Listen to this episode here.
This week's cohost is James Wallis, cohost of the Ludonarrative Dissidents podcast, a show a lot like this one that's Kickstarting their third season now, and designer of one of the first story games: The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen.
Today we're breaking format: instead of talking about one game mechanic, James brought in the concept of innovation in game design. What does it look like, is it important, and how can we do more of it?
The show notes for this one are friggin packed.
Further Reading:
Ludonarrative Dissidents podcast and season 3 Kickstarter
The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen and on Wikipedia
Nordic Larp book by Jaakko Stenros and Markus Montola
Fairweather Manor, the Downton Abbey larp
Dominion, the deckbuilder board game by Donald X. Vaccarino
Blades in the Dark by John Harper
My blog post Calvinballing a Whole Campaign
Star Crossed by Alex Roberts
Dread by Epidiah Ravachol
Apocalypse World by Meguey and Vincent Baker
The Beast by Naked Female Giant
The Crew by Thomas Sing
Thousand Year Old Vampire by Tim Hutchings
Bluebeard’s Bride by Marissa Kelly, Whitney Beltrán, and Sarah Doom
The Well Played Game by Bernie de Koven
Socials
James Wallis 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
Sam: Hello, and welcome to another episode of Dice Exploder. Each week, we take a tabletop RPG mechanic and press it tight between our hands until hopefully it turns into a diamond. My name is Sam Dunnewold, and my co host this week is James Wallis.
James was big in the 90s, back when he ran the UK's largest RPG publishing house and created one of the first story games with The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen, one of few RPGs I've heard of with the distinction of having its own Wikipedia page.
I know James from the Ludonarrative Dissidents podcast, a show he does with two other 90s guys, that covers one game or kind of mechanic each episode. It's a great show. They're kickstarting their third season right now! Link in the show notes.
Rather than an individual mechanic this week, James wanted to talk about a specific topic: innovation in game design. What does it look like? Is it important? And how might we look to do more of it as a community? The show notes for this one are packed with great examples of innovation over the years, and all of them are highly worth checking out.
One last thing before we get started today, I'm going to be recording an ask me anything episode pretty soon here as a capstone for season three. So if you've got questions for me about the podcast, about game design, about my games, about movies, whatever, send them to me.
You can email dice exploder@gmail.com. You can find me on the discord or tag me on blue sky. Okay. Back to today. I'm excited to have James here. Let's just get right into it this week. Here is James Wallis with innovation in game design.
James Wallis thanks for being here on Dice Exploder.
James: I'm glad to be here.
Sam: So what the hell are we talking about today? What topic did you bring in? Because this is not a mechanic, we're talking about a broader topic.
James: Yeah, I wanted to talk generally about innovation in RPG design and, I mean, the whole gamut of that. Where does it come from? What does it look like? Why is it important? Because I don't think it's discussed enough.
I'm talking about anything that kind of does something that's not really been done before. And there are, I mean, there are two types of differences and, you know, mechanical. Advancement in, in games. There's proper innovation. There's stuff that's genuinely new, stuff that maybe has been talked about in terms of theory, .
And then there's iteration. There's just kind of improvements and refining what already exists and polishing it, , know, reworking existing ideas and trying to do existing stuff better. Both of those are valid, but what I'm interested in primarily is, the new stuff, the stuff that genuinely pushes the form forwards.
And it's, I'm not just talking about games mechanics here, and I'm obviously, I'm aware Dice Exploder, your remit, is games mechanics, and games mechanics are really important. But the structure of games, the way games are presented, presented to the reader, presented to audiences, the format of games, the arena in which they're played.
We've, we've had the explosion in the last few years of virtual tabletops, and almost nobody is really talking about how that impacts , gameplay, and people's awareness of the game. I played over lockdown a Ravenloft campaign, and we did it all because it was lockdown on Roll20, and for me, I felt like I was playing a bad board game, most of the time. It completely stripped the out I mean, this is a good DM who I've played with before, who I know really well, it just felt Utterly lacking in atmosphere, it became an exercise in logistics and positioning.
and Ravenloft has never really been about horror, it's always been about messing about with the tropes of horror rather than a genuinely scary experience, but even that lost any of its power or impact. It was just, we didn't actually finish the campaign, which is a shame. But, you know, that, that kind of thing.
