Listen to this episode here.
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.
It’s good to be back.
Further Reading:
Vincent Baker’s original 2005 post on Otherkind Dice
Vincent’s 2022 Otherkind Dice SRD
Psi*Run by Michael Lingner, Christopher Moore, and Meguey Baker
Socials
John’s website, onesevendesign.com, and itch page.
The Dice Exploder blog is at diceexploder.com
Our logo was designed by sporgory, our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey, and our ad music is Lily Pads by my boi Travis Tessmer.
Join the Dice Exploder Discord to talk about the show!
Transcript
Sam: Hello and welcome to Season 3 of Dice Exploder. Each week, we take a tabletop RPG mechanic and ask it about its mother. My name is Sam Dunnewold, and my co host this week is John Harper.
If you're here, you probably know who John is, or at least know their work. Dice Exploder alone has done episodes on three of their games: lasers and Feelings, Blades in the Dark, Agon 2nd Edition, co designed by Sean Nitner, and I'm sure someone will eventually bring on Lady Blackbird. And these are big games. Blades has a freaking TV show in development. It is not a stretch to say that John is among the most influential designers in tabletop RPGs ever.
Needless to say, it's nice to have them on the show.
John brought in a fairly complex dice resolution mechanic, the Risk Sheet from Psi*Run by Michael Lingner and Christopher Moore, and then later published by Meguey Baker, and based on the mechanical idea of Otherkind Dice by Meguey and Vincent Baker.
Psi*Run's Risk Sheet is such an elegant piece of design, packing essentially a whole game onto a single sheet of paper. It's also pretty visual. I think we do a decent job describing it in the show, but if you haven't had the pleasure of looking at it, there's a link in the show notes, and glancing at it for like 10 seconds even before John and I start talking will probably make our conversation a lot easier to follow.
We talk about this as the episode goes on, but I think this mechanic is an especially good one to study if you're a new designer, or even just trying to get back in touch with the basics of design. It's simple to understand, it's obvious how you might hack it. And it's just so cleanly functional. And I'd just selfishly love to see more Otherkind games out there.
Alright, with that, let's get into it. Here is John Harper with Psi*Run's Risk Sheet.
John, thanks so much for being here.
John: Thanks for having me. I am a fan of the show and it's cool to actually be on it now.
Sam: Yeah. Obviously big fan of yours also given how many of your silly games I have covered on this silly show.
So what are we talking about today?
John: Today we are talking about the risk sheet mechanic from a game called Psi-Run by Meguey Baker. And it is evolution of an older mechanic called Otherkind Dice which people may have heard of. Actually the first version is from 2003 I just confirmed from Vincent Baker's old blog. So it's its 20th year now this dice mechanic to exist.
This iteration of it is for the game Psi-Run, which is a game about super powered people that have escaped from some sort of sinister organization and are on the run trying to break free of these, these chasers that are coming to recapture them. And in the process they have sort of amnesia and they're reveal revealing, um, memories of, of their past and trying to put together who they are and what, they need to be doing.
Kind of fast one shot type of game.
Sam: I've played it a couple of times and it's remarkable how intuitive it is, and how much this, I mean, we'll get into the, we should get into the risk sheet before I start commenting on the risk sheet. Do you wanna like, describe, what the central mechanic of this game is? Like, what the risk sheet looks like?
John: It's great for radio, I picked the mechanic that requires visuals.
Sam: Oh, we did a whole episode on character sheets I recorded yesterday, so listen, it was a fun time doing that, but yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
John: So the risk sheet, it's shared by the group, so print one out or you have one on your virtual tabletop or whatever. And it has eight boxes on it that describe different types of goals and consequences that characters are going to be facing. And then each of those boxes has a range of outcomes for a D6.
So like, for example the goal box on the sheet, just ask the question, do I achieve my goal? And if the die is a 4, 5, or 6, you do achieve your goal and the GM has first say, we'll get into the first say thing in a minute.
