Listen to this episode here.
I usually like to think of Dice Exploder as a pretty focused show with a pretty tight format. Yeah we may sprawl sometimes, but we’re not here shooting the shit, we’re here to talk game mechanics. But sometimes, a guy wants to stretch out like a dog in the sun, hang out for a while, and just yap the day away while answering a bunch of listener questions. And there’s no one I like yapping with more than my friend Merrilee Bufkin. So this week, it’s casual times on Dice exploder as the two of us answer a bunch of listener questions.
Further Reading:
Aaron Voigt’s youtube essays
Kurt Riefling on itch
Sam's favorite games blogpost
Exiles by Ema Acosta
Jiangshi by Banana Chan and Sen-Foong Lim
Fiasco by Jason Morningstar
The Forge book by William J. White
Secco Creek Vigilance Committee by Keith Stetson
Killing Time by BrewistTabletopGames
Socials
The Dice Exploder blog is at diceexploder.com
Our logo was designed by sporgory, and our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey.
Join the Dice Exploder Discord to talk about the show!
Transcript
Sam: Hello, and welcome to another episode of Dice Exploder. Each week, we take a tabletop RPG mechanic and pepper it with questions. My name is Sam Dunnewold, and this week it's an ask me anything episode. Woo.
Now I like to think of Dice Exploder as a pretty focused show with a pretty tight format. But sometimes what you really want to do is stretch out like a dog in the sun, hang out for awhile and just yap the day away while answering a bunch of listener questions. And there's no one I like yapping with more than my friend Merrilee Bufkin.
Merrilee is relatively new to the game design scene, but she's quickly become one of the most prolific designers I know. She won a golden Cobra award in 2023 for one of her first ever games. She had two games in the game, Exploder jam earlier this year, and she's one of the first people I sent my random scraps of games to early in development. So for this, between seasons laid back episode, I thought it'd be fun to just have her on and relax for a while. Let her hair down, you know, it's casual time on dice exploders. So casual it's actually been like six months since we recorded this, so if we talk about anything, like at six months ago, that's why.
Also if you miss last week show, I have a zine coming out, Dice Forager, in pre-orders now if you live in the United States or coming to PDF in a few months, it's a little collection of games I've made in the past few years plus some manifestos essays, little written mini episodes of this very show And more. You can pre-order it now by going to dice exploder.com and clicking the pre-order zine button at the top of the page, or you can go back to last week's episode and listen to Aaron King interview me all about it.
Anyway, without further ado here is an AMA with me and Merrilee
Merrilee Bufkin, thanks for being on Dice Exploder.
Merrilee: Thanks for having me on, Sam!
Sam: You want to answer some questions?
Merrilee: Yeah, I'm quite excited.
Sam: So the first comes from Aaron Voigt via Blue Sky. Aaron does excellent YouTube essays. I really love them and everyone should check them out. I'll put them in the show notes. So Aaron's question is, what interesting mechanical trends have you noticed in the past few years? What design trends do you hope to see in the future?
You got any answer for this?
Merrilee: So, this is a hard question for me because I've been in the tabletop scene since last October. And not very long, so I can't really say. The last few years is a bit of a timeline out of reach for me.
Sam: I mostly just put the question to you so that we could establish when you got into RPGs, because I think it is impressive how many things you've made in such a short amount of time.
Merrilee: well, I will say it is very interesting to go back and look at older games, Forge era games and see what was important to them and how those games were in conversation with one another, often much more so than games are these days. Just because we don't I don't always have as tight knit of communities as like OSR or DIY elf games. Like, those are subsets. I see it very much like academia in the sense of, right, you write papers about people who write papers, and you write games in conversation with other games.
Sam: I feel like those communities are a lot more siloed these days, just because there's so many more people than there were back in the Forge era. Like, you could kind of have the whole story game scene in one place and now the thing you're describing feels like the lyric game community to me But not everyone was into lyric games. And I came up in a community that felt a lot like that that was all people hacking blades in the dark, and those games are all very much in conversation with each other but they're a lot less in conversation with games outside of that community.
I mean, I think a design trend we're going to see in the future is even more siloing as social media kind of breaks down on the internet. And I think that's unfortunate and sad.
But, I think the biggest design trend that I'm seeing a lot of right now is more board game y stuff. think a lot of people are making more stuff with cards and board games explicitly. I've got Jiangshi on my shelf over here that comes in a board game box. Fiasco's second edition is decks of cards and feels more like a board game, and I think that stuff is only accelerating. I'm still really excited for Em Acosta's Exiles to come out, which is like cards and you also have a little play board in front of you instead of a character sheet that you're like, putting your cards on and stuff.
So I think all of that is gonna happen more and more.
In terms of trends I'm hoping for, just always want smaller things, you know, and modules is a smaller thing. I want original systems that feel smaller. I want to see more overlap between the story game scene and the, like, NSR, post OSR, elf game kind of scene.
I've seen a lot of that amongst my friends, and I think it's really cool. And then I'm also really excited in the stuff I've been seeing you Merrilee do, of like, getting interested in LARP and then trying to take that stuff and bring it more into the story game world. To take these story games that are giving you,
some strong individual framework and then leaving a ton of space inside of that to just do whatever the hell you want and just freeform with your friends.
Merrilee: Yeah, I think for a long time game designers have been attacking things from, oh, we need to get 5e players, or we need to get people who are playing games that come from a wargaming tradition and get them to come into story games, or just weirder games, smaller games, just something different.
But I think what people can forget is that a lot of 5e and a lot of those games in general are built on it not being theater of mind. You have a lot of play aids, and I think part of that trend coming up is people realizing that people just love holding stuff in their hands. They just really love having a tactile thing, and that's where a lot of that is coming from.
