This episode of Dice Exploder can be found here.
It is still designer commentary season on Dice Exploder, and today I'm talking with Jason Morningstar (Fiasco, Night Witches, a million other games) about Northfield: a game we co-designed about the time Jesse James tried to rob the bank in my home town, we shot the hell out of him and his gang, and then we started an annual small town fair to celebrate our victory. You play as both a member of the James-Younger gang during the bank raid and as a person in the modern day portraying your gang member in a reenactment.
It's a weird little game, much like its subject matter, and surprisingly personal to me (Jason was not surprised by this). On this episode, we break down the process of our collaboration and how we feel about the results (very positively).
More than any other designer commentary I've done, I hope you check out this game. I'm really proud of it. You can get it, as well as a written interview with me and later this month a brand new game from me, over on the Bully Pulpit Patreon now for just $5.
Further Reading
Northfield, the game, on the Bully Pulpit Patreon
Video of the Defeat of Jesse James Days reenactment
Official Defeat of Jesse James Days website
Photo of (allegedly) Charlie Pitts’ ear
Wikipedia articles on Northfield and the James-Younger gang
Socials
Jason on Bluesky and dice.camp.
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
Dice Exploder: Northfield
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Sam: Hello, and welcome to another episode of Dice Exploder. Each week, we take a tabletop RPG mechanic and buy it two tickets for the Ferris wheel. My name is Sam Dunnewold and it is still designer commentary season on the show. So instead of a normal episode today, I am joined by Jason Morningstar to talk about a brand new game we designed together called Northfield, a game about small town pettiness and the end of Jesse James 's gang.
If you don't know Jason Morningstar, you might be familiar with his iconic game Fiasco, the company he co runs, Bully Pulpit Games, his previous appearance on this very podcast talking about transparency, or one of the hundred or whatever other games he's designed. He designs a lot of games about real world history, like Night Witches. He designs a lot of LARPs, like Ghost Court. And a couple of months ago, he asked if I wanted to make a game with him and yes, yes I did.
The game is called Northfield, which is the name of the small Minnesota town I grew up in. Northfields claim to fame. Is that in 1876, Jesse James's gang came to town to rob the bank and the townies shot them up and drove them out of town. It was the beginning of the end of the James-Younger gang. And for as long as I've been alive, every year, the town has a little Defeat of Jesse James Days carnival about the whole thing. It's a little fair, you can buy mini donuts, there's a Ferris wheel, and there's reenactments of the bank raid.
Now, I love Northfield , but I have always felt weird about this carnival. It's really weird, right? Like it plays right into the valorization of a bunch of racist, murdering shitbags for the purpose of bringing in tourist dollars and raising the town's reputation. So in Northfield, the game you play as both a member of the James younger gang during this fateful robbery and the person in the present day who's playing them in the reenactment. It's real quick, only like an hour to play, and I think it's really good. Like I hope you check it out either on the Bully Pulpit Patreon or on itch.io. Links in the show notes.
Today's episode is very much a designer commentary, but it's also about our process of collaboration. I do hope you play the game. I hope you think our thoughts on the design are interesting, but I also hope you're inspired to go out there and collaborate with a friend yourself. Pick a friend, find a small project, and see what happens. Playing a role-playing game is an act of collaboration, so I know if you're listening to this podcast, you know how to do it. And I know you have some friends you're regularly doing it with. Just saying.
Okay, let's get into it. Here is Jason Morningstar and our designer commentary on Northfield. Jason, thanks for coming back and talking with me. Thanks for making a game with
Jason: Well, I know, I'm so excited. Of course I've came back and talked 'cause we're gonna nerd out about the thing we just made
Sam: Yeah, yeah, this is the best. This is the real reason that I made Dice Exploder in the first place. I feel like you have to make eight episodes of the show to buy yourself the excuse for one designer commentary, but then you can make, like, all these people listen to me talk about the cool thing that I made, and the cool thing that you made, and so, yeah.
Yeah, so let's start at the beginning of this. Like, we made a game together. Why did we do that? How did this come about from your perspective?
Jason: you know what? I when I meet somebody I like and I like you. I, I liked you the first time I met you at GenCon. I was like, that's a cool guy. You were doing all the right things. You were volunteering at Games on Demand and you were very forward about your interests and I just appreciated you.
Sam: Thank you.
Jason: well, well, that's absolutely true. And when I meet someone like that, my impulse. is to be like, let's do something together. And so I was, I think it was just an offhand comment at some point, like, we should do something together. Let's make a game together. which I, it's not uncommon for me to do that with people that I really, connect with So I think that's how it started. Is that your recollection?
Sam: Yeah, I remember it being on Discord in the Dice Exploder Discord and specifically you saying something about how you really like the part of the process that's just like getting out the first idea and then you don't like doing revisions and this was in response to me complaining about I hate getting the first part out I just like doing the editing of the revisions and you were like we should definitely be making something together. And I was like, yeah great.
So then yeah,
Jason: let's revisit that as we talk, because I, I, I, I'm not convinced that's how our collaboration here functioned.
Sam: I agree
Jason: but, but and that's fine, but it's, it's interesting that that's what sort of drove that. And then it turns out we kind of, we were sort of parallel the whole way, I
Sam: totally. Yeah. Yeah, I think I was talking in that moment about screenwriting specifically, and I really feel that way about screenwriting, but I actually don't feel that way about game design in the same way, like even in the abstract.
