How do you prevent the appearence of 'immortals'

Question

I haven't played Microscope yet, but I've watched various playthroughs and read the book multiple times. One thing I'm struggling to understand is the game's stance on how period length should relate to the characters' lifespan. The book says this:

"Another good rule of thumb is never to have character lives span more than one Period since that starts to weld adjacent Periods together."

Which makes sense. Not only does this weld adjacent periods together, but also makes the two periods dependent on each-other and harder to wedge anything in between. If a character appears in multiple periods, she becomes immortal almost 'by definition' as from that point onward it doesn't matter how many new periods will be inserted between those initial two, the character would still be alive in both.

And there seems to be a natural tendency for the players to try to tie the history together, by putting the same character into different periods. I've seen it in multiple games, but no one called it out as a violation of the rules, or something that should not be done. If such thing happened, the players always commented along the lines of "Oh, so those two periods are that close together. Now we know that. Okay, let's move on".

I do understand that a group could put 'Immortality' (and 'Time travel') on the Palette, but for me that sounds like a waste of Palette space, and if someone has to explicitly add it to the Palette, this robs the player from adding something of her own. I also do understand that a group can make a house rule of not having these things in game even if they are not on the Palette. Or to add them to the Palette 'by default'. It just seems weird for me that banning these is not among the rules. Not even as optional ones.

How do you manage this in your group? Is this really such a problem, or am I reading too much into it and Microscope is really entirely functional if characters' life can span across multiple periods?

Answer 1

In my experience with Microscope, this has never been an issue. My games of Microscope have tended to have Periods which implicitly lasted centuries, if not millennia, so there was no question of individuals surviving from one into the next. Their descendants or other legacy would certainly carry on, but not their lifespan.

If I felt a need to address this directly, the Palette is clearly the place for it, and the Palette doesn't have a fixed or limited size (it keeps growing until someone says they have nothing more to add) so "wasting Palette space" isn't really an issue. While you could make it a house rule, is that really any different than putting it on the Palette?

Is this really such a problem, or am I reading too much into it and Microscope is really entirely functional if characters' life can span across multiple periods?

This is really the million-dollar question, isn't it?

At a system level, nothing will break in Microscope itself if characters have lifespans crossing Periods. The system remains entirely functional.

The issues that potentially arise would be narrative rather than system-level. If you or I had a lifespan crossing multiple thousand-year Periods, then that would seems a bit... off. If you're doing a history of vampires, on the other hand, then Dracula living across all Periods fits perfectly. Even you or I could live through multiple Periods if the Periods are short enough that each would plausibly last only a few months, years, or maybe a couple decades.

The "welding" effect in the text you quoted is really only a problem if, narratively, the character's existence in both Periods prevents adding a new Period between them. As long as it's plausible for something else to slip into that space, you should be fine.

But it's also worth noting that Microscope is a game which is heavily defined by the people playing and will be very different for each group of players. While you describe the games you've watched online as having been very focused on individual characters, the ones I've played in have tended to be more involved with nations, bloodlines, or named artifacts and only involved individual characters as instigators of Events and participants in Scenes, not as the key to tie large chunks of the history together.