Sam: Yeah. I basically agree with all that if like your goal is to get more people coming into the hobby, It's also completely fine if that's not your goal. I don't think this hobby has to be for everyone, but I feel like we have done a lot of, oh, the thing we need to do to get more people in our community is to like, go after the D& D people, and that actually maybe it's smarter to go after the board game people and the theater kids who like, aren't in the hobby at all yet. Like, the people playing D& D already have their own full time hobby. It's D& D. Like, if we're gonna expand the indie game scene, maybe we should go after these other people.
And, I'm reminded of recently I was invited to a board game night with very close friends who are not gamer people. Like, they are hosting parties people, and they've been doing a regular board game night, and we go. And it's this lovely time, but it was this great reminder that we ended this like, quote unquote, board game night, having only played board games for like, a third of the time we were there, and they were the lightest, most casual possible board games, and to most people, that's what a board game night is. That's what a game night is. It's showing up, having dinner with your friends, hanging out for two hours, and then playing the Monopoly card game. And, if you can find an RPG that those people might engage with for an hour, I think that that's gonna be a much more exciting thing to do in the future than trying to steal D& D players.
Merrilee: Now hold on, Sam. Are you telling me that not everybody gets together to play Fall of Magic for 12 hours and considers that a game night?
Sam: Alright, next question, next question.
Merrilee: Next question!
Sam: do
Merrilee: This is from Kurt on the Dice Exploder Discord. This is for Sam. Do you have a screenplay premise that's too precious to actually write out? What's it about?
Sam: No, is my answer to this question. I write them all out, or they don't feel like enough of a premise yet and so they live in my, like, toolbox of potential future ideas.
You know, there's the classic stupid question of, like, where do you get your ideas, and I truly believe that ideas just show up. Every idea comes from a different place, and for me, No single idea leads to a screenplay or to a game. What happens is, I'll get a single idea, I'll write it down, and then at some point in the future, three of the single ideas I've written down will cohere together into something that feels like a collective that has enough juice to really focus on, and then I will start making that thing.
And so, I don't think ideas are precious. I think I actually, it was Chris Perkins, one of the D& D designers that I heard on a podcast many years ago say you just shouldn't be afraid of running out of ideas. You're never gonna run out of ideas. And I truly believe that. I truly believe that people are too precious with their ideas. They sit on their ideas for too long like being perfectionists.
I'm guilty of this at times, but I think , the best thing you can do with an idea is just get it out there as quickly as you can and so that you can like move on to the next one and get the next one going too. And that there, I think one of the Green Brothers on YouTube maybe also has sort of a famous video about like, you get everything 90% of the way there and then you stop because the last 10% is super time consuming. And I really feel that way about screenplay ideas, I feel that way about game ideas. I just want to get them out there and move on.
That said, if you're curious about my screenplay ideas the current one that I'm working on is about two high school girls one of them's best friend dies by malpractice and she decides to kill the doctor responsible, who's the dad of the other one. And then you get Heather's style teen drama that is very dark and I'm told funny out of that. And that's fun.
And the other one that I'm working on is about a guy who's in love with the tooth fairy. And starts pulling out his own teeth to get her to go on a date with him. And that's a horror movie, and I'm excited about that one too. Those are my screenplay ideas.
Okay, next question, also from Kurt. What's your favorite game? What's your favorite game, Merrily?
Merrilee: I think I have to answer this in parts because my favorite two person game is Tension by Adira Slattery, I believe.
Sam: That's right. You want to tell us about Tension a little?
Merrilee: Yeah, Tension is, it's a banger. It's a cat, a queer cat and mouse romp, so you play as a serial killer and the person chasing them. You're pushed away, kind of, from doing law enforcement, so it's not supposed to be copaganda, which is great. It's a game I think about all the time, not just because we had such a good play experience, but because the game knows what it is. I love something that knows what it is, you know? favorite TV show of all time is Leverage. It's a TV show that 100 percent understands what it is and then, like, pushes that to its limit. And I think Tension does the exact same thing.
And it's designed to to use the tarot deck as its oracle. To me, an oracle is a lot better than a prompt in many ways, especially when there's a lot more collaboration. And I think if it had been done in a For the Queen style, where it was much more prompt based, I would not have liked it as much just because we had so much room to expand and work on it.
So I think that's my favorite two person game.
My favorite group game is really hard to decide because it really depends on the playgroup, right? Like, I would love to introduce people to The King is Dead for those who haven't played it. That's by Meguey Baker and Vincent Baker. And that was the first indie game that I played at Big Bad, so that has a big impact on me, like, emotionally. But if I know the group really well, I'd want to do Fall of Magic. If I have to choose something for, like, a quick thing with people who understand tabletop games, it's For the Queen.
But if I had to introduce people to games, it'd be Fiasco. I think that's everyone's recommendation for the most part, is just start with Fiasco.
Sam: common one.
Merrilee: But I, I got to see that in action with a friend who's really only played 5e and Pathfinder and Gloomhaven, right? All these more wargame y things. And they took to it so fast, and it was just really fun to play with them and to have that experience of watching them really dig into a story game that has ha has inspired me a lot .
Sam: Fiasco is the first story game I played, like, way back in college, and it ruled, and I did nothing but convince my various college friends to play it with me for like six months, and got a lot of people who'd never played RPGs before playing Fiasco and having a really good time. I think it was good then, it holds up now, it's a great answer.
I wrote a whole blog post about my favorite games and ranking games at large, so I'll put the link to that in the show notes. But the short answer, I think, is all games that do like you were saying, Merily, of like, committing really hard to the thing that they are. And, I think the top of that list was We Are But Worms, Blades in the Dark is up there, For the Queen, Dream Askew. It's a lot of classics, but I really think they're classics for a reason.
