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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ainamacar" data-source="post: 5617256" data-attributes="member: 70709">Next week my group is starting a 2nd game, a FATE 3e campaign in a setting that is inspired by Stargate.  Three of us are very familiar with the show, and one of us is not.  However, to help us break away from the tropes and background of the show, the GM has had us play the Microscope RPG for a few weeks beforehand so we can flesh out the basic details of our setting.For those of you who haven't heard of Microscope, it is a diceless GM-less round-robin story-telling RPG where everyone takes turns specifying events, periods, or scenes.  (The latter are roleplayed).   Each round of the game has certain thematic and timeline restrictions, and is quite structured in terms of who has narrative control at any given time, but still offers a lot of flexibility and often progresses non-linearly.   To keep players on task, scenes are directed (they must address a particular question such as "How did we find the stargate?") and events are suggestively labeled either light or dark, though in what way and for whom is undetermined at first.These are the very broadest strokes of what we have determined, for those who are curious.[sblock]The stargate was found in the 1970s on Native American lands in the midwest, then rediscovered in the mid 1990s when it fell into the hands of the US Government.  Much of wormhole physics from the show has been rewritten (gates connect to a single world unless you provide enough energy in which case they go to mysterious galactic hubs, gate travel is two-way) and the politics of the gate suggests an uneasy French-US alliance such that the gate ends up near CERN.  Some broad book-ends are the sudden disappearance of the gate, its reappearance years later (a dark event), followed by the arrival of an alien ship (a light event) and the leak of the gate's existence to the rest of the world.  The pertinent details of these events have not been defined, but even though they are probably far into the future of the FATE game there is a lot of value in knowing just these few things, but no idea of the context.The FATE game will start with the first offworld team to get to a hub but are promptly stranded.  After some investigation they learn enough to get to use another gate leading to an alien world and hopefully food.  The last moment in Microscope was them stepping through the gate, emerging into a world with an alien cityscape dominating the horizon.[/sblock]Now, I've been reflecting on how this style of collaborative setting creation would actually be very useful for gaining setting buy-in from the players in almost any RPG, particularly unfamiliar settings.  By giving the players narrative control (within some scope specified by the GM) before play even begins, they can determine character/party backgrounds, meet and roleplay major NPCs, and invent some of the flavor that will grab them.  I'd also expect some emergent plot hooks that would otherwise never appear.  Heck, let them roleplay the villain (or a henchman) in a fashion not immediately applicable to the party at all.    In short, let them explore and control the world before they do so with their PCs.I've tried things that aim toward the same goal, such as running a oneshot to set the scene for the main campaign or distributing the classic "setting handbook" but in both cases I feel there is less sense of ownership, and the details are a lot easier to forget.  Other formal methods I've heard about are generally focused on each character's background, which doesn't necessarily have such a large scope.The major downside, as I see it, is that strong narrative control by players, even over relatively minor aspects of a pre-existing setting, could give some DMs a fit.  Perhaps the Microscope rules would need a few more constraints than normal.  Still, my intuition is that the surest way to gain player buy-in is to give them ownership of a little bit of the setting from the start.  And although some players and groups generate elaborate backstories and well-motivated team interactions anyway, for other players I can see this process as extremely valuable.  The hack-n-slash loving friend in an otherwise strongly narrative-minded group, for example.How do you all try to create player buy-in for new or unfamiliar settings?  Would this idea work for a wide range of groups, or is it not be worth the trouble?  For setting creation from scratch it has been rather wonderful for my group, but I wonder how it would work in, for example, a Dark Sun campaign with new players and a DM immersed in DS lore.</blockquote>

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