Dice Exploder

Transcripts available at diceexploder.comHere near the end of Dice Exploder's larp series, I wanted to have on Caro Murphy (Galactic Starcruiser) to talk about experience design, and specifically how to think about curating all those parts of an experience bigger and larger than most of us at home will ever have access to. How do you design the set a game is played on? How do you design something for hundreds if not thousands of participants?And Caro delivered so much more: we get into bleed and empathy and how Caro sees games as an inherently educational medium. Let's get into it!Ad LinksVesta Mandate by Story Games ChicagoSign up for the Spectacula pre-release newsletter from Jeremy MelloulFurther readingMeghan Gardner at Guard Up AdventuresClub DrosselmeyerCaro on Imaginary Worlds and then AgainGalactic Starcruiser on WikipediaSocialsCaro's websiteSam on Bluesky and itchThe Dice Exploder blog is at diceexploder.comOur logo was designed by sporgory, our ad music is Lilypads by Travis Tessmer, and our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey.Join the Dice Exploder Discord to talk about the show!Dice Exploder on Patreon

Transcripts available at diceexploder.comSafety in RPGs and larp is a huge topic, one I've wanted to cover on Dice Exploder for a long time, but one I've avoided it because it feels hard to approach inside the “pick one mechanic” format of this show. Even more than most mechanics I cover on Dice Exploder, I feel like most safety mechanics are in conversation with each other in both logistical ways—how they compliment each other—but also in the philosophy behind their existence in the first place, how including these mechanics at the table is ideally a statement about how we'd like to treat each other both at the table and away from it. So today we're gonna name that underlying philosophy and call that our mechanic: “players are more important than the game” is something I hear in conversations around safety all the time, and that's this episode.To break it down, I'm joined by Sarah Lynne Bowman. She studies all this professionally, and she has so much to say and to share about how safety tools work in theory and in practice, how no tool can ever guarantee your safety (even if we should still definitely use them), and how building good communities around our games is at least as important to safer play as any individual tool.Finally, content warning in this episode for mention of sexual assault and emotional abuse in rpg communities. We don't get deep into any specifics, but they come up.Further ReadingYour Larp's Only As Safe As It's Play Culture by Troels Ken PedersenDice Exploder on accessibility in game designCreating a Culture of Trust through Safety and Calibration Larp Mechanics by Maury BrownLarp Design, the bookBibliography from Sarah Lynne BowmanKoljonen, Johanna. 2019. “Opt-out and Playstyle Calibration Mechanics.” In Larp Design: Creating Role-play Experiences, edited by Johanna Koljonen, Jaakko Stenros, Anne Serup Grove, Aina D. Skjønsfjell and Elin Nilsen, 235-237. Copenhagen, Denmark: Landsforeningen Bifrost. 3 pages.Koljonen, Johanna. 2020. “Larp Safety Design Fundamentals.” JARPS: Japanese Journal of Analog Role-Playing Game Studies 1: Emotional and Psychological Safety in TRPGs and Larp (September 21): 3e-19e.Hugaas, Kjell Hedgard. 2024. “Bleed and Identity: A Conceptual Model of Bleed and How Bleed-Out from Role-Playing Games Can Affect a Player's Sense of Self.” International Journal of Role-Playing 15 (June): 9-35. https://doi.org/10.33063/ijrp.vi15.323Bowman, Sarah Lynne. 2015. “Bleed: The Spillover Between Player and Character.” Nordiclarp.org, March 2.Bowman, Sarah Bowman. 2022. “Safety in Role-playing Games I: Introduction -- Sarah Lynne Bowman.” Transformative Play Initiative, February 4.Bowman, Sarah Bowman. 2022. “Safety in Role playing Games II: Before the Game -- Sarah Lynne Bowman.” Transformative Play Initiative, February 4.Bowman, Sarah Bowman. 2022. “Safety in Role playing Games Part III: During the Game -- Sarah Lynne Bowman.” Transformative Play Initiative, February 4.Bowman, Sarah Bowman. 2022. “Safety in Role playing Games Part IV: After the Game --- Sarah Lynne Bowman.” Transformative Play Initiative, February 4.Bowman, Sarah Bowman. 2022. “Safety in Role playing Games Part V: Cultivating Safer Communities -- Sarah Lynne Bowman.” Transformative Play Initiative, February 4.SocialsSam on Bluesky and itchThe Dice Exploder blog is at diceexploder.comOur logo was designed by sporgory, our ad music is Lilypads by Travis Tessmer, and our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey.Join the Dice Exploder Discord to talk about the show!Dice Exploder on Patreon

Transcripts available at diceexploder.comLast week, indie rpg YouTube essayist Aaron Voigt and I delved into Heart: the City Beneath, a surreal and maximalist dungeon crawler with lots to love. But when I ran the game, I had some trouble with it from a mechanic that by all accounts I should love: beats, little nuggets of story, little goals your character takes on that they advance by achieving. I've always found it strange I didn't love beats in practice, and I today I wanted to break down how and why they left me overwhelmed and unsatisfied. I think there's at least as much to learn from looking at what doesn't work in games as what does, especially in games and other art that feels so close to exactly for you…Further ReadingHeart: the City Beneath by Rowan, Rook and DecardSpire: the City Must Fall by Rowan, Rook and DecardSocialsAaron on Bluesky, itch, YouTube, and PatreonSam on Bluesky and itchThe Dice Exploder blog is at diceexploder.comOur logo was designed by sporgory, our ad music is Lilypads by Travis Tessmer, and our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey.Join the Dice Exploder Discord to talk about the show!Support Dice Exploder on Patreon!

Transcripts available at diceexploder.comHeart: the City Beneath. It's a surreal and bloody dungeon crawler full of so much to love… plus some bits that drive me up the wall. This week and next I'm devoting TWO episodes to it. Today, it's everything I love about Heart as seen through the lens of zenith abilities: epic things that let players take control of the game and do something gigantic and fucking cool… before killing their character.I'm joined by ardent Heart-lover Aaron Voigt, aka the guy who makes the indie rpg video essays on YouTube. We get into Heart's spectacular setting, the act of handing story agency over to players, and the joys of playing to lose. Then come back next week for part two with more Heart and more Aaron!AdsRust Never Sleeps, a solo blackjack mecha rpgFurther ReadingHeart: the City Beneath by Rowan, Rook and DecardSpire: the City Must Fall by Rowan, Rook and DecardSanfielle by Friends At The TableAgon 2e by Sean Nittner and John HarperSocialsAaron on Bluesky, itch, YouTube, and PatreonSam on Bluesky and itchThe Dice Exploder blog is at diceexploder.comOur logo was designed by sporgory, our ad music is Lilypads by Travis Tessmer, and our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey.Join the Dice Exploder Discord to talk about the show!Support Dice Exploder on Patreon!

Transcripts available at diceexploder.comOver on the Dice Exploder discord, we welcome new members by asking them what their favorite mechanic is. It's a great tradition, kicks off a lot of great conversations, but I have largely avoided having it turned my way. So today I thought let's just get it out there in an episode: what is my favorite mechanic and what do I think about it?Further ReadingElf MotorsSocialsChris's podcast How to Be a Better HumanSam on Bluesky and itchThe Dice Exploder blog is at diceexploder.comOur logo was designed by sporgory, our ad music is Lilypads by Travis Tessmer, and our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey.Join the Dice Exploder Discord to talk about the show!Dice Exploder on Patreon

Transcripts available at diceexploder.comLast week was a show about how it might work to frame a scene when you get to decide whatever you want that scene to look like. But this week, we're looking at the reverse: what happens when you're given a very detailed scene and must figure out how to incorporate it into your story?This episode brings together a bunch of threads I've been building up throughout this larp series: immersion, the separation or lack thereof between player and character, safer play, and more. I couldn't ask for a better cohost for that than Sharang Biswas.Ads⁠⁠⁠Extra Ordinary on Kickstarter now!⁠⁠⁠Preorder Sharang's book The Iron Below RemembersFurther ReadingHouse of Craving by Tor Kjetil Edland, Danny Wilson & Bjarke PedersenLumberjills by Moyra TurkingtonI Say A Little Prayer by Tor Kjetil EdlandJust a Little Lovin' by Tor Kjetil Edland and Hanne GrasmoUncertainty in Games by Greg CostikyanRules of Play by Katie Salen & Eric Zimmerman The Self Reflexive Tabletop Role Playing Game by Evan Torner The World is Born from Zero by Cameron KunzelmanSocialsSharang on Bluesky and itchSam on Bluesky and itchThe Dice Exploder blog is at diceexploder.comOur logo was designed by sporgory, our ad music is Lilypads by Travis Tessmer, and our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey.Join the Dice Exploder Discord to talk about the show!Dice Exploder on Patreon

Transcripts available at diceexploder.comWhen you're playing roleplay-heavy D&D, what does a scene look like? Since the game doesn't give you much in the way of tools for doing so, are you framing scenes intentionally or just kind of letting them happen? And if the latter, is that serving you well?You very well might be, but I've become obsessed lately with how we frame scenes in roleplaying games, and today I want to talk about a mechanic that does so very firmly: spotlight scenes, a procedure in which  each player in the game gets a turn to say what they want the next scene to be.To do that, I'm joined by Mo Turkington, designer of many great structured freeform larps including the well-lauded Rosenstrasse and her latest release Lumberjills. We get into the history of spotlight scenes, the pros and cons of including rules for framing and ending scenes in your game, and how even a mechanic like this one that feels so structural and procedural, when used int he right context, can have a beautiful, thematically resonant message in it about agency and self-actualization.Ad LinksSong of the Scryptwyrm by Almost Bedtime TheaterFurther ReadingLumberjills by Moyra TurkingtonI Say A Little Prayer by Tor Kjetil EdlandJust a Little Lovin' by Tor Kjetil Edland and Hanne GrasmoRosenstrasse by Moyra Turkington and Jessica HammerMontsegur 1244 by Frederik J. JensenRed Carnations on a Black Grave by Catherine Ramen and Juan OchoaSocialsMoyra's games on itchSam on Bluesky and itchThe Dice Exploder blog is at diceexploder.comOur logo was designed by sporgory, our ad music is Lilypads by Travis Tessmer, and our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey.Join the Dice Exploder Discord to talk about the show!Dice Exploder on Patreon

Transcripts available at diceexploder.comShadows are a metatechnique in larp where you have players in the role of something other than a traditional larp or rpg player character. Maybe they're stagehands turning out the lights because there's ghosts in this house. Maybe they're the characters' worst fears who wander around and whisper into players' ears to egg them on into terrible actions and choices. They're special effects, or ghosts, or whatever else you want them to be. Let's talk about them!Ad Links⁠⁠Extra Ordinary on Kickstarter now!⁠⁠SocialsElin on BlueskySam on Bluesky and itchThe Dice Exploder blog is at diceexploder.comOur logo was designed by sporgory, our ad music is Lilypads by Travis Tessmer, and our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey.Join the Dice Exploder Discord to talk about the show!Dice Exploder on Patreon

Transcripts available at diceexploder.comThere's this period of time between when we've all agreed we're going to play a game now and when we start "actually playing." We've got to learn the rules, learn the setting, maybe go over safety or characters. Maybe we order the pizza in here, too.This part of a game is just as much something that can be intentionally designed as gameplay itself, but I don't see much of that in ttrpgs. Meanwhile in larp, workshops to set up a game are standard practice. What do they look like, and what can we learn from them?Ad LinksExtra Ordinary launches on Kickstarter March 10th!Further Reading The Art of Gathering by Priya Parker Bleed on the Nordic Larp wikiPlaying to Lift, Not Just to Lose by Susanne Vejdemo The Battle of Primrose Park: Playing for Emancipatory Bleed in Fortune & Felicity by Jonaya Kemper Space Train Space Heist by Sam DunnewoldVeins of Corruption, Marc's itchfunding mega-zungeonSocialsMarc on Bluesky and itch and actual plays on youtubeSam on Bluesky and itchThe Dice Exploder blog is at diceexploder.comOur logo was designed by sporgory, our ad music is Lilypads by Travis Tessmer, and our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey.Join the Dice Exploder Discord to talk about the showSupport ⁠Dice Exploder on Patreon⁠!

Transcripts available at diceexploder.comThe show is on Patreon! There's not going to be a lot behind the paywall, but there is right now a pilot episode for a new podcast that's part play report, part games criticism, and part personal memoir. This pilot is about the excellent game Yazeba's Bed & Breakfast, and you can listen to it now on the brand new Dice Exploder patreon.https://www.patreon.com/DiceExploder

Transcripts available at diceexploder.comIn a lot of tabletop rpgs, to do something in the fictional world, we engage with abstraction: to pick someone's pocket, we describe picking their pocket, or we roll a die to see how well we pick it. But in larp, sometimes the action is the action. I pick your pocket... by picking your pocket.This embodiment of play, where my real life actions equal my fictional character's actions, might be what many people understand as the core difference between larp and tabletop games. Today, Kate Hill and I get into the good, the bad, the ugly, and the beautiful of embodied play.Further ReadingPlaying to Lift, Not Just to Lose by Susanne VejdemoBluebeard's BrideNew World MagischolaChasing Bleed – An American Fantasy Larper at Wizard School by Tara M. ClapperGolden Cobra ChallengeFind Larp Shack on Facebook!Two Hand Path and the Dice Exploder episode about itAd LinksWe Three Shall Meet Again by Sam DunnewoldSocialsKate on Bluesky.Kate's actual play Path of Glory on twitch.Sam on Bluesky and itch.The Dice Exploder blog is at diceexploder.comOur logo was designed by sporgory, our ad music is Lilypads by Travis Tessmer, and our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey.Join the Dice Exploder Discord to talk about the show!

Transcripts are available at diceexploder.comLarp! It's that thing where you dress up like wizards, go into the woods, and hit each other with sticks. Right? Well.. yeah! Except no, because it's a million other things, too.Today I'm gonna introduce you to the world of larp. If you've ever been intimidated by it, this is a place to start. Because I think tabletop designers have so much we could learn from larp, so much that this is the start of a big series on larp.And where better to start than with a mechanic that makes getting into larp easier than ever: just pick up a card and read what it says.Further ReadingGhost Court by Jason MorningstarWe Are Roommates Now by Wendy GormanSpace Larps by Jason MorningstarWelcome Guests by Jason MorningstarThe Climb by Jason MorningstarSo Mom I Made This Sex Tape by Susanne VejdemoBehind the Magic by Randy LubinThe Hench Union Larp by Sam DunnewoldSocialsRandy onBlueskyRandy's foresight games are at leveragedplay.comRandy's consumer games are at diegeticgames.comRandy's online games platformStorySynthSam onBluesky anditchThe Dice Exploder blog is atdiceexploder.comOur logo was designed bysporgory, our ad music is Lilypads by Travis Tessmer, and our theme song isSunset Bridge by Purely Grey.Join theDice Exploder Discord to talk about the show!

Transcripts available at diceexploder.comPregens! They're not just a tool to get started playing quicker, they're also a way for a designer to take you by the hand and guide you to a very specific place, and they're a shared language across every table that picks up your game. Today, Aaron Lim and I break down all the joys and beauty of pregens, up to and including Aaron's meme charts.Aaron's KickstarterIthaca in the Cards: Second Expedition and What Should We Have Tomorrow? Full CourseAd LinksA Perfect Rock Growing Thylacine: A Pamphlet Zine TTRPGFurther ReadingLast Train to Bremen by Caro AsercionCaro Asercion on Dice ExploderYazeba's Bed & Breakfast by Possum Creek GamesLady Blackbird by John HarperLarp Design and the chapter BASICS OF CHARACTER DESIGN by Juhana PetterssonSocialsAaron onBluesky anditch.Sam onBluesky anditch.The Dice Exploder blog is atdiceexploder.comOur logo was designed bysporgory, our ad music is Lilypads by Travis Tessmer, and our theme song isSunset Bridge by Purely Grey.This episode was edited by Chris Greenbriar and Sam Dunnewold.Join theDice Exploder Discord to talk about the show!