Alright, Kurt has one more question here. What makes podcasts a good medium?
I have a really strong answer to this question. I really think long form conversation is a thing that the modern day internet has not made space for, has taken space away from.
But I think podcasts give you time to have a long form, nuanced, in depth conversation where people can be unsure and pore over ideas and commenters are not immediately jumping down their throat. And I love that.
And I love the fact that you can then take them with you out into the world while you're grocery shopping. That they can be a background noise, or something that you're paying really close attention to, that they can keep you company throughout the day. I love that about the medium too even if I also think , as someone who listens to podcasts every waking moment that I'm not, like, at my computer I could probably stand to find more time to myself with my own thoughts.
Merrilee: love that.
Sam: What do you think about podcasts?
Merrilee: It allows me, in my head, to connect a lot with comedy that I wouldn't get to see normally. Just cause it, it allows you to interact with something like improv or like these discussions that happen in a very insular space, right? The stuff you do on Dice Exploder would have existed on The Forge in the same way that improv shows exist at a comedy club.
You usually have to go to that place and seek it out. Often it is a walled garden, so to speak, so there's some kind of accessibility issue there where, like, you have to physically go, or you have to, with the forge, there were a lot of issues with accessibility in terms of, knowing what to say and how to say it and the language and so on and so forth.
And so I think a medium where all you have to do is consume is extremely accessible to everyone.
Sam: So the next question is from Shane from the discord and is for you. So Merrilee, what are some things RPGs can take from LARP design?
Merrilee: Okay, I found it really funny that Shane asked this mostly because I think I am very much the LARP representative, other than Jason Morningstar, in the Dice Exploder Discord. And I have read maybe two LARPs. Okay, I'll give myself a little bit more leeway. I've probably read six to eight LARPs.
Sam: How many lARPs have you played?
Merrilee: I have played one longer than that.
Sam: and I was in it, and I've also played another dozen LARPs or so, so I
Merrilee: Sam, you are much more equipped to answer this question than me.
Sam: But it was for you, so I wanna I wanna hear your opinion about it first.
Merrilee: Well, I think the reason, let me justify why I think I'm getting asked this question. I approach every game like a LARP. You told me that one time. And I think it's very true.
I approach game design like a LARP. And I do this not because I view LARP as like, this very great, superior way of gaming. It's just what I think is fun. I'm gonna steal a little bit of your answer from later on, so Ash Krieder told you this one time: the way I design LARPs is to think of a fucked up situation and then make a bunch of people who would have opinions about that situation.
And that is essentially how I design LARPs and how I design any game in general, right? What I want all the time is a committee LARP, which is a LARP focused on a group of people who need to make a decision. And this is all based in what I, as a designer, am seeking from games, which I think is something really, really important to identify when you are designing. I am constantly seeking catharsis. And that is a big emotional release. And the way most people achieve that catharsis is through argumentation. And so when you get a big group of people together and make them argue, by the end of it, when you are done arguing, you will feel some sort of relief because you are no longer in this extremely tense situation.
I think some things that should be taken from LARP design is that emphasis, obviously, on roleplay, emotions, and difficult decisions.
I know it's a contentious word, but immersion? I think one of the things that new players love about mechanics is that it allows a certain level of distance from them and the game, because they're afraid when they start roleplaying. This is something even I, as someone who loves roleplay and who tries to do it constantly, deals with and struggles with, is a fear about roleplaying. Even if I trust the people around me, I don't want to embarrass myself.
I think more games should allow regular Non LARP games, story games, should take that idea of giving the players more opportunities for immersion.
Sam: I want to add a couple of thoughts on what story games can take from LARPs also, as the resident LARP expert between the two of us. LARPs do a really good job of framing specific scenes, like how the scene is going to start, and often how the scene is going to end, whether that's with a choice, or after a certain amount of time, or when a certain event happens, or whatever. And then they leave the middle open for people to just freeplay, and LARP, and do whatever they want.
And I think that framework is something we really rarely see in story games. Story games are much more maybe you're setting up a premise, but even in classic PBTA, you've got a setting, you've got certain archetypes of characters, but that fundamental initial premise is open ended, and wherever you're gonna end up is open ended, and it's the middle that's a lot more defined by the moves that are in play in the PBTA game, or by whatever the mechanics are in the story game at large, and I think that refocusing from we're going to mechanize the middle to we're going to mechanize the beginning and end is something that could make story games really interesting.
Merrilee: I can't think of a story game that has something like you know, in the space LARP we played, when the timer hits zero, make your decision, when you've made your decision, the scene is over, or in my LARPs, when the snack table is flipped, when you finish your bottle of wine, you know, there's all these ways of ending it, because there has to be for me, some sort of end to a LARP, because otherwise, I, we will just stay there all day, I feel like, arguing about this, creating the world, making it work.
And also, in my mind, I brought this up earlier, you need to have an end that enacts catharsis, right? Something that releases the tension, and one of the interesting things about the space LARP that we played is that time ending or making a decision is not, to me, enacting that relief. It often makes you sit with that uncomfortableness, especially if you've made a decision that doesn't benefit your character.
I much prefer a larger end to a LARP, right? The first one that I ever wrote, you flip the snack table. You must physically take the snack table and flip it. And that is a big part of, you've been arguing for however long you've been arguing, and finally when someone cannot handle it anymore, you have to release the tension. And to me, that's a really fun ending. But I don't see anything like that in story games.
Sam: Yeah,
Merrilee: Okay. This one comes from Nico on the Discord, and it's for you, Sam. What's the most valuable thing you got out of judging The Awards? Which, to do, you must read almost 200 games in three months.
Sam: Yeah, so, I was a judge for this awards show in twenty twenty two. And yeah, I think awards should I wrote a whole thing about award shows too. I think they're very silly. I also think they're very fun. Just like ranking things at large.
