No one person can drive the story in any
particular way, but everyone is able to create or destroy story elements that
change the course of the story.
This is a great way
to spend some afternoons with friends who share a love of stories. You will
come up with a tale to rival any movie or novel or tv show, and you will want
to come back to it again and again.
Best $10 I've spent
for a long time :)