But so on that note, like, what do you look for in a collaboration at large? And what did you look for in this one specifically?
Jason: Yeah, I'm always surprised by other people and the way that they approach things. Other people's takes on things that I feel like I've got dialed in. It's always refreshing to see. And with this particular collaboration, a lot of that came from you just being the subject matter expert. Like you, this is lived experience for you.
And so there were tons of times when you're like, well, actually this one time this happened, or I knew this one guy who did this. And it kind of blew my mind because I've never had that experience. Like I've made games that are about people's lived experience before, but always with the idea that someone who has lived through it might actually see it in my game. Not I'm making a game with someone who has done this thing, or knows everything about this thing, grew up with this thing. It's very different and I really totally appreciated that.
Sam: Yeah, I find, just to talk about collaboration for me, like, I have done, I think, very little, collaboration on, like, I think, like, playing games together is an act of collaboration, and I really love that act of collaboration, I do a ton of that, obviously, but I don't do screenwriting with other people well because I'm such a control freak,
Jason: Oh, yeah.
Sam: I have such a strong opinion and I'm so perfectionist on the like, detail level, that I've found it hard to collaborate in the past.
And I think this went really well in part because I had such a clear role in it, like, as a subject matter expert. But also, like, frankly, like, I really look up to you as a game designer. Like, Fiasco's what got me into story games in the first place. And it felt a lot easier to be, like, here's someone that I love and respect enough that I really feel like I can let go of that. It felt like a nice way to, to practice letting go a little bit more in the collaboration.
Jason: Thank you for saying that, and I appreciate that, and I hope that we got that mix right. I know that there were, there were times in this process where I'm like, nah, no, that's, that's actually, that's kind of a bad idea. And often it seemed like you were like, yeah, on reflection, it is a bad idea and didn't necessarily push back too hard.
And I don't know if that was all one way. Or, or not. I don't think it was. There were times when you kind of shut me down too, and, and that's fruitful, right? That's a very positive and healthy dialogue to be having in any kind of collaborative environment. Well, what do you look for? Like, same question to you,
Sam: Well, just to, to go on that, I think it's really necessary in a collaboration to identify... This is actually something that I've, I've learned after, like being a video editor for years and being the like second creative voice after someone else for a long time of like, it's really important to identify the stuff you think is extremely important and to really stick to your guns on that. But it's also important to like identify that everything else you can like take or leave. And like if someone else has a strong opinion about it, great. Then you don't have to.
And I think that there was a lot of that in this of like, I identified the stuff that I felt really strongly about and a lot of that was like, how are we treating my hometown? Like, what is my lived experience? And you really respected that. And then the stuff where I was like, I have ideas here, I'll throw stuff out, but like, I just don't have to be invested in the same way is the kind of stuff that it was really easy to be flexible on. So what I look for
it. I don't, I was staring at this question in the outline and I was like, I don't look for collaboration usually, I don't seek it out a lot and I, I just haven't done it a lot, I think, because of that perfectionism. So I didn't really know what I was looking for.
But I think that that, kind of what I just described is really what I like, like, someone who is able to have to bring their own strong opinions, have different but compatible strong opinions to me, right?
And then be able to defend those, but also like, let things go that they don't care about or that, I care about more. I think that knowing when to be flexible and knowing when to stick to your guns and when to go for conflict in the collaboration and when to let things slide is, maybe the most important thing for me.
Jason: Yeah, and that's all predicated on trust and love, right? Like, like if you can't trust that Somebody who has a strong opinion is coming from a, a place that you can respect. It's just, it's not gonna work.
Sam: And someone with similar taste, too. That's the other thing, I feel like we were on a really similar page from the jump of like what we were trying to do. And I've had a couple other times where I'm like, Oh, I understand that this person I've decided to work with is like going for a thing, and that's cool, I want to see that, but that's not the thing I want to spend my time working on, and like maybe that means we shouldn't be collaborating.
Jason: Yeah. Yeah. That's a good point. And it's something to be thoughtful about if, if you are doing something like this.
And the, the thing that I often will do with a, someone that I want to collaborate with, but it's like a first time is what we did, which is to really set a boundary at the beginning and say, let's make something small. Because if it's not a big ordeal, even if it gets out of hand and is not going somewhere that I'm really happy with, it's not a huge suck on my time or my, you know, my emotional energy.
So, you know, like, this was successful. And if we were to, if we were to do this again, we could take on a more complicated or fraught project, for sure. Because I, I know you a little better now, in, this design space.
Sam: Yeah. Alright, so moving forward, we started out by basically just sending each other, what, seven or eight ideas each, I wanna say?
Jason: that sounds about right.
Sam: in various sizes from like two sentences to a couple of, I know I sent you a couple where I like had a Google Doc I would've sent over if we'd gone with that.
But what drew you to this idea in particular?
Jason: Oh man, as soon as I realized that you were talking about something that you had experienced, like this was semi autobiographical, you know, it was kind of like. Pushing on the edge of journalism, suddenly I was really interested.
Sam: Yeah.
Jason: And there was no question that's what I wanted to do, even though it wasn't my thing. It was your thing. It just was too good, right? That's such a rare opportunity.
Sam: yeah.
Jason: It was very inspiring.