And if you put a 1, 2, or 3 on the box you fail the goal and the player has first say. So the idea here is you have these boxes with goals, risks you know, impairment, harm, chasers. You roll a pool of dice and then assign those numbers after the roll to the different boxes. So, the classic example would be, like, I I want to, use my powers to lift this wreckage off this trapped person and the danger might be that they suffer harm.
So, if I roll a high die and a low die, I can decide, like, oh, I want to make sure they're not hurt, but I don't get the rubble off them, or I do get the rubble off them but they get hurt. If you have two low dice, obviously it's bad. If you have two high dice, it's good. So, it's the classic success with consequences kind of thing that we are familiar with very much so now in PBTA style games and others.
But this was one of the earliest , in that era of design in the early 2000s, to really bring that to the fore and give the player a lot of control over it. In modern forms, in Forged in the Dark and PBTA, there's a little bit more of a gambling feel where you're rolling and you get what you get and you just hope for the best. This mechanic, because you're rolling this pool of dice, usually four or more, you can kind of feeling of safety a little bit, where you can be like, okay, well, even if this goes really bad, if I just get at least one four or five or something, I can put it in the thing that I really don't want to happen or the thing I really do want to happen.
Sam: I find this approach so compelling relative to the standard PBTA, 7 9 partial success kind of range thing. Because, first of all, I feel like this puts a ton of choice in the hands of the player rather than the character. And like, sometimes it's you can kind of then filter that down into the character making a choice of like, Oh, I can feel that if I push on this rubble they're gonna get injured even if I rescue them and I like, pull back and don't do that.
But really, like you as a player are basically min maxing your roll. And I think, like, making hard choices is sort of the fundamental unit of roleplaying games, like, I think that is the most interesting thing you can be doing in these games, and this just makes every roll not just one, but a bunch of hard choices, like, what are you doing with all these dice?
John: Yeah, and can incentivize the getting into trouble because if you do have the risk of harm, it adds a die to your die pool. Now you're gonna have to assign something to that after you roll, but it gives you more choices, more potential to get that six to put in your goal.
So the more in danger you get, the better you are at achieving your goals, even though you're gonna likely suffer some harm consequences. And that's kind of, I mean, the Devil's Bargain die in Blades in the Dark is a long descendant of that kind of thing, where you, you are getting a bonus die in exchange for this consequence. But this, formulation of it, because you have that sheet of menu options to place them in, it is that after the fact, decision making, like you said, it puts that control in the player's hands, which can be really empowering. It's great for something like Psi-Run, especially, because you are super powered people. You're not superheroes necessarily.
However, there is a sort of hidden stinger to the game, where if you play this system for a while you'll notice characters get really chewed up because you're always in that position of having to put a die in one of those consequence boxes. And if you do that, you know, five or six times in a one shot, it's a little dicey but you're probably going to pull through. But after four sessions of that, your characters get all chewed up. Games that have used this system that weren't one shot oriented, it works better if the game is a type where characters are supposed to be sort of ground down and,
Sam: My brand! Yeah, there's an interesting thing in there where you're saying like, hey, if you put harm on the line, you get another die to roll, and you're gonna have to put something in harm, but you know, you're gonna be have a higher chance of achieving the thing that you want to achieve.
But that also opens up a lower tail on the possible results, too, because the more dice you're rolling, like, if you just roll only terrible results, the more stuff you have at risk, you're really fucked at a certain point, like, can get just so, so far into the hole in like a single roll with this game.
John: You can. And there's a fun little minigame component too, because the boxes, they don't all have the same range of results. One might of them might have a result for each number 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. There's six different. Outcomes depending on the die you put. One, like the goal, it's just 4 or higher is good and 3 or lower is bad.
So you have these situations sometimes where you look at your array of dice and you go, Ooh, a 3 is usually bad, but it's actually not so bad on this, box. So I can put the 3 there and sort of avoid this thing that would have been worse. Which can be fun to do as long as the range of choices is, is limited. If this sheet was 20 boxes, it would be overwhelming, but
the way Psi-Run works is generally you have just a few things to choose from by default when your character's doing something risky but then you add stuff in as the fiction demands, you know, if the chasers are going to get closer, you add that as a box you need to deal with and you get a die for that. If harm is a factor, you get a die for that. If you use your psychic powers, you get a die for that, which is always do they go out of control, which is another kind of thematic component here. It's not like, does it work? Does my power function? You know, it's more about, does it cause unintended consequences?
