Micro, mezzo and macro scale and style of play

What a great season it's been to start to skim and study rpg's. For the past ten years I've been swirling around trying to figure out what I'm interested in playing and homebrewing and I'd like to share a model I'm considering. Loosely inspired by social work scopes of practice of micro, mezzo and macro levels, I am gravitating toward a model of organizing my design and play.

Micro level would be the individual and small group level of play. The bulk of tabletop rpgs.

Mezzo level play could include or not include micro level play, but is at the scope of organizations, governments or other more involved groups, cultures and institutions. It's the level of guilds, municipalities, unions, syndicates, clans and societies. This is where I'm trying to figure out my design and play theories and practices. It really was inspired by Ars Magica V's covenants and advancement play that became sessions and play of their own. But the old AD&D Dungeon Master's Guide had considerations of maturing and advancing of play when it started listing strongholds and henchmen to lead, etc.

I've been inspired recently by my recent discoveries of Strands of Fate's chapter on organizations and the Fate Fractal, Pathfinder's Ultimate Campaign and Downtime rules and a Reddit post on organization or mezzo level play that have included other title-dropping ideas of checking out Reign (can't wait), Legacy: Life Among the Ruins, Stars Without Number, Rogue Trader and Adventurer Conqueror King system. There's even an RPGGeek thread on the boardgame Battlestations that sounds like it relates well to what I'm talking here.

Macro level play would be the level of nations, kingdom, multinational corporations or interstellar federations. This might include the Microscope rpg or other similar developments in a campaign. I never got it past character design and opening posts but I was pretty excited to start a Numenera campaign that would include some Microscope RPG gaming to develop politics and culture among the nation-states and institutions of the Steadfast and the Beyond.

So what do you think of the model? What experiences of mezzo level play have you seen or experienced? I'm excited about some potential design sketches and have been impressed by learning about West Marches style campaigning, too. Would love to see a West Marches inspired mezzo campaign design but with a few different details but still trying to figure out what I'm looking for. : )

I'm playing in a Legacy: Life Among the Ruins game here, which as you alluded to, has both micro (PC) and mezzo (families) levels of play. So far it's going good, the PCs have some influence in advancing their Families, largely through the advancement of "treaties". We can also post/play at the Family level.

Many years ago, I ran a D&D 3.0/3.5 campaign and when the players got high enough, they earned Baronies. We brought in some simple kingdom management rules, but it was clunky and arbitrary. We didn't use that as much as I'd hoped.

I think the hard part is without clear rules, the players have to rely on GM buying onto their narrative. When that fails, there is nowhere to turn to. You can argue, but that ends games fast. Without knowing HOW to succeed, players can become frustrated or disinterested in the process.

I therefore conclude, based on extremely limited experience, that a more clunky system with defined mezzo/macro rules has a better chance of lasting than a narrative system that relies on the GM and players connecting in their visions.

I don't think of it much in terms of scale from the point of view of an individual in a setting. I think of it in terms of what the story is being told about. If you are telling a story about a group of criminals, is the story about each individual criminal and if they go straight or leave the area will the story continue to follow them, or is it more about the organisations they are parts of? What is the focus of the game on?

The difference will drive the design which will drive the game. A game about a ragtag group of misfits taking any job they can get and then chasing after their own goals in the meantime is the baseline for Shadowrun, and the group isn't as important as each individual member's drive, whereas the baseline for Blades in the Dark is explictly about the Crew: your individual character in Blades is an important member OF that crew but if (and given the game mechanics WHEN) a member is arrested or killed, the crew collectively shrugs it's shoulders and continues without them.

That sets different expectations of your players and their characters. Even though the above examples are both heist games following criminal undercurrents, the former is more Fast & The Furious where the players interconnections and drives push the plot, where the latter is more The Wire where what your characters want doesn't matter as much as what the system they inhabit wants. And it applies to other games too. Your characters in D&D are forging epic destinies and following quests of dramatic importance to them. Your many, many grogs and dozen or so companions in Ars Magica are quite literally expendable footnotes in the tale of the chantry behind the one or two mages who are doing the really important work.

The focus of the game, be it on individuals, or on organisations, or on nations and worlds sets the focus for us as players to create characters that lend itself to that, and that one's the more important one to communicate to players when the campaign starts: are you able to change the world because this is a protagonist focussed adventure, or are you a contributor to a greater whole?

Can't wait to check out a set of the rules to Legacy. Aye, clear rules are needed. And I keep thinking a design with incentive to develop/advance the group or develop integrated play.

Ooh, this is helpful, txl Although I've role-played over a few decades, but it has been sparsely and with only a few engines. Your theory helps broaden mine.