Just Him and His Dad

From an email I’ve been meaning to post. Today seems like the right day:

Just wanted to let you know – I introduced a friend of mine to Microscope with a 4-person game a few months back, and he enjoyed it so much that I bought him the rulebook. He texted me yesterday saying that he played a 2-person game the other night, just him and his dad (a first-time Microscope player), and that:

“I haven’t had an interaction with my dad like that since we played first edition D&D together when I was a kid.”

It really meant a lot to him as an adult to be able to sit down with his dad and just kind of “play catch” with their imaginations like they did 20-some years ago. Thanks for such a cool game.

Stuff like this makes being a game designer feel pretty great. Happy Father’s Day.

In This Life

“I’m tired of characters who are just shallow stereotypes…”

We had just finished a delightful session of In This World and were basking in the afterglow. Talk turned to different stripes of gaming, from story games to D&D. Which is when Ace said how tired they were of one-dimensional characters. Characters that were just cardboard cutouts or well-trodden stereotypes instead of digging into what made them who they were. We all agreed that this was indeed a pox upon the house of gaming.

And then Joe said: I wonder if you could use In This World to make more interesting characters?

Naturally I looked at him like he had two heads. Make characters? What? C’mon, this is a *world* building game. It’s right in the title!

But we talked about it and I had to admit, it made sense. Not only did it make sense, it seemed like a surprisingly good fit. My innate game design caution made me want to retreat to my thought-cave and carefully weigh the changes that would be necessary, so I could be sure it would work.

Or, shouted Joe and Ace, we could try it RIGHT NOW.

So yeah, we had just finished one game of In This World, and we turned around and jumped in and started another, hacking together the rules for In This Life…

What Makes A Jock A Jock?

In This World takes a concept and then imagines a world where that idea is different.

But to make interesting people, we didn’t want to change the stereotypes, we wanted to explore how individual people might not fit the stereotypes we expect or project on to them.

So we start with a category of person we want to explore — in our first game it was “jocks” — and then the statements are the things that people expect to be true of that stereotype. For example:

Winning matters
Sports are life
Team is your family
Coach knows best
Play hard, party hard
Studying is for nerds
etc

Classic jock stereotypes, right? And then instead of worlds, you make individual people. A person who doesn’t fit one of the stereotypes we just outlined. Coach knows best, but this jock doesn’t trust their coach. Studying is for nerds, but this jock cares about getting good grades. Winning matters, but this jock doesn’t take it all that seriously. They just enjoy the game.

And then dig deeper, following the same procedure as normal In This World to see how these breaks from expectations affect this person’s life and those around them. You see what happens when someone doesn’t fall into that neat little box.

The result was — just as we hoped — complicated and interesting people. And maybe more importantly, sympathetic people. Each character we created, we cared about, even when they messed up, confronting our own preconceptions about those stereotypes in the process. We would have happily kept playing any of those stories to see what happened next.

It also feels different from normal In This World because you’re inherently exploring a tension that arises from being different, from not fitting in. It’s gripping story soil.

Just Scratching the Surface

The funny thing is that even though I didn’t tell playtesters any of this, *multiple* groups independently came up with the same idea. Not all in exactly the way I described here, but some variation on the concept of characters instead of worlds.

“In This Life” is going in the book as an alternate way to play, because it is just too good not to include. I have… a few other ideas in mind as well, but we’ll see if they’re good enough to make the cut. I’ve said before that In This World says it’s a game where you make worlds, but it’s really a tool to examine assumptions. I think there may be a whole host of ways or places we could use this method that we haven’t even thought of yet.

We’re just scratching the surface.

Combining Worlds: See You Space Cowboy…

We had an urge to play some space cowboys. But what does “space cowboys” even mean to us? There was one way to find out: play In This World and chew on our preconceptions.