I had a fucking blast doing this. For me judging the awards was doing a RPG book club where we read, as Nico says in the question, 200 games in like three months and then talked about them for a couple of months. It was so educational to see what so many different people were doing all at once and then to talk through opinions about all that with a bunch of other really smart motivated people.
And in a lot of ways I wish we hadn't made an awards show out of it I wish we'd just like all pooled together our PDFs of RPGs we had laying around and read them all and then talked about it and then that we could have just like walked away with all the knowledge. I just got so much out of it personally to consume that much and talk about it critically and to see just how many different things could be done with this medium and how beautiful and inspiring that is.
I think the most valuable thing was knowing that if I was on the designer side of the awards, if I had submitted something, that there were people out there, these judges, who wanted to read my thing, wanted it to be good, were gonna treat it seriously and with respect, and really talk about its value and what made it exciting, and learned how much fun that is as a person doing the discussion, and how much I wish more people were doing what I'm now doing on this show, really, of like, taking other people's games and talking about them. Because having your work talked about is really fun and cool, I think, like, mostly.
Yeah, I think the most valuable thing I got out of it was this mindset of treating every game seriously and talking about it is super valuable for the designer, it's super valuable for people doing the discussing, and I think it's pretty valuable for the community at large. And the more people are just taking games seriously and treating them with respect, and also wanting them to be better and pushing them, I think that's just a wonderful attitude to have.
Next question comes from Lady Tabletop and is for you, Merilee. As a relative new designer, how has it t felt to publish the volume of games you have published so far? Because it's true, you have published a truly remarkable number of games in less than six months.
You've already won an award. You are pretty well respected in the Discord community. and you've really just like blasted onto this scene guns blazing.
Merrilee: I mean, It I, like every everybody else that makes things creatively struggle a lot with imposter syndrome. I had a bit of a head start in the sense of I have dealt with a lot of this stuff before because I was a fiction and poetry writer in high school and went through the whole winning an award thing and dealing with kind of all the stuff that comes with it. Understanding what that means, and like, what you do with that, like, what do you do when you win an award?
The award that I won was a Golden Cobra for game that made us laugh the most for my Church Ladies LARP. And it was the first LARP that I'd ever written, think when you, when you hear the premise of it, it's not funny. But honestly, having the judges look at it and say, this made us laugh and we thought it was really good and it had a lot of heart, made me feel like I was in a community that got me, These judges aren't everybody in this community, but to have respected folks in the LARP community get what my game really is about, which is kind of that silliness and absurdist nature of these very tight societal roles that church ladies play meant so much to me.
It's difficult to say, like, how, like my feelings about kind of production, because I don't know at what speed most people produce games. I don't have any idea of that, even speaking to other designers, mostly because I design very different games than what I think a lot of folks around me do, because they are often so minimalist. They don't feel like quote unquote real games, which is, I think, a personal thing I probably need to take some time to examine.
Like the two that I submitted for the Dice Exploder Game Jam, one is called High Table Presence, the other is called Stick the Landing. And they're both in conversation with like this idea of a meta game. And often, when games not necessarily pit players against each other, but cause you to judge other players at the table and what their table Presence is and I wanted to kind of explore that. They're both one page. They're free on itch. And I don't really consider those to be like real games.
A lot of my games don't feel like quote unquote real games and I realize that's not a good way to look at it because I view We Are But Worms. I view I eat mantras for breakfast. I view a lot of games that are weird and out there as real games that are very much deserving of that title, but of course I don't turn that inward. That's like really difficult.
I also will say too, a lot of that production my production, comes from the fact that when you start doing something, you often make quite a lot just because you want to play around with different concepts and there's no fear that comes with it because you have that kind of beginner's shield of like, well, I'm new. It doesn't matter.
And the second you start to get recognition or people really like your games, a lot of that pressure can come along with it. And for me, taking that break can get me away from that pressure and can allow me to come back to it. Because I fully beli like, I counted earlier, I have 48 game ideas that are sitting in Scrivener, and my my goal is to eventually make all of those, if they end up being good ideas, and I think some of them are. And I have to get to a place, mentally, where I can put that out, and not feel like it has to be perfect.
I kind of got some paralysis recently on Reuben's Sandwich because I couldn't decide whether I wanted pregens or not and I took some time, I stepped away, and I came back, and I decided I didn't want pregens. I wanted it as pure and distilled as possible. And it was a lot of this anxiety about, is it going to be good enough and live up to the other games I've put out?
And that becomes a really scary thought, of like, are the games I'm making as good as the ones I've made before? And, I think taking that break can get you away from that initial hype you get from releasing games, right?
Sam: Yeah.
Second question from the lady tabletop. What's your favorite game? You think people don't talk about enough that hasn't been talked about on Dice Exploder yet?
Merrilee: Secco Creek Vigilance Committee.
Sam: Okay. Tell us about Secco Creek and then tell us why you like it
Merrilee: yeah, so Secco Creek is I would like to call it a LARP in story game clothing. It's essentially a committee LARP, but it has a lot of those story game rails that make people feel safe. And you can pitch it to people as a tabletop game, and then you get them there and you basically LARP. And
Sam: Before you go on, what's the premise of the game?
Merrilee: So here is what the itch page says what this is. Secco Creek Vigilance Committee is an Old West RPG about justice, law, revenge, and the discrepancy between what is right and what is good. It's designed for intense, one shot play with a non random resolution system that emphasizes choices and their consequences.
And this is their blurb. Three infamous in laws sit in the Secco Creek Jail, the evidence
Sam: Three infamous in laws?
