Shadows 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!
Workshops with Marc Majcher
Transcript1 CommentThere's this period of time between when we've all agreed we're going to play a game now that’s 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?
Dice Exploder is on Patreon, plus Yazeba's Bed & Breakfast
TranscriptCommentDice Exploder is now 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.
Embodiment with Kate Hill
TranscriptCommentIn 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.
Just Read the Card (Ghost Court) with Randy Lubin
Transcript3 CommentsToday 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…
Mule (Last Train to Bremen) and Pregenerated Characters with Aaron Lim
TranscriptCommentPregens! 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.
Coloring Book Character Sheet (Two Hand Path) with Jeeyon Shim
TranscriptCommentPodcast Transcript: Flauros the Demon (Wreck This Deck) with Audrey Stolze
TranscriptCommentDon'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.
A Mirror Dungeon
CommentIdle Cartulary again has me blogging, this time after her post about how to make a zungeon. She’s basically got an almost meditative procedure for creating a cool little dungeon-y location for people to explore. You can use this to write a location in… well it took me about 80 minutes. Here’s what I came up with.
Some Jokes and Manifestos
CommentLast week people started getting physical copies of my short zine of games slash design memoir Dice Forager. Idle Cartulary did this nice review of it, and some folks were talking about it on the Dice Exploder discord. But everyone keeps being cagey about the preamble, not wanting to spoil it I guess? But I think it’s funny and I want people to be able to talk about it, so I’m posting it here.
I Made a Book (and So Can You)
CommentPodcast Transcript: 2024 Year End Bonanza
TranscriptCommentPodcast Transcript: The Challenge Deck (Wickedness) with Audrey Stolze and Seraphina Garcia Ramirez
TranscriptCommentA 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?
Podcast Transcript: AMA with Merrilee Bufkin
Transcript6 CommentsI 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.
Podcast Transcript: Deep Cuts with John Harper
Transcript1 CommentIt’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.
Podcast Transcript: Dice Forager: a Dice Exploder zine
Transcript3 CommentsHello 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.
Silly Cairn
CommentIt is the law that every RPG designer must eventually publish an elfgame. Like all those who came before me, there are dozens of such games that are decidedly not for me, a few that I almost love, and nothing that nails it exactly. But Yochai Gal’s Cairn gets close…
Hospitality, Safety, and Calibration
1 CommentSafety has been a huge topic of conversation in the past half a decade of TTRPG design. We’ve seen the invention of and popularization of so many tools like the X-Card, lines and veils, script change, and more. Most of these tools are system agnostic, often stapled on to whatever game is at the table this week. They work great for a lot of people and situations. But most people I talk to agree with two problems (that might be a strong word but let’s go with it) with most of these tools.
The first is that no tool can truly keep you safe, in any context or place. The tools above exist to help facilitate the goal of safety, they’re not band-aids you can slap on any situation to guarantee everyone has a grand old time.
The second is that people sometimes feel reluctant to use safety tools, especially at the times they might be needed most. It can be hard to look at a group of people around you having a ton of fun, whether friends or strangers, and say “no, stop.” Even when it’s something you need to say.
I have for some time been reconsidering how I think about safety tools and looking for not just better tools but better vocabulary around them to try and, if nothing else, address my own discomfort around their use. Meguey Baker’s piece Traffic Lights Are Communication Tools was a great starting point for this line of thought, but I’d like to put forth two other ideas.
The first, and perhaps more controversial of the two, is that I think the term “safety tool” is not ideal. When you start talking about safety tools, people get on edge. It’s intimidating. If we need tools to be safe, does that mean we are inherently in danger? I mean yeah, kinda, but that’s life. Sometimes people are shitty, either accidentally or on purpose. But there are plenty of games where we can talk about that and prepare people for when it happens with less charged language.
If we set a line against child death while setting up for Honey Heist, something is already off, unless maybe we know we’re playing Honey Heist in the style of The Expendables. If you come to my house for dinner, I don’t tell you at the door to make sure not to bring up child death, unless maybe our friend Kristen’s child recently passed away.
As an alternative to the term safety tool, I prefer the terms calibration tool, taken from Nordic larp, or communication tool as Meguey suggests. Both of these terms carry the same implicit goal of safety while underlining a verb you can act with when something is about to go or has gone wrong. They both also have the benefit of framing things in a more welcoming way in the leadup to an uncomfortable situation: calibrating and communicating are both things I want to do constantly, where safety remains a goal out in the nebulous future until it very much is in the present.
The idea of a calibration tool also feels easier to design towards for me. I don’t know how to design a mechanic that’s going to keep everyone safe, because no such mechanic exists. But I do know how to at least try and design a tool that allows people to check in with each other in a way convenient for the game at hand. It’s the same task, but calibration and communication give me places to start. Safety less so.
The second idea about safety, calibration, and communication tools that I want to popularize is the idea of hospitality. I got this from Jason Morningstar, and you can read one version of how we talk about this in our game Northfield, or in basically any game Jason’s designed recently. But he says he first encountered this framing of hospitality via Sean McCoy. Sean’s post Thinking About Safety Tools In RPGs is indeed very, very good. Everyone should read it.
Podcast Transcript: The Sooth Deck (Invisible Sun) and Custom Oracles with James D'Amato
Transcript1 CommentThis 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.
Podcast Transcript: Keys (Keymaster) with Caro Asercion
Transcript3 CommentsToday, 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.