This week’s episode of Dice Exploder can be found here.
People talk a lot about how and whether RPGs emulate TV and movies, but this week cohost Meguey Baker (Apocalypse World, Under Hollow Hills) brings in a game that takes that sentiment to a compelling meta level. Fan Mail, from Primetime Adventures by Matt Wilson, is the core of the game's key metaphor: that players are simultaneously writers of a TV show, fans watching that show, and the characters portrayed on screen. We talk about the storygame scene in the early 2000s, how Primetime Adventures has influenced Meg's work, and how different this mechanic can feel in a one shot vs a full campaign.
This game feels like a classic. I wish I'd known about it ten years ago.
Further Reading:
Primetime Adventures by Matt Wilson
The Revolution Was Televised by Alan Sepinwall
Inspecters by Jared Sorensen
A Thousand and One Nights by Meguey Baker
Ritual in Game Design by Meguey Baker
Meguey & Vincent’s new game Under Hollow Hills
Socials
Meg on Twitter and Bluesky.
The Baker family blog and games.
Sam on Bluesky and itch.
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 gossip about what it might do next. My name is Sam Dunnewold and my co-host this week is Meguey Baker.
Meg's been designing games for at least two decades now publishing greats like 1,001 nights. And co-designing with her husband Vincent classics like Firebrands, Murderous Ghosts,, and their most recent work Under Hollow Hills, which I cannot wait to play available now from Indie Press Revolution.
Oh, yeah and Apocalypse World, the eponymous apocalypse in powered by the apocalypse, which makes Meguey one of the most influential RPG designers to have ever done the thing. Without her, I probably never would have made this show. So, thanks Meg. I got to meet her at Big Bad Con this past year, and let me tell us yet, she runs a game as great as she designs them.
When I asked Meguey what she wanted to bring on she immediately said fan mail, a meta currency with a great meta name from Primetime Adventures by Matt Wilson, a game from the mid aughts all about emulating network television dramas. We got to talk about the history of the game, how it's influenced Meg's design and how different the mechanic can feel in a one-shot versus a full campaign. This game feels like a classic and honestly, I wish I'd known about it 10 years ago.
One last note quick. We are off next week, but we'll be back after that with a final two or three episodes to close out the season. Anyway here is Meguey Baker with fan mail.
Meguey Baker, thanks so much for being here
Meguey: you are so welcome. Thanks for having me.
Sam: So, what are we talking about today? What mechanic have you brought in?
Meguey: The mechanic that I really want to talk about is the fan mail mechanic from Matt Wilson's Primetime Adventures, which I think is singularly brilliant. And I, I can see how it has influenced some of my play style, if not my writing and design style.
Sam: Yeah, can you tell me what Primetime Adventures is as a game abstractly? Like, what kind of stories is it trying to tell? And maybe even, like, what was the scene like when this game came out? Because it's, what, a 2004 game?
Meguey: Yeah. 2004. Sure. So in 2004 The Forge was still around and there was still a lot of, sort of forum culture was really big. G plus was just sort of a thing. Twitter wasn't really a thing. It just had a lot, it was a very different landscape. Critical Role didn't exist and all those other sort of like big, big, here's how you learn how to play a game places didn't exist.
So in 2004, everyone who was involved in independent design we'd like make all our games. And then February was everybody is play testing their game because everything got released at Gen Con. And that was just. This really recognizable cycle of it. And one of the funny things about 2004 is that, so Primetime Adventures, I believe came, came out in 2004. And I was pregnant with our youngest child, and Matt Wilson set up an email account for our baby to be and would send me emails from ScampleJay at, you know, Dog Eared Designs, which was just fantastically charming and uh, because I played Primetime Adventures several times by then, like in earlier stages, because of play, the playtesting mode of like, Hey, here's my rough draft. Here's my ash can. Here's my like change in mechanics. So Matt and I had that kind of relationship, which was really nice.
There was a lot of how do we do things differently in game design? How do we structure the conversation that is a role playing game to support the kind of stories we want to tell? How do we do this? What is going on here? And there's kind of a duality I think of like Primetime Adventures and Inspectors, Jared Sorenson's game Inspectors. I kind of think they mirror image each other in ways because both of them have a premise of we're going to do a little campaign, and we're following, you know, this is not new and different, we're following a little group of people, but what Primetime Adventures does is explicitly invite the idea that this is a television show, that we're doing a series. For the campaign is the series of the show. And so you're going to have over the course of eight to 16 episodes, you're going to have that sort of character arcs, that sort of story beats.
He introduced the idea of a spotlight episode that you plot out for. So in the session zero, or first session for Primetime Adventures, one of the things you do is together at the table you figure out what you're where your story arc is and whether you get your spotlight episode in session three, and then you're going to do other things and be supporting characters for other people, or whether you're a slow burn and you don't hit your like focus episode until session 10.
It's magnificent.