Our plan was to play In This World to prototype some worlds, and then pick one to use for another game we were going to run. Rather than trying to define “space cowboys” as a concept at the start, we used the ‘combine two things’ technique and inserted space into slot 1 and cowboys into slot 2, just to make sure we were really starting from the ground floor.

And it totally worked! We made four tasty worlds. Well, universes really, because: space. All very good, all very distinct takes on what it meant to be a space cowboy. But which one to use for our game??

Spoiler: we used all of them.

Yep that’s right. After a bit of pondering we realized that all four ideas we created could interlock together, perfectly.

World 1 was a planet where a colony ship crashed long ago, leaving survivors to spread out and settle the barren world. Security androids from the ship had been repurposed into law enforcement, creating relentless robot sheriffs prowling the badlands. A totally cowboy vibe, but on a distant world.

World 2 was a lot more sci fi, with “cowboys” as frontier mech jockeys, on the very edge of the expanding universe, fighting to claim infinitely valuable star-seeds from the emerging cosmic proto-matter before anyone else. They are the legendary adventurer-heroes every child dreams of becoming, their names written among the stars.

What, no hackers yet? World 3 has you covered. Cowboys roam the data nets, infiltrating and stealing. But this is an interplanetary internet, the data connecting a thousand worlds and a myriad of races in a great galactic civilization. Humanity are small fries, a tiny unimportant race, except for one distinction: for reasons unknown, they are the only species who can project their minds into the net. They are the only cowboys, so the other civilizations have to hire them to do their dirty work. Essential but eternally outsiders.

And then World 4 takes us back to a more classic cowboy vibe. The entire galaxy is united and civilized, but one world has been kept wild as a haven for people who don’t want to follow society’s rules. Anyone can reject civilization and go live on the badlands planet, where there is no law but what you make… And once you go, you can’t return.

Four very different worlds, but I think you can already see how they click together. Worlds 1 and 4 are the same place, a world where a colony ship crashed long ago and has now been set aside by the interworld-government as a free haven, an outlet for those who can’t adapt to the galactic utopia. And that galactic civilization is world 3, where humans have a rare niche as hackers, but are otherwise unimportant… with that unimportance perhaps fueling the desire to escape, one way or another. And then world 2, with the larger than life mech-cowboys on the edge of the expanding universe are just the outer fringes of that same civilization, another place where heroic individualism can still survive.

Normally you can merge ideas with a little adjustment, but this was exceptional because we didn’t have to change a single thing. They just clicked. Was that a side-effect of creating them all with In This World? That even though we knew they were independent worlds, our brains were already primed with similar ideas or subconsciously making things that worked together? Who knows? It’s not something I’ve seen in other In This World sessions.

Either way, our combined setting gave us three distinct kinds of space cowboys in this one universe:

• galactic mech fortune hunters on the edge of existence
• second-class citizen hackers, the underclass of an otherwise utopian alien civilization
• pioneers who have rejected civilization and “gone west” to make their own way on the badlands planet

Which actually brought us right back to our initial question: what kind of space cowboys did we want to play? If you guessed dusters, speeder bikes, and robot-sheriffs prowling the wastelands, you would be right. But now we knew so much more about the civilization outside our world, the wardens of our tiny preserve.

We knew what we had turned our backs on.

Early Access Released

My original plan was to release an early access version of In This World to backers after the Kickstarter ended, so they could get started playing before the whole book was done.

But then the other day I was having a great time playing with a new group of people and it made me think — for the millionth time — that this game is just fun to play. And I thought to myself: why wait? Why not let my backers start playing as soon as possible?

So that’s what I did. I finished incorporating all the playtest feedback, revised and improved all the explanation text, made sure everything was ready to go, and then sent it out to backers. Just in time for the weekend!

I can talk about how much fun In This World is all day, but the real test is people sitting down and getting to play it for themselves. And now they can.

Gameplay Video: In This World

Trying something new! I’ve uploaded a gameplay video of one of our In This World sessions. The topic for our worlds: Vacations!