Transcripts available at diceexploder.com What's the best way to convey the emotional experience of being a post-apocalyptic demon-fighting wizard action hero? Did you say “a coloring book with some Yahtzee on the side?” Because that's what Two Hand Path designer Mikey Hamm landed on. Last week was an episode all about the joy of destruction and transgression, and I wanted to balance that out today with another episode on physicality in games and the act of creation. But because I'm joined by the wonderful and prolific Jeeyon Shim, this spilled out into so much more: Jeeyon's background in child education, solo games that ask you to do a verb other than journal, how important it is for our humanity to take breaks and touch grass sometimes, and just how much fun art can be. Further Reading Two Hand Path by Mikey Hamm Making Comics by Linda Barry Field Guide to Memory by Shing Yin Khor and Jeeyon Shim A Mending by Shing Yin Khor Ad Links Sock Puppets Mission ImPAWsible Socials Jeeyon on Patreon, Bluesky, and itch. Sam on Bluesky and itch. The Dice Exploder blog is at diceexploder.com Our logo was designed by sporgory, our ad music is Lilypads by Travis Tessmer, and our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey. Join the Dice Exploder Discord to talk about the show!

Transcripts available at diceexploder.com Don't you hate it when one card in a deck gets a little bent? You ever have someone spill their coffee on your cards while you're playing and wish death upon them? What if I told you there was a game that told you to do these things and worse... on purpose? We're kicking off season 5 of Dice Exploder with two episodes on physicality in games. Today that's Wreck This Deck, and the transgressive feeling you get when the core mechanic of a game is to fuck up a bunch of playing cards. Specifically, we're talking about the revenge demon Flauros and what exactly he demands you do to your deck. Further Reading: Audrey's podcast Alone At The Table podcast and the Wreck This Deck episodes specifically Thousand Year Old Vampire by Tim Hutchings Birds Love Dirt by Emily Jankowski Under the Autumn Strangely by Graham Gentz Balatro This video about a particularly infamous Magic: the Gathering commander deck Rookwood by Nerdy Pup Games Shownotes Sam on Bluesky and itch. The Dice Exploder blog is at diceexploder.com Our logo was designed by sporgory, our ad music is Lilypads by Travis Tessmer, and our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey. Join the Dice Exploder Discord to talk about the show!

Transcripts can be found at diceexploder.com It's the Dice Exploder 2024 year end bonanza! This year I'm joined by Aaron Voigt, Rowan Zeoli, and MintRabbit plus a cavalcade of friends of the show to go over games and adjacent things we loved from 2024. Come reminisce about the year with us! Aaron on Youtube and Bluesky Rowan on Bluesky MintRabbit on Tumblr Aaron's picks Last Train to Bremen by Caro Asercion  Fealty by Michael Elliot and Galen Pejeau Helvetia by Bully Pulpit Games/Jason Morningstar  Rascal News/Scrying on Iran's Tabletop Scene The Most Important Essay in RPG History  Rowan's picks The Time We Have by Elliot Davis Seven Part Pact by Jay Dragon Oceanie 2084 Voices in The Wood, a Void 1680 Actual Play. Rowan's article on Voices in the Woods. Former World of Game Design Employees Claim Tabletop Company Exploits Workers and Clients Mint's picks The Gas Station, by DNGNCLUB shadow/giant by PsychHound Games Flyover Country, by Headstone Hills In Defense of Fiction, by MeatCastle Games Mint Plays Games: Rotted Capes (And the Lesson I Keep Learning This Year) Sam's picks Two Hand Path by Mikey Hamm Florilegium by Nick Wedig A Visit to the Lonely Oak by Victor Lane The Disc 2 jam, organized by Ken Lowrey, and specifically the Wanderhome designer commentary Kiss Me If You Can by Sam Dunnewold, and actual play from Third Floor Wars Other Picks Kurt Refling's pick: Yazeba's Bed & Breakfast by Possum Creek Games Michael Elliott's pick: Two Hand Path by Mikey Hamm Alex Roberts on The Highlander II: The Quickening Unofficial Roleplaying Game by Adam Decamp Jason Morningstar on The Big Store by Nathan D. Paoletta Randy Lubin's pick: the Dice Exploder Discord Hendrik ten Napel on Eat the Reich by Rowan Rook and Deckard Sharang Biswas's pick: Combat in Dungeons & Dragons by Evan Torner Audrey Stolze's pick: Band-Aids & Bullet Holes by Sam Dunnewold Sydney Icarus's pick: Working the Case by Randy Lubin Seraphina's pick: Triangle Agency Socials Sam Dunnewold on Bluesky and itch. The Dice Exploder blog is at diceexploder.com Our logo was designed by sporgory, and our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey. Join the Dice Exploder Discord to talk about the show!

Transcripts available at diceexploder.com A few weeks back, a conversation on the Dice Exploder discord lead to a new game jam: the Femininomenon Jam, a jam about femininity and whatever that means to you, happening now on itch.io through February 11th. To help kick off your thinking on what a game in this theme might look like, today two of the hosts of that jam sit down to talk about the challenge deck from Wickedness by M. Veselak. In this game about a coven of three witches, the challenge deck is a bespoke oracle for conflict resolution. And right out of the gate we get to dive into the deep end with this jam's topic as we ask: is this mechanic "feminine"? What would that even mean? Further Reading: Wickedness by M. Veselak The Femininomenon Jam Socials Audrey Stolze / Lady Tabletop on itch and tumblr Seraphina on itch and bluesky Audrey's solo games podcast Alone At The Table Sam D on Bluesky and itch The Dice Exploder blog is at diceexploder.com Our logo was designed by sporgory, and our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey. Join the Dice Exploder Discord to talk about the show!

Transcripts available at diceexploder.com I usually like to think of Dice Exploder as a pretty focused show with a pretty tight format. Yeah we may sprawl sometimes, but we're not here shooting the shit, we're here to talk game mechanics. But sometimes, a guy wants to stretch out like a dog in the sun, hang out for a while, and just yap the day away while answering a bunch of listener questions. And there's no one I like yapping with more than my friend Merrilee Bufkin. So this week, it's casual times on Dice exploder as the two of us answer a bunch of listener questions. Further Reading: Aaron Voigt's youtube essays Kurt Riefling on itch Sam's favorite games blogpost Exiles by Ema Acosta Jiangshi by Banana Chan and Sen-Foong Lim Fiasco by Jason Morningstar The Forge book by William J. White Secco Creek Vigilance Committee by Keith Stetson Killing Time by BrewistTabletopGames Socials Merrilee on Bluesky and itch. Sam on Bluesky and itch. The Dice Exploder blog is at diceexploder.com Our logo was designed by sporgory, and our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey. Join the Dice Exploder Discord to talk about the show!

Transcripts available at diceexploder.com It's a Dice Exploder EMERGENCY POD! Less than 24 hours ago as of recording, John Harper, designer of Blades in the Dark, released a brand new official supplement for the game: Blades in the Dark: Deep Cuts. It's 110 pages packed full of new setting and new mechanic ideas, and I really wanted to talk about it! I love Apocalypse World's concept of “advanced fuckery,” and I've never seen such a good and extended example of it all in one place. Further Reading: Deep Cuts by John Harper How to Overcome Your Hyperdiegesis Allergy by Idle Cartulary Errant by  Otherkind Dice on Dice Exploder, with John Harper Socials John on Bluesky and Twitter. Sam on Bluesky and itch. The Dice Exploder blog is at diceexploder.com Our logo was designed by sporgory, and our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey. Join the Dice Exploder Discord to talk about the show!

Transcripts available at diceexploder.com Hello from the between-season malaise! Today I'm joined by Aaron King, back again, who interviews me about my new zine Dice Forager: a 50 page collection of games, manifestos, and mini written-out episodes of Dice Exploder. We talk about how setting goals is great and people should do it for, what counts as a manifesto, and how making art meant just for your friends can be just as if not more rewarding than for any other reason. Preorder Dice Forager now! (if you live in the US, otherwise DM me and maybe we can work something out) Further Reading: Dice Exploder blog: Hospitality, Safety, and Calibration  Traffic Lights are Communication Tools by Meguey Baker World Ending Game by Everest Pipkin Your public library Socials Aaron King on itch and the RTFM podcast. Sam on Bluesky and itch. The Dice Exploder blog is at diceexploder.com Our logo was designed by sporgory, and our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey. Join the Dice Exploder Discord to talk about the show!

Transcript This week I've got James D'Amato (Campaign: Skyjacks, the Ultimate RPG book line, and the upcoming Oh Captain, My Captain) here to talk about custom oracle decks. Yeah a Tarot deck is cool, and great for doing Tarot, but James makes the case that it's the “custom” in “custom oracle deck” that will really bring the not-quite-but-feels-like magic of an oracle to your table. But before we get into that, we dig deep into a mysterious black cube to get to our specific custom oracle deck: the Sooth Deck of Invisible Sun. Further Reading Invisible Sun Invisible Sun on the One Shot podcast Spindlewheel by Sasha Reneau Campaign: Skyjacks Oh Captain, My Captain preorder link Socials James on Bluesky and Twitter Sam D on Bluesky and itch The Dice Exploder blog is at diceexploder.com Our logo was designed by sporgory, and our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey. Join the Dice Exploder Discord to talk about the show! Ad Links Characters Without Stories, including my episode Indie Press Revolution

Transcript Today, Caro Asercion (i'm sorry did you say street magic) brings us a game and mechanic all about instinct and physical embodiment: Keys from the larp Keymaster. This game isn't like most games. It's so much about physical embodiment and exploring group identity rather than pesky shit like “storytelling”. Physicality! Larp! The Golden Cobra Challenge! We've got it all. Further Reading Keymaster by J Li The Golden Cobra Challenge i'm sorry did you say street magic by Caro Asercion Socials Caro on itch Sam D on Bluesky and itch The Dice Exploder blog is at diceexploder.com Our logo was designed by sporgory, and our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey. Join the Dice Exploder Discord to talk about the show! Ad Links Oh Captain My Captain by James D'Amato Stout Stoat Press

Transcript Thrilled this week to have on one of my favorite movewrights, it's Aaron King of the RTFM podcast. Aaron brought on Love Letters from Apocalypse World, a kind of custom move the GM can write when it's been a while since we played and everyone might need a refresher on what was going on to get the ball rolling again. I think custom moves are a wildly overlooked part of Apocalypse World, and today we go deep on why that is and how and when to write your own. Further Reading Apocalypse World by Vincent and Meguey Baker Aaron King's Worksheet Manifesto The SF Ultra podcast Reading the Apocalypse by Aaron King Socials RTFM podcast and Patreon Sam D on Bluesky and itch The Dice Exploder blog is at diceexploder.com Our logo was designed by sporgory, and our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey. This episode was edited by Chris Greenbriar. Thanks Chris! Join the Dice Exploder Discord to talk about the show! Ad Links Jukebox by Jar of Eyes Oh Captain My Captain by James D'Amato

Transcript It's the crossover event of the season! This week I'm joined by Jeff Stormer of the Party of One podcast to talk about the core mechanic of Desperation by Jason Morningstar. In this game full of dread about a small Kansas town struggling through a never-ending winter, instead of deciding what happens, each turn you draw a card and decide who the thing on the card happens to. It's a super slick mechanic. Meanwhile over on Party of One, you can listen to Jeff and I actually play the game. Further Reading Me on the Party of One Podcast Desperation by Bully Pulpit Games Socials Sam D on Bluesky and itch The Dice Exploder blog is at diceexploder.com Our logo was designed by sporgory, and our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey. Join the Dice Exploder Discord to talk about the show! Ad Links Spectrum Roleplaying by Nat Knight Sock Puppets by Kurt Refling

Transcript For this final episode of the Dice Exploder D&D miniseries, I wanted to go back to the source, to my first experiences playing the game. And I figured who better to do that with than someone else who was there, my first DM, my very own father. We get plenty nostalgic for back when I was 8 years old, but I also made him talk to me about THAC0, early D&D's needlessly opaque and complicated version of an attack bonus. I made him do this because I think of THAC0 as so representative of how D&D's rules have worked for me over the years, and because my dad has never given a crap about any of those rules. When we played, he barely even read the rulebooks. So how did we still end up playing D&D? What were we even doing? Further Reading Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, second edition Dice Exploder on Theorize from Brindlewood Bay, and the pros and cons of a fixed world vs one you're making up together at the table. E.T. (1982, dir. Steven Spielberg) Ad Links Reacting Consortium Fractals Co-op Socials Sam on Bluesky and itch. The Dice Exploder blog is at diceexploder.com Our logo was designed by sporgory, and our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey. Join the Dice Exploder Discord to talk about the show!

Transcript I have a list of mechanics I'd like to cover on Dice Exploder, and I'd say about a third of them are jokes. One of those jokes is Rule Zero, a maxim that says "the DM (or GM) is always right." I think of Rule Zero as originating in D&D culture, and as part of this D&D miniseries, I thought it'd be interesting to use as a way into talking about the play culture around the game, how it's actually played at the table, and how many of its rules people actually use. There's no one I'd rather talk with about "do rules matter" than returning cohost Em Acosta (Exiles, Crescent Moon) who's spent a lot of time thinking about what rules they find actually useful in play. And in the end, we find yet another answer to my series-long quest for an answer to the question: "what actually is Dungeons & Dragons?" Further Reading: Rule Zero on TV Tropes (I do not endorse this but interesting context) Neverland Quest Pathfinder Errant Em's Patreon Em's banger games Exiles and Crescent Moon Socials Hire Em Sam on Bluesky and itch. The Dice Exploder blog is at diceexploder.com Our logo was designed by sporgory, and our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey. Join the Dice Exploder Discord to talk about the show!

Back ⁠⁠Dice Exploder season 4 on Backerkit⁠⁠ now! ⁠Transcript This episode I'm joined by Sam Roberts (Escape from Dino Island) to talk about prestige classes, special classes from D&D 3e that you could only take by multiclassing into them. Sam thinks of these things as a noble failure: a very cool idea whose execution almost immediately dropped the ball. But what can we learn from their corpse? We get into that, along with a boots-on-the-ground discussion of what our experiences were like actually playing D&D 3rd edition and an exploration of advancement as a concept at large: how does it work in most games, and how might it work instead? Further Reading The Game Left Unplayed, blogpost by Jay Dragon D&D third edition D&D 3.5 edition Sam R's game Escape from Dino Island Socials Sam D on Bluesky and itch. The Dice Exploder blog is at diceexploder.com Our logo was designed by sporgory, and our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey. Join the Dice Exploder Discord to talk about the show!

Back ⁠Dice Exploder season 4 on Backerkit⁠ now! Transcript Welcome to the D&D miniseries! I wanted to kick this off with a look into the mechanical heart of D&D, but I didn't really know what that meant. So I asked my friend Tristan! Designer of the award winning game Shanty Hunters and author of the Molten Sulfur blog, Tristan now spends his time as a designer on Nations & Cannons, a hack of D&D set in the American Revolutionary War. Tristan brought on a mechanized design principle underpinning D&D, the Adventuring Day, which says the game should be balanced for parties to go through 6-8 combat encounters between each long rest. It's an interesting idea... even though absolutely no one in the known universe actually plays D&D like that. So where'd it come from? And how do you approach it as a designer? Further Reading: From the Dice Exploder blog: D&D Is A Comedy Game Molten Sulfur Blog Shanty Hunters 7th Sea Mork Borg Errant Nations & Cannons Socials Tristan on Bluesky. Sam on Bluesky and itch. The Dice Exploder blog is at diceexploder.com Our logo was designed by sporgory, our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey, and our ad music is Lilypads by Travis Tessmer. Join the Dice Exploder Discord to talk about the show!

Back ⁠Dice Exploder season 4 on Backerkit⁠ now! Transcript Today I'm kicking off a miniseries of Dice Exploder episodes all about the Tarrasque in the room: Dungeons & Dragons itself. But before we get into that, I wanted to lay out for context where I'm coming from, what my relationship is like to "the world's greatest roleplaying game™" is like, and what questions I was hoping to answer with this series. If you listen to this show, you probably come from a community that's skeptical of D&D. I'm not personally a fan. But it's unquestionably doing something for many people, and I don't buy that they simply don't know any better. So what's the deal? What's good about Dungeons & Dragons? Further Reading At 50 Years Old, Dungeons & Dragons Is An Artifact post by Lin Codega on Rascal News Dungeons & Dragons Is A Comedy Game on the Dice Exploder blog Homage to the Players Handbook by Tim Hutchings Rascal's pledge drive Socials Sam on Bluesky and itch. The Dice Exploder blog is at diceexploder.com Our logo was designed by sporgory, and our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey. Join the Dice Exploder Discord to talk about the show!

