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I'm interested in playing Microscope online and was wondering if anyone knows what tools exist that might support this?

Microscope differs from many RPGs in that it is primarily playing using blank index cards, which you fill in as you play and arrange in a timeline. Features such as battle-maps and dice rolling therefore are not much use.

I've used MapTool in the past, but i'm not sure that it supports the edit-on-the-fly card functionality that would be required.

Any suggestions?

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4 Answers

up vote 7 down vote accepted

What you may want is corkboard.me. It's a virtual shared corkboard that everyone can place, move, and edit virtual sticky notes on. We used it to coordinate with a remote player for our recently-concluded Alternity Star*Drive campaign. For a fill out and arrange card metaphor it's right on point. It's free and there's not even a login; security is by carefully sharing your special corkboard URL, so it may not be a good choice if you want to publicly share the results.

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Holy cow, that's awesome. Thank you for sharing that. – Jadasc Nov 23 '11 at 15:35
@Jadasc - You may also want to look at spaaze which is a similar corkboard site. – gomad Nov 23 '11 at 18:22
That looks awesome and might be just the thing. Only thing it seems to be missing is the ability to backup off the site ;) – Frater Nov 23 '11 at 23:39
@Frater Screen Captures... alt-PrtScrn on windows. Command-Shift-3 on mac. – aramis Nov 27 '11 at 3:02
And then manually recreate all the cards next time you want to play? That could get old very very fast. – Frater Apr 18 '12 at 1:44
up vote 5 down vote

Trello might also be a good choice. https://trello.com/

It's by the same company that makes stackexchange and stackoverflow. It is relatively new but free, they plan on down the road looking at ways of commoditizing it from the 5% of users that will pay for things like integrations into other products and such.

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up vote 4 down vote

I haven't played Microscope before but this seems like something Google Docs would handle incredibly well.

They are designed to be collaboratively edited in real time. You can have everyone join your campaign document and start working.

UPDATE: Brian recently hosted a game and we played it using google docs. We used outline levels to delineate period/event/scene and text highlighting to depict light or dark. It worked quite well in conjunction with voice chat.

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I agree that Google Docs is your answer. A high-level of stability and the data is easy for everyone to access make it prime choice. The collaboration is unmatched. – Josh Nov 23 '11 at 14:50
As I mentioned in the question, I was really looking for a solution that used the card-based mechanism common to the table-top game. Google docs would give me a word-processor document, which is not really what i'm after. – Frater Nov 23 '11 at 23:40
No, docs isn't the answer. Having participated extensively in the beta-test of microscope, an outline provides for an excellent documentation, but very poor real-time representation. – Brian Ballsun-Stanton♦ Nov 25 '11 at 4:13
Actually, Google Docs can give you a drawing or a presentation document in which you can throw as many different colored text rectangles as you would like. But, you may be right, it may not fit what you are looking for. – Josh Nov 26 '11 at 19:29
There's also Fusion Tables, which is a table-drive database. While it doesn't support carriage returns in text cells... but it could be used (with careful numbering) to do a card-based bit. – aramis Nov 27 '11 at 3:09
up vote 2 down vote

I've always thought Mind Mapping software would be good for this kind of thing. https://www.mindmeister.com is online and collaborative, though not free if you want multiple collaborators. It allows you to add icons which would be good for showing light/dark indicators on the nodes, and you can also distinguish between Periods, Events, and Scenes in a similar manner.

I've also seen http://www.wisemapping.com/c/home.htm, but never tried it, but it looks about the same as mindmeister.

The only downside is you have to have a single top level node, but that can just as easily be the name of your current game.

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I used mindmeister to hold information about my Dresden Files campaign. But I found that at some point, my map was overwhelming. It was hard to find information, hard to navigate. I went to Scrivener and was very happy. – gomad Nov 23 '11 at 18:19
Mind mapping would definately fit the bill. Mindmeister looked good but i'm not keen on paying a subscription on something I will only use occasionally. Wisemapping certainly sounds interesting, though do you know if it supports simultaneous collaboration? I can't find any indication on the site. Gomad - I also love Scrivener for that sort of work :) – Frater Nov 23 '11 at 23:45

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