if you asked Ben's brain about gaming, this is what it would say
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My fellow designer Caroline Hobbs has described Microscope as my Silmaril, the work of my heart that cannot be remade . And she was not wrong. For a long time cracking open Microscope and revising it felt like an impossible task. But what better task to take up than the impossible one? And now, after creeping [ ]
When I was a kid watching movies with my Dad, he would sometimes frown and say, they left out the reaction shot . What he meant was the movie showed some important moment like the bad guy getting defeated or some tragic setback, but it didn t show the characters reaction. The hero s relief as they score [ ]
It s hardly revolutionary to say that in the vast majority of role-playing games, your character is your single strongest vector of contribution, so making a good character is critical. But what s a good character? Easy: Someone you (and everyone else at the table) finds interesting. Someone we want to talk about. Someone who moves the [ ]
I m making it official: a new edition of Microscope is in the works. I ve looked in my crystal ball, laid out my schedule, and set crowdfunding for October. If you ve been following this blog, you know I ve been working on improvements for Microscope for a few years now. Because I love it but I think [ ]
I ve talked about how This Means War strives to simulate a believable (but surprising) war. But now I want to talk about the other half of the game: the character-side. The idea all along was that this was a war-game that wasn t really about war, it was about the people living through the war. All [ ]
The old Games Unlimited in Pittsburgh was the game store of our childhood. It s where we went to buy RPGs, modules, dice, and a whole pile of miniatures. We rummaged through the shelves in the far back and then greedily carried our treasures home on the bus. But now, decades later, they have a new [ ]
The war between Wyverdown and Irontree continues! I know I said I was writing this to demonstrate the rules of This Means War, and that mission is pretty much accomplished, but I am having too much fun to stop. So let s just do a fewwww more seasons… Season 3, Spring of Year 2 The snows [ ]
or, how this weird new game relates to a session of West Marches from over twenty years ago After three wars and 15 sessions, we had our first character death in This Means War. I mean a death caused by the rules, where the Waracle requires you to roll for Fate and then looks you [ ]
We ve got our nations and we re ready for war. You re welcome to download the playtest rules and follow along at home. And if you re asking wait, what nations, what war? you should probably go back and read the first post. Season 1 Starts It s Fall, the first season of the game, and time to consult [ ]
You know what This Means War is missing? Examples. There are not nearly enough examples. I was hyper focused on making sure all the rules clicked before I handed you the playtest, but now that it s out, I ve got time to demonstrate exactly what playing a war is like. And (spoiler) you re reading it right [ ]
What does This Means War look like on your table? A little something like this: That intimidating beast is the Battlemap. But don t be afraid, it is here to help. The Battlemap makes your game flow more smoothly by showing the state of each nation, the territory, the current action, and a brief history of [ ]
Want to start some trouble? The playtest of This Means War is ready to download and play, right now. Be warned, it is very… different… from my other games. We ve played it a bunch and had some pretty fantastic experiences, but it is still very much a summerlab experiment: We re going to sit down together [ ]
I did, by the way, literally change my opinion on Microscope and this rule as I was writing this post, which was originally going to be a piece about how weird and bad this rule is This is a great article by Nicholas aka omophagic_beast, having a lot of issues with Microscope, but then digging [ ]
Want to listen to people playing games? Well you ve got options, because folks out there are playing games of all shapes and sizes: Stormwrought Shores, The Emerald Bloodletting (Microscope: Chronicle): That s the link to the first episode, but The Unexplored Places is already up to game three. Baseball, In This World: Their sports career is [ ]
From my original Star-Pattern post: A player can describe whatever they want their character to do but it’s not *real* until it goes through the approval of the GM, because there can always be factors the GM knows about but the players don’t, which could cause them to unexpectedly fail or succeed. There is, of [ ]
The playtest of This Means War is chugging along, alarming civilians and crushing dreams. Dreams of the characters, that is the players love it. After 10 games I can confidently say that this weird experiment actually works. We ve got two wars going, ancient Baat Kazir and futuristic Novaterra, and I am tremendously pleased with [ ]
