This week’s episode of Dice Exploder can be found here.
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:
Everything Is Illuminated, the book and film
Sam’s playlist from playing Ribbon Drive
The Awards website
The Awards interview on Yes Indie'd
Socials
Takuma on Twitter and Bluesky.
The Dice Exploder blog is at diceexploder.com
Our logo was designed by sporgory, and our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey.
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Transcript
Sam: Hello, and welcome to another episode of dice Exploder. Each week, we take a tabletop RPG mechanic and hit the loop track, but non it. My name is Sam Dunnewold, and my co-host this week will introduce themselves.
Takuma: Hi, I'm Takuma. I am a game designer and musician. You can find my games at nerodhome. itch. io,
Sam: I know them best as the designer of Stewpot: Tales from a Fantasy Tavern, one of my favorite games of all time. It's like if you were a D and D party, but decided to stop adventuring, open a Tavern and become NPCs. I have played so fucking much stewpot and we've got a whole episode on it next week, actually. But in the meantime, the BackerKit campaign for Stewpot is currently live, so go back right away. Oh, you're in for a treat.
But today, we are talking about ribbon drive by Avery Alder, a game about going on a road trip and letting go of our attachments to the future, in which you make a plate list in advance and then come to the table and share it with your friends. What? Yeah, it's a playlist making RPG. And today we're talking all about playlists, not just how they work in ribbon drive, but also how we think about making them generally and how sharing music with your friends is fun. This is a mechanic that's just so unlike so much else out there, but it's still so effective. You can probably feel that already just thinking about it.
Before we get into it. I wanted to plug submissions for the 2024 The Awards, a weird little RPG awards show with terrible SEO. I was a judge for them a couple of years ago, and I just loved doing it. I think awards shows are really silly, but this is my favorite silly awards show.
If you want to know more, Thomas Manuel did an interview on his podcast Yes Indie'd with The Awards coordinator, Nico McDougal and 2023 judge Tan Shao Han all about the process of, and philosophy behind The Awards. All three of those people are past dissects, splitter co-hosts font. There's a link in the show notes to that interview, and you can submit your games or your application to be a judge at theawards.Games right now. Okay. Let's get into it. Here is Takuma with playlists from Ribbon Drive.
Hey, thanks so much for being here on Dice Exploder.
Takuma: Thanks for having me.
Sam: Yeah. So, what game are we talking about today?
Takuma: Today we are talking about Ribbon Drive by Avery Alder, which is a game about road trips, about letting go on the open road, and to do that you make playlists, and you share them with each other and play them, and the duration of the game lasts the duration of your combined playlist.
Sam: Yeah, and the playlists in particular are the mechanic we're talking about today, but do you want to tell us a little bit about how they're actually used mechanically in play?
Takuma: Yeah, so, you make the playlists beforehand, you're supposed to make them based on a theme, like you want to have a cohesive theme, but your themes don't have to match at all, they can be, you know, whatever mix you want. In fact, having them kind of clash makes the story more interesting.
You bring them to the table. And then . we randomly determine the order that our mixes will play in. And once you put the first mix on, you use the two songs to set up your road trip and create your characters.
And the first song is kind of like, okay, where are we going? Like what, what is our group's vibe? Like, what is the vibe of this story? What are we doing?
And then the second song is used for character creation. And at least one thing from the lyrics has to be pulled directly onto your character sheet.
And after that, the mix just keeps playing. You just jump into play after those first songs. And then each time a playlist ends, it's like the end of an act. And then you put the next one on, jump into it, and then once the last playlist ends, then your journey is over unless you finish the game with the alternate resolution mechanic, or the main resolution mechanic, really, before that.
Sam: Yeah, yeah, and the playlists are also just sort of an ongoing oracle for scenes, which I think is sort of a natural thing that happens. You're just sort of listening to and vibing with this music and you tend to do creativity in line with that, but also explicitly in the text it says, hey, if you need to think up something that's going on, like, take a listen to the song that's on. Like, when a song changes, consider changing the tone of the scene to somehow match the new song and things like that. So, I think it is sort of self evident why this is an interesting mechanic to talk about, but why did you in particular want to talk about this game and this mechanic?