I’ve never tried posting video of our sessions before, but a lot of people have asked to see what all my games look like in action, so we’ll see how this works!

It is, of course, totally unscripted. You get to see the whole process, from sitting down to picking a topic for our worlds to hashing out all the details. Real gaming, warts and all! Big kudos to Caroline, Marc, and Al for being willing to take the plunge!

Like and subscribe and all that jazz!

In This World, In Your Head

or, “Can you play this game solo?”

Ever since I starting working on In This World, it has been slowly taking over my brain. I don’t mean I’m working on it all the time, I mean it is working on me!

I’m just going about my day, minding my own business, and then something crosses my mind, some topic like Toys or Museums or Weather. And immediately I start thinking of statements: common and obvious things that are true about that topic. Things we don’t even normally think about. Things we take for granted.

And then, naturally, because In This World has a hold on me, I think “hmmmm, well, what if that wasn’t true?” And before I know it I’m imagining new worlds and questioning everything.

Like just now, after dealing with social media, I imagined an alternate world where people leave each other secret notes in the woods. The most adorable social media!!!

But let’s be clear: the game is designed to be a group activity. It’s not built for solo play. And yet… I find myself playing it solo all the time. I start applying the method and suddenly I’m interrogating the world and percolating new ideas.

And that’s not even counting cases where I play a normal session, and then walk around afterwards thinking of even more ideas (yeah, ask me about my Dating world where instead of “people have a wide range of expectations of dating” there are Five Schools of dating philosophy and everyone adheres to one of them, like a 70s kung fu movie).

It’s a compulsion! I can’t stop myself!

And you know what? I like it.

In This World, Story Games Are Joy

“We started by changing “Story games aren’t about winning,” to “well, actually they are…””

Caroline and Marc took In This World for a spin on a lovely and leisurely Sunday morning. Their topic? Something near and dear to us all: story games!

Less Than Three Games: World of Story Games

“But what I most appreciate about In This World is how it makes me feel that the magic of each and every game is us — people getting together and sharing our unique perspectives to make something new.

“In this world, story games are joy.”

See? Caroline gets it.

It’s Raining Mechs

Alien mechs fall from the sky like shooting stars. Their technology is so advanced that even after smashing into the Earth they still work. And just one is advanced enough to change the balance of power. Governments and militaries around the world race to be the first to secure each mech as it falls…

For this session of In This World, instead of a real world topic, we decided to take something fictional for a spin.

Our topic: mechs.

We had Greek warriors laboring to turn gears inside towering Trojan Horses that actually fought and conquered cities. And another world that was more like “Leave It To Beaver”, but with a mech in every garage instead of cars and cartoonish robot battles as common as songs in a musical (“Fred, your dog pooped on my lawn again!” *mech fight!*).

The whole game was great, but the third world we made, the “it’s raining mechs” world, was a particularly great example of how each player’s contribution builds and bounces off the last. Our players? Mike, Haskell, Jem and me. Everyone had played In This World before.

One of our starting statements — things that are normally true about the topic but might be different here — was “people build mechs” and that change was the starting point of Mike’s world: in this world, people don’t make mechs, they fall from the sky, alien artifacts of some unknown origin. They hit infrequently, usually one at a time in some random part of the world, and there are maybe a hundred here so far.

As the starting player, Mike also got to pick two other statements he wanted to stay true: “militaries deploy mechs” and “mechs fight each other”, explaining that these alien machines are so much better than conventional weapons that if one nation fields a mech you either field a mech to counter it or you lose. Even a minor nation that gets its hands on one is suddenly a force to be reckoned with. The old international balance of power is thrown out of the window.

So that’s all Mike’s turn, player 1. I would say the rest of us sat back and went “hmmm” with our thinking caps on, but that would not a total lie: we were all chomping at the bit, because we all had ideas.