And it's, there's so much else going on. Actual players and how that's impacting how people perceive and understand what a role playing game is. The primary audience of a role playing game has always been the players. It's been a unique form in that regard. The players are also the audience. It's, there are no other art forms where that's entirely true.
And now suddenly we're shifting to an external audience, a third party audience who are not participatory, who don't influence the drama. Much more in a traditional sense. Becoming a performance art form. That's really interesting, and yes, there are amazing academics doing amazing work on that stuff. But how much of that work is filtering back into the design crowd, and the players and gamers and the kind of people who listen to your podcast?
Sam: Dice Exploder is all about the like, examples, right?
Like, I want to get some clean examples of what you think of as big moments of innovation in RPGs so we can kind of have that as a baseline.
James: I'm going to talk about Nordic LARP. Nordic LARP's really, really interesting because, it is a large community and, you know, when we say Nordic, that means essentially the, the major Scandinavians country. So it's Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Finland. And they've always really pushed innovation there, but they've also recorded it in a number of ways.
And they do have this kind of central focus, which is an annual conference called Knutpunkt and that every year produces a publication, usually a a big book of essays about what's going on, and as a form, it's moved forward really, really quickly, and they've introduced a lot of really intelligent concepts, long before the tabletop community even knew there was a problem that needed to be addressed. The idea of bleed, the idea of the emotions that you feel in character, and obviously with LARP, where you're acting this stuff out, sometimes for hours or even days end, this is much more of a real problem.
The idea that these feelings can filter back into your everyday personality. They've been addressing The question of, bleed and how to deal with it and, you know, whether it's good or bad for decades, and that's just one example.
Also, I mean, they're helped by the fact that Scandinavian countries take game design, and LARP in particular, really quite seriously. I used to run the Diana Jones Award for Excellence in Gaming, and one year we gave it to a big hardback book that had come out of Scandinavia called Nordic LARP. And, that was front page news on the Swedish national newspaper.
Oh my the fact that they had won the Diana Jones award, which at the time was not a terribly big or well regarded games award. So they take this stuff really seriously.
The other example I love is they were doing a really big LARP, several hundred people over a long weekend set in essentially the Battlestar Galactica universe on a Galactica class ship that had just gone off in a different direction and was not part of the main storyline or ever referred to in the TV series at all. But all of that, and it's okay, well, how do you, how do you build that?
How do you build something that looks like a spaceship. well, it turns out if you're Swedish, you go to whichever ministry it is and go, hi, we'd like to borrow a battleship for a weekend. And they did! They just, there was this
Sam: At the end, the government is like, okay, like,
James: Yeah, I think it was a decommissioned ship, but all the same!
So yeah, so it's a very different culture to the American games culture, or indeed the British games culture for that matter. But at the same time, it is possible to, to have a games culture that's producing amazing, cutting edge work. Really, I mean, not groundbreaking for the sake of being groundbreaking, but for the sake of creating really interesting pieces of art, and many of these are genuinely artistic.
There are recreational ones as well, it's the same community that produced the what they couldn't call the Harry Potter LARP, but was essentially Hogwarts, and you'd go away for, you know, and be a wizard, or a student wizard, or a wizard tutor for a weekend. And they did a long running Downton Abbey one as well, and those were commercial enterprises.
So it goes both ways. You can do stuff that's commercially pleasing. You can do stuff that's artistically pleasing for a much smaller community, but all of that benefits games as a whole, this valuing of innovation and the examining of innovation as well.
And that's partly, this is another function of why I think innovation is really interesting right now. Because the barriers to entry back then, to publish a game, were much higher. It was much more expensive. You needed to, you know, create the physical book and then have it photographed essentially by your printer and then print physical copies because selling digital versions did not become viable until the early 2000s.
These days, you know, you can open up a Google document, hammer words into it for an evening, save it as a PDF, and have it up on itch within the hour. And that's all it takes to publish a new roleplaying game.
If you have that brilliant idea, you can bring it to press the same day! That's extraordinary. Back in the day, it would cost you thousands of dollars, if not tens of thousands of dollars. And months of time, booker's printers leads times, and the only way to get it into people's hands was either to sell it at conventions, or get it into the three tier distribution system. publisher sells to distributors, the distributors sell to retailers, the retailers sell to the end consumer.