Takuma: I really love mechanics that help you get in the mood, get in the right mindset, get the right vibe. I like Oracle type things. I like things that, you know, aren't quite prompts that give me a lot to work with. I have kind of an improv background for my game design, which I'm, you know, common thing.
But uh, the Ribbon Drive music stuff especially reminds me of like really good, like more dramatic long form improv stuff that gives you kind of vibes that you can really lean into and develop.
Sam: Yeah, what, I don't know very much at all about long form improv. What does the kind of overlap there look like?
Takuma: There's this book called Process which a lot of improvisers have read. Kind of the goal of this fictional, you know, sort of, I think it's probably based, like, kind of autobiographical, but fictional in the context of the book. There's a improv troupe that is trying to improvise a full length play. And they do all of these games, exercises, that make that easier and they're very much about like embodiment, thinking about your environment, your character, all of these things like stuff that makes embodiment easier and faster. And I think the playlists, the music is really, really great, especially in the context that it's placed in, the road trip context, which a lot of people are familiar with, and where music is often playing already. It really just snaps me into that, makes it really easy to call on stuff. Yeah, one of my, one of my favorite mechanics.
Sam: Yeah, yeah. I've been playing a lot of two player games recently, and in particular at least in the ones I've been playing, a very common genre is It's essentially structured around drawing a tarot card and using the tarot card as inspiration for the content of the scene.
And I keep finding this insufficient because I just don't know anything about tarot personally, and I find the art on the tarot deck that I have been using for this to be totally fine. It's like interesting, but it often doesn't really match like the story at hand. It feels sort of very removed from the thing that we're doing.
But I love the idea of an oracle and when that sort of process works, it feels so great and the replacement of a generic tarot deck with a, like, handcrafted playlist, from my heart, and like uh, an equivalent one from each other person I'm playing with in Ribbon Drive, just immediately makes the Oracle so much more personal and intimate and specific for me , and is also just this wonderful act of, like, initial act of vulnerability to set the tone for what we're gonna be doing today.
Takuma: Yeah, just gonna do a side plug for a friend here, if you struggle with using tarot cards specifically for those kinds of Oracle deck games, I cannot recommend Spindlewheel enough, where each card has two sides, obviously an upright and an inverse, but each side is a short fragment of text that is meant to kind of contrast each other and be very evocative and can be put into a bunch of different situations.
Actually I've got a deck right here. I'm just going to pull a card and read it off. So Tapestry Loom is a card and it says on one side the mainstay, the through line, the common thread in a complicated plan. And the other side says, a factory line, a cathedral in progress, the masterpiece of a generation.
Sam: Yeah. That's what I want
Takuma: they're so good. Get a deck, go play some Oracle Deck games with them. Designed by uh, Sasha Reneau. Really, really incredible.
Sam: Yeah.
Yeah. Well, I mean, like, I feel like that's a great example of like how the playlist thing works really well too, because those words you just read out sound like song lyrics.
Takuma: Absolutely.
Sam: Right? Like the, there was something so, when I got to play Ribbon Drive there was something so magical about taking a three word phrase from a song and repurposing it for an RPG character. And also something so wonderful about, you know, just sitting and listening to music with friends in silence, and then doing a close analysis of the text essentially afterwards, like for a purpose, but also to just like get in there into these oracle words and play around. It was so validating and fun.
Takuma: Yeah, it's a really great experience, and I think kind of the unifying aspect of, oh yeah, these are all pulled from the same song, but seeing how much we can kind of bend this and like what parts we do want to kind of line up on, it's just a really great kind of structure.
Sam: Yeah. so what, for you, is the experience like of making a playlist for the game?
Takuma: I am a playlist maker. I love making playlists.
Sam: uh huh.
Takuma: and what, even just starting with playlists in general, like what do you like about making playlists?