Back Dice Exploder season 4 on Backerkit now! Transcript Among my favorite RPGs is Alex Roberts' triumph of minimalistic, elegant design: For The Queen. Today I'm doing just with along with Kimi Hughes of Golden Lasso Games. For The Queen is a card drawing prompt game, and one prompt is always the game's last: "The Queen is under attack. Do you defend her?" That's today's mechanic, but we cover most of this pretty small game at some point. You can back Kimi's new game Starscape on Kickstarter now! Further Reading: For The Queen by Alex Roberts Starscape by Kimi Hughes Oh Captain My Captain by James D'Amato Socials Kimi on Bluesky as well as Golden Lasso Games. Happy Jacks on YouTube. Sam on Bluesky and itch. The Dice Exploder blog is at diceexploder.com Our logo was designed by sporgory, and our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey. Join the Dice Exploder Discord to talk about the show!

Transcript It is still designer commentary season on Dice Exploder, and today I'm talking with Jason Morningstar (Fiasco, Night Witches, a million other games) about Northfield: a game we co-designed about when Jesse James tried to rob the bank in my home town, we shot the hell out of him and his gang, and then we started an annual small town fair to celebrate our victory. You play as both a member of the James-Younger gang and as a person in the present day portraying your gang member in a reenactment. It's a weird little game, much like its subject matter, and surprisingly personal to me (Jason was not surprised). On this episode, we break down the process of our collaboration and how we feel about the results (very positively). More than any other designer commentary I've done, I hope you check out this game. I'm really proud of it. You can get it on the Bully Pulpit Patreon now for $5. Further Reading Northfield, the game, on the Bully Pulpit Patreon Video of the Defeat of Jesse James Days reenactment Official Defeat of Jesse James Days website Photo of (allegedly) Charlie Pitts' ear Wikipedia articles on Northfield and the James-Younger gang Socials Sam on Bluesky and itch. Jason on ⁠Bluesky⁠ and ⁠dice.camp⁠. ⁠Bully Pulpit Games⁠ The Dice Exploder blog is at diceexploder.com Our logo was designed by sporgory, and our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey. Join the Dice Exploder Discord to talk about the show!

Transcript For Ken Lowery's Disc 2 jam, I decided to finally release the game I've been working on for nearly four years: Space Fam. This is a game about, you guessed it, found family in space. In particular, it takes a lot of inspiration from The Long Way To A Small Angry Planet in that you're the crew of a ship escorting a traveler from point A to point B, and along the way you deal with your feelings of guilt and stress about living under an oppressive government. It's a hack of Our Traveling Home by Ash Kreider, and it's like 90% of the way to really great. But that last 10% is always the hard 10%, and I decided it was time to let this game just be what it is and push it out into the world. As a part of that, I wanted to look back on the design process. What went well, what didn't, what would I change if I was going to spend another 30 minutes or 30 years on this thing. To do that, I sat down with two of my friends who playtested the game, and we talked about all things Space Fam. Further Reading Space Fam on itch The Disc 2 jam. A commentary podcast episode for Space Fam is available here. I wrote about the design of Space Fam's "scenes menu" here​. I wrote about the design of the Space Fam character sheet here​. Our Traveling Home by Ash Kreider Stewpot: Tales from a Fantasy Tavern by Takuma Okada Space Post by Jason Morningstar The Watch Night Witches by Jason Morningstar Socials Sam on Bluesky and itch. The Dice Exploder blog is at diceexploder.com Our logo was designed by sporgory, and our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey. Join the Dice Exploder Discord to talk about the show!

Transcript The first ever Dice Exploder game jam came to a close about a month ago, and today I sit down with the three hooligans from the discord who put it together and go through some of our favorite entries. If Dice Exploder is a show about concrete examples, this episode is as Dice Exploder as it gets. All the games we talk about are pretty short, so it should be easy to follow along at home. Check out all the jam submissions here. Thanks to Audrey Stolze (aka Lady Tabletop), Chris Greenbriar, and Sam Roberts for running the jam! Further Reading: Game Exploder full list of entries Sam D's late entry: World Ending Game (Sam's Version) Socials Sam D on Bluesky and itch. Sam R's game Escape from Dino Island. Audrey on ⁠Tumblr⁠, and her podcast ⁠Alone at the Table⁠ about solo games. The Dice Exploder blog is at diceexploder.com Our logo was designed by sporgory, and our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey. Join the Dice Exploder Discord to talk about the show!

Transcript What if your D&D adventuring party settled down and opened a tavern, and the vibes went from dragon murderers to Bob's Burgers? That's my pitch for Stewpot: Tales from a Fantasy Tavern, one of my favorite RPGs. It's currently on Backerkit, and you should check it out. This week I'm talking about a super simple unnamed mechanic from Stewpot, and presumably other games before it, that's inspired much of my own work: everyone goes around and adds a detail about the scene at hand or whatever we're talking about. Simple but effective. I think of this mechanic, and Stewpot generally, as especially welcoming to people new to the hobby. And so I brought on my favorite new to the hobby person: Lee Conrads, acclaimed theater director (there's a lot of theater and audience theory in this one) and also my spouse. It's a very special episode. Further Reading: The Stewpot backerkit campaign Circle X theater company Great Reckonings in Little Rooms Comedy Book by Jesse David Fox Socials Sam on Bluesky and itch. The Dice Exploder blog is at diceexploder.com Our logo was designed by sporgory, and our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey. Join the Dice Exploder Discord to talk about the show!

Transcript Is sharing music with your friends an RPG? It sure is when you're playing Avery Alder's game Ribbon Drive. Takuma Okada, the designer of Stewpot: Tales from a Fantasy Tavern (⁠on Backerkit right now⁠), joins me this week to talk about music, contemplation, and unconventional ways to inspire players. Further Reading: ⁠Ribbon Drive⁠ ⁠Spindlewheel⁠ Everything Is Illuminated, the book and film ⁠Ten Candles⁠ ⁠Dread⁠ ⁠Star Crossed⁠ ⁠Our Radios Are Dying⁠ ⁠Void 1680 AM⁠ Sam's ⁠playlist⁠ from playing Ribbon Drive ⁠The Awards⁠ website ⁠The Awards interview on Yes Indie'd⁠ Socials Takuma on Twitter and Bluesky. Sam on ⁠Bluesky⁠ and ⁠itch⁠. The Dice Exploder blog is at ⁠diceexploder.com⁠ Our logo was designed by ⁠sporgory⁠, and our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey. Join the ⁠Dice Exploder Discord⁠ to talk

Transcripts are available at diceexploder.com People talk a lot about how and whether RPGs emulate TV and movies, but this week cohost Meguey Baker (Apocalypse World, Under Hollow Hills) brings in a game that takes that sentiment to a compelling meta level. Fan Mail, from Primetime Adventures by Matt Wilson, is the core of the game's key metaphor: that players are simultaneously writers of a TV show, fans watching that show, and the characters portrayed on screen. We talk about the storygame scene in the early 2000s, how Primetime Adventures has influenced Meg's work, and how different this mechanic can feel in a one shot vs a full campaign. This game feels like a classic. I wish I'd known about it ten years ago. Further Reading: Primetime Adventures by Matt Wilson The Revolution Was Televised by Alan Sepinwall Inspecters by Jared Sorensen A Thousand and One Nights by Meguey Baker Ritual in Game Design by Meguey Baker Meguey & Vincent's new game Under Hollow Hills Socials Meg on Twitter and Bluesky. The Baker family blog and games. Sam on Bluesky and itch. The Dice Exploder blog is at diceexploder.com Our logo was designed by sporgory, and our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey. Join the Dice Exploder Discord to talk about the show!

Transcript What's the deal with Playbooks? That's a question that's way too big for one episode. But Moe Poplar, of the RPG Academy podcast Show & Tell, had a very particular effect of playbooks that he wanted to talk about on the show today: how playbook choice can be a line of communication between players, GM, and designer. This is one of those episodes that's as much play advice as it is about design. I should do more of those. Further Reading: Monster of the Week Blades in the Dark Socials Moe's website, including his games. Moe's podcast via The RPG Academy, Show & Tell Sam on Bluesky and itch. The Dice Exploder blog is at diceexploder.com Our logo was designed by sporgory, and our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey.Join the Dice Exploder Discord to talk about the show!

Transcript This week, now that the part of season 3 that was funded by Kickstarter is over, I've got a treat for you: the backers-only bonus episode with Mikey Hamm, designer of Slugblaster. You didn't think I was gonna just hold on to an episode this good forever, did you? It's the show's namesake mechanic! Mikey is currently Kickstarting Two-Hand Path, a solo game roll-and-write dungeon crawler. Check it out. While I thought this episode would be a big of a goof about a goofy mechanic (and it is), it also brought out some of the most thoughtful thoughts on deploying mechanics with precision and purpose that I've had on the show yet. Also, we had a blast. A slug blast. List of Games with Exploding Dice Middle Earth Roleplaying Game Shadowrun Earthdawn Luck of Legends The Burning Wheel 7th Sea Heart (Deep Apiarist class) Renegade Racers Kids on Bikes Armello Socials Back Two-Hand Path and buy Slugblaster now! Mikey on Bluesky. Sam on Bluesky and itch. The Dice Exploder blog is at diceexploder.com Our logo was designed by sporgory, and our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey. Join the Dice Exploder Discord to talk about the show!

Transcript This week's cohost is James Wallis, cohost of the Ludonarrative Dissidents podcast, a show a lot like this one that's Kickstarting their third season now, and designer of one of the first story games: The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen. Today we're breaking format: instead of talking about one game mechanic, James brought in the concept of innovation in game design. What does it look like, is it important, and how can we do more of it? The show notes for this one are friggin packed. Further Reading: Ludonarrative Dissidents podcast and season 3 Kickstarter The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen and on Wikipedia Nordic Larp book by Jaakko Stenros and Markus Montola Nordic Larp wiki Fairweather Manor, the Downton Abbey larp The Diana Jones award Dominion, the deckbuilder board game by Donald X. Vaccarino Blades in the Dark by John Harper My blog post Calvinballing a Whole Campaign Star Crossed by Alex Roberts Dread by Epidiah Ravachol Apocalypse World by Meguey and Vincent Baker The Beast by Naked Female Giant (probably permanently out of stock. Let me know if you find a place to get this one online.) The Crew by Thomas Sing Thousand Year Old Vampire by Tim Hutchings Bluebeard's Bride by Whitney "Strix" Beltrán, Marissa Kelly, and Sarah Richardson The Well Played Game by Bernie de Koven Socials James Wallis on Bluesky and dice.camp. Sam on Bluesky and itch. The Dice Exploder blog is at diceexploder.com Our logo was designed by sporgory, and our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey. Join the Dice Exploder Discord to talk about the show!

This week I'm bringing you an episode from the new podcast Lyrical Ludology with host Logan Timmins, a show all about lyric games. I'm very excited for it. There's already at least one more episode of Lyrical Ludology published, so if you like this one, go subscribe and take a listen!

Transcript It's the solo games episode! Hopefully the first of many. I'm joined by Seb Pines, designer of The Awards winning game Dwelling and haver of MFA in basically solo games, to talk about prompts in solo games. This is a broad survey of solo games. We talk about a bunch of games (listed below) that all behave differently. If you're curious about this side of the hobby, this is the primer for you. Further Reading: Dwelling by Seb Pines Thousand Year Old Vampire by Tim Hutchings Horse Girl by Babblegum Sam Artefact by Jack Harrison Project ECCO by Elliot Davis Notorious by Jason Price Void 1680 AM by Ken Lowery I Eat Mantras For Breakfast by Maria Mison The Ink That Bleeds and an excerpt on the Indie Game Reading Club My response to The Ink That Bleeds Socials Seb Pines on Bluesky and itch. Sam on Bluesky and itch. The Dice Exploder blog is at diceexploder.com Our logo was designed by sporgory, and our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey. Join the Dice Exploder Discord to talk about the show!

Transcript This is an intensely visual episode. If you'd like to follow along with the sheets we mention and get some extra commentary from me, you can do so at https://www.diceexploder.com/blog/2024/2/22/dice-exploder-aftershow-character-sheets I'm fascinated by character sheets, mostly because there are so so so precious few that I think do a good job. I don't mean this to call anyone out - I think the job of making a good character sheet might genuinely be impossible. They just have so much they have to accomplish. Today I'm talking to Emanoel Melo, designer of CBR+PNK, about what we like in character sheets and whether there are any we would actually go to bat for. Further reading Aftershow blog post featuring all the character sheets we talk about plus extra commentary on diceexploder.com CBR-PNK Mothership Bruno Prosaiko, the artist behind the beautiful ornate sheets we talk about, on Instagram A collection of Brazilian tabletop games on itch that Emanoel curates Socials Emanoel on Twitter and Instagram. His website, Cabinet of Curiosities. Sam on Bluesky and itch. The Dice Exploder blog is at diceexploder.com Our logo was designed by sporgory, and our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey. Join the Dice Exploder Discord to talk about the show!

Transcript Alex Roberts, designer of Star Crossed and For the Queen, joins me to talk about pity points from Kagematsu, a mechanic that doesn't actually do anything itself beyond evoke a particular feeling when put in opposition to love points. This episode is what I always dreamed Dice Exploder could be. We start from a simple game mechanic, but we get into power dynamics at the table in the past and the future, how people treat you when you're disabled, cultural appropriation, my personal techniques for flirting, details of a new game Alex is working on, and of course “what is the true nature of love?” Happy day after Valentine's Day. Further Reading Kagematsu is no longer available in print or online Kagematsu actual play, featuring Alex, on the One Shot podcast What Dice Do blogpost by Graham Walmsley The Quiet Year by Avery Alder Alex's finished podcast Backstory Star Crossed by Alex Roberts For the Queen, second edition coming May 14th from Darrington Press Socials Alex's personal carrd page Sam on Bluesky and itch. The Dice Exploder blog is at diceexploder.com Our logo was designed by sporgory, our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey, and our ad music is Lily Pads by my boi Travis Tessmer. Join the Dice Exploder Discord to talk about the show!

Transcript This week I've got designer and illustrator Strega Wolf van den Berg on to talk about money and the Mork Borg third party license. What, if anything, is the difference between making RPGs for fun, to pay rent, and to be paid fairly? And what is the cost (aha) of bringing money into making art? On the flip side, this is also an episode about community, and how the shape of Mork Borg's license fostered a community around it that allowed Strega Wolf to find a space in this hobby. Community can give us so many things that money can't. Further reading: The Mork Borg third party license Lichoma The Origin Of My Depression by Uboa Socials Strega Wolf's website and itch page Bogfolk, and on itch Sam on ⁠⁠Bluesky⁠⁠ and ⁠⁠itch⁠⁠. The Dice Exploder blog is at ⁠⁠diceexploder.com⁠⁠ Our logo was designed by ⁠⁠sporgory⁠⁠, our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey, and our ad music is Lily Pads by my boi Travis Tessmer. Join the ⁠⁠Dice Exploder Discord⁠⁠ to talk about the show!

Transcript This week I've got Nova, aka Idle Cartulary, of the excellent Playful Void blog among other places linked below. Nova's one of my favorite writers in the, as she puts it, DIY elf game scene, and I knew that was a world I wanted to cover more this season. Nova brought on the rumor table from Zedeck Siew's Lorn Song of the Bachelor, an excellent elf game adventure. We got to talk about what makes a good random table at large, our taste in how adventures are written, and how point of view is the thing that often turns serviceable fiction into real primo shit. Further Reading: Nova's kickstarter for The Curse of Mizzling Grove Dice Exploder on pick lists Lorn Song of the Bachelor The Isle, in print and on itch Socials Nova's blog, ⁠Playful Void⁠ Nova's podcast, ⁠Dungeon Regular⁠ Nova's games ⁠on itch⁠ Sam on ⁠Bluesky⁠ and ⁠itch⁠. The Dice Exploder blog is at ⁠diceexploder.com⁠ Our logo was designed by ⁠sporgory⁠, our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey, and our ad music is Lily Pads by my boi Travis Tessmer. Join the ⁠Dice Exploder Discord⁠ to talk about the show!

