Microscope Was My Key to Storytelling Games
I already loved Microscope but it took trying to explain it for me to understand it.
Background
I wanted to play a favourite game with my friend.
Microscope is about GMless collaboration to build a history of any genre on an epic scale. It does this very effectively and in my experience it gets the creative juices flowing like nothing else. No other game can let you play out something like the entire Dune saga or the rise and fall of Rome in a single afternoon.
I was thinking this about how to describe Microscope to a friend who might enjoy it. He's played D&D 5e, Rogue Trader, and Star Wars: End Of The Empire systems. None of these resemble Microscope at all. How could I explain this weird little game from Ben Robbins? How could I describe how it works, what it does. How you make a history together, but how it's not just like slowly hashing out ideas and writing them down.1
What does Microscope even do?
I knew I needed to explain the mechanism by which Microscope galvanises creativity. In my experience there was a key to this: If another player creates something you think could be better, the rules prevent you from just saying that, you can't talk about it.2 But you can still do something about it: You can to make an event or period that can destroy it or change it. If they disagree with you, they can try to bring it back as another version or some other way. But no one can contradict each other.
I was simply doing some house work and thinking about how to explain, when I came up with this example and how to explain it to my friend. What I really ended up doing was explaining the core function of storygames like this to myself.
Fantasy Kings Example
Player A and player B are doing a medieval themed Microscope game. Player A is the Lens, thus he chooses this rounds focus. He picks "Kings."
Player A makes the Event within an existing Period: "King Chad takes power. A noble and wise king who rules with justice and peace from Gigopolis. He brings prosperity to the land of Gigaplany." Since it's Microscope, Player A is free to invent King Chad, Gigopolis, and Gigaplany on the spot for that Event.
Player B thinks this needs spicing up. Stirues drive conflict, golden ages are boring in his opinion. It'd be way more interesting if there was intruige But he cannot say that. What can he do? Nobody owns anything in Microscope, so he simply makes this event:
"King Chad Assassinated 5 years after taking the throne. by the Woko-ath Assassins, who are funded by the Sajak Hordes, enemies of Gigaplany. His reign comes to an abrupt end and Gigaplany is thrown into chaos as factions vie for power."
Player B is now happy. All that chaos is far more interesting than a peaceful kingdom.
Player A however, had some more ideas for King Chad. He's the Focus so he gets to have a last turn for this round too. but King Chad is now dead. Since Player B defined that it was just 5 years of reign, his longer plans require adjustment, he needs a new King. He makes the following event: "King Chad's son; Prince Gainus reveals himself secretly to two royalist factions. Thus uniting them he proceeds to the capital Gigopolis and takes the crown as true heir. His right to rule is undeniable, thus a stop to the open hostilities in the Kingdom of Gigaplany. He rules in the same manner as his father."
I thought of the above example as illustrative of Microscope's power. instead of just having one idea, one event that's a compromise like you would without Microscope, you now have an entire chain of events or periods. That's when I thought, it's like a conversation. But you're having a conversation through the rules. The game-state is a conversation. The Lens and the Focus set the subject of the conversation to keep it on topic so someone can't just change the conversation completely, whatever they "talk" about has to relate to the Focus somehow.
That is how I realised truly how Microscope functionsand why it's so damn powerful at what it does while simultaneously being so simple. It's rules for having a worldbuilding conversation, but it makes the whole conversation productive.3 Effectively, this is how history works anyway: people have different ideas on how to do things and when they try to do them; history happens as the ideas meet in all the arenas of life and the world.
While it may seem adversarial, I feel that the appreciation of “solving” these narrative or story beats is the storytelling game version of noetic appreciation.
Microscope’s pattern as the Key
Blades in the Dark (BITD) has a different focus to Microscope: BITD is focused on stories of gangsters building a criminal empire under an oppressive government. It uses uses dice for uncertainty, which is exactly what it says it does; the dice are there to inject uncertainty. This is in contrast to the purpose of dice in a simulationist RPG: abstracting all the minor factors that go into an action.
The goal-threat-action structure is a standardised way to handle the back and forth of narrative authority, including the authority to describe or dictate the parts of the world characters are in. Similar to Microscope, this structure is what brings the fiction of the game into being. I was once told how it doesn't even make sense to do game actions outside that structure during a heist. I didn't get it, but now I do. It’s not a ‘free conversation’, it’s a structured one and violating that structure, violates the game. Just like if you just decide to have a normal conversation about the game state of Microscope during play, you've stopped playing it.