Merrilee: So it's your mother in law, your father in law, and your sister in law. So three, famous outlaws sit in Secco Creek Jail. The evidence against them for their current crime isn't as cut and dry as you'd hope. But the people of Secco Creek remember the outlaws other sins, and they have no intention of letting them make it to trial in the territorial capitol of Bright City. The crooked court there would be sure to let them off, but no one would be able to let them off the end of a rope if it's tied tight and dropped fast. Some of the citizens of your fair town are gathering outside the jail right now, and the train to Bright City doesn't leave until 310 tomorrow. What will you do?
So it's a game for five players and one judge, and it's about three to four hours for a single session
Sam: And it is neatly a fucked up situation that a lot of the characters have a strong opinion about.
Merrilee: It is a committee LARP and I love that! And I think it's great because of its quote unquote non random resolution system, which is essentially just talk it out with the boys, just discuss it and decide what the best outcome is.
There is a little bit of mechanical, like, you can trade some of the mechanical favor with each faction, with each other. There's some more complicated stuff, but when we played it, it was very much just, okay, we want this to happen, what do we think the outcome is going to be? And I just really loved that.
I thought it went super well, especially for a group of players that are not LARP players that are not people who are interested in that, and yet most of the game was roleplay. Most of the game was this committee LARP kind of, okay, we want to come to a resolution about what to do. Some of us disagree with others.
The only thing is that, you know, there is movement in the game. So you can go from one place to another. And if the players don't agree, you can have one player that ends up staying behind, which isn't very fun for them. So it runs into some of those issues of, Basically why committee LARPs usually only take place in one confined space where people cannot leave.
But, I didn't really see too much of that issue in our game. I feel like it was still very workable.
Sam: Yeah, all the pre gen characters give you a reason to care and like, stay involved and like, go get yourself involved in other people's scenes. And, god, I would really love to I have this dream of doing a Dice Exploder episode that's just like, the name of one of the pre gen characters in a game like Sekko Creek or Lady Blackbird that like, comes with a bunch of characters.
Like, Imagine a Dice Exploder title that reads, Lady Blackbird, parenthetical, Lady Blackbird, with whoever the guest is. Like, I think talking about pre gen characters and all the work that they're doing in a game like this is, ugh. That's also on the list of things I would love to see more story games pull from LARP.
Merrilee: And I think the pregens in Secco Creek follow Jason Morningstar's, basic outline for a pregen, which is, you know, you want an adjective noun, you want a reason for them to be in everybody's business, have an opinion like have some reason to be involved, and then a connection to all the other characters.
And what I like about how Secco Creek handles the idea of factions is that it didn't feel cumbersome because we didn't use it a lot. And I think if it had been utilized more, it would have been fine. It may have added to play if that was more what we were looking for, and I love a mechanic that I can choose to use as much as I want, right?
If I find that none of my players are engaging with it, I can just drop it. And I love a game that doesn't suffer when I do that. And I think Secco Creek very easily could just be a LARP. It could be a committee LARP where you have to, you are confined to the jail and the five of you need to figure out what you're going to do with the criminals and the game ends when you decide that rather than with Secco Creek ending at that 310 or I think our game ended because we ran out of time and we just kind of made this ending resolution for it.
Sam: All the people on one side got shot, as I recall, so
Merrilee: So, I mean, like, I think it is, as I said, just a LARP in storygame clothing , and I really love that because it's about those people and their opinions about the community and what to do with it, so what a great game.
Sam: I'm gonna say two LARPs Factory Reset and The Straits Are Not Okay from Ash Kreider. I just love Ash's games, I love Ash, I love everything that they do. But I think these LARPs in particular are just so purely what I want out of a LARP.
Factory Reset is a game where you are all robots in a world where every six months robots are supposed to be taken back into the factory and have their memories wiped so they don't become too sentient. And most of you have become very sentient and have not been reset for much longer than six months. And you sit in a waiting room. and one by one are taken into the back and reset and then come back out and keep mingling until everyone's memory has been reset and then that's the end of the game.
It's excruciatingly sad, it's incredibly interesting, there are a couple of moments of potential long term hope embedded in it, but I just, it's just so pure. I've described essentially all the mechanics in the game by this point. Each character is its own short story that you get to help write by embodying the character. And, it's just so good.
And then The Straits Are Not Okay is a very similar format from Ash. It's uh, a midwestern family at a gender reveal party, the end of the game is gonna be when you do the gender reveal and the resulting fireworks set the national forest on fire. And in the meantime, every character is just like a fucked up, repressed midwestern conservative. And they slowly start yelling at each other. And I have been astounded at how much fun such a mundane feeling premise is to play.
So in both of these games, like, we really do just have a bunch of pre gen characters in a fucked up situation hanging out with each other and doing a thing. But in the Straits are Not Okay especially, that scenario is just in modern day. You're just hanging out. You're just pretending to be like people that you probably know in your real life. And it's still so fun and so revealing about those dynamics and about, I think, white American family dynamics at large.
And it's just been a blast every time I've played it.
Merrilee: The Stranger Not Okay was a big influence on the Church Ladies LARP because when I wrote it, I had only read two LARPs, and that was the Regency Committee on Punchbowl Poop Prevention by Tasha Robinson, which is the game that I remixed. And then The Straits Are Not Okay.
And The National Forest Catching on Fire is that ending the game with a bang kind of concept that stuck with me so hard. Ash's games are incredible.
So our next one comes from Chris Greenbrier on the Dice Exploder Discord. What's a premise or game that you want to exist, but know you aren't the person to actually design?
This is really hard to answer, because if I have a game idea, I will make it. I don't feel like any game is outside my reach to make. It may not be in the cards for me to make it right now, though. I do understand that some games are better for maybe more mature hands, a. k. a. myself in the future.