Transcript On the season 3 premiere, I'm joined by John Harper, designer of many games featured on past episodes of Dice Exploder including Blades in the Dark, Lasers & Feelings, and Agon 2e. John brought in the Psi*Run risk sheet, a fairly complex dice resolution mechanic, known generically as Otherkind Dice. The risk sheet is such an elegant piece of design, packing essentially a whole game onto a single sheet of paper, and being so clear in both how it works and how you might tear it apart for your own ends. If you're a new designer, or even just looking to get back in touch with the basics, John and I agree that hacking this thing is a great place to look. It's good to be back. Further Reading: Psi*Run's risk sheet Vincent Baker's original 2005 post on Otherkind Dice Vincent's 2022 Otherkind Dice SRD Psi*Run by Michael Lingner, Christopher Moore⁠, and Meguey Baker Annalise Socials John's website, onesevendesign.com, and itch page. Sam on Bluesky and itch. The Dice Exploder blog is at diceexploder.com Our logo was designed by sporgory, our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey, and our ad music is Lily Pads by my boi Travis Tessmer. Join the Dice Exploder Discord to talk about the show!

Thursday January 25th Dice Exploder is back with an all new crowdfunded-by-listeners season! The lineup includes John Harper, Alex Roberts, James Wallis, Idle Cartulary, Strega Wolf van den Berg, Emanoel Melo, Seb Pines and MORE - that's right, I'm over-delivering on the Kickstarter as a treat. Check back next week for the season premiere, and visit the blog's new home at diceexploder.com. Transcript

Hello and welcome to the Dice Exploder 2023 end of year bonanza! I love me a good ranked list of movies on an end of year movie podcast, but ranked lists are bad and this show's about RPGs not movies, so you get this instead. It's me, Aaron King of the RTFM podcast, Lady Tabletop of the Alone at the Table podcast, and Sharang Biswas of winning tons of Ennies this year and being a games academic, and the four of us (plus a half dozen other special guests) are here to tell you about a bunch of cool games shit we played, read, and listened to this year.Hope you had a great year in games! Come on down and listen to ours.Our picks:Aaron's games* GREED by Gormengeist* Undertree Temple of the Elf Gods by Happy Chthonian* Crush Depth Apparition by Amanda Lee FranckAudrey's games* Void 1680 AM by Ken Lowery* Wreck This Deck by Black Armada Games (Josh Fox and Becky Annison)* Extreme Meatpunks Forever by Sinister Beard GamesSharang's games* Fight With Spirit by Story Brewers Roleplaying* The Silt Verses by Gabriel Robinson and Jason Cordova* The Broadcast by Jason Morningstar and Lizzie StarkSam's games* Eating Oranges in the Shower by Hazel Anneke Dixon* Barkeep on the Borderlands by W. F. Smith* Exiles by em acostaGame adjacent things* Aaron: Grog the Frog by Alba BG* Audrey: Roleplaying Games Enter the World of Ballet in a Unique New Performance by Linda Codega* Sharang: The Dungeons & Dragons players of Death Row by Keri Blakinger* Sam: The Ink That Bleeds by Paul Czege (here's an excerpt from the Indie Game Reading Club)Thing we're proud of* Aaron: RTFM, Speedrune, and Aaron's annual list of favorite books* Audrey: Behold: A Game* Sharang: Winning 3 Ennies: Judges choice for MOONLIGHT ON ROSEVILLE BEACH and Best Rules/Best Family Game for AVATAR* Sam: you're lookin at itPicks from friends of the show:* Ray Chou: Decuma* Thomas Manuel: A.A. Voigt on Youtube, Daydreaming About Dragons podcast by Judd Karlman, the Indie Game Reading Club, and Aaron Marks at Cannibal Halfling.* Mikey Hamm: Picturepedia and other coffee table reference books* John Harper: Girl By Moonlight* Em Acosta: The Zone and Blades in ‘68* Nova / Idle Cartulary: mindfulness fantasy map drawing (see her Dungeons Regularly vols. 1 and 2)* Moe Poplar: the Dice Exploder podcastFurther reading:* Meakpunk manifesto by Heather “Flowers” Robertson* Sharang's piece about Brindlewood Bay* Amanda Lee Franck's Comradery* Alba BG's Instagram* BALLETCOLLECTIVE presents THE MOMENT IS IMMINENT* RTFM patreon episode on VOID 1680 AM* LadyTabletop's VOID 1680 AM broadcastSocialsAaron can be found on, like, just listen to RTFM, linked above.Audrey on Tumblr, and her podcast Alone at the Table about solo games.Sharang is on itch and Twitter and Bluesky.Sam is @sdunnewold on all socials and itch.Our logo was designed by sporgory, and our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey.Join the Dice Exploder Discord to talk about the show! This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit diceexploder.substack.com