Sam: it's funny because I, put it on the list specifically because I was like, you know, I'm not really a person who has paid a lot of attention to history or learned a lot about history in detail in my life, but I know you really like making games about history, and I
Jason: I do, yeah.
Sam: what piece of history do I feel invested in? Like, am I excited about? Like, I should put whatever that is on the list. And I, I think that the dissonance between how Northfield, as I grew up in it, views this event, this robbery, and the reality of what happened, has always just been like a scab that I could pick at and I've never quite gone and actually picked at it all the way until this project and it felt like there, there'd be something exciting to do there.
And then also then you get to make a game about cowboys and shit, right?
Jason: Right, yeah. Sort of recontextualize the American myth, which is also always, always welcome. Always interesting. Fertile
Sam: honored tradition. Yeah.
Jason: 100%.
And I'm so glad that we did. It's, interesting to think about, when we approached this project we had a lot of ideas about how to, you know, which story to focus on, how to incorporate both stories.
and, you know, some of those were rabbit trails that didn't pay out. Uh, And the one that we came up with is just sweet. I love it. But there were others, you know, like we discarded half a dozen other ways that we could have addressed this same topic.
Sam: Yeah. On that note, another thing that I know you mentioned early in the process that you're interested in right now is just time in games, and you shared The Pit with me, which is this playtest in which you have sort of a, past, a during, and an after of some major event format for playing a game, and I know you're thinking about time in other ways too.
What is it that's really interesting to you about time in games right now?
Jason: I think it's just underutilized.
Like,
if you look at other media, it's like, you know, you're a screenwriter. You can, control that so tightly and so capably within a screenplay if you choose to. Whereas we're kind of stuck in this linear rut. Right? It's, it's a huge revelation when you can incorporate a flashback in Blades in the Dark, or in Fiasco, and that's like the most baby step way of handling how time works, or how time works cinematically or aesthetically.
And I just, I think that there's more we can do with it. It is a designable surface that nobody's really playing too hard with. So, it very much interests me and that this project really scratched that itch.
Sam: Yeah, and I think really successfully. We'll get into that more later,
Jason: So, Sam, the thing that we made, Northfield, is about your hometown, Northfield, Minnesota, and it's full of real people who are very invested in these events that we're, we're kind of attacking. So, so, A, how do we balance that? How do you, control the, balance between truth and maybe potential harm, lived experience versus abstraction? How did you want to approach this, and do you think we succeeded?
Sam: Yeah. Well, I feel like Northfield, needs to be poked at and yelled at about this. Like, I think North Field's weird little Defeat of Jesse James day's Carnival, like, deserves to be pointed at and said, this seems like I, I racist, I I bad. Like it valorize these guy like it. So, I started from a point of, like, I believe in the thing that we are trying to say.
And then, after that, I was worried about, like, is this gonna come across like, I just hate my hometown, I don't wanna do that, are we gonna be going after any real people, like in a way where like really, we're putting my opinions about one way that the town behaves onto like five reenactors uh, and like, the five people who those reenactors are like allegorical of in real life are much more nuanced and like more dispersed. This feeling that we're talking about here i think is much more of like the town at large rather than just those people.
So I I think that it was really important to try to make the present day reenactor characters in the game as different from the real life people as we could, like, maybe we were borrowing details, we borrowed the fact that, like, one of them was a former governor, but we changed that guy's age. I didn't want there to be an obvious one to one for any real life person to any character in the game. And I think we broadly succeeded at that, and I, like, ran the game by people from Northfield, and I was like, do you think I'm being too harsh? And all of them were like, No, this is great. Northfield, like, sucks in this way. Like, and someone should say it.
Jason: Uh, From outsider perspective, it is really weird. It's weird thing.
Sure
Sam: Yeah. Yeah, So, I feel like we succeeded. I don't feel like I overstepped. I can imagine people being mad at me about it, but I think those are the people that I want to be mad at me about it.
Jason: Yeah. I kind of hope that some of those people are like, how dare you? How dare you? What? Wait a minute. And like, there's a conversation to be had there. And if this helps foster that, I think that'd be amazing.
Sam: Yeah.
Jason: How many towns have a role playing game written about them?
Sam: Yeah, exactly, right? I mean, I played this with my parents in playtesting in Northfield, which ruled, and my mom's first reaction was, you know, down at the local youth center, they have a weekly RPG night, and I bet they would love to play this, because someone made a game about their town, like, you should send it to them, and I was like, yeah, we will absolutely
Jason: hundred percent. A hundred percent.
Sam: I wanted to ask you, too, about the more general case here. As we said, you've made a lot of games about real historical events, like, how do you think about balancing games as entertainment versus, like, games as history lesson, and also, like, respecting the real lived experience of, people
Jason: Yeah, that's a great question, and I've answered it before, but main thing that I try to think about is kind of what the game wants to be. And I say that a lot, but if the game wants to be didactic, and it wants to be a teaching tool, then, you know, you really should probably honor history, stick to it, respect the lived experience of people who may pick it up and read it who actually went through it. And design with that in mind.
If the game wants people to engage with it meaningfully, and it's, it's a difficult topic, then sometimes it wants to be abstracted, you know? And that abstraction, you know, maybe it's not Afghanistan, but it's space Afghanistan. and the exact same things are happening, but you don't have to pretend that you are a Pashto speaking combat interpreter. Because that's fraught and uncomfortable, and it's gonna make people say, no, I will not engage with This material, I won't play this game, but if it's space Afghanistan, okay, maybe I will.