Like there's a few game ideas that I have that I think they are going to take a little bit more understanding of what I want out of the game. I've had this game idea for a split group game that I want to make called You Will Die Here and We Will Watch. And it is just an extremely complex game. And in order to make sure that I maintain that level of minimalism and refinement that I really like in a game where there is no fluff, there's only the necessary components, I think that game is going to have to go through a lot of iterations and I'm going to have to have a much better idea of what I want from it, how players will play it.
If I'm just enamored with the idea of a split group concept in general, if this is even the game to do it with, there's so many questions around it that me right now can't answer.
But I still had the idea, I'm still in love with it but I think one of the big things we have to do as artists is balance that critique of the self in the sense of, oh, I'm not ready to make this with understanding that maybe some things are better made at a higher level of maturity.
It's like an exciting thing I get to look forward to in my game design journey is getting to a point where I feel like I can do the heavy lifting needed to make a great game with this premise.
Sam: Alright, Sam R. asks this is maybe my favorite question of the day, incidentally. If you were a guest on Dice Exploder and not the host, what mechanic would you bring on? Do you want to start here or do you want me to go through
No, you go through your
I have a fucking list. I keep a list that has like 25 mechanics on it or something at this point that like I would love to talk about. I'm not gonna go into detail on these because I think each one really would be a 40 minute episode unto itself. So I'll just like tantalizingly leave the list here. But let's do my top five maybe top six Mechanics I would bring on to Dice Exploder.
So number one is from Apocalypse World, every character gets a name. Number two from Space Post choose the least interesting option.
Number three from The Skeletons is Time Passes, which is where you are all
Merrilee: Sitting in a dark room with the boys,
Sam: You are all skeleton tomb guardians, and between scenes you turn out the lights and sit in darkness for up to 5 10 minutes at a time to simulate the passage of millennia. Number four is, boy this is a lot of Jason Morningstar games in a row, Huldu, which is this game that is not released yet that we got to playtest in January in which you make and then wear gnome hats because you are gnomes, and you can only wear your hat when you are doing magic or when you are speaking with the human world.
So the game is, like, you really want to put these fucking hats on, and so the game is really encouraging you to go do magic, which is gonna cause problems and drive the story forward, or go talk to the human world, which is gonna cause problems and drive the story forward.
And then, Number five is, I think, Dream Askew's recipe for beans and kale that they include in the book. Which they recommend you make as a meal for your friends when you invite them over to play the game to eat before you start playing.
Yeah, so those are, those are my top mechanics.
Do you have a mechanic that you would bring on to Dice Exploder?
Merrilee: I think, actually, the one that I would want to bring is timed LARPs.
Sam: Mm
Merrilee: not because I actually really like it, but because I find it really interesting. As someone who has a lot of time blindness, The concept of marking time is a contentious one for me, because I yap a lot. I don't have great concept of time, I just talk and I live and I do things, and so, putting me under the constraint of time can often make things extremely stressful for me, which is what a lot of LARPs go for, right? They try to make it stressful, or they try to put you in this pressure cooker, like you. You love putting me in a pressure cooker.
Sam: I love putting all my players in pressure cookers.
It's the best.
Merrilee: it's great. And what I would want to talk about with that in particular is how it affects the way that different players approach the game, how you conceive of the game itself, and especially LARPs that have very long time windows.
One of them that Nick sent me an article about recently was a 10 hour LARP. And what I loved about it was that there were like different sections in the time that marked different stages of the lARP. And the idea of combining that with time constraint, rather than move on when a certain event happens, is really I get chills thinking about it. It's such a cool idea to me, but it also sounds awful and wonderful and weird.
You know, like, I want so badly to experience it, but at the same time, it is so frightening to me, and that makes me want to do it even more. Right? The more scared I am of a LARP, the more I want to do it. And time the LARPs. Give me a really big fear.
And I think the idea of a time mechanic in any game. I played a really, really good RPG that isn't out yet. I just got to test it. That I think it's called Killing Time, where the first season was, because it's done in like four seasons the first season was timed, and you have to look through a tarot deck really fast. And I, like, got past it with, like, 23 seconds left in the, like, 30 minute timer or something.
And it was just, you had to make these choices between roleplaying and staying true to the character and you know how hard I want to push for that and also knowing that there's this ticking clock and it created this very intense flow state of like really being in it and I think that's what's so appealing to me about the time mechanic.
Sam: What's the spiciest TTRPG take you feel comfortable sharing on your extremely generous and kind podcast? Yeah. I had a hard time actually thinking of a spicy take to share in the first place. And then I thought of one that is just on the other side of me not being comfortable sharing it.
Merrilee: Oh, no. I actually, I have mine, and I
Sam: Yeah, please.
Merrilee: I think too many people dismiss the Forge era. I think too many people have heard that the Forge was a certain way, and it very much may have been, right?
I, when I talk about The Forge, which I just read a 400 page textbook written by Bill White, got to play a game with him. You know, I dived a lot into the history of The Forge. And regardless of how it was, I think we as a community have to recognize that we are a community no matter how large we get and no matter how intense our walled gardens of discords and blogs, etc. get and how fractured we become on the internet. We have a history.
You know, Apocalypse World was not made, PBTA was not made in a vacuum. Those were games in conversation with Forge era games. And a lot of our history, the games that created this scene as it is, come from the Forge.
The games created in that era, the people who are still in the scene, there's a lot to be said for the good things that came out of it, the lessons we can learn from it, and I think if people just dismiss it, and say that the Forge was not great, or that it did things badly, or was pretentious, all the things that people say about the Forge, I think is one of those where we're walling off history and not learning from it.
I don't think we should have a repeat of it, but I do think there are so many lessons to be learned, not just about community management, but about game design, about how to talk to other designers. I mean, this is such an important part of our history and so many people ignore it or dismiss it.