Hello hello! Today I've got for you another between-season bonus episode. This time we're breaking format to talk about i know the end, a module I published earlier this year about going back home after a long time away and all the horrors that entails. Because if you can't occasionally publish something self-indulgent in your podcast feed, what's even the point of having one?My cohost for this is my friend Nico MacDougall, the current organizer of The Awards, who edited i know the end and had almost as much to say about it as I did.For maximum understanding of this episode, you can pick up a free copy of the module here and follow along (or skim it in advance).Further reading:The original i know the end cover artThe “oops all PBTA moves” version of i know the endThree of my short filmsMy previous written designer commentaries on Space Train Space Heist and CouriersJohn Harper talking with Andrew Gillis about the origins of Blades in the DarkThe official designer commentary podcasts for Spire and HeartAaron Lim's An Altogether Different River, which comes with a designer commentary versionCamera Lucida by Roland Barthes, a photography theory book that we talked about during recording but which I later cut because I remembered most of the details about it incorrectlyWhat Is Risograph Printing, another topic cut from the final recording because I got basically everything about it wrong while recording (the background texture of the module is a risograph printed texture)Before Sunrise by Richard LinklaterQuestionable Content by Jeph JacquesSocials:Nico's carrd page, which includes links to their socials, editing rates, and The Awards.Sam on Bluesky, Twitter, dice.camp, and itch.The Dice Exploder logo was designed by sporgory, and our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey.Join the Dice Exploder Discord to talk about the show!Transcript:Sam: Hello and welcome to Dice Exploder. Normally each week we take a tabletop RPG mechanic, bait our lines with it, and cast them out to see, to see what we can catch. But you hear that different intro music? That means this episode I'm doing something much more self indulgent, a designer commentary on a module I released earlier this year called I Know the End.And just a heads up here at the top, to get the most out of this, you probably want to have at least read through the module in question before, or as, you're listening. I threw a bunch of free copies up on itch for exactly this purpose, so feel free to go run and grab one. I'll wait.Anyway, I love designer commentaries. You can find a few of my old written ones, as well as links to a few of my favorites from other people, in the show notes. But I wanted to try releasing one as a podcast, because one, that sounds fun, and two, what's the point of having a podcast feed if you can't be ridiculously self indulgent in it on occasion?And I picked I Know The End to talk about because it is... weird. I don't know. It's weird. I describe it on itch as a short scenario about returning home and all the horrors that entails. But you'll hear us take issue with, I don't know, maybe every word in that sentence over the course of this commentary. It was a strange experience to make this thing, and I figured that might be interesting to hear about.It was also the first time I ever worked with an editor Nico MacDougall my friend and the organizer behind The Awards since 2023. Nico was excellent to work with and you can find their rates and such in the show notes and they are with me today to talk through this thing in excruciating detail as you probably noticed from the runtime we had a lot to say. Definitely contracted two guys on a podcast disease. Anyway, I hope you enjoy this. But regardless, I'd love to hear what you think of it. Should I do more? Never again? Want to organize the Dice Exploder Game Jam we mused about doing at the end of this? Hit me up! I'd love to hear from you. And now, here is myself, I guess, and Nico MacDougall, with a full designer's commentary on I Know The End.Nico: Well, Sam, thanks for being here on your podcast to discuss your... adventure.Sam: You're welcome.Nico: Yes.Sam: for having me.Nico: Very first question is adventure: is that really, like, the right term for this?Sam: Are we really starting here? Like, I, I don't know. I, I feel like I got, I really went into this thing with true intentions to write a proper module, you know? Like I was thinking about OSR style play for like the first time in my life, and like, we were both coming out of the awards 2022 judging, and a lot of the submissions for 2022 the Awards were modules. I thought that was great but it really was sort of like opening the floodgates of this style of play that I knew basically nothing about. And, at the same time that we were reading through all 200 submissions for the awards, I was also reading Marcia B's list of 100 OSR blog posts of some influence.And so I was really drinking from the fire hose of this style of play, and also, I wasn't playing any of it. Like, I was experimenting with Trophy Gold a little bit, which is this story game that is designed to try to play OSR modules and dungeons as, like, a story game kind of experience. And I was kind of figuring out how it works and like how I wanted to run it and how to make it go And Joe DeSimone, who was running the awards at the time was just encouraging everyone to make weirder shit and like, that was his ethos and those were the people that he got to submit to the awards. Like, it was just the weirdest stuff that I had ever read in the RPG space and... That's probably a lie. There's some weird stuff out there.It was just like so much weird stuff. It was like stuff on the bleeding edge of a whole side of the hobby that I didn't participate in in the first place. My intro to this part of the hobby was the bleeding edge of it. And I was like, alright, I, I just wanna make something there, I wanna try playing around there and see what happens.And Joe tweeted out the tweet was like, Now we're all making modules based on songs that make us cry. And I was listening to the Phoebe Bridgers album Punisher on loop at the time to inspire a screenplay I was working on. And the last track is called I Know the End, and just ends with this, primal scream.And it was, it was a hard fall for me, at the time. And the primal scream felt really cathartic. And I was spending a lot of time in the, small town where I grew up. And, this horror monster idea of a town that is, itself, an entity and like is a whole monster, and like, what does that mean exactly? I don't know, but intuitively, I like, understand it, and we're just gonna kind of drive... towards my intuitive understanding of what this thing is supposed to be. I just decided to do that and see what happened. And did that give us an adventure in the end? I don't know. Did that give us a 32 page long bestiary entry in the form of a module? Like, that sounds closer to right to me, but also, taxonomies are a lie and foolish anyways.I don't know, I made a weird thing, here it is. Nico: Yeah. So I was scrolling back in our, in our conversation to where you first shared this with me, and I... I would like to share with the audience the text that accompanied it. It was the Google Doc, and then it said, This might be completely unplayable, it might actually be a short story, or, like, a movie, but I'm gonna publish it anyway, and, you know... If that isn't exactly it, like...Sam: Yeah I like that stuff. I don't know, another thing I've been thinking about a lot this fall is writing by stream of consciousness. Like, I realized that I don't have a lot of confidence in any of my work that I feel like I created quickly. Like, the RPG thing I'm most well known for, I think, is Doskvol Breathes, which I just pumped out in an afternoon. It was just a thought that I had on a whim about how you might play blades in the dark maybe. And I finished it and then I released it and people were like, this is amazing. And I still get complimented on it all the time. I'm still really proud of it, but it, I don't have any confidence in it because it came so quickly.And, like, I know that this is something I need to, like, talk about in therapy, you know, about, like, It's not real art unless I worked on it for six months straight, like, really worked my ass off. But this process, I sort of looked back over my career as a screenwriter, as a short filmmaker, as a game designer, and started realizing just how many of my favorite things that I've made came from exactly that process of the whole idea kind of coming together all at once in like one sitting. And even if it then took like a bunch of months of like refining like it's wild to me How much of my favorite work was created by following my intuition, and then just leaving it be afterwards.Nico: Yeah, I actually did want to ask about the similarity between your, like, process for TTRPG design versus screenwriting, cause... While I have read, you know, edited this, but also, like, read your your game design work and know relatively well your thoughts on, like, you know, just game design sort of theory and stuff in general, I have never read any, like, screenwriting stuff that you've done. Although, lord knows I hope to see it someday. Sam: Well, listen, if anyone listening to this wants to read my screenplays, I'm on Discord. You can find me and I'll happily share them all. My old short films are largely available on the internet, too. You know, maybe I'll link a couple in the show notes.Nico: oh yeah,Sam: But I I think of my process for screenwriting as really, really structural.Like, I, I'm a person who really came out of needing a plot and needing to know what happens in a story, and to really especially need to know the ending of a story so I know kind of what I'm going towards as I'm writing the thing. I outline like really extensively before I write feature or a pilot, like there's so much planning you have to do, I think it is really, really hard to write any kind of screenplay and not have to revise it over and over and over again, or at least like plan really carefully ahead of time and like really think about all the details, revise a lot, run it by a lot of people for feedback over and over. But especially for me that, that having an ending, like a target in mind when I'm writing is so important. I just don't know how to do it without that.Except occasionally when I get some sort of idea like this one where I have a feeling of vibe and I just start writing that thing and then eventually it's done. And I, I've never had that happen for a feature film screenplay or like a TV pilot kind of screenplay.But I have had a couple of short films come together that way where I don't know what the thing is, I just know what I am writing right now, and then it's done, and then I go make it. And I I don't know why that happens sometimes. Nico: Yeah, I mean I would imagine length plays a factor in it, right? Like a short film, or, I mean, gosh, how many pages did I know the end, end, end up being? Sam: 36. Nico: But I find that really fascinating that, too, that you say that when you're screenwriting, you have to have it really structural, really outlined, an end specifically in mind, when, to me, that almost feels like, well, not the outlining part, but having an end in mind feels almost antithetical to even the idea of, like, game design, or, I guess, TTRPG design, right?Even the most sort of relatively pre structured, Eat the Reich, Yazeeba's Bed and Breakfast, like, Lady Blackbird games, where the characters are pretty well defined before any human player starts interacting with them, you can never know how it's going to end. And it's kind of almost against the idea of the game or the, the sort of art form as a whole to really know that.Even games that are play to lose, like, there are many games now where it's like, you will die at the end. And it's like, okay, but like, that's not really the actual end. Like, sure, it's technically the end, but it's like, we have no idea what's gonna be the moment right before that, or the moment before that. As opposed to screenwriting Sam: yeah, it's a, it's a really different medium. I still think my need to have a target in mind is something that is really true about my game design process too.Like the other game that I'm well known for, well known for being relative here, but is Space Train Space Heist, where I was like, I have a very clear goal, I want to run a Blades in the Dark as a one shot at Games on Demand in a two hour slot. And Blades in the Dark is not a game that is built to do that well, so I want to make a game that is built to do that well, but like, captures everything about the one shot Blades in the Dark experience that I think is good and fun .And that may not be a sort of thematic statement kind of ending, like that's what I'm kind of looking for when I'm writing a screenplay, but that is a clear goal for a design of a game.Nico: Yeah. even In the context of I know the end, and to start talking a little bit about my role in this as well, as, as the editor, I think the point of view, the vibe, the, like, desired sort of aesthetic end point Was very clear from the start, from the jump. And I think that in many ways sort of substitutes for knowing the end of the story in your screenwriting process.So that really helped when I was editing it by focusing on like, okay, here's the pitch. How can I help sort of whittle it down or enhance it or change stuff in order to help realize that goal.And sometimes it kind of surprises me even, like, how much my games shift and change as they reach that goal. Like, sometimes you can, like, look back at old versions of it, and you're like, wow, so little of this is still present. But, like, you can see the throughline, very sort of Ship of Theseus, right? Like, you're like, wow, everything has been replaced, and yet, it's, like, still the thing that I wanted to end up at.Sam: Yeah, another thing that is, I think, more true of my screenwriting process than my game design process is how very common that in the middle of the process I will have to step back and take stock of what was I trying to do again? Like, what was my original goal? I've gotten all these notes from a lot of different people and, like, I've done a lot of work and I've found stuff that I like.And what was I trying to do? Like, I have, all this material on the table now, I have, like, clay on the wheel, and, like, I just gotta step back and take a break and refocus on, like, what are we trying to do. I Think it's really important to be able to do that in any creative process.To Tie together a couple of threads that we've talked about here, talked at the beginning of this about how much this felt like a stream of consciousness project for me, that I really just like, dumped this out and then like, let it rip.But also, I mean, this was my first time working with an editor, and I think you did a lot of work on this to make it way better, like really polish it up and make those edges the kind of pointy that they wanted to be, that this game really called for. And that makes this, in some ways, both a really unstructured process for me, and then a really structured process, and... I don't know what to make of that. I think there's something cool about having both of those components involved in a process. Nico: Yeah, it is. I I very much agree that like, yeah, most of my sort of design stuff have, has proceeded very much the same way of just kind of like sporadically working on it, changing stuff, like revamping it, whatever. And it's like, it's sort of, yeah, in a constant state of fluxx up until the moment where I'm like, okay, I guess it's done now.What I was gonna say, I was gonna jump back just a point or two which is you mentioned Clayton Notestein's Explorer's Design Jam. And I was curious, like, what was your experience, like, using that design template? Sam: Yeah I really enjoyed it, I really had a good time with it. I had already gotten really comfortable with InDesign just teaching myself during lockdown. Like, that's what I did for 2020, was I, like, laid out a bunch of games myself and they all looked like shit, but they all taught me how to use InDesign as a program.And I think templates are really, really valuable. Like it's so much easier to reconfigure the guts of another template than it is to create something from scratch.And I like Clayton's template. I think it's nice and clean. I think you can see in all the publications that have come out using Clayton's template, how recognizable it is. How little most people stray from the bones of it, and on the one hand, I think it's amazing that you can just use the template and go really quickly and like, get something out.And also I just want to push on it a little bit more. I want something, like the template is designed to be a template. It is not a suit tailored to whatever your particular project is. But also, I think if I had tried to lay this out without a template, it would look substantially worse, and there are a few notable breaks here and there that I, you know, I enjoyed experimenting with. I like the use of the comments column for little artwork. I think that was a nice little innovation that I added.And, you know, I didn't write this originally to have that sort of commentary column as a part of it. Like, all of the text was just in the main body of it. And I like the way it turned out to have that sort of, like, director's commentary thing hanging out in the wings. lot of people have talked about how much they like that in Clayton's template. so I, I don't know, like I, think that on the one hand a template really opens up a lot of possibilities for a lot of people and really opened up a lot of possibilities for me, and on the other hand I do still look at it and I see the template And I'm like, I hope this doesn't look too much like every other person whoNico: Right, right. I mean, that is definitely the difficulty of providing those kinds of tools, because like, it makes it very easy to make things especially if you're sort of just getting started, or if you don't have a lot of confidence or familiarity with it inDesign or anything like that. But ultimately, I feel like Clayton himself would say that the Explorer's Design Template is not intended to be, like, the final template, right? It's intended to be, like, a tool that you can use to varying effects, right?Yeah, I was thinking about it when I was going through this earlier, and I was like, Oh, yeah, like, you only use the comments, column a few times, and then I literally only realized maybe five minutes before you said it, I was like, oh, wait, all the little artwork is also in that little column thing, like you just said, and I was like, oh, that's like, that's actually a really cool way to use the template, because that space is already provided if you include that column, but just because you have the column that's, you know, quote unquote, intended for commentary, doesn't mean you have to use it for commentary, doesn't mean you have to put text in there.Sam: Yeah, you definitely like learn a lot of stuff about the guts of the thing as you start playing with it.Nico: Yeah. is probably getting on the level of, like, pretty pointless, sort of what ifs, but I'm curious... If Clayton hadn't done the Explorer's Design Template Jam, or if you had, for whatever reason, like, not been inspired to use that as the impetus to, like, make this and get it edited and laid out and published or whatever, like, Do you think you still would have tried to use that template, or would you have just tried to lay it out yourself, like you've done in the past?Sam: Honestly, I think without the jam this wouldn't exist. I have like a long to do list of things at any given time, like creative projects I wanna on, youNico: Oh, yeah,Sam: know? And the thing that brought this to the top of that to do list was just wanting to have something to submit into that jam. You know, I wanted to work with you as an editor. I Always want to clear something off the to do list. I always want to have some kind of creative project. And, I wanted to submit something to that jam, but I think if you took any one of those away, I might not have put the thing out at all. Nico: Yeah, that's really interesting. But I guess that's also, again, kind of what a good template or layout or just tool in general can help is actually get these things made. Sam: That's what a good jam can do, too, right? I mean, there's a reason the Golden Cobra contest is something that I love. It's like 40 new LARPs every year and they only exist because the Golden Cobra is throwing down the gauntlet.Nico: That's very true. Well, maybe it's time to move along to more practical concerns Sam: Maybe it's time to do the actual commentary part of this episodeWe've done the waxing philosophical part, butNico: we, yeah, checked off that Dice Exploder box. Now it's time to do the actual game talk.Sam: your bingo cards Nico: Yeah, Sam: Yeah, so let's start with the cover.Nico: Yes, the cover, which I only realized it was a teeth, that it was a mouth with teeth open when you said in the outline, ah yes, it's a mouth with teeth. And I looked at it and I was like... Oh my god, it is. Like,Sam: I did my job so well. I wanted it to be subtle, but I always like looked at it and was like it's so obviously teeth, I'm never gonna get this subtle enough. But I'm I'm glad to hear that I succeeded.Nico: I truly don't know what I thought it was before, but it definitely wasn't teeth.Sam: Yeah. Well, it started as I'll share this in the show notes. It started as this image. It was like a 6x9 layout, and, the teeth were still there, and it was