And then you can still have that conversation when the game's over. You know, map it to real life, map it to reality or history or contemporary events.
So, I look at each project individually. I don't have a stock answer to that question, but I want to be respectful, I want to be thoughtful and I, I want what the game wants, whatever that might be.
Sam: To bring it back to this particular game, there's that feeling that I know you've talked about in a lot of other places, we don't need to go into detail here, about people being afraid of getting the history wrong when
Jason: Sure, yeah,
Sam: game, and I played this game last night with relative strangers at a con, actually,
Jason: What a flex! Oh yeah, I played this last night.
Sam: No big deal, no big deal but like, couple of them were nervous about it, and I got to be like, Yeah, these guys fucking sucked though, so like, why do you need to respect the history of Cole Younger, and they were like, Oh, nice, and were able to get back into it. And in this particular game, I loved being able to say that, but like, we don't like these guys, you can get their history wrong because it's a fuck you, and that felt really good in this particular game.
Jason: And we call that out. Like, it's actually in the rules. We're like, these guys were shitbags, don't worry about it.
Sam: Yeah.
Jason: Which, yeah, is very liberating. Hopefully it's liberating to people who might otherwise be like, Oh man, I don't know what an outlaw in the 1870s would be like. Like, nobody cares.
Do you know what a shitbag is like? That's what they were. Go for it.
Sam: Yeah. So, as we got into the actual process we really started with historical research, which feels like the right thing that you'd need to do. We did contemporary research too both you finding some nice links and me going through them and also I think me just conveying some of my experience to you was part of that process
Jason: Yeah, yeah, 100%. We were looking at primary sources, like newspaper articles even, like, maps and things from the time, Sanborn, fire maps, and so forth.
Sam: Yeah. So, what stood out to you first from the research into this particular game?
Jason: Well, it's, you know, it's interesting, because I, I'm really interested in the Trans Mississippi West, and that particular period of history resonates with me. I've done other games that are kind of contemporary to this. with that piece of it, the 1876 piece of it. And so like, I, you know, I knew who Jesse James was. I knew, you know, a little bit about it, but I'd never really done a deep dive on them because they're shitbags and I don't care.
But when I, when I did care and I looked into it, I realized that they were a bunch of traumatized sad sacks who made bad choices and, that you could see how they were made. And that they were all very similar. We had to differentiate them in the game a little bit because their stories were very very similar. you get down to it, like, they'd all been brutalized, they'd all seen horrible things happen during the Bleeding Kansas period by both sides, they'd went to get revenge, it became a blood feud, and after the war they just became outlaws because they didn't know what else to do. Like, they'd been disenfranchised, and they hated who they were and what they'd become, and what the country they lived in had become. So like, they just became bandits. Which is what they'd been doing for five years anyway.
Sam: I found that particular dive at the beginning to be on the one hand like so obvious in retrospect, but on the other hand it felt like there's this feeling I've had where I like move to a new city and I've been living there for like six months a year or whatever and I like travel from one neighborhood that I know to another neighborhood that I know by a new method and like realize that they're next to each other in a way I didn't know.
And that was the feeling that I got from this particular deep dive into history. Like, I knew all the Civil War stuff, I knew these guys were shitbags, but I didn't I hadn't quite made the connection of, like, just how they were forged in the Civil War to become who they had until you put such a pin on it in the research here, and that was really useful and just like clarifying to me of everything that was going on.
Jason: Yeah, it's such an interesting time, like, all these awful things that are just sort of bookmarks in the history of Northfield, right? So you've got the Indian Wars. This is happening. The raid happens right around the time of the Battle of Greasy Grass or Custer's Last Stand. So like there's all kinds of, things happening in America, in Minnesota at that time. The, what we would consider white on white racism in Minnesota at the time, so interesting to me, you know, like Swedes, I guess, looking down on the Swedes. The Swedes aren't good enough. They're ignorant bumpkins. Like, what? What is happening? What kind of racism is this? Fascinating stuff.
Sam: Yeah, and you mentioned that like all these guys kind of felt the same and we needed to start like embellishing on them to differentiate them a little bit, and I found it fun to dive into the details of the history here and look for those differentiations, like look for different themes that we could hit in terms of PTSD or vengeance or the fame of Jesse, like the, finding those ways to, to differentiate between them was really interesting.
Jason: it's also a lot of that came from thinking about what their contemporaries in the present would be like. So that's what really hit on things like PTSD, substance abuse, you know, there were things that were direct analogs. Like, these guys are soldiers. What are the things that soldiers struggled with then? What do they struggle with now? Are they any different? Maybe, maybe not so much.
So that was very helpful. But then we also got to differentiate in really fun ways. So we have a trio, in the past it's three brothers, in the present it's two brothers and a sister. Then we've got a pair. And then we've got the other guys, which we've got to talk about at some point as well.
Sam: yeah, yeah, another thing that is not surprising in retrospect, but that did surprise me when I realized it was how much this is a game about family,
Jason: Yeah.
Sam: and that family loyalty for mostly ill.
Jason: Yep. both time periods.
Sam: Exactly, yeah. Before we totally move on from the history, were there any particular fun facts from the history that you enjoyed?
Jason: Oh man, you were pulling up the greatest stuff about sort of the disposition of their remains.
Sam: Oh yeah.