Sam: It's, it lacks curiosity.
Merrilee: thank you. Yes, it lacks curiosity in the same way that saying D& D 5e is bad lacks curiosity about what we can learn from the things we don't like, and often doesn't invite you to understand the critique itself.
I love watching video essays, but one of the things about video essays is if you don't watch them with that curiosity or critical thinking in mind, you just consume the opinion and then that's what you have. And if you don't dissect it and like work through it, then you don't have an opinion of your own. All you have is that, synthesized opinion of the essayist.
And I think that's what happens with things like D& D 5e or The Forge, where people just hear this thing bad and they don't critically examine, what can we learn from it? Is there a good thing? And I think there are a lot of lessons to be learned from both of those.
Sam: Yeah. That's a great take.
Alright citrusSquid asks, do puzzles have a place in tabletop games? And if so, how do you design satisfying ones?
Merrilee: No.
Sam: I don't necessarily disagree with that answer. I think it's really hard to make puzzles satisfying in role playing games because first of all, you're firmly in player knowledge, not character knowledge mode. The like classic puzzle is you're in a room and there's some mirrors you have to move around or whatever , and I think it's so easy for people to just not know what they're supposed to fucking ask about.
And I think it's so easy for players to just get stuck and not be able to solve the puzzle. And I think it's really easy for the, like, board game pandemic effect to take over, where essentially what you have is four people sitting around the table, and one of them is playing pandemic, one of them is solving the puzzle, and the other three are like sitting there watching.
And all of those things are not satisfying experiences to me. They are not, I think, what makes roleplaying games strong. So, can you put puzzles in tabletop games? Absolutely. Can you do puzzle hunts on a team ? Absolutely. So, it depends on exactly what you mean by puzzles, but also, like, I don't think that the medium is strongest at doing puzzles.
Merrilee: No! But I expand.
No, no, go on. Yeah.
genuinely, go do an escape room. Go play a video game. I think if you want to put puzzles in your tabletop game or in your campaign, legitimately, go watch 10 different YouTubers do a bunch of shrines in Tears of the Kingdom and watch how a single puzzle can be completed in so many different ways
Sam: Yeah.
Merrilee: everyone approaches it differently. And I think my issue with puzzles, even in most video games, is that they are not approachable in any way except the one intended design. I know Tears and Zelda in general is overhyped when it comes to these puzzle designs, etc, but I think as someone who doesn't love a lot of puzzle design, those scratch a very specific itch in my head because I don't get frustrated in the sense of, Oh, I'm not, I'm not able to find THE solution. It's more, I don't know if I can find A solution right now. And sometimes that means getting more things or more knowledge. Coming back to it when I'm not frustrated. Gives me creative freedom in a way that most puzzles do not.
And I think if you're gonna have a puzzle in your game, it better have more than one way to solve it If you get to a point where your player comes up with a creative way to solve something and you're like no that's not the way it's supposed. I don't care forget that. Put your ego aside Let them solve the frickin puzzle. Let them feel clever. If that's the whole point of it, you know. Oh, I feel so strongly about that.
Sam: classic, like dungeon crawling puzzle design advice, it's like problems with no obvious solution many possible solutions and no good solution. And I think that that is in fact really great advice for role playing games.
The fun part of, interacting with a puzzle is, can I, like, wedge my stick in there and, like, wobble the bowl back and forth to, like, get it to move in the way that I want it to? You can't get that kind of problem solving or like puzzle solving in another medium, in a way that just throwing a fucking sudoku on the door to like keep it from being opened or like you know whatever your elaborate version is of that just ends up feeling frustrating and silly and a waste of time.
Next question. Lady Tabletop is back again. She asks, First board game you remember playing, or first TTRPG you remember playing, or first imaginative play you remember as a child?
Merrilee: So this is one of my favorite things to talk about because it goes to show that sometimes you have formative childhood experiences that you don't correctly classify.
When I was in middle school, I went to Camp Garroway, which stands for Girls in Action, Royal Ambassadors, and the Young Women's Association, which are all groups within the Southern Baptist Convention. I grew up Southern Baptist, very religious. I was very into it. And Camp Garroway was a place specifically for girls Girls in Action, the GA part.
And after you had spent all this time with your counselors, and you had been doing Jesus stuff all week, you were exhausted, it was the middle of summer in Mississippi, so it was like 100 percent humidity, 95 degrees, the cockroaches can fly, it's awful, and they would get us together every year, To play this game called Underground Church, and in Underground Church, you play as Christians who are living in a country where Christianity is outlawed.
And it is essentially a very large LARP. Where your counselors are facilitators, except they wear all black and carry around these gigantic, like, police flashlights. They were very intimidating. And, so, all you do is walk around the play area until a counselor spots you, and you have to try to talk your way out of like, going to jail, because they'll take you to jail.
And so, essentially you're having to come up with a character in that moment who has a good enough reason to not be taken to jail for being suspected as a Christian who's just gone to underground church. And then, say you don't do a good enough job, well, you get taken to jail! Which is where you go and you face the wall for, like, five minutes while counselors yell about how Jesus has left you or whatever.
Sam: Just really drilling that like persecution complex in at a young age.
Merrilee: they love Martyrs in the SVC. They love Martyrs. And so like, You go and you get released from jail and then you just repeat the cycle and there's added things to it, like some of our counselors could be converted, some of them couldn't, some could be converted with a lot of work.
It is such an interesting game to me as a designer now looking back on it. Because, At the time, I was often so excited to play it when I got the opportunity to, because when I looked back on it before I got into tabletop games, I was like, why did I like lying so much as a kid? Like, why was I so excited to get to lie and transgress in this way?
