Using Microscope

[ejnotts]

the campaign (partly created with a couple of games of Microscope to flesh things out and include them)

I'm planning to use Microscope with my players to generate a new low fantasy world/campaign. I'm hoping to balance core elements of the world that are already formed in my head with their creativity. Do you have any hints/tips of how to run microscope effectively for the purposes of transitioning to D&D?

Also, great to see some other folks from the UK around here

 

[JochenL]

I am very interested in this, too!

 

[ejnotts]

Hey @TealdragonUK ,

Could you sharing your thoughts on Microscope when you get a moment - would love to hear about your experience!

Thanks

 

[ejnotts]

For anyone else interested in Microscope, you can find an introduction here.

 

[JochenL]

I always wondered if this would work as a forum game... What do you think? Any experiences with that?

 

[ejnotts]

I always wondered if this would work as a forum game... What do you think? Any experiences with that?

I don't have any experience playing it on forum... though there's nothing in the game, to my knowledge, that would prevent it from being done on forums. I suppose the dynamic would be different - potentially less back-and-forth debate as rapid posting in forums can get disorganised quickly? I'd imagine instant messenger or voice/video call would work a bit better. Just my 2 cents though!

 

[TealdragonUK]

Microscope is awesome! Along with Kingdom if you want to zoom into a place, and there is a 'hack' called "i'm sorry did you say street magic" which uses Microscope to create a city.

I set the 'bookends' of the history and set the overall theme (classic DnD fantasy in this case as we were planning for a big 5E campaign), and took the approach of the history being 'history' and in the past, we began the game time wise after what we created. (There are many options for how you might want to use what you make). What I have used the Microscope game for is to mine for plot elements, the big bad evil, and the players if they wanted had some history to pull from for character backgrounds if they wanted. It's great when you drop something from the 'history' into the game that they made and they get to encounter it.

We ran two sessions for the game of Microscope to give the history some extra flesh and to allow people a good second go after they got the hang of it. Some players may find it a bit weird, but once you get the hang of it, it's great!

Happy to answer any questions on it

Also, there is an extra book Microscope Explorer which has a lot of extra stuff in it, including guidance on using Microscope for setting up your campaign!

 

[TealdragonUK]

I don't have any experience playing it on forum... though there's nothing in the game, to my knowledge, that would prevent it from being done on forums. I suppose the dynamic would be different - potentially less back-and-forth debate as rapid posting in forums can get disorganised quickly? I'd imagine instant messenger or voice/video call would work a bit better. Just my 2 cents though!

You could use a trello board online and chat, because of the way you organise cards and discuss things I think a forum approach wouldn't really work, but as long as you can organise the cards in some kind of display it works for online play. You don't need a GM, I acted more as a guide to the game and made suggestions where needed. Make your players do all the hard work, it's great!

 

[ejnotts]

Along with Kingdom if you want to zoom into a place, and there is a 'hack' called "i'm sorry did you say street magic" which uses Microscope to create a city.

Yeah, I heard that Kingdom is really good for a specific area, creating more detailed factions, etc. Hadn't heard of "i'm sorry did you say street magic", but after a quick google I can see how it would work. There's so much value (in my opinion) engaging players this way.

My concern with using these tools for world- and campaign-building is that you add complexity (teaching everyone different rules for multiple games) and increase the number of sessions before starting a campaign. No doubt including one of these games is valuable for player engagement and outsourcing what is typically a GM's burden, but I imagine you'd get diminishing returns from running multiple different games, unless you have an enthusiastic group of players with committed gaming times (something I find a struggle to find!). Not a critique, I just suspect mileage may vary depending on the group, GM, etc.

I set the 'bookends' of the history and set the overall theme (classic DnD fantasy in this case as we were planning for a big 5E campaign), and took the approach of the history being 'history' and in the past, we began the game time wise after what we created ... What I have used the Microscope game for is to mine for plot elements, the big bad evil, and the players if they wanted had some history to pull from for character backgrounds if they wanted.