Jem, throws a smoke bomb to distract us and jumps in next. One of our statements was “mechs require fuel”, which honestly I didn’t expect to come up a lot. But oh no, Jem says yeah that’s true, they totally do. But it’s alien fuel that we don’t understand and can’t produce. So every single mech has limited use. You might get three or four major battles out of one and then it’s dead.

Oooooooh, tasty! That throws a massive wrench in the cost-benefit analysis of mech battles. I love it. Haskell decides to add some detail and make us feel bad by saying that if you didn’t fight and instead hooked up a mech as a power source, you could produce vast quantities of clean energy. Yes they would run out of juice eventually, but not before they did a lot of good, if we were willing to use them for peaceful purposes instead of war. Which no one does, because they’re too valuable as military assets. Now we have guilt.

Another of our statements was that “mechs vary”, meaning there are all sorts of different models and so on, but I throw in a relative softball that no, in this world every mech is the same. I like it because it makes the balance of power crystal clear: one mech equals one mech, all the world over.

That’s round one done! For round two we put away the remaining statements and focus on just adding detail to what we’ve already established.

The second half really drove home the ‘one mech equals one mech’ idea and removed any romance from the situation by adding that pilot skill doesn’t really make a difference, because the mech control systems are really doing the work. You control the mech but it’s not like being an ace pilot gives you an edge. This is not your heroic anime story.

But even more importantly, the whole situation is veering towards a zero-sum game: when a mech falls from the heavens, everyone can see it coming and decide whether to try to grab it, but you have to deploy mechs to capture mechs, which uses up fuel. If you’re unlucky the cost might be higher than the reward.

In the blink of an eye, we had made a juicy and nuanced world, teeming with tension. I would play a whole campaign exploring that setting.

Careful readers will notice that at no point did we discuss *why* there were alien mechs falling from the heavens. It never came up, because that’s not the part of the setting we were curious about. And that’s a core principle of In This World: you dig into the stuff that the people at the table are interested in. You make the world you want to explore.

In This World Kickstarter Has Launched!

The kickstarter for In This World is now live.

I pressed the button and unleashed the flood.

One Week Until Launch

The date is set. The kickstarter for In This World is launching on Tuesday May 16, one week from today. That’s my plan, anyway! Because the sooner I launch, the sooner you all get to play the game.

I’m also going to be chatting with folks at the Foresight Games event this Wednesday (tomorrow), talking about In This World and how questioning our assumptions about the world we have now is fundamental to visualizing a different future…

Calling All Streamers

Want to stream or podcast a game of In This World? I would love to jump on and facilitate a game, or just send you the rules so you can play it, or just talk about this weird little game and how it works.

I suspect In This World is particularly well-suited for streaming, because it jumps in fast and showcases a lot of player creativity. And since you’re making several bite-sized worlds instead of one big creation, viewers can get a whole picture out of watching just a chunk.

Drop me a line at info at lamemage.com. I’ve already got some things lined up, but the more the merrier! I think In This World is a game that speaks to a broad range of people — gamers and non-gamers alike — so I want to give a broad range of people a chance to try it.

In This World Prepares to Launch

The Kickstarter prelaunch page for In This World is up. Click that notify button!

This is temporary art while we hammer out the finishing touches on the cover. It will be glorious.

Since we’re getting closer to release, it’s also time to officially wrap up the playtest. I tend to let these things simmer to get as much good feedback as possible, but the playtesters have already outdone themselves.

If you’ve got any more feedback, end of May is the deadline!

In This World vs The Trident of Progress

I realized I haven’t posted anything about In This World for a while. But I’ve only not been talking about it because I’ve been busy working on it instead.

The three prongs of the trident of progress have been:

1) Integrating all the playtest feedback and refining the presentation of the game,

2) Seeing what amazing cover art Al Lukehart can make, and

3) Gearing up for the kickstarter

If you had “In This World kickstarter in May” on your bingo card, you win the points.