I love the storytelling, I love the sequencing, I love the vibes, and seeing, okay, this is the kind of thing that I'm wanting to convey with this playlist. What are the bounds of that? Like, what do I want to include that's like, at odds, and like, how do I connect these two things? And it's, yeah, it's the limitations. It's the limitations, and working within them, and really needing to cut stuff down.
I, I like writing short things. I like writing minigames. I like writing short stories. I just like cutting things down in general and making them very small.
Sam: Yeah, me too. always find making playlists to be such a personal and intimate act, but also there's sort of this plausible deniability in terms it's like I'm, I'm being very vulnerable. I'm expressing a part of myself, but there's also this plausible deniability of I didn't make any of this music. Like someone else made this music. And so it feels like this easy way to sort of step into being very vulnerable with someone.
Takuma: Yeah, it feels really good. to be that vulnerable. And yeah, I think I do have an easier time with the playlists than even say, the session zero of a different tabletop game, where you need to kind of advocate for the things that you're interested in and, and kind of say, no, I don't, I don't know if I'm feeling that right now. Like that stuff is hard to do when you're just saying it out of your mouth.
But with the playlists, it's really, there's definitely a bit of a lowering of that barrier and it also, I'm someone who tends to struggle with just like listening to new music
Sam: Hmm.
Takuma: without like anything else going on,
Music being used in movies, like music videos really work on me. But, Ribbon Drive playlists are definitely one of my favorite ways to experience new music from, you know, people that I care about, and, it feels really good to have them share that with me, and, you know, after the game, talk about, oh yeah, this is why I chose these songs, and like, this is why this one's important to me, it's really, it's really nice.
Sam: Yeah. You also mentioned I like how I'm just turning this entire thing into, let's talk about making playlists instead of Ribbon Drive. But you, you also mentioned specifically like sequencing of songs as something that you enjoy, which I really love about making playlists. I love curating an order for a thing.
And I feel like especially in the way music has developed in the past couple of decades, people listen to way fewer albums, people listen to way fewer, like shuffle is sort of the default. And I miss that curation of order, and I'm curious why you like ordering music.
Takuma: Oh, I actually I spent a lot of time listening to albums on CDs in high school, and that's when I would listen to things in order the most. And then for a while, yeah, I was in that like, shuffle an album, shuffle playlist kind of space, and
Sam: Pandora arrived on the scene,
Takuma: Yeah, well for me it was Spotify.
Sam: Yeah, fair enough, yeah.
Takuma: But I think the past year or so, I have really been craving that order again in the albums, and I think I've been making specifically ordered playlists for much longer than that. Like, I do that on and off anyway, but I think listening to albums again in that order really makes me appreciate it more and be better at it. Uh, kind of the emotional journey that a specific sequence of songs takes you through, you know, the song that feels like kind of a reprieve after a really intense one or kind of the swelling of the energy and the story and like the bits that you pick up.
I think I've been engaging a little more with just whole story arcs in general the past couple years. I think before that I was, I was kind of in a low bandwidth, I can't really handle this or think too deeply about it right now kind of space. And just in general, the past couple years being able to kind of go, okay, looking at this as a whole now, What was the arc of it? What parts did I really enjoy? What things worked? What things did I not like? Which parts do I think could have been shorter? Which parts do I think worked really well? And just like, picking apart the whole craft of it.
Sam: Okay, that is an interesting transition, actually, into the part of Ribbon Drive where you switch playlists from one person to another. Like this happens naturally when a playlist is over. You just pick another person and start the next playlist. But there's also a thing where people can introduce obstacles into your journey, which is sort of a generic name for some kind of trouble in your way that's preventing you from continuing your road trip, and either you can resolve these obstacles and get through them, or you can take a detour, which means avoiding the obstacle instead, and anytime you do that, you're supposed to switch playlists to a new person's playlist.
And I actually don't think this happened during my playthrough of the game, and I imagine it might even be sort of rare for it to happen in play just because of the vibe of the game being so low key. But first of all, I'm curious if this happens frequently, since you've played the game so much more than me, but also the moment of contrast between one person's like chill playlist and the next person's heavy metal playlist or whatever is also a very interesting and surprising moment to me and I'm curious to talk about like how you feel about that moment in play
Takuma: I don't remember an exact time that it happened. It has not happened very often. That is definitely true, for me at least.
