RE: [GM-Less RPGs] The Yogscast vs Microscope
I haven't watched this particular video yet, but I'm positively surprised by them playing Microscope.
I've been watching the Yogscast for about 4 years now, and since they started playing RPGs their taste was usually pretty bad in my opinion (I mean, they brought me to DnD, which in turn brought me to other, better, RPGs, but still) – only RPG they played I liked was Everyone is John (but that's only short fun – being silly only gets you this far) and maybe their Space-Sci-Fi-Homebrew-Thing.
Call of Cthulu, DnD3.5, DnD5 and Edge of the Empire are very mechanic-heavy, and every GM of the Yogscast (Tom or Mark) seems to prefer mechanic-heavy games, quickly turning boring to watch.
This probably is the reason I haven't watched the video yet – Another Yogsquest with another mechanics-heavy game that'll bore me after 2 videos … Yay …
And yet, this is at the opposite end of the spectrum. Maybe they've discovered that all of the mechanic heavy games end up having something of the same architecture and feel after a while. It's something that I don't think that a lot of people have noticed.
Or, to put it as the Forgites use to:
System matters.
At a certain point, the rhythm of interaction and the way that narrative flows around the table becomes screamingly obvious and you can't look away from it. It draws the eye. That's part of why "traditional RPG design" is so immediately distinctive and probably why so many people are generally reluctant to move out of the architecture they learned at the beginning, to the point of very seldomly going outside of the RPG that they learned at the beginning of their gaming lives in a lot of cases.
Hopefully, the Yogscast will bring some of the production values that they've built up over the years to showing us how Microscope looks in actual play. I expect things will be offhanded and silly until the first time that someone realizes they can make a Scene whose central Question is, "why does my father hate me?" And then there will be a pregnant pause.
I always love that moment.