That's exactly how I was envisaging using it Did you find there was a good payoff in terms of player engagement and enjoyment? I can imagine it being really satisfying!

there is an extra book Microscope Explorer which has a lot of extra stuff in it, including guidance on using Microscope for setting up your campaign!

Juicy - going to look into that

One other thought - I'm considering using the world of Nibirum, which @Monsen operates and shared, as the established setting in my campaign's Microscope history... My thinking is that I'd create the theme, the 'bookends' of history, and constrain my players to create focuses, periods, events, and scenes that relate to locations in Nibirum. By positioning the maps as historic (and perhaps inaccurate), I can use all the amazing maps when considering things like natural geography, but I'm not constrained by them. E.g the region of this continent still exists, but the city of New Cassia? Yeah, that city used to exist, but it's completely ruined now...

Mind-dump over!

 

[Zantan]

My concern with using these tools for world- and campaign-building is that you add complexity...

I find the opposite to be true. It takes time to acclimate players to microscope, but it puts everyone on the same page. My players often only pick up on half of the world building I spew at them during a regular session because they are distracted, but if they helped build the world they remember nearly all of it.

There are lots of other advantages, like they give you hooks they care about and it gives them one more way to feel engaged. My players even request microscope breaks mid-campaign and I call for them when I need extra time to plan.

On a similar vein I would encourage you to adopt some principles of Fellowship, a PbtA game with a heavy emphasis on collaborative world building. Each player is a representative of a faction and have the authority to fill in any details they wish about them. It gives you leeway when certain specifics of an encounter don't matter ("player 1, someone from your faction attacks the party, tell me who they are and why they are attacking") and is another source of player engagement. I find that with the support of microscope and fellowship my players are engaged even when I feel like I'm failing as a GM.

 

[ejnotts]

I find the opposite to be true. It takes time to acclimate players to microscope, but it puts everyone on the same page. My players often only pick up on half of the world building I spew at them during a regular session because they are distracted, but if they helped build the world they remember nearly all of it.

Hey @Zantan , thanks for joining the discussion.

I totally agree that players only pick up a fraction of the worldbuilding GMs put forward, so setup games like Microscope really help in that regard. And I imagine the breadth of hooks it generates is priceless. Mid-campaign Microscope breaks sounds like a really good tool too!

My concern around complexity was more if multiple games (e.g. Microscope, Kingdom, i'm sorry did you say street magic, Fiasco, etc.) are used to build worlds/settings/parties. I think using one of these (primarily, at least my mind, Microscope) offers lots of value for relatively little added complexity. Two games adds more value, but further complexity... and I reckon there's diminishing value for each additional game used, but complexity (and consequently the players) becomes increasingly difficult to manage. To caveat all this - I suspect highly engaged players likely makes it easier to use multiple games without as much downside from complexity.

So the learning curve to acclimate players to one of these games seems worthwhile. The additional learning curves to acclimate to additional games seems less appealing to me. Given you have experience using both Microscope and Fellowship for campaign settings, did you find this to be the case?

Speaking of Fellowship...

I would encourage you to adopt some principles of Fellowship

I hadn't heard of it before, but sounds like a really interesting concept. I'll look into it

 

[Zantan]

Microscope is weird at first because no one is used to games like that, but it's just like learning a board game, you get the hang of it as soon as you start doing it. As a GM you need to decide which variant to use, learn it well enough to teach it, and choose bookends that are focused enough to enhance your campaign (and maybe avoid events old/recent enough to interfere with your plans). Try to adapt your plans to their ideas but ultimately you are GM and you can gently refocus ideas that undermine your plans.

Also be prepared to abandon parts of microscope, the structure isn't always necessary. We had already done world building before microscope, so eras we're predefined and we decided not to roleplay scenes to keep things moving. Also sometimes players just have cool concepts and don't have an idea for the timeline, help them out and make up an event related to that. Or sometimes they just want to come up with cool ideas about how the world works and riff off each other while you scramble to incorporate them into your plans. That's cool too.