It definitely does feel kind of weird though, especially because it's like, oh, I want to listen to the whole thing. Like, my friend made this, I want to listen to the whole thing. It's hard to kind of like, push yourself to do that for the story.
Sam: It's
Takuma: but it is, it is, but stories, stories can be, and I do really like kind of the abrupt switch between playlists
Sam: It brings like a new energy to the story in a way that feels really fun. Like if, if things are kind of slowing down a little bit, like switch into an entirely new background vibe can give you like more propulsion that you might've been missing.
Takuma: Yeah. Okay, each playlist is, you know, 40 minutes to an hour and you you don't want to just sit there vibing and chatting for two and a half hours, three hours, like that's not what you're playing this game for. You're playing it for a sudden thunderstorm to appear and needing to get off the road and stop at a motel for a night and like what happens there, or your car breaks down, or maybe something supernatural happens. I've had that happen in games and that's actually been really cool like ghosts and stuff showing up in a playlist because of the vibes
Sam: Oh yeah.
Takuma: Yeah you want those swerves, and I mean that's the part that feels most like you know traditionally tabletop game to me, right, is the kind of randomness and the introduction of a curveball that you weren't expecting. That part feels really good.
Sam: Yeah. Yeah. You know, you say that feels like the most traditionally role playing game part of this, And that just makes me think, like, it's shocking how few rules there are in this. It's truly just like, bring some playlists and vibe on that and tell a story together. Like, it's, there's so little to hang on mechanically in this game other than listening to your cool playlist with your friends, but it's also enough and that's shocking to me.
It like, it's How does it do that? How is just like having some music to listen together like enough for a whole role playing game?
Takuma: It's, it's why it's such a good game. Um, Oh gosh. Okay, so I have two things for this, which is the scope and the setting of the scene, and the limitations of the game are done incredibly well. And the other thing is actually the resolution mechanic of crossing out your futures.
Sam: Oh, yes. Do you want to describe that mechanic quick?
Takuma: Yeah, so, when you play Ribbon Drive and you make characters, you create a character with a name, three traits, and two futures. And one of the traits or futures has to come from the song. Usually more, when I play it, usually multiple end up being pulled. But the kind of tagline of the game is "We tell stories about letting go on the open road." And over the course of play, as your characters develop, you use your traits and you cross out your futures. Either you're like, I have to do this, I want to do this, I have to do this, I don't want to let this go, or you cross it out and you're like, oh, actually, I'm in the moment, I can be here, I don't have to worry about this,
Sam: I don't have to get back together with my ex, or I don't have to travel to Europe, or whatever the thing is.
Takuma: Mm hmm. And the way it works is the first player to cross out both of their futures is retroactively the protagonist of the story, which is pulled from this movie, Everything is which is a road trip movie with Elijah Wood. um, interesting movie that I watched a while ago, but you realize that a character in that movie is the protagonist a good way of the way through, and you're like, oh, wait, it's not, it's not him. Oh, but it, it works, it works, it really works well though, and, it's that kind of like reveal where it's, kind of left up to chance and also to play, which is also really, really good about it. And I, I kind of stole that a little bit for, for Stewpot as with the, like, crossing out the experiences,
um, and like, letting go being the measure. But it's like, you know, I wanted everyone to get there and have it be more of an ensemble thing. But the protagonist framing really, really works well here and I think helps the wrap up a lot where you can kind of, okay. We have a focal point now. Like, starting out with all of these strands that you have, and you kind of explore them, and you narrow them down, and you get down to this one, and you wrap up there, you tie it off.
Sam: It's nice also for hitting the theme of letting go, to at that point where you found your protagonist, needing to, as a group, let go of everything else that was going on in the story. yeah, yeah.
Yeah, so it is, the game has that future structure, and there's a rule in there too where you're not supposed to talk about the future unless it directly relates to a character's future.
