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.
I noticed recently that the RPGs that most reliably give me their intended experience, regardless of who I’m playing with or how experienced and familiar with the game the facilitator is, have an enormous amount of structure to them. At any given point, it is always clear in these games who is responsible for taking the next action and what their options are for that action.
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.
I’ve mentioned this several times on the Dice Exploder discord and to many folks in private, but here’s a first official public announcement: I’m actively seeking out people to come take over Dice Exploder as the primary host for 3-4 week runs. (This is not a solicitation for submissions; I’ve been reaching out to folks personally.) I’m hoping to get two or three of these out this year.
As part of that, I wrote up a style guide for the show, basically a document describing everything I do to make an episode.
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.
For the longest time I did not understand solo RPGs.
From my conversations with others, I think this is a very common condition. The thought goes “I play RPGs to tell a story with my friends. If I wanted to tell a story to myself, I’d write a novel.” And for many solo games, the act of playing them can feel this way. I feel obligated to take a game’s prompt and, as instructed in a “typical” journaling solo game, write a proper and thorough response. Maybe I shouldn’t feel that way, but I do, and most of my friends who’ve tried the medium feel similarly.
But I wanted to understand them better, so I invited Seb Pines on the podcast to talk solo games, figuring it’d be a kick in the butt. I picked up a bunch of Seb’s recommendations, and then I discovered The Ink That Bleeds.
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.
This week on the podcast I’ve got Emanoel Melo talking to me about character sheets. It’s such a visual subject, and there were so many more sheets I wanted to talk about than we had time for, that I thought I’d put together a companion blogpost here with some bonus thoughts and content.
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.
