Microscope roleplaying game
Oct. 26th, 2014 11:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jackhttp://www.lamemage.com/microscope/
http://arsludi.lamemage.com/index.php/492/youre-no-white-knight/
I was recently bitten by the roleplaying bug and one of the simplest experiments I wanted to try was playing Microscope. A recent indie game quite well spoken of, way at the "structured improv" end of the scale. The basic concept is collaborative, with each player contributing ideas of any sort, with no fixed PCs but the ability for the players to jump in to a crucial point in the history and choose characters to play for a short scene until a specific question is answered.
It is not a linear narrative, rather describing the history of a whole epoch (typically decades, but possibly weeks or centuries). It is hard to describe this, but I was convinced by play descriptions that the fairly simple rules are well-designed to get interesting ideas from all players without falling into some of the most common failure modes (eg. some people are shy to contribute, everyone feels obliged to submit increasingly silly things, no-one dares to shake-up the status quo).
As best as I can tell, it it likely to appeal to board-gamers and improv-players as much as roleplayers. And is fairly easy to play in a couple of hours including faff.
I'm worried I've fluffed the introduction, see the links at the top for more.
Basically, who else would be interested in trying it? I provisionally planned to invite some people over for food and Microscope, but I could bring it along to a games evening if people were interested.
http://arsludi.lamemage.com/index.php/492/youre-no-white-knight/
I was recently bitten by the roleplaying bug and one of the simplest experiments I wanted to try was playing Microscope. A recent indie game quite well spoken of, way at the "structured improv" end of the scale. The basic concept is collaborative, with each player contributing ideas of any sort, with no fixed PCs but the ability for the players to jump in to a crucial point in the history and choose characters to play for a short scene until a specific question is answered.
It is not a linear narrative, rather describing the history of a whole epoch (typically decades, but possibly weeks or centuries). It is hard to describe this, but I was convinced by play descriptions that the fairly simple rules are well-designed to get interesting ideas from all players without falling into some of the most common failure modes (eg. some people are shy to contribute, everyone feels obliged to submit increasingly silly things, no-one dares to shake-up the status quo).
As best as I can tell, it it likely to appeal to board-gamers and improv-players as much as roleplayers. And is fairly easy to play in a couple of hours including faff.
I'm worried I've fluffed the introduction, see the links at the top for more.
Basically, who else would be interested in trying it? I provisionally planned to invite some people over for food and Microscope, but I could bring it along to a games evening if people were interested.