Sam: It fits the mechanic well. I mean, as we've kind of been saying, like, other kinds of dice are so much about collateral damage of various kinds, I think, whether that's to you or to other people, sort of partial success consequences is, that's what the mechanic is, I don't know, I'm just stating the
John: Yeah, because of that ratcheting component, the chasers are going to get closer. You are going to suffer some harm. Your powers probably are going to go out of control.
The other box we haven't talked about is the reveal box, which is characters have these unanswered questions that you come up with during character creation and when the reveal box is in play, you put a die there, and you or the GM or someone gets to answer one of those questions with a flashback or with a memory that comes to you or something.
Those can be really powerful in terms of driving the story forward too. It's not just the chasers that are getting closer there's a little track that you use in the game where the chasers are sort of like, a number of scenes behind you and we flash back to them like, doing DNA analysis and like, picking up your trail and stuff. So there's that component where you see them visually, like, moving ever closer to the scene you're in for a confrontation.
But the reveal thing also is a big driver because whenever I've run it, like, somebody will realize they have some sort of relationship in the world, you know, they have a lover, or a parent, or a child, or something, and all of a sudden they're like, we have to go to Minnesota! Like, I gotta find my mom! I just remembered, you know, and that can just veer the story and the game really makes that easy. It's very easy to just move the characters to a new location, doing a new thing, pursuing a new goal. And those dice outcomes, you're always going to get something when you roll on one of those. The chasers or the reveal or your powers going haywire, that's going to make the narrative, really drive.
Sam: I think the reveal box in particular is something we should spend more time on, because I think it does everything that you were describing. But my friends who have had trouble with this game really cite the reveal box as the reason why. That because the 1 to 3 on it just says runner has no memory triggered, GM has first say, it becomes basically a dump box.
Like if you roll mediocrely and you're not invested in the long term story or you really want to make sure that this moment doesn't spiral completely out of control for you, you just put one of your failures there and nothing really bad happens, but Because it's such a good dump, but also because it's, like, recovering memories is both the most fun way to kind of drive the story forward emotionally in my experience, and also the way that the game mechanically, like, proceeds towards its end. I've had a couple of friends end up in games where people just kinda focus on the moment and never get to that memory stuff and never quite get the, emotional investment that like that card would bring. I have not personally had that experience but I, know I had someone just say like, hey, I'm gonna just turn that 1 to 3 into like, another psychic powers go wild, or like something bad happens to me in the moment. Yeah, yeah, just cranial brain pressure increases, and if you do that five times, your head explodes. Like, we'll put that on a one to three.
And, and I think that something like that would be interesting there. But it's also nice to have kind of a dump card, so I feel a lot of different ways about it.
John: yeah, have a few thoughts about that. One is there is a bit of a social contract element here where when we agree to play side run, we agree to play these people with missing memories that want to recover them. So If you don't engage with that and like, purposely avoid it that is gonna cause problems, you know it won't necessarily automatically be that way because you don't always have the freedom to put a low dye there. You might not have any low dice so it's gonna happen and when one player character answers their questions, that triggers the endgame. Mechanically, you, obviously, you can end the game session whenever you want, but that's the mechanical trigger for it. So I would, not, like, be a dick about it, but, like, I think, you know, if I was playing with someone who, like, was like, no, I don't wanna do that I'm gonna avoid revealing my questions, I'd be like, well, you know, this is maybe not gonna be a fun game for you.
Um,
but, having said that I think the idea of having a punchier consequence on that 1 3 there is totally not a bad idea at all. And the game does kind of give you a space there, it says, on 1 2 3, the GM has first say for the reveal, and describes confusion, frustration, or a lack of connection that results.
So, there is some room there to not just have a nothing happens outcome. If you put your two and reveal, I think the GM's within their right to say, like, you lose track of that agent for a moment and you're lost in this reverie that doesn't lead you anywhere and the next thing you know they're behind you with their gun at your back or whatever.
