Mausritter is an old school dungeon crawling game where instead of playing as elves fighting dragons, you play as mice fleeing from owls. It’s not unlike any number of other old school games like Cairn or Into the Odd, but its inventory system is the only inventory system I’ve ever actually liked. Does it work differently than other games? At a raw numbers level, not really! But instead of a bunch of paper bookkeeping, Mausritter turns items into little cardboard squares like board game pieces that you put in a grid on your character sheet. That physicality makes all the difference.
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The Brainer VS The Brain-Picker (Apocalypse World 2e/3e) with the Bakers
TranscriptCommentA third edition of the landmark indie darling Apocalypse World is on Kickstarter right now, and I wanted to have on Meguey and Vincent Baker to see what makes this edition different. Specifically, in Dice Exploder fashion, I wanted to get into specific examples. I took the Brainer playbook from 2e and starting with the name change to the Brain-Picker, for everything that had changed in 3e, I asked the Bakers “why?” And I felt a way about it when so many of their answers pointed back to their kids.
Actual Play: Void 1680 AM Community Broadcasts (with Ken Lowery)
TranscriptCommentTo close out this miniseries on actual play, I wanted to feature a game that I think uses actual play as a game mechanic. Hear me out. Void 1680 AM is a solo playlist-building game in which you create a fictional radio broadcast. Except when you're done, you can send it to the game's creator (this week's cohost Ken Lowery), and he'll broadcast it out onto the real radio via the AM antenna in his garage (and on YouTube).
Obviously it feels different to play the game knowing it's going to go out on air. But I think it feels different even just knowing that it could go out on air. And while most actual play feels first and foremost like an act of performance, Ken's broadcasts feel more like an extension of gameplay and an act of community building. How's it feel to be inside all that? Come take a listen.
Actual Play: 4AM at a Diner (Last Train to Brooklyn) with Linnie Schell
TranscriptCommentLast Train to Brooklyn is an actual play from Twice Rolled Tales where they play Last Train to Bremen on a New York City subway car. It's also probably my favorite actual play full stop. Why? I think because it leans into what I'm most excited about this medium: treating capturing the act of play more like a documentary than a means towards fiction. It's excited at least as much about its nonfiction story as its fictional one.
Today I've invited Linnie Schell, one of the main creatives behind Last Train to Bremen, to come give me a beat by beat director's commentary on everything that went into it, all building to the moment I really wanted to highlight: its ending.
Actual Play: An Uncomfortable Offer (Maia's Game Room: The Electric State) with Maia Wilson
TranscriptCommentOne of my favorite parts about these episodes where I'm highlighting a single moment from an actual play is how many practical lessons I can bring back to my own table by going beat by beat through a significant moment in play. And today, Maia Wilson has brought a particularly significant moment from her show Maia's Game Room in which one character, in desperate straights, is pressured by an NPC to pay for his help with sex.
It's an intense moment. It may not be for you (and this episode may not be, either). But I think there's no better way to learn about how to establish good communication and try to keep people safe at the table than by breaking down a specific example. Plus, when you get this right like I think Maia and her table do, the results can be cathartic and compelling. Let's get into it.
Actual Play: A Tree Shanty (My First Dungeon: The Wildsea) with Brian Flaherty and Elliot Davis
TranscriptCommentIn The Wildsea, you play as sailors on a sea of trees in a climate post-apocalypse where the climate won. And in the My First Dungeon mini series of this game, today's co-cohost Brian Flaherty took it on himself - along with co-player J Strautman - to write an original song, a “tree shanty,” that played on each episode…
Actual Play: The First 30 Minutes (My First Dungeon: Orbital Blues) with Rowan Zeoli
TranscriptCommentYou Will Die In This Place with Merrilee Bufkin and Jay Dragon
TranscriptCommentLast summer a hot new game hit the indie rpg scene: You Will Die In This Place, a surreal and experimental... dungeon crawler? Technically? ...that seems to have more in common with House of Leaves than it does many roleplaying games. And for a couple weeks I saw so many discussions about this game that I eventually broke down and was like, do I need to do an emergency podcast about this?
Love, Sex, and Romance: The War (Will That Be All?) with Kim Lam
TranscriptCommentToday we’re wrapping up the Dice Exploder series on love, sex, and romance with Will That Be All? by Graham Walmsley, a game about the social relationships between the downstairs staff at Melton Hall, a fictional British estate, over the course of about a decade between the first and second world wars.
It’s a lovely game about finding solace and community even as the world outside feel deeply uncertain - and that’s what Kim wanted to talk about: how setting, and in this case the spectre of war, can encourage and affect how not just romance but relationships of all kinds can play out in a game.
Love, Sex, and Romance: Big Chunky Prompts with Tasha Robinson
TranscriptCommentI’m back! Alex and Sharang have done an amazing job talking love, sex, and romance over the past month but I have plenty to say on the subject myself. In particular, I wanted to approach the conversation Alex and Sharang started about the quantification of romance from the perspective of how I feel when I’m actually at the table playing these games. Because that quantification makes me feel kinda weird… but what do I want instead?
Because freeform romance is tough for me. Romance is scary! I want some help, some guidelines, some dare-I-say rules and mechanics for it. But if not quantification... then what? What else might help alleviate my fear and awkwardness? Or is that awkwardness part of the fun and charm of romance, and really we should leave it in?
Today, Tasha Robinson returns to the show to talk it all through with me.
Love, Sex, and Romance: Physical Touch with Alex & Sharang
TranscriptCommentIn this final episode hosted by Sharang and Alex, perhaps their climactic episode, they are turning up the heat on sex mechanics all the way to physical contact, both as a way to simulate sex acts through other kinds of physical touch... and through actual sex acts being used as game mechanics.