And then I realized it wasn't because I wanted to lie, it was because I wanted to roleplay. And the idea of playing this character was so exciting and fun, and I think that also has, in a large way, impacted the fact that I think roleplaying is something you can be good at and get a good grade in and that's healthy and safe to think, which is not true. I think you can roleplay well and you can roleplay safely, but I, literally, whether or not you roleplayed well enough, meaning whether or not you went to jail, was probably very impactful on me in my roleplaying now as an adult.
But it also immediately introduced me to, like, these much more combative ideas in terms of, there were layers to it, and I actually am writing a LARP that is a LARP metagame, so you LARP on top of actually playing the game Underground Church. So you're playing the characters who are playing the game, which is my favorite concept for a game ever, is to play characters playing a game.
And so that was kind of my first experience with I would say structured imaginative play. So, but getting to see it in that extremely structured way, you can actually find instructions for it online, but only on one website. I, like, actually called the camp and said, hey, do you guys
Sam: ha
Merrilee: roles? I'm a game designer. I'm looking to make a game based on it. They were very cool about it. It was a very sweet Southern woman. She said, I don't have them. Our camp director does. Do you want me to get, get them to give you a call? I was like, no, it's fine. Don't take my name or anything.
So I was able to find them online, though. So just a really interesting, strange experience. And other people have, played it, too.
I've, I've talked to somebody else who has played it in their church, and that was really wild to know that this wasn't just at my church. So, very weird.
Sam: can story games learn from Christian persecution complexes?
Merrilee: Honestly, a lot.
Sam: Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.
All right, Sam R asks what's a favorite move or play you've made?
I have an answer to this. I was GMing a game of Blades in the Dark. The probably protagonist character, honestly, of the group was the son of Lord Strangford, who is one of the like, most powerful, richest men in the whole city. And this protagonist was like a rich kid who decided to go cosplay as being a scoundrel out in the streets. And had come home and was like, hey dad, I think I can like, start a drug business if you want to get in on that.
And his dad was like, fuck you. Don't do that. You're gonna like screw up my actual drug business and this son was like but I want to make a name for myself. And like they got into this conflict where I ultimately made a fortune roll as the GM to determine how much his dad loved him and rolled very poorly.
And that might be my favorite individual role I've ever made in a roleplaying game. A role for how much does dad love you? I think that's just very funny, and very satisfying, and led to an extremely dramatic moment in game.
Merrilee: Cute. I tend to remember other people's moments more than my own but I would say it's a toss up between probably the first roleplay experience I really ever had, which was during our game of The King is Dead, it was like the first solo scene that I had with another player, and like, was meeting them after a long time away, and the first thing I said to them was something like, Oh, it's unfortunate to hear about how your kingdom failed in regards to this mission they were working on.
And I am obsessed with rhetorical dominance and basically how characters and roleplay control conversation, personal power in those conversations, etc. And that, to me, exemplifies how you do rhetorical dominance, which is about basically posturing and positioning within a conversation. So, my character, who was very prideful like, intentionally worked to push the other character into a position of lesser than her.
And my favorite thing about that was that the other person immediately. It was like flipping a switch, them going immediately, Oh, oh, my lady, of course, yes, it is unfortunate to hear about that. We apol like, it was so fast. And at that second, I was like, I'm addicted to this. I love this. This is incredible. Like, to have an idea about that, and then to have another player respond with the same energy, and knowing, like, they're, they were a very experienced role player, and that maturity allowed them to take that lesser position very quickly.
And it didn't feel like they, as a player, felt like they were having to step back in the scene. In fact, they took up the same amount of space as me in the scene. They still had that presence, even with their character playing that kind of groveling role, and that was so cool to watch as a dynamic, and it continued throughout the game.
Sam: Closing in on the end here. LadyTabletop, back for more. What is a piece of advice about game design or creative work in general that has stuck with you?
Merrilee: Make Weird Shit. Like, I just think you should make your weird little games, just put them out there. Don't care about kickstarting, don't care about marketing, don't care about anything. You know, talk to people online, tell them about your games once you've given them space to tell you about their games, don't be a dick about it, don't show up to a Discord and promo the first week you're in there, like, it's about building a community and then sharing your games in that community, and then like, painstakingly working to integrate feedback and, like, do stuff.
I don't know, make your weird little games, put them on the internet, stop caring about anything else. And stop making games that are over ten pages. Just stop. needs a game over ten pages. That's so long. Ten pages is so much to write. Design a game around a single mechanic, around two mechanics. Don't even use mechanics. Stop designing big 100 page games that have all these different sections and things and blah blah blah. Do that after you've matured as a game designer, if that's something you really want to do.
But, like, use little games as a way of learning, right? Think of them as your, projects that you're doing at school, they're the little pieces that help you refine, they're the spoons you make as a woodworker, or like the weird little metal creatures you make as a welder. They're like ways of refining and honing your skills while putting cool ideas out into the world and there is absolutely nothing wrong with not making a heartbreaker that's 150 pages. It pains me to see people show up on the scene and feel like that's what they want to make and like need to make in order to be relevant. Make your one page silly game idea, draw all over it, scan it, put it on itch.
Sam: I'll underline a thing that we answered in another question, which is, I think, giving yourself time and space to work on stuff like understanding that time away from the creative work is part of the creative process is really important. think that's a great place to wrap things up for today. Marilee, thanks so much for being on Dice Exploder this week.
Merrilee: Yeah,
Sam: yeah. Well, let's uh, let's fade to credits here.
Merrilee: credits time!
Sam: Thanks again to Merrilee for being here, you can find her games at Merrilee Bufkin dot itch.io. As always, you can find me on socials at sdunnewold or on the Dice Exploder dicord. Our logo was designed by sporgory. Our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Gray. And thanks to you for listing. See you in December for our year end Bonanza.