I think that's fair to do. You know, again, like, don't want be too punishing for something that's supposed to potentially be a place to put a low die.
Sam: Yeah. And, I have historically played with a lot of people who are like you're telling me that with my single success I can get a little bit of character development and have myself fail in all other regards? That sounds like a party. Like, I'm completely in. Like, I really want to do that.
And it's, it's nice to be able to do that. But you know, I recorded this episode with Alex Roberts about a mechanic that sort of is naming a negative space, and we talked a lot about how you just kind of leave something empty in a game, that's a little bit of a missed opportunity. And on the one hand, I like that there's a card that is a little bit of a dump give people a little bit of a break, because this game can be so harrowing and so full of consequences.
But I also, I do feel like there's An opportunity there, to put in something explicit about the GM, like, hinting at a memory for you, or something to kind of, like, push that forward. Yeah.
John: I think that'd be a perfectly good little hack there. Because, yeah, it does Things can fall apart. chase component turns into captured when the chasers show up, which of course is another narrative thing. Like, somebody gets captured, we have to rescue them. But then there's a do I disappear forever outcome brought in after that, and it's just yes or no.
Like, yep, they disappear forever, bye. Again, kind of playing into that one shot vibe. Where things can be very consequential and have, high stakes. So, yeah, I think a group of players that, are interested in, revealing their characters memories. And having a little bit of a release valve, pressure valve there on the reveal think it works well,
Sam: I mean, off that, do we want to talk about first say at this point?
John: Yeah.
Sam: So the first say, just to be really clear, what we're talking about here, like the goal card says, as we said before, 4 6, runner achieves goal, GM has first say. 1 fails goal, player has first say. And, just in plain English, the, thing that I interpret from that is, hey, this is the person who's going to like, take point on describing what happens next, but then we're gonna open up a conversation about That.
But Vincent Baker published a long blog post about other kind dice, sort of an other kind SRD awhile back, and I know reading it. that first say sort of maybe had broader connotations within the design community at the time or like was opposed to games that were giving people last say or final say.
I'm curious if you can talk about that.
John: Yeah, there was a lot of discussion in the early 2000s around narration rights, kind of is, It turned out not to be very fruitful, really. it was, the conversation was fruitful and several games at that time took it, that idea very seriously, and mechanically parsed it out, trying to tease out this power dynamic between, like, very strongly GM'd games who has the authority to say what's true in the fiction and You know, all that stuff was kind of unsaid in designs before that, or very tightly constrained in different ways.
So people had this notion that, well, you could, like, parcel it out somehow where, because I mechanically did a thing, I got this six or I spent my token I get to say that the schoolhouse burned down or whatever. And that exploration, it produced some interesting experiments. And I think it kind of showed how those assumptions are unspoken largely in a lot of other designs. But really finely mechanically parsing out, like, narration, who gets to say what when. Kind of ended up being a little bit of a dead end because it was too, mechanized for that, it felt, it felt too tightly constrained, so this is a little bit of a product of several years of that conversation and taking a stab at a different way of doing it instead of saying that you, you may speak now, you, you're the one Who, who gets to decide what's true and everyone listens this was a way of turning away from that and saying, well, what we really need is, like, a way to kick this off and, like, give someone a prompt and say, hey, why don't you describe the thing first and there is still a little bit of power thing going on there because the person who leads, they're giving everyone else something to work with and they're making, you know, it's a strong, Choice.
It's like an improv game. You know, first person to talk is going to establish a lot, but then the other person who wraps it up has a lot to say too, and how that all resolves. So it's more of a way this development and Otherkind Dice and Psi-Run, a way of just kind of helping people say the stuff that needs to be said to resolve it, as opposed to that, really like authority passing kind of stuff.
Sam: Yeah, I mean, it's really starting a conversation instead of ending one feels so much kinder and like, like the point of playing role playing games, like I want to tell a story with my friends, I don't want someone to like dictate a story to me necessarily, and even as you're saying, someone's gotta start and I like knowing who that person is going to be.