And, it's like, that goal of eventually we're gonna let go of our futures, we can't talk about the future except in this particular way, and we have these playlists going on, is... it's so little structure, but it is also all the structure that you need.
Oh, and I guess also that like, we haven't really talked about how this is very explicitly a road trip game, and how, first of all, making playlists immediately makes it feel like a road trip game. Like, it's one of the only other times in at least American life, you're sitting around listening to music with friends. And doing the playlist creation really feels like a road trip, but then just those couple of rules plus the vibe of road trip story it gets your group all the way to we can tell a whole story and we have all the tools we need to do that. We just intuitively sort of understand how we're gonna do that. Despite being so minimal.
Takuma: Yeah, absolutely. I think part of what made me fall in love with the game in the first place, it was more like, playing it and like not really understanding why it all worked well but like you know feeling it i struggle a lot with like improvising conversation
Sam: Mm.
Takuma: in tabletop games especially. I'm like i'm just gonna third person this. I'm not, I'm not gonna be speaking in character. It was the thing i struggled with a lot but then putting me in the framework of oh you're on a road trip with your friends and there's music playing, and you're just, a lot of it can just be idle chatter,
and in jokes, and ribbing each other, and laughing, and going, oh, they're asleep again, in the back, like,
It's really, really easy to talk in Ribbon Drive with the way that it's framed, with the road trip, with the way that road trips themselves, you're commenting on, Oh, pass the snacks. Oh, when are we stopping for food? I need a bathroom break. Oh, it looks like it's gonna rain. How much farther should we go tonight? There's all of these logistical questions that also provide a structure for the, for the chat in between. It's such a good combination.
Sam: Yeah. Yeah, as I'm thinking about it, one of the things that feels so helpful about each of these pieces is that they're all so incredibly specific. Like, even if there's not very many of them, being on a road trip is so specific. Making a playlist is so specific. The futures rule, even. Like, the restriction on conversation about how you're supposed to talk about the future, is so specific in what it makes you think of and how it makes you act in those conversations that even though there's not a lot of sort of walls around your play, the ones that are there are very clear and very easy to sort of wall jump off of for inspiration.
Takuma: Yeah, it's, and when you're, you know, working with a minimal framework, like, you need that specificity. Like, that's the thing that, It's like a seed crystal.
Everything else kind of forms around it.
Sam: so, Another thing that like, bringing playlists in does that I really love is it ensures that everyone is going to be invested in the game, because everyone has made such a big contribution to it. Like, it's really hard to show up to the table to play a game like this and not be very present and very excited to play, because you have this whole playlist to share with your friends. And that, that does a really nice job of helping like, not get stuck in that I'm looking at my phone being distracted thing, or what are we doing tonight? Like some weird game thing, I guess? Okay, I'll show up and hang out. Like, it makes sure everyone is really invested right out of the gate.
Takuma: And even when you're like hesitating or struggling a little bit it's really easy for the other players to, you know, ask you questions in the game to kind of pull you in as much as you can handle.
Sam: So is there anything else in particular that you, like, want to make sure that you get to talk about with playlists here? You do have this note in the outline about like, I want more mechanics that convey vibes and atmosphere. And I'd be curious to hear you talk about that more.
Takuma: I think the framing of the road trip is especially helpful for headspace, like the thing I was talking about with conversation before, but not just the conversation, but just imagining yourself in that situation or imagining this character. You know emotionally what it's like to be on a road trip, you can feel that, you can pull on that, you have your memories of that.
It makes the conversation easier, but it also makes it easier to remember, oh, I was feeling this staring out the window at hour, you know, 13 of this road trip with the same two other people in the car. I can pull on that and because, you know, it's such an enclosed space and it's such a specific feeling and I think I really like that kind of LARP y space where it's like combining kind of like tabletop and LARP elements.
I am not a LARP expert, but a lot of games I like have these kinds of like physical components or are conveying space in some way that maybe isn't directly totally physical, not a physical representation, but is meant to do that kind of scene setting.