Jason: So like there was a real, like a, chord of vengeance after this town had stood up and killed these dudes and it was not, the pride of a town that had done right. It was like, we buried these people, and they're ours, and we, we want to humiliate them in the grave. That was the feeling I got from some of it,
Sam: It felt like we want to take their fame for ourselves, and I think that is the feeling that has always bothered me about the contemporary fair, and I'm glad that we found that because it, reflected on the present in the way that I wanted it to.
Jason: For sure. So that was the thing that I was most interested in that really kind of surprised me.
Sam: yeah, I always am struck by Cole Younger ending up out of jail years later, just like doing the rodeo circuit,
Jason: Yeah,
Sam: and really playing into whatever legend of his that was left, and the sadness of that, the like, grossness of that from like, the, how society was still like, valorizing him, and also again, the way it reflects on the present.
Jason: There's so, it's so deeply resonant in so many horrifying ways. I think about his brother who was pardoned, immediately got out of prison, and then took his own life. You know, like, what, what's that about? there are tons of angles there. and there's, probably a whole nother game about, like, the Wild West show and the, being forced to Perform your own history. rYour own make believe history. It seems really weird to me.
Sam: , on that note, what's the most fucked up Northfield fact that you learned from me? Like, contemporary fact.
Jason: Oh, wow. I was so excited. Like, nothing's, nothing's gonna be truly fucked up, because people are people, but the idea that there is so much sort of insider maneuvering and importance put on the reenactment, that being one of the writers in the reenactment is like a social cachet to just a really powerful degree, and that it extends beyond the whatever the community theater infighting there, but like that it's, it travels in families, it travels in positions of power within the community. That just blew me away. I wasn't surprised because people do that, but it was delightful to hear. It sounds like a Fiasco, but you could easily write a Fiasco around it.
Sam: yeah, yeah, yeah,
Jason: What's your favorite?
Sam: I loved. I was just looking for a video of the contemporary reenactment to share with you, and I found this video, and it's like, maybe cell phone footage, maybe it's someone's old digital camcorder from like 2004 that they're still using, and it's filming the reenactment. It's got the like digital zoom going on. And you can hear a mom talking to her four year old kid describing what's happening as the reenactment goes. And the kid is like, who are they? And mom's like, oh, they're the bad guys. They're the cowboys. We're gonna shoot them. And it's like what is going on?
And then then like at the point where the guy comes out and says get your guns boys they're robbing the bank, someone has put this iMovie title that like spins up onto the screen like get your guns boys they're robbing the bank, and then spins away again.
I could not have dramaturged it better. That is exactly what it is like to be there.
Jason: That's fantastic. Yeah, those videos were wild. They were absolutely crazy
Sam: Yeah. So let's, talk about games as journalism and games as autobiography a little bit. So, maybe let's start with the journalism. You've said to me a couple times now that you're really interested in games as journalism. What do you mean by that, first of all? And then what has you really interested in it right now?
Jason: So I think that I view of games and, and this, this is games writ large, right? LARPs, tabletop role playing games, board games, all those kinds of analog experiences. And I guess digital stuff too, but that's not really my, my wheelhouse. But I view them all as potentially ways of commenting on the world, right? I'm writing games where I have something to say, I have a point of view, I want you to learn something, I want to tell you something, I want the game to tell you something, I want you to tell yourself something through play.
And that often is, hey man, here's a story about some badasses in 1944. Which is great, but why not, hey man, here's a story about some badasses in 2024. You know, this is happening in my hometown right now, let's talk about it. This is happening in the world this second, let's talk about it. I think that there's potential there.
And that's, you see it, you know, you, I can give you examples of people who are exploring this space, but I think that there's just so much potential there that I want to see more of it.
And as sort of designy tools get more democratized, I think it'll be easier to just throw something together that then can be rapidly disseminated and that is of the moment. And maybe in a couple of months, it won't be relevant anymore. And I think that's fine. I think that's awesome.
Sam: Or maybe it'll be an interesting artifact of a time that you want to revisit, right?
Jason: Yeah, 100%. Like let's talk about Toma Lam and Ben Bassanio's game, Can't Stop, Won't Stop, which is a LARP about the free Hong Kong protests in 2020.
Sam: Oh yeah, I remember hearing about
Jason: It's a beautiful, two player LARP where one person plays a protester and one person plays the protester's parent. And you have a phone conversation about it. That's, that's the whole game. Butr it was written while the protests were happening, and it was directly designed to comment on what was happening in Hong Kong that week. And just love that. I was very moved by it at the time, and I still am.
And you can look at it now as an artifact, like you just mentioned. It's not as relevant now but in the, in the moment it absolutely was. And it's, you can think of ways that that's pro social and positive, right? You play the game, you're gonna learn something, you're gonna open your eyes, you're gonna have some empathy and maybe you share that with someone else, and maybe that is a way of communicating about something you care about.
Sam: Yeah. Do you think games are a particularly good medium for that engendering of empathy because of the way you often embody another character in a role playing game?
Jason: Yeah, totally. I do. I absolutely do. And then of course, as I, when I talk about games as journalism, that makes it really tricky because you are, you do have a point of view. You do have an agenda. You're not just observing. Because I don't like, it's, I think you can make games that are just observation, but I think it's harder and less impactful. It's just not a medium designed for that viewing something from a remove the way that a journalist might. So it's participatory journalism, I guess.