But, I want everyone to have a chance to be like, I like that content, or, oh what about this cool idea? Like the best stuff is always people like riffing on each other, and if you're shutting down a conversation, as opposed to opening one up, you're gonna miss a lot of that.
John: Yeah, and I think Meg even says here, When you have first say, your first say can be, Oh gee, I don't know.
Sam, what do you, do you have an idea for this?
Sam: yeah, yeah
John: That's, that's also having first say. And it's, an opening of that door. Someone's gotta do it. And the game is sort of nudging us in that direction.
and also like, we're in the same category here. we want to see our characters. Maybe get beat up a bunch and go through the ringer a lot, and there are those times, especially when you're suffering, having first say is, I really want to be like, and then he throws me through the window, you know, and that's, that's really fun for me, so it's even juicier to have that, first stab at it when it's your own character that's, being harmed or whatever.
Sam: Yeah, It's cool to see on the harm card, the one result is runner is dying, player has first say that like, when you are most in trouble, the game looks at you and says, This is your moment. you're dying! It's your person who's dying, you should have the right to sort of begin the end of your character's story here, or like, you know, be a voice of authority in this moment, even if this horrible thing is happening to you.
John: Yeah, and that's a card that has many results, it's 1, 2, 3, 4, and then a 5, 6. So it really is just a 1 that is like the worst.
Sam: Yeah, if you're like, pretty beat up, the GM has first say, but if you're like, dying, then you get first say back again, right? Like,
John: Yeah, it's like the way harm works here, too, because it's you just suffer harm without, fatal harm or whatever it just means that before you rolled, you put one of your dice on the impaired section. But then if you get hurt again after you roll, you have to put your highest die there.
So again, it like, it raises those stakes, it pushes the game towards its finale it's in a kind of soft way, strangely. You're not having to calculate a bunch of stuff, it's not
Sam: It's clean! It's so clean! I love it just It feels like such a natural part of the system. It is such a clear result of what might happen when you are hurt, and so easy and intuitive to implement. it's a really nice little piece of of design.
John: yeah, it's like, a little visual aid reminder you know, people who've played Blades, for instance, where it's harm is also, you know, kind of narrative I think we've all played those sessions where an hour into it, someone goes, oh, man, I was supposed to be taking a die penalty this whole time, I forgot, This is just, because everyone's sharing this sheet together it's very easy to just put your die out and you know, like, okay I have one viewer and it's just gonna sit there
Prompting everyone else to be aware of that and help remember to do it and also, get that sense when, Three of the four players have dice in the impaired box, and maybe you see, like, I have the blue dice, you have the red ones, whatever, we're like, oh boy, things are, things are tough,
Sam: There's something so cool about how Psi-Run really has It has a couple of other subsystems, like, beyond this risk sheet, but 90 percent of the game is just the risk sheet. Like, so much of the game is just this. that's part of the reason that I'm out here forgetting Harm in Blades, like, all the time, is because, you know, there's, like, four or five different systems going on, in the middle of a score, or, like, little appendages of stuff.
And I, I obviously love Blades, I love the way it plays, but it's also keeping track of all those things distracts from the main system and when you can make harm like a core part of the main system visually right there on the same sheet along with everything else, like it, basically works the same,
John: yeah, I always recommend this for people who want to introduce people to the hobby for the first time if they have any interest in the supporting fiction X Men esque, or X Files, or whatever you want to flavor it as because Almost everything is that sheet. Your character sheet even hardly has anything on it. questions mainly.
Because of that amnesia component and the ambiguous nature of what's happening at the beginning, they don't have to be brought up to speed on a bunch of lore and where the dwarves came from or whatever. It's just very, very fast to get up and running. And then the physicality of having that sheet there, they're, they've learned like basically the whole system after one roll.
And especially now there's a category of board games called roll and write games where you roll a pool of dice and then assign them to different aspects of the board game and people who have familiarity with those games, which are fairly popular, I think, in the board game space.
it's another easy way to say, Hey, you know, roll and write games, this is like that, but it's storytelling?