Sam: the way you're talking about it is funny, like a road trip is almost uniquely good at that because sitting at a table together feels like being in a car yeah
Takuma: I mean, in terms of horror, I have not played this, I have just heard all of my friends rave about it forever, but I'm a baby and I cannot handle horror, is Ten Candles, obviously, which I'm sure many people have already heard of,
It is a horror game where you light ten candles and they slowly burn out over the course of the game. I don't know the specifics because I have not played it, but I don't think we could avoid mentioning it here in terms of, I think, similar games that do a similar thing.
The games that use a woodblock, Jenga Tower, I think are a little similar. The kind of, like, precariousness and trying to be very, very careful when it comes to, you know, Dread or Starcrossed. One of my early, really influential examples of this, besides Ribbon Drive, is Our Radios Are Dying by Aura Bell, where you play two doomed lesbian lovers just adrift in space as your oxygen is running out, and you play it sitting on two, like, spinny chairs, and you can only barely touch, and you have a script, basically, and you can pick lines from it that are just kind of your last moments together adrift in space as you're spinning around on chairs.
Sam: That's so good. Yeah, I think I mentioned this on another episode before about Star Crossed specifically, but there's a way that that game feels like the tower exists both in our reality as a tumbling block tower, and also in the fiction of the story at the same time as this tension between the two of you, and the playlists in Ribbon Drive feel really similar, where they exist in our reality, we are all listening to them and being inspired by them, but if we are doing a scene in which we are driving in a car, it is almost certainly the case that the characters are also listening to those songs.
Takuma: Absolutely.
Sam: And yeah, that, that overlap of an object that exists in two dimensions at once is just so magical.
Takuma: I, yeah, it's, one of my favorite things that I want more games that do that so badly. Like, obviously there, there are great ones out there, but I can always use more. I would always love to see more. I
Sam: I think the best ones are finding new objects and new metaphors to do it with. And every new one of these sort of physical metaphors that I hear about is It's a new piece of magic that feels special for its newness and surprise in a way that reuse of it kind of wears out.
Takuma: I think this is part of why I really love original systems just in general. I do create a very strong association between a system and the first thing that I play it in.
Sam: Mm hmm.
Takuma: actually another Avery Alder example is The Quiet Year, in which I think that a lot of people like using it as a world building game, but Hot Take, I think that is a very, very specific story and no matter how much like setting, redressing, you do it feels very similar when you play it, even with different groups of people and different scenes. And I played a lot of it in a short amount of time and got a little sick of it, being like, ah, we're just, we're doing this again. I didn't even say anything like just the way that it plays out.
And I mean, I think that's a good thing for the design of the game and the way the prompts are set up. Like it is really, really well designed. But it can't do things that it wasn't designed for. And I really like original systems that very intentionally choose these specific words for this prompt, or these specific rules, this is the exact moment you should roll, and this is why it should feel like that, because I think that is still doing the kind of thing you're talking about with the existing in two dimensions, just a little more abstracted when it's more traditional mechanics.
But it is still doing that to me and I really like even just feeling that with with like dice and tokens and cards, Yeah, I think I really like original systems for that reason.
Sam: Like, you are able to take A new metaphor, like the candles in Ten Candles, or like the Tumbling Block Tower, or even just a new way of rolling dice, or a new conversational restriction, like the futures thing in Ribbon Drive, and either build a story around that, or find the right thing like that for the story you are interested in conveying, it's just magical, it's just so special, and It's so much more effective than repurposing another tool.
Like, I think repurposing other games tools, often work, they're sturdy, they're good groundwork, but they're not a replacement for finding the absolute best possible thing for the very specific thing you're trying to do with a game.
Takuma: And like, hacking is a great jumping off point for sure, and there are definitely settings and stories that don't need a lot of adjustment. I've definitely played hacks where I've been like, this is such a good idea, like, this is such a good fit for this system that I can get really into it, like, this makes sense.
But I, yeah, really encourage people to not think, Oh, I want to hack the system, but I want to tell the story, here are all the systems that I know, which one's the right fit, or which one is the closest that I can start with and go from there.