So yes, the barriers to entry are way lower these days. So the possibility is there to see a really interesting idea in someone's work, take it and run with it, that's, that's completely, that's open and that's out there. And I'm sure there are communities doing that, though I, maybe because I'm old and long in the tooth and have a funny accent, I'm not invited to them.
Sam: Well, and because the industry is so siloed, right? Exactly the way you were talking about. When the industry is so split up, if a lot of people are being really innovative in a part of the industry that you are just not in, you're never gonna find out about it.
James: Yes, exactly. . Part of the problem with the barriers to entry being so low is there is so much product there. I defy anyone to stay on top of all the stuff that's coming out on itch. Not even just the interesting stuff, all, you know, there's so much of it. And then at the other end, you've got the DM's Guild staff that's up. There's some great work there, but how could you possibly follow both of them? There's so, so much of it.
I mean that's basically where board game and card game design is all based around remixing existing ideas and very, very occasionally a new game mechanic will come in and everyone will, will pounce on it when when deck building
Sam: I was gonna say, Dominion came out and it was just deckbuilders for days,
James: my god, yes,
Sam: VULTURES on that mechanic.
James: And people have built entire companies on, it's a deck building game, but it's not Dominion. And deck building is brilliant. But Donald Vaccarino did not create deck building. It's part of what makes Magic work. His brilliant innovation was taking it from the... externality of Magic in what you do in the pre game and putting it at the center of the game itself.
So, this is why innovation excites me, it's because very little of it comes out of nowhere. Munchausen didn't come out of nowhere, it came out of me spending two years thinking about how to do it as a conventional game. But also... A lot of the other reading I've done.
And this is one of the other things that I wanted to talk about, which is the lack of manifestos in the RPG. And this is one of the things that I am going to applaud the OSR for, because they do wear on their sleeve what they are trying to do and why they are trying to do it, and they know. And an awful lot of games designers out there don't really know what it is they're designing, or why they're designing it. They just kind of want to do a new game that's better than the last one, and that maybe does a new genre, or captures the new genre better, but there's no sense really of consistency there.
And one of the things that came out of the Nordic LARP scene, a lot of them wrote manifestos about what they thought LARP could be. So there was one manifesto, the Jeep form manifesto, that got shortlisted, I'm pretty sure, for the Diana Jones award in the early 2000s. And I think the person who nominated it was hoping that it would influence people over in the English speaking design world into looking more about what they were doing, and why they were doing it, and starting to really analyze that.
I think sitting down and just, even if no one sees it apart from yourself, writing down what you are trying to achieve with your game even if your manifesto is as simple as I want to do the most Ridley Scott science fiction esque game there's ever been which you will not because Alien and Blade Runner both exist and they're brilliant, and Mothership as well which is possibly, even depending on your point of view, possibly even better than Alien.
But, you know, set yourself some goals, set high goals, have a go, but know why it is you're doing it, rather than just stupid dice tricks. Oh, I'm going to redo the dice pool, but it's all going to be dice that have triangles on their faces, so it's just D4s, D8s, and D20s. Why? Why would you do that? And sometimes that really works. But don't just mix up your dice for the sake of mixing up dice, unless you are running a dice company and you want to sell a bunch more dice.
Sam: Yeah, I mean that's a reason for it.
James: That's a reason. Commercial, creating a game that sells, that's possibly the hardest thing of all. Creating a roleplaying game these days, as we've said, and bringing it to market is incredibly easy. You want to first task, create something that's going to find a market, that's going to find an audience.
Sam: That reminds me of this essay I wrote last summer about this campaign I'd run with a weekly group, like we all came up playing, Blades in the Dark like a lot together. And so we're super familiar with Blades. And we got to a point where like we were tired of playing in the Blades world. We just kind of wanted to play something new and we didn't really care what. So we decided we wanted to do a pirates campaign and then just threw together some rules out of like how we were home brewing Blades in the Dark in the first place.
And so I, I wrote this essay called Calvin Balling an entire campaign of just like throwing together like a bunch of pieces that we were all familiar with of mechanics to like, make the thing go in the way that like we and our group all knew how to make happen.