Sam: Totally. so yeah, well, let's talk about games as autobiography a little too because this game For whatever reason I came into this, like, we're gonna make a game about the Jesse James gang, that's not autobiographical to me, it'll just be like a thing I know a little bit about. And then like, of course it has become like, probably my most personal game in its way. This is so much a portrait of a particular part of the town I grew up in and that I'm still incredibly connected to.
And I found that really thrilling, like I really loved doing that. It felt really cathartic, it felt really useful for myself as a resident of Northfield part of the time to just have this deeper understanding not just of the place but of how I feel about the place and the community there. And I, I really got a lot out of it and I hope I get to share that with people.
But I also think Games autobiography is like a weird thing because you're, you're inherently like opening up your fixed life to other people to like poke and play with and remix in a way and that's a really interesting, at times uncomfortable experience too.
Jason: No, I think that's valid. And like, in this case, you wrote an essay, you know, like, this game comes with a personal essay about your experience, your impressions, your feelings about it. And I think that's amazing and great. And I would love to see more of that too.
This is a more fertile space. I think there are a number of games where people are like, I, you know, I'm autistic, or I'm, I have this particular thing going on. I have a disability and here's a game that's about that. I think there's plenty of that, those kinds of explorations.
One of my favorites is Hannah Schafer's game, 14 Days, which is a role playing game about having a migraine. And I just, I admire her so much for that and it's such an interesting play experience. But it's autobiographical, right? Even though we open it up, it's participatory, it's not, you know, it's your game. When you play it, you're going to have your own experience with the Defeat of Jesse James Days but it's still, like, Sam's game, right? We're riffing on an experience that you shared with us that we otherwise would never know about.
Sam: Yeah, and I really want people to riff on this particular part of that experience at least. Not long before we started working on this I played Logan by Logan Timmins, which is this lyric game that is just like a Firebrand style PBTA game where you are going through this guy's life and you do like a bunch of low stakes scenes that probably really happened to him and then you do some like really high stakes moments of things that really happened to him and I think the game is beautiful and really cool and it felt I liked Logan the game a lot but I also found the idea of writing something like that myself to be such a terrifying act of vulnerability
Jason: Yeah, I
Sam: And I really enjoyed getting to do some of that here, while still like, you know, this is not playing through Sam Dunnewold's worst traumas, and no one has to make a game about that if they don't want to, right? This is like something extremely personal to me, but I still got to like cordon off the part of it that I wanted to share with people, and I really enjoyed being able to do both sides of that.
Jason: Yeah. I think there's some boundary setting there that we navigated successfully
Sam: I'll also just add, like, I loved working with real events, autobiographical and historical, because every time I felt stuck creatively, I could just go back in either to my memory or to Wikipedia, and look for solutions. And it felt like a really productive way of being able to try to generate ideas and move forward on something when I was stuck.
Jason: Yeah, a hundred percent. I agree. I'm often inspired by real events, and I use it all the time. We also had the benefit of a very comprehensive website devoted to the Defeat of Jesse James Days.
Sam: Yeah.
Jason: And, like, we really, we vetted that. We went through it and found lots and lots of good ideas, particularly, I think, character ideas from the biographies of the reenactors and performers. And some of the other features on the, on the website, for sure.
Sam: like, playing cards for all the reenactors.
Jason: They really, they went deep. They, they went deep. It was
Sam: Yeah, Yeah.
Okay, let's talk some about the actual mechanics of this game. So first I want to go through a few ideas that we tried out and discarded. I think the first mechanical idea I pitched you was like I was really interested in the goal of having both of these timelines happen simultaneously in play. And I had this idea to do an other kind dice kind of thing, where you would, like, roll a bunch of dice, and then assign outcomes to things that were happening in the past and the present at the same time. And I think that is still a really cool idea that really did not fit this game ultimately, but I would love to see someone else figure out what the right game is for that.
Jason: Yeah, that's a good one to put in the drawer, because the right idea is out there. This was not the right idea, but absolutely. What else did we try? Going through the robbery twice, incorporating both time periods. Which is kind of, I mean, it ends up being kind of like that,
Sam: Yeah, yeah, I think the initial ordering that we tried of like, you'd do minute 1 in the past, minute 2 in the present, minute 3 in the past, and so forth, and then you'd reset and do the alternate, I'm still curious to like, play that and see how it goes, but it did feel like it was maybe gonna be messy, and I know you playtested it.
Jason: We playtested it and it just didn't, it wasn't good. It didn't, it wasn't, it wasn't satisfying. Oh, and I remember early on we had discussions about even, so we were given the gift of a robbery that lasts six minutes. Which is such a good round number. It's a good number of moments, scenes, whatever. So we got these six minutes to play with and there were early discussions about like, play them in any order you want, and it just, the amount of chaos that creates just was not practical. What we ended up with, I think is a really good solution, which is just do one, then do the next, then move on to two, and do the next, and and that works perfectly well.
Sam: Very clear. Yeah.
Jason: Yep. Sometimes the simplest solution is the best.
Sam: Yeah. So then, let's talk about the trio, the Miller, Chadwell, and Pitts, because we, we started batting around some ideas with this of like, what are we gonna do with these guys, should we like, collapse them into one character, should you just play Pitts because he's the only one who lives, and then Miller and Chadwell are NPCs, or like, what are we doing with this?
