One Campaign, Many Systems: An Experiment (Part II)

In Part I of this series, I laid out my plan to play through a series of RPG systems – one a week – over the summer. On top of that, I wrote about my gaming groups’ desire to maintain a single set of characters and therefore a cohesive story for the duration of the campaign.

Last week saw our first transition between systems. This first transition is something of a “soft” transition to Microscope. I call it “soft” because there was very little in the way of cohesive story that we had to maintain between D&D and Microscope. But first, a small synopsis on how the campaign started with our D&D 4th edition sessions:

The Story

We revisited the world we created last summer (more on that in a minute) but 30 years into the future. The players all had new characters, although last summer’s characters all made reappearances as NPCs.

The D&D story hook was a missing fleet of ships that had been sent to a neighboring island nation. The PCs were tasked with finding out what happened to it.

In the course of their nautical journey, they were attacked by a species of fish men that was completely unknown in the world. They later found out that there seemed to be an invasion of these fish men, and the invaders were arriving from a generally eastward direction. This area was known as “the uncharted east.”

What happened next got mixed reviews from my players. In sailing towards the invading force to investigate their origins, the group of PCs discovered that they are living in a huge biome, not unlike The Truman Show‘s big reveal. This is where the D&D session ended.

The Microscope Session

Last week we played Microscope. It is something of a quasi-RPG (or perhaps “non-traditional RPG”) in that players do not pick a single character and play in a game world at a fixed point in time. Instead, the players are designing the timeline for a world, zooming in and out throughout the whole world’s history, placing events, epochs, and even zooming in close enough to observe individual characters for a brief moment.

It’s a great game to stretch your creative muscles, and can also be a fun way to build a world before you start a campaign.

And it backfired spectacularly.

As a group, we opted to take one of the pregenerated “starting seeds” to set our history in. “Machines discover their organic origins.” Then, we began laying out the history, including the departure of humans from the world, the arrival of aliens, and the accidental epidemic of manufactured bacteria. At the end of the session, we lamented some of our palette choices (whose bright idea was “no metal” and “no political powers”?), but I think we were overall satisfied with the game and would play it again.

So when I say it backfired, I should clarify that the actual playing of the game did not backfire. It was more the discussion at the end of the session where I asked, “And where do we think [the Islands World] we set up last year fits into this timeline?”

You see, with Microscope, we had designed a world of technology. Our campaign last year was one of fantasy and magic. For some of the players, this was an irreconcilable difference. Suggesting that last year’s fantasy world existed inside of another more technological world caused some bad feelings within the group, even though using that plot device facilitated bridging RPG systems (particularly D&D and more modern systems). They did not want to conceive of last summer’s world as something other than what we assumed it was last year – a strictly fantasy world. Anything else would ruin the memory of that campaign.

We reconciled the bad feelings by simply saying that the fantasy islands biome/Truman Show world was simply one possible reality that collapsed during Gamma World’s “Big Mistake” and it is not the same reality that we played in last summer. It wasn’t a perfect explanation, but it was good enough.

What I learned

It was a huge mistake on my part to bring back last summer’s campaign world. Because the players had such an investment in the world as it existed in their imagination last summer, when I shook up those preconceived notions, I got some kickback. I would have been better off either:

1. Starting the campaign with Microscope, and using the new world we created
2. Doing it the way I did it (including the Truman Show plot device), but with a new world of my own design.

I would lean towards #2 because it would let the players get a little invested into the world with their characters, then back out and take a larger view of the entire history. In other words, I think that starting out in a fantasy world, then saying, “Hey, somewhere in this world’s history, there were machines” is not only perfectly valid, but can also be a great storytelling opportunity. It also bends the player’s brains a little. I just wouldn’t do it with something that is already well loved and that the players have an emotional stake in.

I should have also laid out expectations at the outset of this summer more clearly. We all agreed that we would try to play through a bunch of different systems, and that we would try to maintain the same character throughout. That was the extent of the discussion. There was no detailed talk of the how, or that perhaps I might smash some preconceived notions about last year’s world, and is that ok, or should we start fresh? Part of that was me wanting to keep “the big Truman Show reveal” secret, and part of that was simply me not thinking ahead. If there is a next time for such an experiment, I will have an intentional group discussion so that there is an agreed upon set of expectations at the outset. If that means some of the story is spoiled or revealed, so be it. It’s better that everyone be on the same page.

In the end, the backfire was mostly laziness on my part. I was leaning back on something established so I wouldn’t have to make something new. I guess being a lazy DM isn’t always a good thing.

Going Forward

Next week, we will be playing Gamma World as the PCs move through the “Door in the sky” into the real world outside their manufactured biome. Most of the players will be rolling their PCs randomly using the super easy WotC Gamma World character generator. Onward!