And it felt like a culmination of the thing that you were just talking about of people are kind of tweaking the edges of mechanics and like, why are we bothering to do that? Like we were tweaking the edges of these mechanics because we were just at home. Like, we can do that on our own.
Like when I'm seeking out a game, I want that game to bring me something that I couldn't have done on my own. And I feel very often like this sort of changing how a dice pool works around the edges kinds of mechanics are things that I can just do at home on my own if it feels like the right thing for the game that I'm playing. Whereas the kinds of innovation you are calling for here are things that I'm not gonna come up on my own, that are gonna push me into a whole new venue of play at my own table.
And in a lot of ways, I like, I don't need another game about superheroes or another dungeon crawler or whatever. Like my table, and I can come up with that. What I want from the new thing is a game that's going to either give me a scenario for one of those existing games that I wouldn't have come to on my own or is going to give me a system of play that will let me do something completely different that I wouldn't have come to on my own.
James: Yes. Yes. And you mentioned Blades. Blades doesn't have any huge mechanical innovations as I, as I recall, but structurally, the fact that the way it defines the structure of the game and the flashbacks that everyone talks about, of course that's, that's where it's really smart.
Sam: Yeah.
I think the thing that makes Blades special is it took a ton of ideas that sort of already existed in play culture and just wrote them down. Like the idea of flashbacks, of we're gonna do stuff out of order, like I probably was doing that at my table a little bit before Blades, but like I do that way more at my table after John Harper was like, by the way, you can just do this.
The position and effect conversation too is, I've had way too many conversations don't at me about like the relative merits of the position and effect mechanic, but like fundamentally what that mechanic is he's just John saying, Hey, uh, maybe you should have a conversation about fictional positioning before you pick up and roll the dice and like set the stakes for what a dice roll are before you do the thing.
And that's like smart to do in any game that you're playing. Like I, I think that's smart to do when you're playing Dungeons and Dragons. But Dungeons and Dragons, the rules text does not ask you to do it.
And to me, all that stuff in Blades feels like polishing to some extent. But I feel like there are innovations to be found in that kind of polishing space of noticing what is happening actually at the table and shoving people's faces in it so that they actually like, understand what's going on.
It's the same feeling of like. It's hard to talk about a concept until you name it. I think that Blades did a lot of like naming social things, quote unquote mechanics that were already happening at the table.
James: Yeah, the way it puts that in front of the GM and the players and goes, this is how you structure a campaign, this is stuff that's lacking in so many games. You know, the idea of the what is a role playing game paragraph is widely ridiculed these days. What a game needs, what every new role playing game needs, assuming it's not half a page of rules, is something that goes how is this roleplay game different probably from other roleplaying games that you have played? Or alternatively just how is your evening gonna look? What do you do? Are you generating new characters every time or is it ongoing?
Simple concepts like that that particularly designers, and I include myself in this, who came outta the D&D community almost take for granted because it's just part of how a role playing game works. Let's state them and then let's look at them and go, is this valid or are there more interesting ways of doing it? And it doesn't have to be a huge jump.
I keep coming back to Starcrossed. Starcrossed does a number of brilliant things, and I don't think many of them are actually in the design because it's basically Dread but co-op. That's brilliant. I mean, Dread is, Dread is brilliant. The idea of using ker instead of dice, still just so good, so good on so many levels. But major innovation in Starcrossed is going, this is a game about falling in love. Because I can't think about a role playing game that is explicitly about falling in love before Starcrossed. At least not one that got major attention and currency.
Sam: I was gonna say, I can think of some came before Star Cross. Like I've heard Alex talk about some of the romance games that influenced her, but I think you are absolutely right that Starcrossed really popularized it.
James: I think so, and there's there's the romance strategy, there's Emily Care boss's stuff, which is absolutely lovely and has been around for a while, but never really seemed to pick up the traction that Starcrossed did.
And I think Starcrossed is, quite transparent. You can explain it to someone in about 30 seconds. It's Jenga, and the moment you explain what the bricks mean essentially, and, and how you play, you can do that really quickly and people just go, I've got it. Whereas you try and explain a lot of role playing games to people, and unless they're already role players and into it, you're just gonna get bogged down really quickly. You're gonna lose them.
