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arcane_asp
2016-03-11, 08:55 AM
Hello Forum - I've come across a description for a group RPG that caught my eye. On whim, I bought it, just waiting for the book to arrive (didn't really fancy the PDF version, I'm kind of old fashioned like that).

Has anyone on the forum played "Microscope" from Lame Mage productions?

http://www.lamemage.com/microscope

Looking forward to getting stuck into it, just wondering if anyone's had some good (or bad?) experiences with it? Any tips or general advice are appreciated!

The two expansions also caught my eye, but one step at a time :smallsmile:

CovertCobalt
2016-03-11, 12:34 PM
I've played Microscope twice, both times with great results. It's an awesome tool for building the backstory for a world you want to use for another campaign, since it lets everyone shape the setting together, which almost invariably leads to greater player buy-in.

solidork
2016-03-11, 10:52 PM
I've played it a few times and it was a lot of fun. One time we accidentally made Dragonlance, it was pretty funny.

arcane_asp
2016-03-15, 10:51 AM
I've got high hopes for it! Our group tends to speed through RP's we enjoy quite quickly, and then attention wanes and we head on to the next thing. From what I can tell, the scale of a game of Microscope can vary, so it can be single short session or multiple long ones, depending on peoples mood.

We might attempt something silly & light-hearted for our first attempt, just to get us in the swing of it...

Knaight
2016-03-16, 04:09 AM
I've played it a few times, 15ish or so. I'd call it probably the single most brilliant RPG I have ever played, and also easily the least conventional. It tends to work best in short spurts (1-5 sessions), with smaller groups (3-4). People with a tendency to waffle or just take forever to do things can kill the game, but if you've got the players for it it is rock solid. A few highlights, from our games:

We had a game that was inter-apocalyptic, with both the beginning and ending periods being catastrophic apocalypses. Between that concept, some very well done timeline elements, and some excellent additions to the add-ban list (banning macroscopic aliens was genius), and there was a rock solid game.
One of the games which seemed like it was going off the rails early actually turned out really good. The concept was subterranean fantasy civilizations, and somehow the beginning and end periods ended up being the introduction and loss of the tunnel cow. Yet this game had more stealable concepts than most. The conquest of sentient spores in particular stands out, along with an organization that would briefly work as a heroic one in a normal RPG, and which would later work as a really sketchy villainous one.
The term "trial by lemur fire" was spawned by Microscope. Enough said.


To some extent, you had to be there to appreciate these. Still, that the game survived and thrived things like completely ridiculous bracket periods says a lot about it.

With that said: There are some explicit warnings about not including immortal characters, and not tying eras together by including characters in several. These are really, really important. Somebody broke one in on of our games, and created an initially well received character named Glumm the Everlasting. By the end, everyone but that person hated Glumm, he was on the ban list for most scenes, and the character still dominated the game. Don't let it happen to you.

Prince Zahn
2016-03-17, 01:10 AM
I played it once at a convention, it was great fun :smallsmile: the way it works is just brilliant if you ask me. I hope to play it again someday.

If you use it with the intent of building a campaign setting out of it, I think that since everybody pitches into the world what they want, it makes it easier to understand the kind of campaign the other players are after. . . Unless it really just debunks into a barrel full of laughs. :smalltongue: but you can't easily predict that sort of thing.

arcane_asp
2016-03-24, 07:01 AM
Okay, I officially love this game! I was just trying out (there were 3 of us doing it in the end) and we had a great time just world building & being creative. Looking back at what we made, I don't think we will use it as a campaign setting. We probably could if we wanted to, but it more fun just coming up with it :smallcool:

The rules specifically state that you should steer away from creation by committee and suggesting ideas to players, but I think a bit of that will happen naturally anyway. We designed a world set on a giant colossus floating through space - I have a great map of the timeline, but its not uploaded to a URl source so I can't really show it here (anyone got any suggestions on where to host the picture so I can add it?)

I am definitely going to delve into this again. What really surprised me was the reaction of one of the less publicly creative group members, he hit it out of the park with some of his contributions! Might be a good tool for those who have reservations about creative play & roleplaying in table-top games :smallsmile:

Knaight
2016-03-24, 03:18 PM
The rules specifically state that you should steer away from creation by committee and suggesting ideas to players, but I think a bit of that will happen naturally anyway. We designed a world set on a giant colossus floating through space - I have a great map of the timeline, but its not uploaded to a URl source so I can't really show it here (anyone got any suggestions on where to host the picture so I can add it?)
The rule against direct creative collaboration is one of the most important rules in Microscope, and I would strongly suggest following it. Microscope lives and dies off of the independent creative control of each player during their turn, and part of what makes it work so well is that it blends creative visions in such a way that the individual aspects are fully realized, and not watered down versions that have been run through a committee.



I am definitely going to delve into this again. What really surprised me was the reaction of one of the less publicly creative group members, he hit it out of the park with some of his contributions! Might be a good tool for those who have reservations about creative play & roleplaying in table-top games :smallsmile:
This right here? This is one of the reasons that the rule against collaboration is so key. When the less publicly creative people are put in a position to create where they have to create, they can often make very interesting stuff and often enjoy the experience. If creation by committee is employed, then they're more likely to recite someone else's idea on their turn instead.