Sam: you know, you're gonna write a little story though. Not a little like railroad. Yeah
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John: The great thing about this, too, is it is very easy to hack. Like, just now, you came up with, like, two different ways to make that card sing better at a given table, with just a moment's thought, and all of the result boxes are like that. You could tweak them and say, oh, I actually, I want to make The goal 5 6 you get it and 4 less you don't, or I wanna tweak this or that, or change this word or change that word, it does a lot of work in play just by making little tiny changes like that. It's easy to see how that hack is impacting play.
Sam: It's a beautiful piece of design for implying all of that so easily. Like, the fact that there are so many different ranges on these cards is on the one hand just kind of cool and it provides the sort of moment of feeling like you're getting away with something by like putting a three on a card. Where a 3 4 is a partial success, as opposed to putting that 3 on the goal where it's a failure. But, also so many different ranges implies exactly the thing that you're saying, you can change these ranges, and The, the chase card turning into capture, turning into disappear, is implying this idea of, what if you had linked cards?
What if you swapped one card out for another? Like, what if you're, you changed the harm card so it started as like a glancing thing and became a like mortal wound thing? Like, you can immediately start seeing How to take this thing apart and push on its edges and do other things with it just in the visual layout even it's incredible
John: Yeah, it to new designers as a thing to hack just, you know, get it to the table and play and hack. At least a couple times to get the sense of doing that, because this rewards that in a very immediate way. And like, like you said, you, you can just immediately see well, ooh, what if we had archetype cards?
So like, I'm the tough one and you're the fast one or whatever. So we, we, I have a card that I can put dice on that's unique to my character. You know, it's stuff like that. It's very easy to see the space and implement design. And you know, will that project stay in the other kind dice space? Maybe not.
Like I said, it's much more suited to one shots, it chews up characters a lot over time. But as a design exercise and a fun thing to play. I really recommend it to anyone who's thinking about doing design work or is curious Blades in the Dark actually was, used other kind dice for a week or two of early playtesting.
we knew it wasn't going to suit the game. It needed to be a long, long play game with lots of sessions and lots of character and crew development and all that stuff, but, as a place to start and kind of see, like, okay, what kind of challenges, consequences, opportunities, and dangers, like, what is, kind of the vocabulary of the game in that, at that level?
it helped in that sense a lot.
Sam: Yeah it's interesting you say all that because when I hear A game that chews up characters and spits them out I think of Blades first. Like, that's, that's all the Blades campaigns that I run. But Blades, of course, has resistance to kind of mitigate that and, you know, provide that longevity to it.
John: yeah, it definitely, it does chew up characters too. not in like three sessions, necessarily. Possible, but
Sam: but yeah.
John: it, it can happen. But yeah, but there, there's a, old post on Vincent's blog anyway about this series they ran called Salt River, which was sort of a western mining town, freeform ish game that they played with their local group of, friends. And it used other kind dice, but there were no, it didn't have a risk sheet, it was just from the momentary fiction,
so you would just say, I want to do this, but I might not achieve it,
I'm gonna pick up a die for that, and I might lose the respect of Rebecca, so I'm gonna pick up a die for that.
Anyone else think of, is there anything else here? And someone might be like, oh, well, Rebecca's dad already hates you so that's gonna escalate with him, probably take a die for Rebecca's dad,
Sam: I can almost see a way to make it GM less there of like everyone go around and propose a card and just
John: that particular group was GM less,
Yeah.
um, and, and the other part of it was that sort of question answering thing
that wasn't about the memories, but In that GM list or shared GM role thing, somebody would say, I wonder what's happening with your character and Rebecca and Rebecca's dad. I want to go there and see how that's escalating.
And now we have this question. We're going to resolve that question by trying to achieve a goal and taking risks. And when we do that, we go, okay, cool. Does someone else have a question? Well, I was wondering, you know, the sheriff and the, canyon, he's looking for those bandits that went out there.
What's going on with them? Okay, let's find out. And it helps you when you have a system that's kind of like, needing to be improvised in the moment. Those scene setting questions make it so much easier for you to go, okay, well, now we know this is over. We've resolved the thing our co GM was curious about, so now let's cut away to something else.