We are still looking for the role playing game that breaks through to the mass market that isn't d and d. And Starcossed is, you know, one of the closest I've ever seen.
Sam: if the average person was more comfortable romancing their own friends, I think it would've made it through, right?
James: that's the thing, you know, the concepts are there the simplicity of explanation, it's not a dumbed down design. It creates amazingly complicated, wonderful stories.
And this is part of the, you know, people accuse Munchausen of, of having almost no rules. And yes, it does have almost no rules. It has a lot of structure implicit within the way it is presented. And this is, I talk about this a lot in the context of board games as well. Rules and structure are two separate things,
Sam: Mm-Hmm.
James: but in d and d they weren't, the rules were the structure of the game. Everything was together. and the structure and the narrative structure is all explained in rule terms. And there's a lot of designers who still do that because they're still following, you know, the best selling role playing game of all time.
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I can't believe we haven't talked about Apocalypse World yet in this conversation. Right. And like,
just the, I know, I know like just the, the vocabulary of referring to role-playing game actions as moves, like you are playing a game and on your turn you make a move, the idea that that was how you structured the play of role-playing games was such a mind blowing idea to me reading Apocalypse World for the first time. And I have since found that. Basically every role-playing game that I love, that delivers really consistent experience, has a turn-taking structure to it that like is really leaning into that language.
Like Starcrossed, right? It's very much a back and forth kind of thing. Or I think about Fiasco and For the Queen also as games with like pretty rigid turn taking structures to them that deliver a really consistent experience. And that's not the only kind of game that I love, but it is a kind of game that I think is a lot more approachable and a lot more consistent than a lot of the broader campaign sized roleplaying games that we play out there.
James: Yes, I, I think you're right. And one of the things that fascinates me about Apocalypse World is I think to a lot of people, it's a very narrative game. It's very much about the story, it's about the characters. It's about developing the characters and their individual stories in a way that's outside the GM control. And that's really interesting in its own right. But it's much more game-ic than most role-playing games. It feels like a very traditional play passes round, you each take your turn, game.
And I talk a lot. We named our podcast after this ludonarrative dissonance. The whole idea of rules pulling in one direction, rules setting a particular tone while the narrative of game is trying to set a completely different tone. The one I always come back to, which is probably not- well in video games, Bioshock. Which is, you know, a game about exploring this, this ruined kind of art deco underwater city and issues of paternality and control and fatherhood and, and all the rest of that. While you are a player who can shoot bees out of your hand! It's, it's, you know, absurd juxtaposition there that really, I've never finished it. I don't want to because I just went, I, the stuff I can do in the game is not the stuff that the story of the game is about. And I just, I hated it. Also, the hacking sub game is awful.
But the other one is Clue Dungeons and Dragons. Came out late nineties or early two thousands I think not long after Hasbro bought Wizards. And it's, you're solving a murder while occasionally stopping to kill wandering monsters. It's, and those two things do not fit together.
Sam: We're just smashing two brands together.
James: Exactly. Well, I mean that's, that's a lot of the Hasbro business model.
But yeah, so there's a lot of Apocalypse world that to me feels like it shouldn't work because it's, it's emphasizing the story, but at the same time emphasizing the very structural game-like elements. And the fact that it does work, I think is testament to the the Baker's design genius. It's an extraordinary piece of work. And yes, set the industry on its head, created a new vocabulary for stuff. I mean, the, the fact that everybody talks about playbooks now, or almost everybody talks about playbooks.
I mean, let's, let's talk briefly about other games that innovate in a really interesting way.
Journaling, role playing games. That's, I mean, I think the first one is a Polish game called The Beast which is card based. A fantastic, not just a fantastic game design concept, but the concept of it as well, the transgressive taboo breaking elements of... for those who don't know it, it's a deck of cards. You randomize the cards. Basically, you are writing your diary over the course of a month. You write a new entry every day by turning over a card and answering that prompt. But the first line of your diary is always I have Sex with the Beast. It's a secret. And that's... just, those few words are so powerful. You know, it's, I, I, I want to tell that story.