like, all black, and the teeth were this much wider, gaping maw, like, inhuman, unhinged jaw kind of situation. And then, in the middle of it, was a, like, live laugh love kind of Airbnb sign with I Know The End on it. It was like the mouth, like, eating the sign.And I liked that. I felt like, the problem with that was that... As much as creepy, live, laugh, love sign is kind of the like, vibe of this, I didn't really want to bring in the like, kitsch of that at all, like, I felt like that kitschiness would hang over the whole thing if I made it the cover, and I mean, this whole thing is just about my own personal emotional repression, right? And my feelings about my small town that I'm from, andabout like, my ambition, and, exactly, yeah.But I, I write a lot, and I make a lot of art about emotional repression , and I think the particular vibe of this game's repression doesn't have space for irony, or satire, or like, Do you wanna live, laugh, love? Like, I don't know how else to put it. Like, it just felt really wrong.It was like, if you put that into the space at all, it's gonna curdle the whole feeling. Nico: it's about the framing of it. I, know that Spencer Campbell of Gila RPGs has written something about this on his blog. I don't remember specifically what the context is, but he's a psychologist by training and is talking about how, like, the way that you frame something matters a lot to how people respond to it, right?So you like, if you're framing it as like, oh, you have, twelve things and I take away six from you, versus like, oh, you have nothing and then you are given six things. It's like, both scenarios, you like, end up with six but Sam: One feels like a letdown and one feels great. Yeah,Nico: yeah, and so I think in his article he was talking about in the, yeah, you know, tying that into the game design context, obviously.And I think it matches here where like, sort of runs the risk of like, priming people to expect kitsch, and I don't think that that's really present in the rest of the game. And that kind of mismatched expectations could really, like, lead to some problems when people are trying to, like, play the game.Sam: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I mean this cover is just kind of like, oh. Like, it doesn't it doesn't really tell you much other than just like there's something back there that's maybe vaguely menacing, and that's kind of it. That's kind of Nico: Yeah.Sam: Alright, speaking of which can we, can we talk about my favorite interaction between the two of us as we were working on this?Nico: Oh, yeah, I was not sure how to bring that up. yes, please do. Now that we're moving on to... For everyone following along at home, we are proceeding to the credits page.Sam: The comment I got from you while you were editing this was, IDK if it would look different in print, but having the text so close to the edge of the page is activating my fight or flight response. And I just replied, working as intended.Nico: It yeah, I had the feeling, I think, even when I sent that, I was like, this, this is not like an accident. Like, like, like no one makes this like no one does this by accident. But, yes, truly, I hope that you are following along at home because I believe that Sam generously gave a whole bunch of community copies of this game, or made them available. Sam: I believe it was 42, 069 I'm usually doing some number like that. This game, I might have done a different number, but that's, the other games that I've done.Nico: So, but the text on this, for credits page specifically, it's truly, like, at the edge of the page. Like, it looks like it could be cut off. It's like, in print, it would be like, cut off by the process of actually like, making it. In fact, feels like if you try to send it to a printer, they could almost send it back and be like, you've gotta give us some space there. Like, you simply can't do that. There needs to be a gutter, or bleed, or whatever the term is. Like, Sam: I love it. maybe one day I will print this. Honestly, like if I become a super famous game designer or something, like, this is one of the ones that I Nico: screen, slash screenwriter.Sam: yeah, yeah. This is one of the ones I'd like to go back and hold in my hand, but I also I don't know, I just love it. I, I love designing for digital as, like, a primary thing, because I just feel like most people who play the thing are gonna play it out of digital.And I don't know if that's, like, the primary audience for a lot of modules. Like, I think there are a ton of people out there who just, like, buy the zine and hold the zine in their hand and probably never get around to playing it. But I, I love the digital. I've always loved the digital. I don't know, I just like making for it.Nico: Well I mean I was even thinking about it in the context of like, you know, how you talked about how you changed the aspect ratio, I was like thinking about that and I was like, I mean, it's not like that would be impossible to print, but like, most standard commercial printers operate in like, one of the more standard like, page sizes. Even the risograph you said is what it's called, right?Sam: The, the RISO. Yeah, I don't know if it's Rizzo or RISO, but I'm gonna sayNico: The RISO background also makes the, again, just from like a fully practical point of view, it's like you're adding color to the whole thing,Like there are many potential barriers to this as like a physical product that would, that are simply not there when you're designing for digital, so like, it is nice to have that sort of freedom, like, when you're thinking about how to lay this out or, or put stuff on here, it's like, you're freed from a lot of those practical considerations.Sam: There's a few other details I want to talk about on this page just kind of like references I'm making that are not obvious.So the first is that the header font and title font of I Know The End is a font that I ripped from Lilancholy, which is this amazing book by Snow, which is ostensibly a game, but but also a reflection on childhood and personal relationship to emotions and trauma.And I love the look of the font, but I also intentionally wanted to reference that game while I was making something that felt really personal in a similar vein. And another another reference here is that the color of the whole game, like this red, is pulled from the cover art for the Phoebe Bridgers album Punisher that I know the end is off of. I, I just found the, like, most saturated red pixel that I could on the album and was like, that's the color! I love hiding little references in every little detail that I can. Nico: Yeah, it's so interesting because I did not know any of that, you know, prior to this conversation or seeing that stuff on the outline. What did you sort of hope to achieve with those references, right? Because I can't imagine that you're plan was like, for someone to look at it and be like, oh my god, that's the Lilancholy font, and that's the Phoebe Bridgers album Sam: that's one pixel from that album cover.Yeah.What am I trying to achieve? I don't know, like there's, so the Paul Thomas Anderson movie Phantom Thread Is an amazing movie, and it's about Daniel Day Lewis being incredibly serious, scary Daniel Day Lewis, making dresses, being a tailor, and an element of the movie is that he hides his initials inside the dresses, like, when he's making them, he, like, sews his initials in.And that's a real thing that, that people did, and maybe it's just for him. It's also kind of an arrogant thing to do, you know, that all these, like, women are gonna be walking around wearing these dresses with, like, his initials kind of, like, carved, it's like this power thing. But my favorite part of it is that Phantom Thread is PT, also known as Paul Thomas Anderson.Nico: Ha Sam: And, like, like, I, I just feel like when you're doing that kind of thing, it's just, what an act, it's just so beautiful and arrogant and satisfying. Like I think doing that kind of little reference and joke for myself brings me into the mindset of what I am trying to convey with the game.Like, if I'm thinking in the detail of the font selection, what do I want to reference? What do I want to bring to this game? Then, I'm gonna be I'm gonna be thinking about that in every other choice I'm making for the game, too. And even if half of those choices end up being just for me, I will have been in the headspace to make the other half that are for everyone else, too.Nico: Mm hmm. Yeah. Yeah. like, You could almost even call these, like, Easter eggs, right?But it also made me think about, I had to look this up actually as you were talking, because I was like, about that, the CalArts classroom number that like all of the animators that studied there fit into like Pixar movies and stuff, like, A113, A113. And I think that's also sort of a good example of it in some ways, because it's like now, with the advent of the internet, and you know, and a certain way of engaging with media, like, everyone knows what that, what that means now, or they could if they just looked it up, or they just see some BuzzFeed, you know, article that's like, you know, 50 easter eggs that you missed in the latest Pixar movie.But yeah, it's like, it's very interesting because it kind of asks who is the movie for? What's the intended or imagined audience for all of these things? And it sort of shows that, like, you can have multiple audiences or multiple levels of engagement with the same audience, like, at the same time. Maybe, I would say, it's very unlikely that any random person would just like, look at the cover of I Know The End and be like, oh, that's the Lilancholy font, but,Sam: I have had someone say that to me, though. Yeah.Nico: but, so, what I was just gonna say is like, but I don't think it's hard to imagine that like, the type of person who would, who would buy, who would be interested in I Know The End or Lilancholy, I think there's a pretty decent chance that they would be interested in the other if they're interested in one of them, right?And so it is interesting as well, where it's like, I am often surprised by like the ability of people to sort of interpret or decipher things that far outweighs my sort of expectations of their ability to do so.If only just because I have the arrogance to be like, well no one could ever have a mind like mine. Like, no one could ever think in the specific bizarre way that I do. Then it's like actually a surprising number of people think in a very similar way. Sam: Another thing I think about with making these really, really tiny references, easter eggs, it's the, not making a decision is making a decision, right? CentrismNico: Oh,Sam: Like, if you have literally anything that you have not made a choice about with intention, that is a missed opportunity, I think.And... I have so much respect for people who will just pump something out, like, write a page of a game and, like, upload as a DocX to itch. Like, Aaron King is a genius, and I know a lot of games that are put out that way, and I love that stuff. But for me, like, the kind of art creation process that I enjoy and like doing is so based on finding meaning in every crevice, finding a way to express yourself in every detail. just love doing it.Nico: you are the English teacher that the, the curtains are blue meme is referencing, in fact.Sam: Yes.Nico: The curtains are blue in I Know The End because,Sam: Well, and I know the end they are red, but Nico: yes.Imagine that being the new version of the meme: the curtains in this are red because there's a Phoebe Bridgers album that has a single pixel that is that color.Sam: Yeah, I don't know. It's true, though.Nico: Exactly. it is in fact true. But so would, in some ways, any other interpretation of...Sam: Yeah.Nico: of the red color, right? It's like you picked it because of the association with the album cover. Someone else could be like, Oh, it means this otherthing. And like that interpretation is correct. Sam: Yeah, I mean, I also picked it because of its association with blood, you know, like I, I wanted to kind of evoke that feeling too, so.Shall we do the table of contents? HehNico: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think the most interesting thing to talk about, and I want to know when this entered the sort of the design process, is the blacked out Table of Contents entry which corresponds to an almost entirely blacked out, or in this case, redded out,Sam: Yeah, Nico: messily redacted,part of, the book,Sam: Yeah, I think this was always there, I think I started writing a list of locations very early on, and on that list of locations was, like, I work in Google Docs to begin with for most of my stuff, and it was a bullet pointed numbered list, and the last list item was struck through, and it was your mom's house.And I just thought that was a funny little joke. It's like really dark? Another, just like a little detail, I have such a great relationship with my parents. Like really just a better relationship with my parents than anyone I know. And, so much of my art ends up with these like, really bad, fucked up relationships with parents, and I don't know what that's about.But, there's, there's something about, there's a piece of your hometown that is like so traumatic that you can't bring yourself to look at it. There's a piece of yourself, or your childhood, or like, where you came up, there's something from your origin story that you can't bear to face is a lot of what this is about. And even as the climax of this thing is I think in a lot of ways turning to face everything that you left behind.I mean the whole module is about that but I think fact that even when you are doing that, there's one piece of it that you can't bear to look at is really tragic and a mood to me. You know, it really felt right. Nico: it's sort of like, yeah, I'm finally gonna stand my ground and face my fear, or whatever, except for that thing. That thing, that part over there, for whatever reason, because I'm actually just very afraid of it. It really, as always, is sort of like the exceptions to the rule make the rule, or emphasize the rule. You're kind of carving out the negative space around it. And it makes it clearer in so. so Well, Yeah, so like, then the first thing of the game text itself, so to speak, is like the front and back of a postcard. And where's the picture from? It looks kind of old timey in a sort of non specific way.Sam: It's from Wikimedia Commons, I believe. I was looking for pictures of old postcards, and I wanted a small town, and, this is what I found.The postcard image is actually like a hell of a photo bash too. The stamp on it is from a real postcard I received from my cousin. The handwriting was me on just like a piece of paper that I scanned, and then the postcard is another like open source postcard image.Nico: Yeah. I am, once again, sort of showing, showing a lot of my bias here. I am often kind of against a lot of little, like, accessories, or sort of, like, physical things that are often part of crowdfunding, like, stretch goals, you know, like, it's, I don't know. I don't think it's, like, ontologically evil or anything like that, it's just, I understand, it's part of the reality of crowdfunding, and, like, attracting attention, and yada yada yada, I just personally don't love that reality. Which, of course, is easy to criticize when you're not part of a project is trying to do that, but that aside, I think it would actually genuinely be very cool to have, like, this postcard as, like, a physical object like, if the game were to be printed.Sam: You gonna make me like, handwrite every one of the postcards too? Cause that isNico: I did not say that. Oh, is that really? Well, but then, then you have it already, you can just print it off, like, or you make that the, like, I don't know, the hundred dollar stretch goal, you know, they back it at that level and then the postcard just appears inside their mailbox. Like,Sam: That wa that is creepy. I will tell you that,Nico: You say that as though it's happened to you before. You're like, well, let meSam: well, I'm not, I, I revealing nothing. How autobiographical is this? Nico: Yeah. so I guess, yeah, so getting, So this is the introduction page, the background, the introduction, giving the context to what this module, extended bestiary, what have you, what it is. My question here from a sort of meta perspective is like, how much are you trying to sort of give away at the start of this? How do you pitch this to , like to someone you know?Sam: that's a great question. I'm pretty proud of the execution here. I think I do a good job of, like, leaving some juicy hints here as to what might be going on without giving anything away. Like, the fact that I advertise this as maybe closer to a bestiary entry than a module, like, uh, what? Like, like you, you have an idea of what that means, but also like, where's the monster, what is the thing that I'm looking like, that is kind of planted in your mind in a way that I think is intriguing and sets expectations without giving the whole thing away.And, also, this is just me, like, trying to figure out how to describe this thing in real time as I'm writing. It really came from intuition. Nico: yeah. I know that, you know you're on, very much on record talking about how, you know, like, taxonomy is fake and, you know, et cetera, et cetera. Sam: As much as I love it.Nico: right, right, exactly, I mean, I feel the same way, but I, I am curious as to like if you were trying to sell someone on the idea of even just playing this game, like, how effective do you think it is of like communicating whatever this is, you know, like, is it effective to say it's kind of this, or it's not this, or maybe it's this, like, Sam: I think this is going to be really good at reaching the kind of person who will love this, and really bad at selling this to like a mass audience, you know? But luckily, I'm not trying to sell this to a mass audience. I'm like trying to make Joe Dissimone proud, you know? Like I'm trying to make like something as weird as fucking possible.and I think there's a kind of person who really appreciates that and this struggle to define what this is using existing terminology, I think is going to really appeal to the people who like this.Nico: yeah, I agree, I think it signposts well hey, you, there, like, look at this thing. Isn't that interesting. And if they're like, If they're like, no, that's confusing and I don't know what to do with it, and they go somewhere else, in some ways, it could be argued that that is like, working as intended, right, likeSam: I kind of find it interesting in the sidebar here to watch me sort of like struggle with how you're supposed to play this game, like what rule system are you supposed to use?I do think with some distance from this, the best way to experience this is as a solo game. Like to just read the thing but pause and journal about your character's experience as you sort of walk through it. I have started playing more solo games since I wrote this in preparation for a Season 3 episode of the show, and I think this would serve that experience really well.I considered even, like, rewriting this to be more of explicitly a solo experience, but I, ultimately was really happy leaving it in its sort of nebulous, provocative, what if, is this, what is this sort of state. Nico: Yeah. I would genuinely be interested to have like, the two of us play the game, like this game, like one running it, one as the player, because I don't necessarily disagree with what you said, might be better suited as a solo game, but I really do think that there is something that can be gained about, like being in a room with, like, one other person, or, you know, being on a call with one other person, or whatever and going through this,Sam: Yeah, yeah, I can feel the intensity of that as you describe it. And it sounds harrowing and... Amazing. I do, I do have this dream of like running a Mork Borg dungeon, like over the course of like three sessions, and then like taking one of the players who survives and being like, I've got another module that I think we should play with the same character. Nico: yeah. Anyways, you go home and you think you're safe, but actually, like, Sam: I do think that this as a response to OSR play is really an interesting way to try to play the game, like to Nico: just sort of experienceSam: Yeah, to try to take the kind of character that you would have coming out of that and the experience you would have coming out of that and then like get tossed into this, like that disorientation I think would serve this really well and would do something that I found I really like to do with the OSR kind of play of like finding ways to bring in more character stuff, to just have people to reflect on their person, rather than on the logistical problem solving.Nico: Mm hmm. Which, of course, in some ways also is like, I don't want to say direct contradiction, but like, moving perpendicular to a lot of the sort of OSR principles, rightSam: But yeah, I mean, fuck em. Nico: exactly, I mean, I'm not, saying that to discourage you from doing it, I'm just saying, like, I just think it's an interesting for those to come into sort of, conflict or, or whatever in, in that specific way.Sam: I mean, that's what the bleeding edge of something is all about, right? It's like, what are our principles? What if we throw them out? What does thatNico: Right, right. What if we smash things together that, like, should sort of repel each other like magnets? Like,Sam: Yeah.Nico: Let's move on to the town?Sam: Yeah. So this is the, like, GM spoiler page.Nico: Right.Sam: I don't know that I