The Shackles of Precognition

In the past few years I’ve had a lot more regular weekly games than one-shots. Mostly games with no GM, so no one is writing a story for us to follow. We are all just playing in the moment and seeing what happens.

I love it. Except for one thing, which I’m doing to myself.

Sometimes I come to the session with an idea for a scene already in mind. It usually happens when I know my turn is next and I want to be ready to leap right in and frame a scene to get the game started quickly — can’t waste precious game time!

But it always feels like cheating. It doesn’t feel genuine to show up with a scene already baked. Even if it’s a great idea, I feel bad because it doesn’t feel like I’m playing in the moment. I’m reciting a bit of story I already wrote, even if it’s just a premise for a scene.

And it’s a slippery slope. Once you have a starting point, and a whole week to think about it, you start imagining what you’ll say and how it might play out. Soon you have a whole mental script of what you want to happen. Even if you remind yourself that these are only things that could happen, you’ve got a whole agenda looking over your shoulder. A script monkey on your back, interfering with your spontaneity.

It sucks, and it goes totally against the principles of these games. And the irony is that the more fun the game has been, the more tempting it is to think about all the things that could happen, because the game is fun to think about!

Once I get past any planned material, everything is fine, and the game becomes natural and fun again. I’m just reacting and improvising, listening to what the other players are bringing and running with it. That is true, in-the-moment, play. And when I make scenes mid-game, they’re spontaneous and often even better, because they’re hot reactions to the vibe at the table, right now.

This trap of planning ahead only comes up a fraction of the time — usually only when my scene is next, and even then only some of the time — but I’ve been wrestling with different ways to fight it. Sometimes I’ll jettison a pre-planned scene idea at the last minute and make something else up on the spot. Or I’ll ask other players involved in the scene questions so they help shape it. “Would your character have been following me, or is this just a chance encounter?” etc. That immediately starts to make it something organic and interactive, freeing me from my preconceptions.

Either way, I try to get the pre-planned bit out of the way as quickly as possible so I can get back to playing in the moment and seeing how the other characters respond and react. Outrun my own precognition to escape, Muad’dib-style.

I see other players pre-plan scenes too. Honestly it happens all the time, I assume for all the same reasons. But ironically it doesn’t bother me when other people do it, probably because I’m still playing in the moment so I’m having a normal game experience. It only bothers me when they go too far and are clearly laying out a whole story line they’re attached to, trying to GM the game from within.

Are they burdened with guilt the way I am when I roll up with a scene idea in a wheelbarrow? I do not know. I’m guessing some yes, some no.

Where the Ball Lies

We play these games together to be surprised and satisfied by ideas we wouldn’t have created on our own. How all our contributions combine is something no one of us can predict. For that to happen, we have to let go what we individually *expect* or *want* and just see what *does* happen.

We had a great sequence in our Cars+Clouds kingdom game that really reminded me of that, of why it’s so important to not get hung up on what you expect or want, and instead just go with that is happening. To play the ball where it lies.

In this one session, there were *multiple* spots where some player was expecting things to go a certain way, but was then stymied by another character doing something that upended their plans. This was a culmination of six months of play, the big finale, so people had *thoughts*. And we talked about it as players, but instead of going back and cleaning things up to fit people’s expectations, we just embraced the situation and went with it. We followed the procedure and stayed in the moment and had the characters react to the things that happened as they happened.

The result was a richer and more intertwined story than I think any of us would have predicted if we just sat down with a blank sheet of paper and planned it out solo. We confounded each other but in doing so made each others’ stories so much better.

This even extended to the player / scheduling level: we thought we were going to finish the Crossroad that session, and were watching the clock to make sure we could get everything done, but then as more action unfolded and characters escalated, there was no way it could all get done without another session. And it was clear to us that that was the right choice, because the added story we were packing in was The Good Stuff, and our game was far better with it, even if it didn’t fit the schedule we had expected.

We went with it and we were rewarded for it.