And the, and the other thing I love about it is when you come to the end, there is a final card that you will turn over, which will bring your story to an end. You are then instructed to either hide or destroy your diary. I love the idea that, you know, in 20 years time, somebody will come across this diary that you wrote. It is anonymous, this anonymous document that begins, I Have Sex with the Beast. It's a secret. Yeah,
Fantastic piece of des design. If it did spawn everything that followed. And an awful lot of them do follow the same model of being, you know, following card based prompts or prompts of a random table. And let's pause for a moment to bow in acknowledgement to the power of the random table which to a large extent is, you know, card generation mechanics are, are broadly the same. It's enormously powerful.
Sam: Yeah, we're doing a whole episode on that this season.
James: oh, oh, I will, I, I look forward to that.
So yeah, innovation can, can come out of the genre, outta your mechanical style, outta your structural style. It doesn't have to be a, a major jump forward. There's a lot of board games and card games doing that at the moment. The Crew that's been hugely successful is basically... it's the traditional card game Wist but co-op with a campaign mode and, you know, you say that and you go, oh really? Could that? Yeah. Yeah, that works. It really works. It's great.
And innovation can be as simple as that, mashing up two different flavors that ought not to work together. But again, one of the things we've got here, and this harks back to what you were talking about about Calvin balling mechanics, is because games designers. Shouldn't be working in isolation because you've got your player group, you've got your play test group. It's not a matter of just writing the entire game and then testing it in what you hope will be the final form.
We have this iterative design process this evolutionary thing, and I think working with your players to refine a system of mechanics as you go to go, okay, the sort of combat that we feel would fit this. Are there moves that you can't do? Are the things that our existing mechanics are not allowing you to do? What do you want amplified? What by contrast do you want? Toned down. Do you want the volume reduced on? Does it really matter? Do you need an initiative system?
Ludonarrative Dissident did an entire episode on initiative systems. , and my key point was most of them suck. That you do need to know who goes in what order, but you. It shouldn't take up any time to work out how to do that because it's boring. and, you know, should you just go around the table? Is it as simple as that?
Sam: You should.
James: yeah, yeah. It really, most people don't mind, as long as it feels fair. As long as nobody's getting advantage by getting extra turns or something.
Sam: Feel like something you said in there about play testing and paying attention to what's going on at your table is something I feel like is, is super important and not thought about enough.
I love lyric games. We did a whole episode on lyric games. I love all these games that are not necessarily meant to be played in the first place, that are sort of like texts first and foremost, whether or not you play them. But I also think it's the case that games that do want to be played, want a lot more play testing than we as a culture have given them.
Like I don't think most people play test enough, and I feel like getting games to the table and just paying attention to what is going on in the conversations that happen at the table? The actual ways in which people are engaging with your game rather than the ways you are intending or hoping that they will engage with your game. Like looking at that stuff and then writing it down and adapting to it is really valuable. And a place where you can find innovation.
James: Yes, very much, very much. I think the tyranny of the games designer is going the same way as the tyranny of the GM in the eighties. You know, the GM was, was paramount and that what they said goes and they were rolling dice for the noise they make.
And these days. Players, I think are much more prepared to go, I don't like that rule. Let's, let's chuck it out. Particularly once you move away from d and d, there are people who want to play d and d by the book and perhaps within the OSR community. But I think as you move towards the more narrative and there are people who, what they want to do is have a system of mechanics that will work for their character. That doesn't necessarily mean to let their character succeed, but it means to let their character be interesting.
Thousand Year Old Vampire, Bluebeard's Bride, games that are predicated on almost certainly the death of the player character at the end of the experience. That's an extraordinary innovation. But the journey to that death has to be interesting and people are going to optimize for that.
And sometimes structural rigidity is a good thing. Again, a Thousand Year Old Vampires is an amazing piece of design but the thing I would say is if you find yourself at the table and you're going, you know, this rule really isn't working for me, congratulations. You are a game designer. You know? It, it is that easy. That's the first germ. If you can think of a way of doing it better,
and I think better is really, if we wanna watch word for the whole thing, doing it better, doing it in a way that works better for you. You don't have to publish it, you know, even on itch you don't have to push it out there, but create something that you and your friends are really gonna enjoy because it's tailored for the experience that you want. Then that is the best kind of game design.