have a lot to say about this particular page. It's, it's the town. There are, like, two suggestions in the first chunk of this book that came from you that I think are really valuable to this. Like, the first is that the town is always capitalized throughout. Which I like sort of was doing, but you really emphasized, and I think was a great decision.And, the second is that there aren't any contractions in this book except for possessives. And, that was another suggestion that came from you, to have this sort of stilted, formal, slightly off kind of language of not having contractions, that I think serves it really well and is just really cool.Nico: Yeah, I have to give credit for that, to the Questionable Content webcomic, which is a webcomic that has been running forSam: God, is it still going?Nico: oh, it very much is still going, I, it updates Monday to Friday, and I, am reading, I am seated and reading,Sam: stopped reading that like a decade ago.Nico: It is officially 20 years old. It started in 2003.but so one of the characters in that she initially never uses contractions. It is always, it is, it is never, it's. Do not, not, don't, you know, is not, not, isn't and over time, as the character sort of gets more comfortable and starts to open up about her kind of mysterious past, and they'll deal with a lot of the sort of like, serious emotional turmoil that is present in the character, she like, starts to use contractions.And so, it's a specific device that is very weirdly ingrained in my head at this point, because I remember, like, realizing that when it was called out the first time, and then I will fess up and say I have re read the webcomic from the beginning several times. I have a lot of time on my hands sometimes. And it is always kind of a delight to go back to the beginning and see this character and to really notice that device because you know where she ends up and how much more comfortable she is and so to see that difference in the beginning makes it very effective on a reread in a way that is sort of present in the maybe subconscious the first time on the way through.Thank you. And I feel like it's similar here, not quite the same because I don't know if you would ever necessarily actively realize, like, oh, there are no sort of contractions here.Sam: and the town is never gonna stop being a entity of repression.Nico: Yeah, exactly. And so it's giving this like underlying anxiety kind of like,like, you're just like, Ooh, this is Sam: Yeah. It's like, what is going on? What's wrong with the language here?Nico: Yeah. And you might not even really be able to, articulate it because it's sort of hard to articulate the absence of somethingSam: And like, that's the feeling of the whole module. yeah, It's, it's just, it's a great decision. Nico: Yeah. And then of course, capitalizing town, you know, are you even really a game designer if you're not capitalizing some random words in Sam: yeah. gotta have one at least, come on.Sam: I will say I really enjoy the fact that I give no origin story for the town. I think that's also really powerful, of leaving a hole that people can fill in if they want.The mom repression stuff is kinda like that too, the like, the blacking out sharpie. Of like, that's a hole you could fill in in play if you wanted to, but I, I'm not going to. I'm gonna intentionally leave that hole there.Nico: It also is the kind of thing, right, of like, oh gosh, Nova was saying this in the Dice Exploder Discord recently, where like, part of the reason the OSR can be so sort of rules light and stripped down is because like, it is relying a lot on the sort of cultural script of like, what is a fantasy role playing game, or even just like a fantasy story in general, you know? What your knowledge of an OSR game is.And this, in a similar way, is sort of like, you know what a hometown is. Like, you know, I don't need to tell you what the backstory of this is, because you know what it's like to be from somewhere. Cause it's also worth saying, like, this game does not give any character creation instructions, right? I mean, actually, I guess that's not entirely true, because underneath the postcard, you know, it just says, A decade or more gone since you fled the small backwater town that spawned you.And it's like, yeah, that's basically all the sort of character creation information you need, like,Sam: yeah, yeah, like wait, gonna play yourself and you're gonna be sad about this, like uh, Nico: Right, or, like, or if you're not playing yourself, you are playing a person who's sad about it, like, you know, it's like, it's kind of all you really need, Sam: you have internalized the tone of this thing, like, your character is in ways the negative space of the voice of the text. Nico: Like, a weird relationship with your small hometown, we just don't need to spend very much, time covering that broad background. It's much better spent covering the specific, like, locations and people in this town that also sort of help to convey that, feeling, that information.Sam: Temptations and terrors?Nico: Yes, probably The closest thing to a system that is in here, inasmuch as it's taken roughly verbatim from Trophy Dark Sam: yeah, I do think it is notable that when I wrote this I had not played Trophy Dark, and Trophy Dark is the one where you definitely die,Nico: Right. Right. Sam: My intention was not that you would definitely die in this. I really want escape to be a big possibility at the end and so it's interesting that I went with Trophy Dark as, like, the obvious system.Yeah, I like these lists. This is just a lot of tone setting, basically, right? I don't have a lot to say about the details here. The first terror, a children's toy, damp in a gutter, is a reference to another song that makes me cry. The Rebecca Sugar song for Adventure Time, Everything Stays.But most of the rest of this is just, vibes. Here's some vibes. I don't know, I re read these lists and I was like, yeah, they're fine, great, next page. But I don't know, is there anything that stands out to you here?Nico: I mean, I think the most important thing about these lists, these kinds of things, you could maybe even sort of broaden this to like pick lists in general, is that, they kinda need to do two things, like they need to both give you a good solid list of things to pick from, if you're like, at a loss, or if you just are like, looking through it, and you're like, this is good, I want to use this.Or, the other purpose of using it is to have it sort of identify the space that you're playing in to the point where you can come up with your own thing that like, could just be the next entry on that list, right? For me at least, the whole point of like, buying a game is like, I want something that I like, can't essentially come up with by myself, you know? Because I like to be surprised, I like to be sort of challenged, I like to be inspired, and so I think a really good game is one that you sort of like, read it, and you're like, okay, like, there's great things to use in here that I'm excited to use. I also, after having read this, am coming up with my own ideas. Like, equally long, if not longer, list of things that like, fit into this perfectlySam: Bring the vibes of your small town. Nico: Yeah, exactly, that I could also use. It's like, and so it's like, it's kind of funny that like, for me at least, the mark of a good game is like oh yeah, you both want to use everything that's contained in it, and also you immediately get way more of your own ideas than you could ever use when you're running the game.Sam: Yeah. Next?Nico: Yes. Act 1. Sam: I love this little guy, I love Wes he's just kind of a pathetic little dude, and I feel sad for him.Nico: It's so funny, too, because this particular little guy, like, doesn't look very pathetic to me. Like, he looks like he's kind of doing okay. Sam: I definitely like drew, like all the art in the book I drew, and I did it by just drawing a lot of little heads, and then assigning them to people. Like, there were a couple where they were defining details about how the people looked, that I knew I needed to draw specifically. But in general, I just drew a bunch of heads and then doled them out, and like, this is the one that ended up on Wes. And, I think that the contrast between, like, in my mind, Wes is this skinny, lanky, little kid, you know, he's like early 20s, finally making it on his own, and he has no idea what the hell's going on with the world, and he always looked up to you, and he's finally getting out of town. And then he's, he's like overcompensating with the beard for the fact that he's like balding really early, and like, you know, he's, I don't know, like, I think the contrast is just fun.Nico: I love this whole life that you have for this, this little, this little guy, like, which is, I can't stress this enough, mostly not contained in the text,Sam: Yeah. yeah. I think a good NPC is like that. I think it's really hard to transcribe the characters we get in our heads.Nico: yeah, Sam: I really like the, the pun in the Town Crier, I mean like the Town Crier feels like a horror movie trope, like the old man who's gonna be like, You got don't go up to the cabin! But it's also, like I wrote that down first and then just started describing this Wes guy and then I was like I'm gonna just like make a pun out of this.This is something I did all the time while writing this, was I had, like, a little oracle going, actually, at a certain point, like, in the same way that you would in a solo game with an oracle. Like, if I was stuck for an idea, I would just roll on the oracle table and then, like, fill in a detail that was somehow related to the oracle. Nico: Mhm. Sam: That, that didn't happen here, but the idea of, Oh, I want a little bit more description for this guy, like, what should I do? I, like, pulled the word crier, and then was like, Oh, that's really interesting, like, when would this guy have cried? Like, oh, that's a great question, let's just, like, put that to the player. I'm always, like, a thing in screenwriting that is really hard to do, and that I'm always looking for is, like, really good, pithy character descriptions.Like, a friend of mine loves the one like, this is a woman who always orders fajitas at a Mexican restaurant because she loves the attention that she gets when the fajitas come out.She hates fajitas. And that description just says Nico: That's Sam: much. It's so good, right? And that one's even a little bit long for like a screenplay, but it'd be great for like an RPG thing, right?And something about like Here's a little bit about this guy. You remember when he was crying once, like a baby? What was the deal with that? Like, it's such a, like, defines everything else about him. Like, I, I, I'm really proud that.Nico: Yeah. No, that's, that's how I felt a little bit with I ran Vampire Cruise at Big Bad Con this year. And that game has some of, like, the best random NPC generating tables that I've, like, ever seen and played with.I remember one specifically, it was, like, I was like, rolling to generate a passenger, and I think it was like, the secrets part of the table, or something like that, and what I rolled was like, regrets that she never got to see the dinosaurs, and it's like, what does that mean?Like, like, Sam: She had a traumatic experience at a science museum as a kid, or maybe she's like 10 million years old, like, I don't...Nico: or, yeah, or she's just like a weirdo who like really loves dinosaurs? It's like, it's, Like, it really gives you sort of what you need to just sort of like, spin a world out of that specific detail. Sam: It's weird because I like completely agree with you, and you know, I was tooting my own horn about like this question about Wes sobbing and also like, in every single spread of this thing, I'm taking like two full pages to talk about like one or two NPCs, which is a terrible way to do the thing that we are talking about doing. Like,Nico: That is true, that is, it must be said,Sam: it makes it feel so much more like a short story, or maybe like a solo game, right? It's like, eh, spend two pages, like, getting to know this guy. Nico: who won't come up again, spoiler alert, Sam: Yeah, it feels like the right call for this thing where like, I mean it's like the text is forcing you to sit with the memory of this guy, it's like forcing you to come in and like spend more time than you would like to like back at home with these people.And there's some like location context built into all these descriptions too, and we like learn about the bakery thing here and like old stories and stuff. And like, already it's like, do we need that shit to run this game? Like, absolutely not, like, get, get out of the way, like, but also, I don't know, it feels right?And it's one of the things that makes all this weird and, you know, unrunnable.Nico: Which is of course the goal, we don't want people to run this. Yeah, no, that's something that I've thought about in my own games as well, is, is, and just sort of like, my life, I guess, is sort of like, what makes a place that place, you know, like, what makes a town a town, what makes a city a city, like, is it the people who live there? Is it the places? Like, again, kind of back to the sort of Ship of Theseus metaphor, it's like, if everyone you know leaves, and a lot of the stores turnover, like, is that still your hometown? Like... Does your relationship to it change?And so I, in defense of, of what we're doing here, it makes a lot of sense to spend so much time thinking about the people and the places that are here because that also basically is the game, right?Like, like, this is not a dungeon crawl, right? Like, this is not a hack and slash thing, It's not a dungeon crawl, like, Sam: it's a person crawl. Nico: Yeah, exactly, you're yeah, the point of you coming home is you're trying to find Sidra, the person who sent you this postcard, asking you to come home, and yeah, you're basically doing a point crawl, trying to find this person.And then there are various conditions that need to be in place for you to actually find them = And yeah, so it's like, using more words than a sort of your standard OSR like dungeon crawl or point crawl or whatever, or hex crawl, but like, it's kind of the same way where it's like, yeah, but like, that's the game, that's the adventure, like, Sam: yeah, yeah. Another detail here I'm really proud of is the like, offhand remark about how Wes and Sidra aren't talking for what are probably romantic reasons. Because the implication, there's like a strong implication that you, player, have some sort of romantic history with Sidra, like, whether it was ever consummated or not. And I love the just sort of, like, offhand, Wes and Sidra had a thing that didn't work out, because it both... leaves open your potential romantic relationship with Sidra, but also like complicates it and like darkens it from whatever sort of nostalgic quote unquote pure like memory of it you had.And I love that it just sort of brings a little complexity into what happens when you leave for 15 years. And then like what it feels like when you like, hear, oh yeah, your ex has been like, dating someone for a couple years. What were we talking about? Like just that, like sometimes like a bolt of like, information about like, someone from your past that like, you care a lot about will just hit you and you'll be like, oh, wait, what? And we're just I'm supposed to just like, take that and move on? Like, yeah, yeah, Nico: It's also a very small town, right, where it's a sort of like, oh yeah, passing reference to this because everyone knows this already, right? Like, this is old news as well as, like, in a small town, it's like, there's a small pool of people your age that you're interested in, so, not like you're gonna get with all of them inevitably, but it's like, yeah, there's a pretty high chance that you might.Last thing I did wanna say on this, do you wanna share what Wes's name was in the first draft of this that I received?Sam: What was it? I don't rememberNico: It was Glup Shitto. It was, it was one of the first comments I left! It was one of the first comments I left! I was like, Sam, you've gotta know this can't be the final thing, right?Sam: knew it couldn't be the final name. But there was something really funny to me about like the one person who like doesn't fit into town, like this little fucking Star Wars fanboy like schmuck kid is just Glup Shitto. And he's leaving town cuz like when you got that name, it doesn't fit anymore. You gotta get the fuck out of there.No wonder the town couldn't absorb him. His name was Glup Shitto.Nico: I want to say, like, I might have, like, made my first round of comments because I was, like, yeah, feeling the same way of, like, okay, obviously this is not the finalSam: yeah, yeah, I just didn't change it and you were likebruh Nico: and then, yeah, and then you, like, made changes based on the comments that I left, and I went back to it, and I'm like, it's still Glup Shitto. Like, it simply can't be this! It's not allowed! It's, it's not legal! Like, Sam: there ought to be a law.Nico: yeah.Sam: Alright, let's do Act 2 gosh.Yeah, so I made this little map. I like the little map. This is just my hometown, incidentally. Like, there's so much in this that is just, like, pulling details directly from my hometown. That oracle that I mentioned earlier, like, Northfield, Minnesota was, like, one of the things on the oracle. And you can see that here in like, the riverwalk and this little bridge over it was very Northfield. the Rube, which we're getting to next, these two bars, the kind of cowboy themed bar thing was a thing.Nico: Again, it's a very small town of just like, no sort of reasonable business person would have these specific Sam: yeah, but they, they exist here for some reason Nico: it almost feels like the kind of thing where it's like, like they can exist in a really small town, because it's sort of like, well they're the only things here, and they can exist in like New York City Sam: yeah. Nico: everything's in New York city, and like every kind of place is there, but like anywhere in between, people would just be like, I don't understand, and then it goes out of business,Sam: Exactly. Yeah. Yeah, doctors always also a big portion of my childhood and my past always coming up in my stuff just because I spent so much time in hospitals as a kid. So the, inclusion of a doctor here is also very much something coming out of my hometown.I like the little mechanic here of, like, rolling and you, like, add one every, every time. I think that's a nice sort of way to handle trying to find Sidra. Nico: as like a classic Nico mechanic 'cause I simply haven't made and published that many things. But in my mind, my narcissistic fantasy, it is a classic me mechanic.Sam: I believe that came from you.Nico: I fucking love a table that like evolves over time.And it's not like I invented it, but like, I think my more standard thing is sort of like you have a table of like 12 things, and then you change which die you roll on it, you know, it's like, oh you can do like a d4 through d12 or whatever and that's like, I really like the ability to sort of go back to a table and, like, use it multiple times as opposed to, like, Okay, we have one table for this, we have a different table for that, you know.Sam: Additional persons. I really like this format for sort of generic NPCs, like, I'm not gonna tell you anything about this person, but I am gonna tell you what you think about them and your relationship to them.I think it's a really cool way of doing... Oh, do you just need to, like, bring someone in? You, like, met someone on the street or whatever? In a lot of other settings, you would just have, like, a random person, and it would be, like, the Vampire Cruise thing. If you give them an interesting detail in here, it'd be a cool thing.But I think, especially in, like, a small town format, the, like, here's your relationship to this person, because everyone knows everyone, and, every character that comes in, like, is gonna have to inspire some kind of feeling and past in you. I think this works really cool, reallyNico: It also feels very sort of true to life in terms of, at least, how I often GM things. Someone will be like, hey, can I, like, ask just, like, the next person I see on the street what they know about this thing? And I'm like, I mean, I fuckin I guess, like, it'll shock you to learn I don't have a name for that person, but, you know, I just have to, like, come up with, like, here's a weird voice, and like, a random thing they know, and like here's a name, Sam: This is a great way to turn that experience back on the player.Nico: exactly, yeah, there's this random person, you're like, alright, this is someone who owes you an apology, why is that?Like, Sam: yeah, Nico: I also wanna say that I feel like this was actually a relatively late addition to theSam: Yeah, it was. I always intended to write these, but it was like the last thing that I wrote.Nico: Yeah.Sam: Yeah.Nico: There was definitely some time when I sort of came back and looked at it, and all of a sudden there was this relatively large additional persons section in here, and I was like, huh, interesting.Sam: Yeah. I'm happy with how it came out. I think these are my best little guys. Nico: Oh yeah, Sam: I really like the unfinishedness of these little guys that you can project a little bit of yourself onto them while there's still some, like, major details there. This someone you seek vengeance upon looks a lot like a penis, and I don't know how I feel about that one, butNico: I was gonna say, I find that one fascinating as the ide