Psi-Run's able to do that work with it's scene based, the chasers are a number of scenes behind you. And they're, they're also locations. You change locations when you change scenes. it kind of mechanically does that work of saying, okay, we're in a new place, there's some question of what's going to happen here, and we're going to resolve it with these goals and dangers, and then we know we're going to move on and then during those rolls we're going to find out do the chasers catch up by three scenes, or two, or whatever, and it's kind of doing that same work that Co-GM work but it does it more mechanically, so the GM honestly, you could, you could definitely play Psi-Run GM less for sure and just, you know, change the first say to another player or something like that.
Sam: Totally.
John: Yeah.
Sam: so I really love this system. I mean, I think Psi-Run is amazing. I've been working on a game that, every time I think about other kind of dice I'm like I should try them again in this game and then I do and they don't work but like I like this system so much, I respect it so much, and I also have never seen another game that uses it, which is partly about my age and, like, what games have had staying power, but also, it does feel like something about Otherkind Dice has had less like, broader applicability to games than the sort of classic PBTA formula. And I have an instinct about that, which is the sort of like, how much it's chewing up characters in the way that you've described here. But do you have any other thoughts on like, why this has never really caught on more?
John: I'm not really sure. I mean, that is a factor. Characters are very simplistic. There's not a lot of places to go with them So, any kind of game that wants, like, development and long term play and stuff is, not gonna be super well served. There's ways to do it, you could definitely hack it to you know, maybe you get a different type of harm card when you develop in a certain way, and there's, there's ways to, think about that.
When Otherkind was first sketched on Vincent's blog, a bunch of people did hack it and make minigames and there was a little flourishing of stuff. Then Vincent kind of put together Otherkind Proper, which is a game about these sort of fey folk, dealing with the world of men encroaching on their territory.
It ultimately wasn't really, I think, what he wanted it to be. So it's not, product you can get or anything. You might be able to find a PDF scrolled away on the internet somewhere, but After that, I think that was around 2007 maybe. 2008, there was another little flourishing I wrote a game called Ghost Echo, which is a little two pager that's on my website that uses Otherkind as its base.
And it, also is like, approaching Apocalypse World moves, because Vincent had been sharing early ideas around what the Apocalypse World moves were gonna look like. So it kind of straddles those two worlds. It has goals and dangers, but they're connected together in these little move formats. When you do this, you can achieve these goals and you risk these dangers.
and, you know, Apocalypse World was just coming into fruition, starting to playtest and stuff a year later, I think. So. in that flourishing of these minigames people played them a bunch, and especially on story games someone was always posting oh, it's, I've got An Otherkind Dice game, where you, play time travelers, and they just didn't last, part of it was that people weren't making game products back then, really. In that community anyway, they were making, the game was just a, forum post. There wasn't even a PDF or anything. So they had a lot of influence contributed to the ongoing conversation that led into stuff like PBTA. buT yeah, product wise, Psi-Run is kind of the only one.
There's Nathan Paoletta has a game called Annalise. Which the foundation of it is, other kind dice. It uses some other stuff. You have tokens and these resources you can trade and stuff. But it has a similar kind of root. But that's kind of it. I again, no, go
Sam: I got really distracted by the mention of Annalise because I like read it like six years ago and haven't heard of it since and like didn't remember any Otherkind like influence in it at all. But I'll have to recheck that out. That's interesting.
John: I mean, once you go back, you'll see it, but, it has a bunch of other stuff going on that, doesn't make it super obvious
but yeah, I respect this design a lot too. I think it's really elegant. It works great in play. I've always had great sessions with Psi-Run and freeform Otherkind of dice.
But yeah, there, there is something about it that I think when people start building their game around it, they tend to abandon it and move elsewhere. And it is the two things. it could be just as simple as that. The characters get chewed up and also it's not super obvious how do you have longer form development.
But yeah, , I would love to see a whole bunch of Otherkind games. Maybe a zine of them or something would be, would be awesome.