But, yeah, talk about where we ended up, and how much you love it.
Jason: Yeah, how much do I love it? I love it very much. So we've got these three characters and they're the ones who are not part of the family, right? They're not Youngers and they're not Jameses. And the Youngers and the Jameses all kind of grew up together. They knew each other. They were tight. So there's five people who will just ride or die for each other. And then these other three knuckleheads, right? Miller, Chadwell, and Pitts. I don't exactly know where they came from. They were just bad men. So first of all,l one of the challenges is that's way too many people. That's eight characters. And these other five are very compelling, lots to do with them. What do you do with these other three?
They could become a composite. We could have changed history a little bit, just have you play one of them. But what we ended up with, which I love, and that solves another problem is that these guys are outsiders. There's three of them. So one person plays all three. And in the present, they're also outsiders, which means that they're not Miller, Chadwell, and Pitts, they're Gonzales, Van Donzel, and Lee.
That opens you up to make them ethnic outsiders or social outsiders or class outsiders. They don't fit in in this sort of weirdly high stakes, contemporary Northfield reenactors situation where everybody else are brothers and sisters that are like reenactor royalty. And so like it maps one to one. It's perfect. Playing all three of those characters is not a difficult thing. It works just fine at the table, and was a really, I think a really smart choice we made.
Sam: I really love the moment of when the person who is playing those three characters suddenly is only playing one character because two of them have died. That is a really cool moment too.
Jason: 100%. And because they don't know that. They don't know what the cards are going to show in minute five. But yeah, Miller and Chadwell are, they're gonna die in Northfield, because they did. It's a great moment. It's a really fun moment.
Sam: Yeah. Okay, and so, lastly, I wanted to talk about the awards mechanic at the end of this, which was your idea, and I love this in the abstract, I'm happy with where we ended up, we also went through a hundred ideas for what the awards should be, but how did you get to the idea of handing out superlatives to people at the end of the game?
Jason: So this, game needs a way to transition from play back to real life. Like, the way that it ends after the sixth minute is very abrupt and so that's what was on my mind. Like, what's the thing that lets you reflect on this experience? And I guess I'm a cynical, sarcastic person. And all of these characters are awful. So I was like, well, maybe what we do is, is ask the players to give them awards that are impossible to assign sincerely. Like, I love the words that we came up with, but we, we spent a good deal of time perfecting that list making sure they were positioned just right.
Like what was one of the, what was the negative? Oh, most chicken shit was going to be one of them. and that was my suggestion and it totally didn't work. And you called it out because It doesn't fit with the other ones, which are all on the surface very positive in some way or another.
My very favorite and the one that came right away and that stuck with us the whole time is Best Brother, because Best Brother is only gonna apply to some of the people and even less people in the present than in the past. And one of the roles that is played in the present is Sally, who is already alienated from her family. And so an award that she, that character is not allowed to have is just great. I just think that's a beautiful moment.
Unless somebody's like, fuck it, Sally is the best brother. She gets it. Which also is a statement that I can get behind. But like, it's just cutting in a really nice way,
Sam: Yeah. Yeah, I love the way that you get to the end of this game, and you're like, I have to, I have to say these people are good? Ugh! Like, cause that's the feeling that I want people to have about the Defeat of Jesse James Days, too. Like, it feels perfect for the statement of intent out of us, and it allows people also to like deroll really well, I think.
Jason: Yes, because it's a player level choice, talking in a group, you're no longer embodying those characters. So, it is. It's like a little interrupt there.
Sam: The other thing I really love about this mechanic, like something, I'd love to do a whole episode of Dice Exploder on some mechanic that does the processing at the end of a session of everything that just happened into the story that we're gonna remember about it. I think that's such a really interesting thing that happens at the table as you're sort of like checking out.
Like I, I think of a lot of problems with the way Blades in the Dark does handing out experience, but like, that's the thing that I think about with this, of this 10 minutes that I took every time I played that game with my group to like, what did we do today? Let's like, revisit and recap and internalize and like, convert all the messy conversation of play into the unit of narrative that we're gonna like, take forward.
And I think that the awards mechanic here is really, really, really good at that. And that's really cool to me.
Jason: Yeah, because you also have to reflect, right? You're making judgments about all these characters, and there are fewer awards than there are people. I think there's the right tension there. It's just, it's good. It's good. I hope people will play this game, but if not, just trust us. It's real good.
Sam: It's really good. Steal that part.
Okay. Overall, in the end, I think we're both really happy with how this game came out. What are you most happy about, and also what was most surprising to you about the way that this came out?
Jason: So we actually did what we set out to do. I'm always a big fan of that, so we're like, we're gonna make a small game, we're gonna make a short game. And that sort of evolved into the game itself is going to be time limited. It's going to be about a 60 minute experience. That worked great. Very happy about that.
I got to hit all the things that I'm really happy about, like we played with time, we played with history. The game's form factor is right in my wheelhouse for sort of how I'm thinking about games right now.
And like, we had fun. I genuinely enjoyed working with you and it was just a good time. Whenever I'd get a notification that you had made comments or edits, I was always just like, this is gonna, this is great, I gotta go check it out because I knew that it was going to move the design forward and in a good way and it always did.
Sam: I did the same thing, like, to my detriment. I was working too hard on other things, like, honestly, I'm so happy with this process and this game, and I'm proud of it, and I've loved working with you, and like, boy, should I not have done this. Like, I I had way too much else going on in my life at this time, too.