It's a bonus between-seasons Dice Exploder! Wowie!As promised back in my episode with Gem Room Games about Mork Borg, today I'm talking about accessibility in game design using Mork Borg's graphic design as an example. My cohost is Marc Muszynski, a friend and screenwriter with low vision, and we talk in detail about his experience with Mork Borg. Is this game, with all its important and loud art, accessible to people who can't see? Like with most accessibility questions, It's Complicated™!Further reading:Mork BorgAccessibility in Gaming Resource Guide by Jennifer KretchmerTTRPG Accessibility Drive 2023 game jam on itchContrast checking tool for visual design.Color checking tool for colorblindness.Sylexiad, my favorite Dyslexia-friendly font:Fate Accessibility Toolkit by Evil HatTwo articles about “sanity” mechanics in RPGs (don't put “sanity” mechanics in your games)Socials:Marc on imdb (lmao)Sam on Bluesky, Twitter, dice.camp, and itch.Our logo was designed by sporgory, and our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey.Join the Dice Exploder Discord to talk about the show! This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit diceexploder.substack.com

On this episode I'm joined by Nychelle Schneider, also known as Mistletoe Kiss, a moderator from the Blades in the Dark discord and contributor to The Wildsea, the upcoming Dagger Isles supplement for Blades, and Underground Maps & Passkeys among others.Nychelle brought on the idea of customizing existing games, homebrewing mechanics for your table (or even publication). This is... a big conversation, chock full of cool ideas that I hope people take and run with. There are so many games out there, and I think there's so much to be gained by making stuff that can plug into and enhance other people's art.Nychelle also has so many interesting trains of thought about in this episode, many of which I didn't follow up on as much as I wish I had. So I encourage you to listen to what she says, and then take those ideas an run with them. I hope that every week, but especially with this one.Further reading:A post-show blogpost about Sam's joke Blades playbook The BoogeymanBlades in the DarkNychelle's Blades playbook The SurgeVincent Baker's blogpost Apocalypse World Custom AdvancementTim Denee's Dogs in the BarkSam's Blades crewsheet Spirit ChasersSam's Blades downtime hack Doskvol BreathesSeveral zines by Aaron King of PBTA moves that exist outside of games: Reading the Apocalypse, PbtA23 January Digest, and PbtA23 February Digest Socials:Nychelle's website, Twitter, and itch.The Blades in the Dark DiscordSam on Bluesky, Twitter, dice.camp, and itch.Our logo was designed by sporgory, and our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey.Join the Dice Exploder Discord to talk about the show!Transcript:Dice Exploder: Nychelle===Sam: Hello and welcome to the season 2 finale of Dice Exploder. Each week we take a tabletop RPG mechanic and pull it apart like your dad fixing a broken vacuum. My name is Sam Dunnewold, and yes, this is the end of Season 2. We've laughed, we've cried, we've funded a whole friggin Kickstarter, and we are now going to take one hell of a break, because damn am I tired.I'm expecting Season 3 at the end of January, but we'll see how it goes. And in the meantime, keep an eye out for a number of bonus episodes I got planned. I've got that Mork Borg and accessibility episode recorded. I'm plotting out a, like, let's celebrate this year in RPGs panel show near the end of the year, and I may have a couple of other treats for you too.But this week, my co host is Nychelle Schneider, also known as Mistletoe Kiss. I knew Nychelle first as a moderator on the Blades in the Dark discord, where she's a community leader and just General encourager of everyone who stops by. Just a lovely human being. But she's also contributed to like a million projects the Underground Maps and Passkeys charity bundle of Blades content I put together a few years ago, the Wildsea, the upcoming Dagger Isles supplement for Blades. She's made A lot of Blades content. And when I asked her to come on the show, I was delighted that Nychelle wanted to talk about just that: adding your own mechanics to existing games. This is a big conversation. It's so full of cool ideas that I hope people really take and run with. There are so many games out there, and I think there's just so much to be gained by making stuff that can be plugged into and enhance other people's art. I've done this a lot with Blades myself, and I just never get enough of it. And Nychelle has so many interesting trains of thoughts about how to do this in this episode, many of which I didn't follow up on as much as I wish I had.So I really encourage you to listen to what she has to say carefully, and then keep pushing at those ideas. I hope that every week, but especially this week. So, with that, here is Nychelle on adding to existing games. And be warned, we get right into it, no hellos or anything. Okay, uh, here we go, prepare your ears for game design.Nychelle: I think a lot of times in game design, we can get caught up a lot in making sure that things function a certain way or are laid out in a certain way that's very easy for the audience or the reader to pick up the book, read it, and then go ahead and produce it.And I think a lot of times that we can get bogged down in mechanics to where we're like, oh, this is the only way you can do this.Sam: Mm-hmm.Nychelle: So like D&D, everyone knows d and d. Everyone's also like, oh, well, we obviously fight them. No, that's not the only thing you can do, but why is it baked that way? Why is our assumption perspective always that? Oh, it's because of how it's written or how it's presented, gives you a certain paradigm for you to interact with the material in a certain manner.And so for me, I like playing with that. How can I interact with the same thing? If I'm handed the same object 14 times, how can I interact with that object 14 different ways or give flexibility to somebody else who play with it in a different way that I didn't even think about. And so that's what I really do do a lot of thinking of what I create mechanics is how much fluidity is built in while it's still having a structure.Sam: Yeah. Interesting. So I think it would be useful to like immediately jump into like some examples of what you mean. So what's one example of what you're talking about?Nychelle: Oh gosh. I would say a really good example of this is in the Blades in the Dark custom playbook that I created called The Surge, which for those who are listening, you can find it on my itch. And one of the abilities is called Can I Learn Rising Moon? And essentially you can gain temporary access to a veteran ability you currently do not have, and you start a four segmented clock. So anytime you go to access this ability, you have a clock that begins, or you add a tick to this clock. And then when the clock fills, the GM will bring in a special entanglement or situation or something that happens. And that is one way that I've really got to enjoy a twist to mechanics and games is adding more flexibility because it opens up a whole new possibility of how you can play with a particular dynamic.Sam: Yeah. Part of what you're talking about here and part of just knowing your history as a designer is that you seem to really enjoy making moves and making abilities and custom content for other games than making your own games from scratch. Do I have that right?Nychelle: Yes, it's a really weird thing. But I find that my creativity, especially when it comes to game design and mechanics, I can talk mechanics all day long. I've got a really, really good grasp of game mechanics. But I also love to build things fiction first. I am definitely a fiction first, mechanic second gm. I've had a regular table, oh gosh, I think we've been playing now like seven plus years or something together and I absolutely love baking and things, but I also love jumping off of somebody else's creativity.So like when I wrote for Wildsea, it was a ton of fun because I got to go through all of the course material and whatnot that Felix had written. And it was really great being able to take little hints or tips that he kind of wove into the core and build upon that and flush it out into something that was even greater than what initially he had planned.So, yeah.Sam: Yeah, just to, to speak personally, like I think it is really hard to come up with an idea from scratch, but it's much easier to find your groove in someone else's framework. Making custom content for games is like that. And to that note, I really wish more people did it. I think you see a lot of people making custom modules and adventures and stuff in this sort of OSR and the NSR scene. But for the story game scene, the tradition is much more to make your own game from scratch. Or at least like, to make a game that is inspired by, but functionally different from and standalone to another game. As opposed to making content that can be used with something like Blades in the Dark or The Wildsea.And yeah, I think it's easier to get started from making content for other people. I think it's really, really validating, and I think more people should do it.Nychelle: Yeah, I also think that, it could be something that is within the industry, but I think there's a lot of expectations of hat wearing when it comes to technical writing or game design specifically, because everyone thinks, oh, I have to do everything. I have to learn how to do layout. I have to learn how to do editing. I have to do the writing. I have to learn the artwork or find somebody who's willing to work with me on that. I have to learn publishing, I have to learn finance regarding hey, am I, publishing this to individual game shops or a big name? Contracts? Like there's so many different hats that we just expect to discover ourselves.Which is great. It's a wonderful way for a person to diversify their skills, learn something, being like, Hey, I really enjoy layout, but I really hate editing. Or like, I have high respect for people who do edits because they come in and they change like four little words in this one paragraph, and suddenly like, I sound so much more eloquent than I was before. But there's alsoSam: I, I just worked with an editor for the first time and it wasNychelle: oh my God. Yeah.Sam: Go on.Nychelle: But you can also learn in so much when you work together as a team. So like with the Blades in the Dark Dagger Isles expansion that we did, there was so many writers that were a part of that.I did the playbooks and crew sheets. But there were so many different writers and people who were doing the setting and the factions and the lore and like the crafting. And I would go ahead and run games for them and then we would just sit back I would just hear all these stories and wonderful aspects of like, oh, well, that's actually a piece from our culture, and you can connect that to this and that. And then we would just have a brainstorming session and I would have so many notes from every single session of like, oh my God, this is amazing. And then I'd try to weave that into the crew sheets and everything, and I have so much fun with that.Something I, I learned at residency for grad school was, what are your verbs doing? What is your verb poetry? And I was like, what is this thing you're talking about? Because we had to bring in pieces and workshop them and. It was so amazing 'cause I had one mentor who essentially like took everything out of this one scene and just read the verb poetry of it.Sam: Hmm. Nychelle: And it was like, what are your verbs doing? And then changing up like two of them, legit, only two of them, and removed another thing that didn't need to be in there. And then the verb poetry was just so different. So thinking of like how to apply that to like gain, like what verbs doing a certain passage is just like a whole different way to view it.Sam: Well there's, I was just talking on some server about this, how I was playing The Exiles, em's game, and, in the middle of the campaign I was playing, she put out like a very slightly tweaked version of the rules where essentially all that had changed was a couple of words here and there in order to make the layout, the graphic design of a rules reference page feel a little bit better.And a couple of the words that had left changed the entire vibe of like a whole move in a way that I thought was much worse. And so I just kept using the old rules because I wanted that, like two words of poetry to be in there. It made such a difference at the table. Nychelle: It really does. And I think that's another thing too, is like when you get in the editing, like I don't like editing, first off. I will hands down like editors are amazing, wonderful people and I will 100% hands down pay them what they actually deserve, like the, the work that they do. But there's also, I was talking to Felix about it, when he was doing layout for Wildsea and there was a phrase that he used, but you can't leave off with only like two words or like one word on a sentence. Like if it's the end of a paragraph or something and you start a new line and there's only like two words, you have to cut two words, so it goes back up into the other one. Otherwise it doesn't look correct. Mm-hmm. You can't have, your orphans there. Yeah, that may have been the term he used. But sometimes the words that they wanna cut are the poetry words, Sam: I know Nychelle: and it's like, oh gosh, I can't have you cut that. It's like, you take out my two words, Sam: yeah. You Nychelle: ruined the entire thing. My words have no meaning now.Sam: Sometimes, when I get that note, I'm like, what if I just add a couple of words instead? And, like, that doesn't always work. Sometimes you need the space. But sometimes it does make sense to like inflate the duration of a sentence so that you can keep a couple of those poetic words I think.Nychelle: But also I think that changing up how your verb poetry happens or something else that one of the mentors mentioned was we, especially nowadays, are such in a... not political correctness, it's probably the wrong term for it... we try not to have infliction, personal infliction upon something we say. It's passive versus active voice. You're separating yourself and it's, it becomes passive. And so when you have that in your work, even if it's a technical writing such as game design, you are already putting a barrier between your audience and the words for them to be engaged.And then if your verb poetry is a certain manner and adds another barrier, and by the time they get down to the end of a passage or something, they're not engaged. They don't have the buy-in that you want, and so they're gonna go ahead and walk away.And that's another thing too that got mentioned is a lot of, just kind of like a little side tangent, but a lot of people who are not English first speakers, when they write in English, it becomes passive, not active. 'cause that's how a lot of other languages are set up. So it's kind of a weird thing where they're almost at a disadvantage from being engaged, with their audience. It's kind of interesting thing.But we do the same thing in technical writing. In game design, we do that passive versus active. Sam: Totally totally. So, I want to veer us back to the subject of hacking games for your table. And specifically, I want to talk about one of my favorite blog posts in the hobby. Uh, which comes from Vincent Baker, designer of Apocalypse World, called... Apocalypse World Custom Advancement. In which he gets the question from a reader: “is there any solution that lets players play the same playbook potentially forever?”And Vincent's answer is, yeah, just hack the game. Keep hacking the game so that you can keep playing the same character. And specifically how, like hacking the game such that the rules accommodate really powerful characters because a game like Apocalypse World or Blades can I think really see the characters outgrow the setting that they're in pretty easily. And at a certain point it starts making sense to change the game so that the world can keep up with the players.And Vincent in this post has a bunch of good ideas for how to go about doing that. And you know, there's some great ones too, in the Apocalypse World Rule book and in the Blades in the Dark hacking the game sections.I think the idea of you're going to extend your time with one campaign and one game by bringing your own custom moves to it, by bringing your own hacking and custom materials to it, is really cool.Nychelle: Well, a game core isn't supposed to be the only material we take into a game, is it? It is meant to be a diving board, a foundation for us to go ahead and move on from it. That's the whole point of any particular game system core is, okay, now here's your foundation. Now go on, evolve it, build upon it, take parts out, change things like that's, that's a whole dynamic of what happens at a game table.And one campaign I did for Blades in the Dark was we wanted to really interact with the faction game. How does the mechanics behind factions really interact with each other? And so we did an entire campaign for a year and a half just on factions. And brought in our own factions and did different clocks and things like that. But like we learned and also grew so much just out of taking one particular mechanic and saying, okay, how are we gonna play with this here? And how can we grow this? Because the core should never, I think that's one thing is we should never limit ourselves to strictly one particular thing. We, we should forever be evolving and changing it to make what we enjoy because that's the whole point of playing games is to do something we have fun with. Right?Sam: Yeah. Yeah. That's really fucking cool. Because you are absolutely right, like fundamentally what you are doing at the hobby is making your version of Blades in the Dark.A theme of this season of Dice Exploder has really been that the flavor level of a game is as much mechanics as the like rules level of the game. And every group is bringing their own flavor to play and thus hacking the game. And sometimes you get like, you see someone like Tim Dinee putting out like on the one hand, Dogs in the Bark where you're playing Blades in the Dark as a pack of dogs, which totally works. This supplement is so simple and quite short andNychelle: Dude. I have done like a mini campaign with this. It is legit the best, especially when you play some of like the rat factions as if they're from like Brooklyn and New York. It like the, oh man, it's it's amazing. Sam: It's amazing. And then of course, when you switch back to regular Blades, like suddenly every rat and dog in the city is gonna be like someone you know. Right? It is gonna be amazing, but. Also, it's such a goofy take on the game.And on the other hand, he has also put out Blades in '68, which I guess isn't out yet, but is this moving the tech level like a hundred years in the future for Blades into this like seventies themed almost setting where war is over, superstition is gone and we're doing a much different vibe on the original thing. It's gonna feel really different.And then of course, like I'm coming in like hey, you should, play Doskvol Breathes, this downtime hack where you're just taking like three sessions to play out one downtime. And other people are coming in saying, yeah, I uh, I just like pick my two downtime actions and move the numbers around on my character sheet and get back to the next score 'cause that's the thing that I like.And all of those versions of the game are really valid and really exciting.Nychelle: Oh yeah. Now there was one experiment I did and I've kind of done it throughout Covid. I have run one particular, one shot, six different tables. Same setting, same scenario, everything. Not a single ending was identical. Six different tables, and it was like, it's the same scenario, it's the same setup. You have the NPCs and everything do the exact same thing, and there was a different ending for every single six of those games, which was just amazing.When you think about what a player and what a group of players being a variable can do to a game, so if you're doing that with mechanics, if you're changing a variable in a mechanic, you know that you're gonna get something completely different.Sam: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, and I think people should not, like a mantra I have about doing this, I don't know if I picked this up from someone else or not, is nothing is safe. Like you should change everything when you're doing this. Just play with everything for your table and what it means. I think this is actually from the Vincent Baker article I was talking about earlier, that really if there's a mechanic that you are using, mess around with it and see if there's something else you can do with it, but do it with intention. Like try to figure out what the purpose is for the thing that you're trying to accomplish. Like I just wrote a custom move last week playing in my regular game where it's like a pirate themed game and someone got a necromantic book. It's me, I'm the someone, I got a necromantic book that can summon a kraken when you cast a spell right. And we just like wrote a move for what happens when you try to do that? 'cause it should be a little bit bigger than just pickin' up some dice and rolling to see if you did it. You know, there should be a little bit more to it than that.And having, this is something I love from this Vincent Baker article, from the Blades in the Dark hacking the game section, is the encouragement to write moves, special abilities, mechanics, whatever you wanna call them, specifically for like named people and objects and locations in your game.There's a, an example one from the Vincent Baker article that goes: “If Groam gets his hands on you, he ties you to a table and you know he is really fucking good at that. If you try to escape, roll plus hard.” And like, then there's a bunch of options for like, specifically what happens when Groam has tied you to a table because he's really good at that.It's just so specific. It's so tailor made, bespoke to whatever table had this character Groam at it and doing that in games is just so exciting.Nychelle: Oh yeah, one of my favorite things as a GM is I've had plenty of players that will just fill out a character sheet and they're just like, yeah, my name's Bob. I'm this alignment. Or sometimes they, they won't fill out the descriptors or, or like, what they look like. They're just like, it's Bob. It doesn't matter what he looks like. But no, no, Bob actually matters. Tell me how Bob looks. Does Bob have a particular person he really likes to talk to and why? Tell me if Bob has a special butter knife that he does and he only uses it on scones. Why does Bob only use this particular butter knife on scones? Well, there's a story behind it.And drawing that story out or encouraging your table to do that, I just absolutely love because then I can have this whole thing on Bob's scone butter knife, or maybe it's a flashback score where, you know, Bob really wanted to stick it to the man, and this is how he does it because he stole so and so's butter scone, you know, for, for being outed a coin or something. Like when you start customizing or home brewing, even if it's just at your table and for anyone who's listening, you don't have to be a game designer or this person that has like all this knowledge of what not to change your game.You simply focus on your table, what you guys are comfortable with, what intention you have behind it and go from there and build it out and change it that makes sense for you guys. Sam: Yeah, the, the secret is if you're playing these games, you're already a game designer Nychelle: Exactly. Sam: But don't tell anyone. Yeah.Nychelle: Everyone's a game designer in a certain flavor or aspect. But yeah. No, it's really great when you start doing that because it also makes 'em more personal. I had a recent conversation with Allison Arth. And we were talking and discussing what does gaming actually mean? And we essentially brought it back around to it is an intended and created community. And I think that really also speaks to game design too, or changing the game, is being really intentional about how you curate and cultivate a community that you're interacting with through game design, mechanic change, maybe even the environment that you're playing with at the table.Sam: Have you ever like, changed a major rule of Blades that's not like a special ability or anything like that, but like, a more generic rule at the table?Nychelle: Mm. One I haven't really played with too much though I am looking forward to it, is magnitude. This mechanic that I feel is very much a backbone in an aspect of how you can do the thing, but also it doesn't really get brought up a lot. I find, and I feel that it doesn't really get brought, it's more of like a backseat mechanic that gets done. I.Sam: Yeah. Gosh, I should have uh, pushed us to talk about this as the whole framing device for this conversation. But that reminds me of Broken Spire, which is a blade supplement by Sean Nittner where you are starting from a place of trying to kill the Immortal Emperor. You're already on that score. Then every time you do something you like flashback to an entire score of setup in which you prepared another thing in your final attempt to kill the Immortal Emperor.And the downtime system in Broken Spire works like mechanically very similarly to Blades, but the downtime actions have all been changed so that they have much more impact on the game. Nychelle: Because you're, you're working not in micro anymore. You're working on a macro scale. And, and I think that's a, a thing that we a lot of times really get stuck in the micro. And don't realize how much the micro can impact the macro of what is actually going on or how much it doesn't impact what's going on in macro.Sam: Yeah. Yeah.Nychelle: I, I have not had a chance to play broken Spire, but had a couple of conversations with Sean about it, and I am like, dude, I, I need to play this. Sounds so badass. Sam: The, the idea of like one of the downtime actions is “say how you shift your heat to another faction. Roll for your action.” So instead of like reducing your heat, you're taking all of your heat and dumping it onto an enemy. And another one is like you just reduce the tier, the entire tier of an enemy faction. Which is wild. There's like, you're just gonna like casually in your downtime, fuck up an entire organization. Maybe it happens off screen.Even the idea that you could be taking Blades in the Dark, which by default is so much a game about like scrapping your way up from the, like bottom of the streets, you get just a couple of changes and suddenly you are monarchs of the underworld destroying factions left and right at your whim. It's so cool.Nychelle: Oh yeah. And I don't even think you're necessarily just of the underworld at that scale. You're impacting the politics, not only locally but the faction and, and the consequences of those actions across the Shattered Isles. Like there's so much that could be going on here. It's really fascinating to think about, but also to consider that of like, yeah, no, that's, chump change.Sam: Yeah. Yeah. Another, related idea to all of this that I've been pouring over in my mind a lot is the idea that the scarce resource in RPGs for me, right now anyway, is not new games and new systems, it's new settings and especially new scenarios.Like for example, I don't need another variation on Powered by the Apocalypse. Like even if someone's gonna write like a hundred beautiful moves across seven playbooks and all the rest, I'm sure they'll do a better job than me, but the thing that excites me about a new game is not what is it doing differently mechanically, it's what is the premise of the thing itself.Nychelle: Mm. Sam: in part because I know I can bring all of the tools that we're talking about here, of ways to change the game, to take a different system and change it to fit whatever the idea for this game is whether or not you've included a package of rules with your, your setting. Premise or you haven't. And that's just another thing I wanna put out into the world again, that I want to see more weird stuff to do, not ways to play the game. I have plenty of ways to play RPGs. I want more weird ideas, like story ideas that I can bring to my table that I otherwise wouldn't have had myself. Nychelle: Well, that's why you play fiction first, Sam. No, I'm joking. But no, it pretty much is because honestly, learning how to hack the game, learning how to really grasp mechanics, and like lines and veils and like, there's a whole plethora of things that each of us take. Experiences and all that stuff. But really when you pack it down, it's all tools in your toolbox, right? It's everything that you, that you sit down with at a table and you open up your box and you have all the tools there to go ahead and play and tinker with whatever is on the table. But I think that's a thing of especially when it comes to traditional RPGs, I'm going to say, and this probably will be spicy, is I think we get a little too focused on the toolbox that we bring to the table and not actually what the thing is on the table. Sam: Exactly.Nychelle: And I think that's where we really need to focus is, yes, we have the toolbox. A toolbox will evolve. Sometimes you'll, you'll be like, man, this hammer, I use this hammer every single time. It's been my friend for years. And then you switch over to a screwdriver or something else, like your toolbox will always be there. There's plenty of things to help you better utilize your toolbox. But getting the fiction, getting the narrative, and honestly getting that community together where you're creating something completely new and beautiful and it, it takes a life of its own.That's where it's really at to be quite honest.Sam: Yeah, like I am so excited to receive an ultra power badass like nail gun for Christmas, right? I'm excited to add that to my toolbox, but let's not forget that we're trying to build something.Nychelle: Yeah. Sam: The thing that we're building together is, is the exciting. Nychelle: We're trying to build a birdhouse, you know? Sam: Yeah. Yeah. And I want more birdhouses and fewer hammers. To come back out of the metaphor, I feel like I've had a couple of groups that I've played with for many years, and sometimes in those groups I feel like we've found a really comfortable groove, like a kind of story that we come back to again and again. And I, you know, that groove is a hit. I am happy to keep telling the story of that groove in variation.But I also, I'm excited when someone is able to bring me an idea for a new kind of story that's gonna like knock us onto a new groove to find a new space to play in. And mechanics are not the thing that's going to do that very often unless those mechanics are really in support of the new cool story idea.And the new cool story idea to help knock me and my longtime friends into some new place to help us explore some new story? That's the thing that gets me really going in RPGs right now. Bird houses, not hammers.Nychelle: I, I think it also comes down to being willing to explore new things. Sam: Yeah. Nychelle: it is, having that understanding of my paradigm and my perspective and how I'm viewing this game isn't the only one out there, and I want to see the game from as many different angles as possible. And I think that that is one wonderful thing that can happen is how many different bird houses do you end up seeing? if we're staying with the, with the narrative here of like, how many different bird houses do we end up making? How, how many different bird houses do we end up seeing? And again, I think it goes back to that intention of community is what are you doing with intention?Sam: Yeah.Nychelle: Sorry. I know you guys came here to talk about mechanics and we're talking about philosophy of gameplay.Sam: No, no, no. I, I gave up 40Nychelle: Uh, true. Sam: talking about mechanics. So I, I, I kind of knew what I was gonna get to with this episode topic anyway. No, I think oh, here's, here's the variation on the metaphor I wanted to say. I feel like I've made a lot of different birdhouses and I wanna make some fucking chairs now. Like, like I want, like the thing I want out of the RPG design community at large is for people to bring me some new shit to make other than birdhouses. Yeah, and I also, the other thing I wanna say is it's perfectly fine to just love polishing hammers and to really just be on that side of things and to not give a shit about what you're making. And it's perfectly fine too to just make birdhouses and only birdhouses for the rest of your gaming life. If that's what you're enjoying, like more power to you. But for me personally, the thing that I am excited about is something new. And something new on the fiction side rather than, than the mechanics side.Nychelle: I do think we're getting there in the indie gaming space. I think we're moving away from mechanic speak. It seems to be going in a very certain direction in the last few years, and I, I think we're getting more to the story and the process of building other things besides birdhouse. It's like, how many different things can we build with this? What can we build with this? It's really interesting to see like in like five years down the road, I wouldn't be able to tell you what we would build.Sam: Yeah. Make shit weird and make weird shit as uh, Joe DeSimone says. Nychelle: Oh yes. Sam: Thank you so much for coming on Dice Exploder.Nychelle: Thank you for having me, Sam. I greatly appreciate it. You've been a wonderful host.Sam: Oh, you too.Thanks again so much to Nychelle for being here. Like I mentioned in my intro, I think there's so many threads in this one to follow up on, and I want to underline two things that I really took away from it. first, making content for other people's games is just a joy in and of itself. Just like there's joy in the creating of all new games, there's joy in exploring the crevices of others. And it's often a lot easier to do. So go spelunking into someone else's head and set up camp. Second, game design is community building. The goal of these storytelling games is to sit with your friends and tell a story. And the sitting with your friends part of that is just as much something to prioritize and design for as the story part. Maybe more so. Like, deciding what snacks to buy is game design for your playgroup. Love your friends and the people you play with. And I think that's a lovely note to go out on for season 2 of Dice Exploder. If you want more of what this episode is talking about, I do have a post up on the Dice Exploder blog breaking down a custom Blades playbook that I made for playing a character named John Wick. I think it's pretty fun and gets into a little bit more examples of what we talked about today. You can find Nychelle on Twitter at mistletoe trex, on itch at mistletoe kiss itch. io, or on the Blades in the Dark Discord. As always, you can find me on the socials at sdunnewold, Blue Sky and Itch preferred. And there's a Dice Exploder Discord! Come on by and talk about the show, if you like. Our logo was designed by sporgory, and our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey.And thanks to you for listening this season! I'll see you in a few months! This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit diceexploder.substack.com