And as you say, with play testing, if it's not working for you in your play test group, then it should not be published. There's no particular reason for that.
Sam: Yeah. I wanna come back to like a really basic question here that we've more or less have already answered, which is why do you value innovation and novelty in the first place?
Like obviously it creates this much wider variety of experiences that you can have at the table and like kinds of things you can play with friends. But is there, is there a deeper reason that you value innovation and novelty and are pushing so hard to see more of it?
James: I think it's kind of a, a selfish reason. I don't think we're there yet. There is no perfect form, no one perfect game that we are all kind of striving towards. But the games are getting better and they are getting more fun and more immersive and more involving and they require less setup and less memorization of tedious rules. And all of those are things to be strived for. We are getting better games out of it. Games that are more interesting, that are doing different things in, in different ways beyond most of our conception. I could never have written Bluebeard's Bride.
And these are, these are by no means new examples. But for innovation to be successful, it has to be transmitted. Other people have to play it. Other designers have to come across it, have to pick up on that seed and take it and use it in their own games.
It can, you know, Jenga is not a role playing game building Jenga into, a horror game. Absolutely brilliant. So I would say, you know, look at games that aren't role-playing games. Look at what's coming out of Germany and Japan in terms of modern board game design. Look at really interesting video games because there's so much going on there. Read books about improv drama. Read the books on the new games movement from the 1970s and the works of Bernie de Koven and the games thinkers, games philosophers. There's so much out there that you will find, just informs your game design practice. The way you play, as well as the way that you think about games generally and the way that you design, cross fertilize your fields wildly. There's so much you can draw on, so many, so many great ideas that we can pull in and be influenced by. .
Sam: Yeah. It, it is funny to me. I didn't expect it out of this conversation, how much it feels like the main barrier to innovation is how siloed the community is. Like, the thing I've been really excited about in innovation over the past couple of years is seeing so many more of my story game friends kind of discover OSR stuff for the first time and be like, oh, like I don't really have any interest in like doing the classic dungeon crawler thing, but there's some interesting stuff with rules lightness here and like the idea of modules and other stuff sort of on the edges of that community and, and play style.
And similarly, the other way around of watching more and more people in the post OSR scene kind of looking around and poking over at story games like what's going on here again? Like how can we like bring some of this energy back into the, you know, modules and the dungeon delving that we are doing? Like trophy gold is really, really compelling to me the way it is
James: I, I have yet to see that I, I hear
Sam: yeah, it's, I mean it's, it explicitly a game that is like, let's do the classic OSR style dungeon crawl, but let's do it like a story game where the first and foremost foregrounded thing is character motivations and story and like what you want and the horrible things that happen to you and how that affects you mentally. Like, like it has all these rules in the original zine for taking any given module and adapting it for that style of play.
And I, I think that kind of mixing and matching of these communities is really really compelling and, fertile ground for new games. And the more we can be talking to each other and like all corners of the hobby, like talking together, I think the more innovation we'll see and the cooler stuff that we will find.
James: Absolutely. Amen to that. and it's not all, not all new stuff. There are very few new ideas. Don't be hung up on, on necessarily being new you know, picking up old existing ideas and using them in a new way is often incredibly potent. Oh, that's the other thing. It just a general thing about creativity that I say to everyone:
Your first work will almost certainly be awful. Don't worry. Everyone's is. It's part of the process. Failure is not the end of the process. It is an integral part of the process. Take your failure, learn from it, particularly in games design. Keep the stuff that worked. Chuck out the stuff that didn't work. Try it again. Do something else to it. Do something else to it. Do something else to it.
Sam: Thanks for being here, James.
James: This has been a pleasure. Thank you so much.
Sam: Thanks so much for being here, James. Ludonarrative Dissidents is kick starting now it's third season. Link in the show notes along with all the many, many things we talked about on the show today. You can find James on socials at James Wallis and The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen on DriveThruRPG.
As always, you can find me on socials at SDunnawald or on the Dice Exploder Discord. The game jam accompanying this season of the show is wrapping up soon, so get your games in.
Our logo was designed by Sporgory, our theme song is Sunset Bridge by PurelyGrey, and our ad music is Lilypads by my boy, Travis Tessmer.
Thanks to you for listening, and I'll see you next time.