I m not particularly big on audiobooks. If it s a book, I want to read it. And books I particularly like I will read over and over and over again.* So it is a very weird thing that even though I love Lord of the Rings, I can t remember the last time I read the books. [ ]
Power has been out for the last four days. And I am not alone. Cape Cod gets high winds, but this storm was big even for us. 70 mph gusts, combined with one to two feet of snow in one day, knocked down trees and took out power all up and down the Cape. Heavy [ ]
or, omfg Ul-Massara offered peace!!! What the fuck is going on Second session of Ul-Massara vs Baat Kazir, playtesting This Means War. It s winter, the third season of our war, and we just introduced characters and started to explore their lives. We finish the season… and both sides agree to make peace. I cannot describe [ ]
Another playtest of This Means War: When colonists first came to this world, they were united under a single government, working together to survive. Generation after generation slowly built the sprawling mega-city that shields them from the deadly atmosphere and makes life here possible. (Yeah we described the skies as looking like those 60s Ralph [ ]
My post Star-Pattern: A Pitfall of GMing is in the running for a Bloggies award. It s a bracket competition with a new vote every few days, so it ll be interesting to see what happens. Star-Pattern is in the Theory category if you want to vote for it: Bloggies 2026: Theory, Round 1 Bloggies 2026: Theory, [ ]
Naming things is hard -some gaming guru on a mountain top, hundreds of years ago, probably Coming up with names for things is hard, particularly when (like us) you play collaborative creative games where you make the setting together. A GM just has to pick a name they like, but if you re a GMless group [ ]
If you re overseas (from me) and want to avoid the spiraling shipping costs, I ve added Kingdom, Follow, and In This World to join Microscope on Lulu print-on-demand. I never went all-in on print-on-demand before, because back in the day the print quality I was seeing wasn t that great, but the tests I did recently looked [ ]
If you look at the games I ve made over the years, there a few things that are true for all of them: no built-in violence no dice deciding outcomes the players control what s true in the world Sure, you can choose to make a Microscope history that s all about war and fighting (for example), but [ ]
I just got the Chinese translation of Microscope, courtesy of Labyrinth. And woooow. It looks good. I m not sure this picture really does it justice but it looks fantastic in person. Usually I ask translators to use the same design as the original book, to keep the look consistent, but the Labyrinth team wanted to [ ]
We re sitting down to play a story game. We re going to build worlds together and generally make a bunch of stuff up. Imagine our fiction as a chess board. Forget all the rules of chess: none of that applies in this metaphor, I m just using the board because it s a nice grid of squares. You [ ]
This is one of the examples included in Rules of Law to show how the game plays. But then I thought, well if this is such a good demonstration, why not share it with people who don t have the game yet but are wondering what it s like? So here it is. These laws, and the [ ]
Gather round children, and let me tell you a tale about Santa Claus and the spirit of Christmas! All around the world, people had forgotten the true meaning-of-the-season. So it was up to us, the assorted elves and minions of the North Pole to remind them. Yep, it was time for our somewhat annual holiday [ ]
In the intro (which they recorded after the interview) Jason and Brad reflect on how we covered a wide range of topics, and let me tell you, they aren t kidding. Dice In Mind (episode 159): Ben Robbins of Lame Mage (or listen on Apple Podcasts) We had a very fun, very interesting discussion about a [ ]
Rules of Law fits very nicely on two pages. It s a tight procedure, with not too many weird exceptions or explanations, so that works. But one thing I miss are examples. Because clear rules are great, but just as a picture is worth a thousand words , an example can convey a lot of nuance about [ ]
Our justice says who we are as a people. What do we punish? Do we enforce our laws fairly for everyone? Do we think our system is just? These are big questions about the foundations of society, so of course I made a game about it, and now Rules of Law is ready to play. [ ]
It is essential that players like their characters. The character is the lens through which the player experiences everything in the game. It is also essential but not so obvious that they have to like the other players’ characters as well. That s from my very first post on ars ludi, twenty years ago today. I ve [ ]