The structure is even similar: The goal is first. In Microscope, this is the Focus of each round. in Blades, the Player sets the Goal by describing it. whatever they want to achieve
They diverge slightly: In Microscope, everyone has equal authority; nobody gets to dictate contingent consequences for anyone else, thus dice are not required.
BITD does have player roles — GM vs other players — the GM does present contingent consequences. Thus the Game Rhythm is Goal → GM Threat → Player Action. The contingency of the threat is resolved with a dice roll, if the roll fails, the Threat comes true.
Microscope players respond to each others' actions rather than responding to GMs threats. The rhythm is similar, like another song from the same genre of music.
Thus the game rhythm is Goal (Round Focus) → player action → player action in Microscope.
This can be seen in other Storytelling Games from the Forge denizens too; Ben Lehman’s Polaris even defines specific key phrases for its “structured conversation” gameplay. Dice serve the same role they do in BITD; resolving narrative input between players. So does Blades in the Dark, with its Action definitions; each is a word. Having stricter components like key phrases and words seems to be part of genre specific storytelling games. (Microscope lacks them).
Finally
There’s a little more to this. This isn’t just the story of how I came to understand storytelling games. This is what inspired me to start writing on Substack seriously: I wanted to play a favourite game with my friend.
I've spoken to earlier about the importance of genre names and labels as "signposts" for different experiences. It's two way. It's not just me wanting to make others actually understand what I like.
It also lets everyone, including myself, actually understand what those experiences can offer and why we might like them. Otherwise we run off the road or hit a roadblock — so to speak — because that signpost is pointing to an unfamiliar path, not where we thought we were going.
While I’ve done group worldbuilding the usual way it’s far slower.
If it violates the Big Picture or themes that were discussed at the start, that's when you can object, though Microscope does allow for 'emergency palette discussion' if everyone agrees'.
The only time I've seen it fail is is due to insufficient discussion at the start; a player misunderstood the big picture or the palette discussion was not thorough enough.
This reminded me of a practice on the rpol net forums around 'God Games'; where each player would take on the role of a god with certain 'domains' that restricted what they could do. Functionally, it was very similar to what you describe for microscope: Gods could create planets, celestial objects, entire races, objects of power, even laws of the universe or exotic matter. The game was phased into different tiers of play with points spent to dictate the relative 'power' of different creations, which also affected how hard they were to mess with after creation. Each tier decreased the scope of the god's power: going from easily making planets, to making races, then individuals, with the ultimate goal of playing out the stories of their prophets and adjutants, and the wars and tales they experienced within that created setting.
I played in a few and even ran one myself (the GM's role was to define how things interacted with each other in a neutral arbiter type way so one side couldn't just say that their god-beast always won), and I had fun during those experiences. But looking back on it, it was a very different kind of play to any RPG. Good in some ways: the creative juices, like you say, were flowing in abundance and if you entered with gusto and willingness to create the game was very fertile ground. I still remember some of my own creations and how they ended up defining the cosmology. The bad was in a few ways: games often petered out without constant renewed interest, constant addition of new material made consistency hard (the phases were intended to try and reset the gamestate to something managable, since you could have anywhere from 3-30 people playing in a forum game), the looseness of rules meant any PvP felt very arbitrary or just boiled down to who had more points or more-suited domains, and the need for a GM to be running dozens of stories simultaneously when you reached the prophet stage was heavy and led to burnout (the end-game for it was always a third-person RPG from the perspective of your 'hero unit' oddly enough).
I see many of the same downsides and upsides in the story-games of today. Creative writing exercises framed by rules have a fairly long history (I played these around 2005). The appeal to me has always been that creativity is easier to stimulate within restrictions rather than complete open freedom. Restricting player creations to 'domains' forced them to think creatively to accomplish their goals, and produced inspiration through word association (if you were 'light' domain you probably recalled every light-based power, hero, spell, etc you remembered as fodder for your creations. That was your spell-sheet). The co-adaption of RPG rulesets seems logical however they aim to create different experiences. Microscope seems to be a better version of those forum games by removing the GM bottleneck, so its interesting to see the genre keep evolving.