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.
Here’s some play advice: the instinct to hold on to your best ideas so you can “properly set them up” or do “big reveals” is a trap. Get to the goods.
The goods will beget more goods. If we spend three years leading up to meeting a player’s evil twin, that’s gonna be exciting. But you know what’s way more exciting? The fourth time that evil twin shows up. You can’t get to that fourth time and all the baggage, betrayals, double-crosses, and oaths of vengeance that come with it without going through the first three. So just get started.
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.
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.
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.
Here’s a question: if someone new to RPG design comes to you and asks what they should read, watch, and play to get up to speed, what do you recommend?
This week on Dice Exploder: it’s the season 2 finale! Nychelle Schneider, also known as Mistletoe_Kiss, joins me to talk about customizing games for your table. Not making your own powered by the apocalypse game or whatever, but like adding new abilities and moves to Blades in the Dark or your game of choice. It’s a big conversation, way too big for one episode. This one is chock full of cool ideas that I hope people take and run with.
But since we don’t have as much in the way of specific examples on the podcast this week, I wanted to give some here on the blog…
I had this weird experience picking apart the design of Agon.
Agon (second edition specifically, but I’ll be saying just Agon for the rest of this piece), by John Harper and Sean Nittner, is a game of Greek heroes, big action, and gaining Glory. It’s silly and fun and like The Odyssey plus The Fast and the Furious.
It’s got one main mechanic, a conflict resolution system that covers an entire scene and every player’s action in that scene with a single roll. The GM rolls for antagonistic forces, players roll to see if they best them, and then you go from worst player result up to best player result with each player taking a moment to describe their horrible failure or wild success within the scene…
Here’s the long version of The Awards, Dukk Borg, Gem Room Games, and me, plus a bunch of opinions about comedy in RPGs, criticism, and awards shows at large. And, of course, my full review of Dukk Borg.
I have complicated feelings about ranking things. When you start ranking art, you start deciding what makes one art “better” than another, and that often leads to trouble. But also… it’s fun?
A few weeks ago I saw this meme going around. And because this is the internet, my reaction to it was “this is wrong and I should write a thousand words about why…”
The thing about Google Slides that makes it my favorite virtual tabletop is that everyone knows how to use it. No setting up accounts, no learning a new service, you just get right to playing. It’s easy to navigate and remember where things are. And if all you’re doing is dropping in jpgs of character sheets and putting text on top of them, maybe with a few extra slides for session recaps and notes, Slides is fully functional. You’re killing it even.
Here’s a tour of how I use it.
I’m kind of obsessed with this article over on the excellent Indie Game Reading Club. It’s a guest post by Jason Morningstar in which he describes his process for throwing together a game in an hour. And I don’t mean prepping for a session, I mean soup to nuts all the mechanics and everything, done in 60 minutes.
This post is more or less a love letter to that article. Here’s how my playgroup did that and what we learned.
The deeper I get into this hobby, the more vibes become everything to me.
Vibes are just as important to a game as the rules. Rules moderate your story / adventure / experience as you tell / navigate / experience it, but vibes guide what everyone brings to the table before a single rule kicks in. A beautiful picture can inspire the mood of a whole session or campaign. The design of a pdf or even just an itch page can tell every player what kind of character to think up when called to. Is this a mechs with emotions evening, or are we descending step by step into a scary murderhole? Either’s fine by me, we should just pick ahead of time, and the Pinterest board the GM put together half an hour ago might get us all on the same page…
There’s a (potentially apocryphal) story about the design of Apocalypse World that says that the first thing Vincent Baker designed for the game was the Angel playbook. (Or possibly Brainer? I’ve heard both.) Before what dice you were rolling, before the basic moves, before any kind of MC-facing mechanics, Vincent started with some evocative stats and abilities. Before he knew what “open your brain to the world’s psychic maelstrom” meant, those words existed on a page. From there, he and Meguey built the game around what that playbook would need to function instead of starting big picture and gradually filling in.
Now, I’m sure that first playbook was iterated on later. Maybe it was completely revised. I’m sure a lot of that game existed before the fifth playbook was written. Maybe all of this is a lie! But I think there’s something very useful about the idea of starting a game’s design with its character sheet and/or playbooks and building out…
Tons of games use XP rewards to incentivize player behavior. But I think XP is often too intangible a reward to truly motivate players to act differently, and doubly so when there’s a time delay between their action and reward (such as to the end of the session with end of session XP triggers)…
On this week’s episode of the Dice Exploder podcast, I talked with Michael Elliot (@notwriting in most places) about Antiquarian Adventures. And while editing it, I was reflecting on our discussion on conflict in games and stories. We talked about how providing mechanical motivations for players to lean into conflict is a great thing to propel your story go forward. Failure and disaster are great because they give your story something to react to. Without conflict, story is boring, and at that point what are we even doing here?
...right? Is that true?
A new game from Sam means a new blogpost about how it came together! This time I’m looking at Couriers, my 2-ish page RPG inspired by Blade Runner 2049 and Lasers & Feelings…
Sometimes you spend one thousand years revising the same piece of a game (or movie or book or painting or…) over and over until you feel like your brain is leaking out your ears. By the end of this essay, I hope to give you a thorough taste of my current brain leakage…
I love so much of what this game is doing. Its vibes are immaculate. It has… just… so much, for better and worse. I wish my experience playing it had been more satisfying.
Apocalypse Keys is designed by Rae Nedjadi and published by Evil Hat. It’s “the Hellboy RPG” — a game in which you play monstrous humanoids investigating world-ending supernatural mysteries while you balance your humanity against your monstrosity. (It’s gay.) It kickstarted fall of 2022, and a full version of the rules was released to backers during the campaign.