Sam: Honestly, like Something I've been obsessed with lately is, Aaron King wrote this zine called Reading the Apocalypse, which was just a PBTA move based on a novel that they read that year. Independent of any game. So it's just a bunch of, like, weird, very flavorful PBTA moves.
And I feel like you could publish something really similar that's just, like, other kind dice results, and then try to, you know, peel through it and be like, Oh, I see the whole game out of the infected card that becomes turned, right? I I I You can build the whole game around that yourself. And thirty six of those in a zine that, like Are all from different genres and doing weird different things, that'd be a cool product.
John: Yeah, do like Mork Borg style, like, magazine layout. Every spread is a different risk sheet with crazy graphics and thematic stuff and that could be super cool. There you go, internet. There's a project for you.
Sam: Take it thing thing I've been working on is a Firebrands hack where you're like a found family in space and every once in a while you have to go, like, do a job instead of, like, being chill on your spaceship. And, I've gone through like 30 different systems for like what the jobs look like, but one of them was Otherkind Dice, and I, always feel like you ought to be able to make that work, of like, just do a little bit of Otherkind Dice as a treat, as like, one of the Firebrands and,
John: idea. Yeah, that could definitely work. just as you were describing that, I was picturing a risk sheet, but it's like the control console for your ship,
Sam: oh
John: you know, and you have to like, You have this bucket of bolts and you're like, well, what's what's broken this week? Oh, well, we got to put let's put the one in the sensors because they're on the fritz and
Sam: Yeah, I mean, you can see it, doing, like, Star Trek with it, right? Like, you can, like, really, it's so genre flexible, too, I feel like.
John: man, I I don't know I'm getting a little fired up about this now
Sam: It's just so easy, like, it's so obvious what you're supposed to do. for a full PBTA game, it's also pretty obvious what you're supposed to do, but, like, writing a playbook Takes more work than writing a single other kind risk sheet. Like, you can get the whole game done in like less than the time it takes you to write the angel, you know?
I think that's what feels so inspiring about it to me.
John: Yeah, I hope when people listen to this they check it out And maybe start dabbling. Maybe this will launch the otherkinddice renaissance that we didn't get in 2004.
Sam: Or we did get it this time. It'll be recorded and...
John: yeah, yeah, it'll be in a place people can find it, hopefully. Mhm,
Sam: I'll say that this is gonna come out like right around zine month 2024 and that means now people are finishing those and they can start thinking about their 2025 projects And just like throw an Otherkind dice like array in there and like you're good to go.
John: Yeah. Oh, man. I have things I have to do on a deadline and now I just want to, when this interview's over, I want to just like, open up InDesign and start laying out a risk sheet.
Sam: that just being a creative
God, I've been we're like all so much of this is getting cut out at this point, but I, like, have been really trying to embrace the, whoever said the quote about, like, working on your art should be like having an affair, like you should be stealing time to work on it, and like, yeah, I have this stuff I need to get done on a deadline, and I, like, have a set aside my normal time for it, but I can't bring myself to work on it at 10 o'clock at night, I have to go, like, cheat on something.
Like, I have to go, like, steal away and do my cool little other kind project then.
John: Yeah, my friend Eric Levandusky he always would say that there's always time for a love affair. I don't know if he was quoting someone, but I love that phrase.
Sam: John, thanks so much for being here. This was amazing.
John: Yeah, that was my pleasure. Like I said, I'm a big fan of the show and it took me a while to figure out what mechanic I wanted to talk about because there's so many
. [Laughter]
Sam: Well listen, come back any season you want to like,
John: I, would love to.
Sam: Thanks again to John for being here! You can find them on socials at John Harper most of the time, and their games are available at onesevendesign.Com and on Itch, among other places. Links in the show notes.
This episode was edited by Chris Greenbrier. He did a few this season. Thanks so much, Chris. You can hear him on air on the Blaseball episode last season.
As always, you can find me on socials at sdunawalt or on the Dice Exploder Discord. Our logo was designed by sporgory, our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Gray, and our ad music is Lily Pads by my boy Travis Tessmer.
And thanks to you for listening! See you next time.