What do you want from the story? Like, how do you want the story to be told? What do you want it to feel like? And start there instead of going, oh, I'm gonna hack this system.
Sam: Yeah. Being really intentional about the decisions you are making to support the story you want to tell I think is, The way I prefer people to approach game design.
Takuma: Mm hmm. Mm
Sam: Okay, to kind of wrap this up a little bit, one of the things that Ribbon Drive recommends at the end is, this game was written in, like, 2009 when I still had music on CDs, and it's saying, hey, if you physically brought a CD or a mixtape, maybe swap with someone.
And now, of course, everyone's just making their Spotify playlist or whatever, and then you just, like, send the links to the Spotify playlists around. But I really love the way that the game, even if it wasn't in the rule text, there would be a natural debrief on this game that is just trading playlists around.
And that's really cool. It's a nice like wrap up to the game. And love that the game text itself highlights it so much and encourages it and even offers you this they have a website where you can or 8tracks. com maybe is a place? I've never heard of this site before. Do you know anything about this site?
Takuma: I know of it exclusively through some friends who are really into making character playlists
Sam: There
Takuma: from like, Tumblr RP and like, fanfic writing. I think it's dead now. I think 8 Tracks is no longer functional. Rip 8 Tracks. But uh, you can find characters from stuff and you're like, oh, I wonder what this person's take on this character is, and you can, you could go on there and look at that.
Sam: God, I just clicked the link and it, I mean, this website looks uh, very 2009, I would say, but also it is here. There are 27 playlists tagged Ribbon Drive. You could absolutely go upload your playlist. It looks like. But something about it being this like old outdated site also feels like it fits the vibe of the game really well.
Takuma: Yeah.
Sam: But. Yeah, there just always is a magic to taking an artifact of play with you when you leave a game, too. And, double, like, even the map at the end of The Quiet Year, like, having that record of the story that you told together is really cool. And there, I especially like in Ribbon Drive the way that you get to keep this object of self expression from someone else and, like, take it home and start to listen to it on repeat.
Takuma: Yeah. I've really liked listening to my friend's playlists after playing, and yeah, I would say up there with one of my favorite artifacts of play from a game. Like, The Quiet Year maps are also really, really fun, and it's fun to see like, oh my god, this friend was an incredible artist and I didn't know, or this incredibly crudely drawn guy is so funny.
I remember, I remember that guy, oh, there were some teens who were turning into snakes in one of my games. There were, like, some photoshopped torsos placed on Snake
bodies.
Yeah. Snake centaurs.
I really, yeah, I really like artifacts. I like physical ones and I like non physical ones. And I think the trading is especially good with the, like, physical stuff. Like, I wish I still had a thing to burn CDs with for this.
Sam: Yeah. Yeah. You get, it's like a, a creative physical object that someone other than you made, and then you get to take home has an extra magic to it, because it has both your friend's creative spirit in it, and also the memories of your time shared together, attached to it. And that that just makes it lovely.
Takuma: It's really special.
Sam: Yeah, any last words you have about Ribbon Drive, or about making playlists? Do you have advice for people on making their own playlists at home?
Takuma: Oooh. Just, like, don't be afraid. Just really, really lean into it. Pick a really a theme that is very, very you and like, speaks to you strongly and just go from there. You can kind of like, challenge yourself to like make the transitions really good and like, actually have an arc to the playlist itself. You don't need to worry about that, but it can be fun. Yeah, just have fun with it.
Sam: Yeah. Playlists and music are fun. So is roleplaying games.
Takuma: Yeah.
Sam: Well uh, thanks so much for being here on Dice Exploder.
Takuma: Yeah, thank you for having me. Yeah
Sam: Thanks again to Takuma for being here. You can find her on Twitter and blue sky links in the show notes. Stewpot is on backer kit until I want to say May 10th, and you should back it immediately. Come back next week for an episode all about how much I love that game.
As always you can find me on socials at S Dunnewold or on the Dice Exploder discord. Our logo was designed by sporgory, and our theme song is sunset bridge by purely gray.
Thanks. To you for listening. See you next time.