This stuff is fascinating, I think much more broadly applicable than you might believe at first blush, and I think also very obviously under discussed in the way that all things sex and sexuality are under discussed. Let's get into it.
Love, Sex, and Romance: the Phallus with Alex & Sharang
TranscriptCommentOur series on game mechanics centered around sex and romance continues with returning champions Alex Roberts and Sharang Biswas, and today they are talking about dicks. “The phallus.” Or more generally, physical objects. I did some episodes on physicality earlier this year and how the physicality of a game undeniably affects how it feels to play it. But Alex and Sharang go a step further, talking about how in a game you can use an object as almost a vessel for player emotions. Take a listen.
Love, Sex, and Romance: Roll to Seduce with Alex & Sharang
TranscriptCommentAlex Roberts and Sharang Biswas are back for round two, this time with “roll to seduce,” that classic action so many people try and even succeed at taking across any number of games. If I roll high enough on my persuasion check, surely the dragon will fuck me instead of killing us, right? In some games, yes! Right indeed!
This is such a weird dynamic, but clearly so appealing to so many people, and today Alex and Sharang get into the why and how of it all. That leads to all kinds of places, but in particular the seductive choice to quantify sex and romance, but put a number to all these ephemeral and scary ideas about sex and romance, presumably so we might better understand them or be able to avoid dealing with how potentially embarrassing and messy they can be.
Love, Sex, and Romance: Sex Moves (Apocalypse World) with Alex & Sharang
TranscriptCommentLove, sex, and romance: huge human topics, wildly under-discussed in roleplaying games. At least in my opinion. So today on Dice Exploder we’re kicking off a new miniseries on the subject hosted by NOT ME. Instead, for the next four episodes, Alex Roberts (Star Crossed, For the Queen) and Sharang Biswas (editor of Honey and Hot Wax) are taking over the show to bring you all things love and sex.
And today they’re kicking off with an episode on sex moves from Apocalypse World and Monsterhearts, classic PBTA moves that trigger when two characters have sex. Let’s get into it!
Rolling the Dice... On Camera! (The Die Guys) with Moira Joy Smith
TranscriptCommentMoira Joy "MJ" Smith is the Dungeon Master for the Try Guys D&D actual play show "The Die Guys". She created the show in 2024 along with the Try Guys, and I was her right-hand dude during production and the show's video editor.
Today, ahead of a whole series I have planned later this fall on actual play, MJ and I sit down to talk about how we made The Die Guys. We start with a bunch of background - how shows get made for YouTube at large, how the Try Guys specifically make shows, and how this show came about - but we get granular to, all the way down to how I made choices in the edit about whether to leave in or cut individual jokes.
Afterimage #2: City of Winter
TranscriptCommentI have a box full of memories that lives in my closet, a pair of drumsticks, a half smoked cigar, a thimble full of sand from a beach I've never been to. If I passed away and you were cleaning out my closet, you would look at this box and you would know it was important, but you wouldn't know why. You wouldn't know whose funeral I played at with those drumsticks, or on which rooftop in my hometown, I smoked that half a cigar. But you would feel their weight all the same...
Afterimage #1: Yazeba's Bed and Breakfast & The Kite
TranscriptCommentHello, and welcome to a brand new episode format here on Dice Exploder: Afterimage. It's equal parts This American Life style personal memoir and play report.
When I was in third grade, there was this cartoon that aired while I was coming home from school, so I could only ever watch the second half of episodes…
Clarity (Changeling: the Lost 1e) with MintRabbit
TranscriptCommentIn the unreliable urban fantasy world of Changeling, Clarity is a mechanic that measures... well, for now let’s go with a character's ability to trust their own reality. But finishing that sentence is kind of what this episode is all about, because Clarity has deep ties to various sanity mechanics from any number of Call of Cthulhu inspired games, even as it’s trying to do something different, maybe a little more nuanced and less obviously offensive as measuring a person’s sanity with a flat number.
There’s any number of metaphors you might find meaning in with Clarity. It’s not clear to me that that makes it much better than sanity. And yet, today's cohost MintRabbit loves this game and this mechanic dearly, sees so much of herself in it. And seeing yourself in a flawed game, still finding beauty in it, that's what makes today's episode interesting.
Question Oracle (Stoneburner) and rolling the dice again with Ray Chou
TranscriptCommentFor the two year anniversary of Dice Exploder, my first ever cohost Ray Chou returns for what starts off as a brand new episode about Stoneburner by Fari RPGs and that game’s oracle mechanic: a way to use dice, random tables, and the careful framing of stakes to adapt the game for solo play.
But at some point the conversation morphs into a deserving sequel episode to our first go around on rolling the dice in idie rpgs more broadly. When do you roll dice? Are partial successes good? And how does all of this change for solo and GM-less play? We didn’t ask all these questions last time, and we didn’t have great answers to the ones we did. So let’s check in on the state of rolling the dice!
10 Candles (10 Candles) with Jay Dragon
TranscriptCommentThis is, at long last, the end of this Dice Exploder miniseries on larp. And I wanted to send it off by returning to the question I kicked it off with: what can tabletop designers learn from larp? To get into that, there’s few people I’d rather have on than Jay Dragon (Wanderhome, Yazeba’s Bed & Breakfast).
When I pitched Jay this topic, Jay wanted to bring in the 10 Candles from 10 Candles. This is a game best known for, what else, the 10 candles you light at the beginning of play. And the act of doing so, and then turning out the lights, sets a mood that feels like a ritual, something deeper and more visceral than most tabletop games, something not exactly larp-like, but that feels of a piece with the emphasis on environment and embodiment that larp often brings…