But, like, in some ways, I think the way I did it was because it was so much fun to, like, get that notification that something had happened.
I feel like we made exactly the game we set out to make, and also this is completely not what I expected the game to look like when we set out to make it, and, like, the form factor, everything else about it, I love all that stuff, but all of it was, like, a surprise to me.
And I, I'm really taking away from this, just how valuable short play experiences are. Being able to play this after dinner with my parents and have them be like, that was fun, because we did it in an hour, and then we got to, like, talk about it, that's like, a game you can bring to a dinner party, in a way that you can't bring Dungeons and Dragons
Jason: Yeah. It's now, it's now weird.
Sam: Yeah, Exactly. Exactly. And this is in some ways something I've been saying about For the Queen for years now. I love that game. I'm doing an episode on that game very shortly here and we'll talk about it more at length there. But I would really love to see more games and a more diverse set of games that fit in that space and feel satisfying and are a complete experience. Yeah, Thanks so much for making this game
Jason: Yeah,
Sam: like
Jason: this is good.
Sam: It's just been it's just been great.
Jason: I'm so excited to get this out in the wild. I assume if people are listening to this they'll be able to access it and play it, and I can't wait to hear where people take it, you know. It was very fun. Good times.
Sam: Before I say goodbye today. I wanted to leave you with this. We mentioned Northfield comes with a little essay I wrote about the town and our game. I love games that come with little essays. And I wanted to read that essay for you here since it's basically designed commentary in this episode would feel a little incomplete to me without it. So.
Notes From a Local
I love Northfield, Minnesota. The little waterfall on the river, the gorgeous trees and autumn, the coffee shops, the windmills, the way you can walk down the middle of the street late at night, because no one's out driving. I love how the college professors and cereal factory workers both quietly think they're the real heart of the town, and everyone takes so much pride in being humble.
When I was eight, the thing I loved most about it was the Defeat of Jesse James Days, because on Thursday nights, the carnivals sold all you can ride wristbands. We'd get fair food for dinner and mini donuts for dessert, then I'd ride all the rides that weren't too scary and my mom would throw out from the tilt-a-whirl.
When I got to high school, Jesse James Days, as it's often shortened ostensibly for brevity, meant a kind of freedom. A whole weekend where there was actually enough to do in this tiny town we'd long since exhausted of activities. My friends and I would browse the pop-up flea market, lose it bingo, and stay out too late.
Maybe it was because we started serving the mini down it, but next we collectively decided we hated Jesse James Days. It was a loud and gaudy eyesore, the obnoxious tourists clogged up the streets, and complaining is fun when you're a surly teen.
This was the period in which a friend said to me, with all the glee of a kid who's just discovered a new moral crusade, why don't they call it Joseph Lee Haywood days? I had no idea who the heck Joseph Lee Haywood was, so my friend explained that he was the guy behind the counter at the bank when Jesse James stuck a gun in his face. And when Joseph refused to open the vault, Jesse shot him dead. Joe saved the town's money. He's the hero we should be celebrating, not the serial murderer who came here and killed our neighbors.
But the answer to my friend's question was also obvious. We don't call it Joseph Lee Haywood days because no one knows who the fuck Joseph Lee Haywood is. We capitalize on the good branding of a Confederate bastard for tourists of dollars. Or maybe we like inflating the James legend because the bigger it gets, the bigger we look for having taken him down. At best, we just don't think about any of it while enjoying our kitschy cowboy cosplay.
We certainly never talk about how yes, we may have stopped Jesse's violent raid on our home, but the Dakota people couldn't stop us from doing the same to them just two decades earlier.
There's an arrogance here that feels deeply human to me, the desire to take a bloody, an uncomfortable history and turn it into mini donuts. I find that instinct somehow hilarious as much as it is relatable. Of course, we want to look away.
Personally I'm much prefer staring straight into this bleakness than sanding off its edges. I think that lets us appreciate how far we've come and how far we have to go much more than repression does. If I was the mayor of Northfield, my version of the defeat of Jesse James days would try to do that. But I'm not a mayor. I'm a game designer.
The process of making this game was extremely rewarding. The more specific detail I learned often through the excellent commentary, Jason left on his research, the more I felt like I understood my home and myself today. Then like now we were traumatized by war and poverty and a misguided sense of loyalty to family, nation, and cause we would die for each other and we'd kill for each other. We were and are proud for better, and certainly for worse, not just of the home we've created and protected, but of keeping Charlie Pitt's ear in the back of our local historical society for 150 years. Of course, we have a local holiday to bring the community together and celebrate who we are.
It's a pretty fun fair. When I go back home in September, I always attend. You can catch up with your high school friends' moms, eat some mini donuts. Watch the reenactment. See us as we imagine ourselves to be and as we actually are.
You can pick up a copy of Northfield now at the itch link in the show notes or on the Bully Pulpit Patreon, where Jason and the Bully Pulpit team are putting out wonderful, weird little games every month. It's such a great Patreon.
As always you can find me on socials at sdunnewold or on the Dice Exploder discord. You can find Jason on blue sky and dice.camp at J M star and Bully Pulpit games on Twitter and blue sky at bully pulpit underscore HQ. Our logo was designed by sporgory and our theme song is sunset bridge by purely grey.
And thanks to you for listening. See you next time.