Edit:
Also a map helps a lot, so everyone has the same understanding and seeing geographical relationships helps generate ideas.

 

[TealdragonUK]

Welcome to the Microscope fun @Zantan

@ejnotts I guess it depends on your group and what you are planning, for just a couple of sessions type one shot or a quick game of something Microscope might be overkill, but it was with my very regular group of best friends and planned for the start of a 'big' campaign. Mileage always may vary with players... It's also just a fun game on it's own, so you could play it through once or twice to try it out ahead of a planned campaign creation kind of game.

I've found the pay off great, everything Zantan mentioned applies. You can cut play time down a lot if you skip over the roleplay, but then you can lose some of the dramatic impact, depends on your group I guess, not everyone is happy improvising RP scenes.

For pay offs, my main favourite has been, long story short, we had a villain in the Microscope game that used rabbits to spread a plague, so as time progressed rabbits were hunted pretty much to extinction. When they were camped for the night and those on watch saw a rabbit... Seeing your adventurers react to a bunny like its the one out of Monty Python is priceless! That villain is going to come back, and I'm working hard to kind of make it their fault. The look on their faces when they hear his name will be amazing!

We were also planning to use the Followers and Strongholds book to create a base of operations. They explored an old Empire watch tower which has a secret emperors magic laboratory with a teleport circle (a major thing as in the microscope game we made flying ships to get everywhere and made teleport magic all but lost to the world). The ended up going through it, but managed to get back and told me they were setting up shop in the tower. I looked so surprised because for some reason I had not planned it at all as a likely home base location, I had just thought it was a cool encounter location... Sometime you just miss the obvious...

I've not tried incorporating a setting, but you could easily use the main elements of it to establish the Yes and No parts at the beginning (what we are good to have and not good to have in the Microscope game) and use Microscope to explore areas and events. You could make a list for people to pick from as a focus list of ideas to help people out. You can always drill down deeper with Microscope or add more events in-between others. Time is mutable...

We have not tried a mid-campaign game of Microscope, we just had so much stuff from the first one, but I could see how much fun that could be after playing in the world for bit to go and flesh out some history some more.

 

[ejnotts]

@TealdragonUK , yeah I get the impression it's an investment to run a game of Microscope, hence only worthwhile when a campaign is on the cards, rather than a one-shot. That said, if multiple one-shots will be played in the same setting, it might still be worthwhile.

And @Zantan 's guidance to take on a curator role as GM also makes sense.

I think, with the players I'm planning to play my Low Fantasy Gaming campaign with, we might drop the roleplay element, as @Zantan suggests. Though I'd like to "run" a session or two of Microscope before doing it with my players, just to get comfortable.

Seeing your adventurers react to a bunny like its the one out of Monty Python is priceless!

This is amazing - it's that sort of memorable moment that makes TTRPGs so great 😂

I'd actually looked into Strongholds & Followers before, and found it to be a pretty handy resource. The balance between fluff and crunch in the book is quite appealing. The challenge is tweaking it to fit into the gritty setting I'm going for with my Low Fantasy Gaming campaign... the Emperor's Magic Laboratory sounds like a cool base of operations!

Given Covid, I think I'll try Microscope with Trello with my players to build up the setting, the work on some one-shots to embed the players into Low Fantasy Gaming, before then moving onto a longer-term campaign. Hopefully, by that stage, we'll have gone through at least a few sessions of Johnn's Adventure Building Masterclass, so I can leverage that learning too!

 

[Gedece]

Trello doesn't have vertical cards, but I can see how you could represent every horizontal column as a different period, and things under each one as the things in that period. It's not perfect but I think it works.

 

[Zantan]

We used Google docs, it worked well enough especially with headers and a table of contents.

We also decided it was distracting to define each card as light/dark.

 

[ELF]

We have used Google Jamboard for online games of Fiasco. It could be good for Microscope as well.