Live Action Microscope

Sitting around the campfire at CozyCon last night, talking with Ross about crazy ideas for strange game spaces, larger groups and weirder things.

Case in point: Microscope LARP. For use at cons or other large group & large space settings. Each Event in the history is mapped to a physical space, like a room or a marked area. Want to play a Scene in that Event? Walk over there, grab the other players in that area and pose your Question. Play it out just like normal. Be the captain of the submarine and find out what terrible secret made him scuttle his boat in the North Atlantic…

I’m envisioning some system where as each Scene gets played, the Question/Answer synopsis is physically posted in the space (in chronological order, on the wall or something) so more players can drift in and create more Scenes before or after. Likewise, you would want options for spawning more Events or Periods, so probably you would want to start using only part of the available game space. You could throttle the rate of new Event or Period creation so you didn’t run out of room: maybe only one new Period or Event every X minutes. If multiple people have ideas, draw randomly to see who gets to make one. And the Focus? Oh yeah, it applies to everyone in the game until the clock strikes whatever.

Yes, it would be crazy having thirty+ people crawling all over the history, fleshing out and exploring details simultaneously, playing the same characters other people played in other Scenes but they only heard about (or perhaps stood and watched from the sidelines). Crazy, unwieldy awesome.