Sam: could do a whole episode on that mechanic. Also,
Meguey: It's so good. Oh my goodness. It's so powerfully good. It allows for players who by their nature step forward a lot, they can plot out their arc and recognize, oh, I step forward a lot. What if I intentionally put myself in a supporting, like, I just want to
Sam: Yeah. Yeah.
Meguey: lift so that they're in the spotlight. I know I'll get mine down the road. And the inverse is also true. Someone who's like, I often. You know, you just can support yourself as a player, you know, like, oh, I need several sessions to really feel a character, so I really don't want my spotlight to be until at least session five, you know, such an amazingly good tool.
And Jared Sorensen's, with Inspectors' opportunity to break the fourth wall was looking at the same sort of like, what if we understood this a little bit more as episodes of a TV show? What if we used the language around that as a way to convey what we mean by framing a scene or, where's the point of view shifting, how to cut a scene, like all these things that our language comes over from film and of course has its roots in live theater.
So that was a wonderful thing to see that all come through in Primetime Adventures.
My most memorable game of it, it was a detective game and it was me and Emily Care Boss and Vincent and think Joshua AC Newman. But one of the other things that Primetime Adventures does is it sets you up for that sort of TV series motifs.
So we had a recurring motif in this series of camera angle shots of people's shoes. It was awesome. Like you never get that as a focal point in a role playing game of like saying, okay, yeah, so underneath the table, we're seeing that it's kind of a wide shot and then it zooms in on my shoe and there's like a bit of brown mud and everybody goes, whoa, you know, because it means something. So cool. So cool.
And that's a fan mail moment, right? Where people are so excited about the idea, he's like, oh, that was wicked cool. It's cool enough that I'm going to give you a fan mail token.
Sam: That's a great point to transition into okay, what is this mechanic exactly and how does this mechanic work. So I think you're probably better suited to actually explaining the mechanic than I am, too, because I've played two one shots, and you've played it sounds like several campaigns, maybe,
Meguey: several campaigns, but also several campaigns a long while back. So why don't you say how it was for you in the one shot? And then I can say what I know from a longer campaign. How's that?
Sam: Sure. Yeah, so, fan mail, to my understanding I believe I read the third edition of this game, which came out in maybe 2014? The way fan mail works is you start with a little pot of basically poker chips in the middle of the table. And those are fan mail waiting to be claimed, as it were. And then whenever a player at the table, notably not the producer, is what they call the GM role in this game. So the producer can't do this, but the other players at the table, whenever any of them does something cool, they can take a piece of fan mail, like a poker chip, and hand it to the person who did something cool and say, wow, you did something really cool. Here's some fan mail.
And then those tokens can be spent for the resolution mechanic for every scene. Every scene builds to a thing where you flip over cards to determine how a scene went, and you can spend fan mail either to get an extra card on your draw for that procedure, or you can spend fan mail to appear in a scene that you were not otherwise in.
And when you spend fan mail, there's a chance that it ends up going back to the producer as budget, which is the producer's tool to influence these card draws on their end. They can spend budget to add more cards to their opposition to the scene.
And then when the producer spends budget it goes back into the pot into the middle as potential fan mail thus creating a sort of loop this resource that is called different things at different points around the loop, but it's sort of the fan mail loop. And some of it slowly disappears, too. So you sort of slowly have this pacing thing where the session winds down as more and more fan mail like ejects from the system But yeah, that's the overview on fan mail.
Meguey: And how did you find it when you played your one shots? Did you, did it, did you feel like it hit on all those different parts of the loop in a way that you could see
Sam: Yeah, so in one of the one shots that I played, I did get to experience the loop in full, I would say one time really effectively. And in that loop around, it felt really cool. It felt great to just, sort of, see the engine of the game chugging away so obviously.
Meguey: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Sam: Every piece of it is also so wonderfully named. Like the TV show vocabulary in this game, like you were saying.
It brings language that is so easy to use to the mechanics of the game that doesn't feel like you're breaking immersion so much because it has this sort of, like, layer of fiction where you are the writers and producers of the game which then helps frame how you should be approaching playing the game.
Meguey: Yeah, it's one of the best for that. Like, I could not agree more.
Sam: Yeah, and so I feel like the first time out in this game really went super well. Really just felt clean at every step of the way.
But as we kept playing in that session, you know, we didn't have a ton of time, and what started happening was everyone in that particular group I'm the really experienced RPG player. It's a group that I started with a bunch of people I met last year largely who had not played RPGs before or who had at least not played anything other than Dungeons Dragons. So I, as the producer role, kept seeing moments where I was like, ooh I want to award fan mail for that. And I would just kind of call them out to the table and be like, ooh that feels like something maybe someone should award fan mail for and then someone would like. Do it on my behalf, effectively.
Meguey: Totally fair.
Sam: but it did feel like I needed to remind people that the mechanic existed. And I think over a longer campaign, maybe they would have gotten into the habit eventually, but like I needed to see how the mechanic works so I could like talk about it today, so I was like poking people, and like so that that felt a little
Meguey: Annoying. Yeah, that definitely, does hit like anytime you're learning a new game, you're learning a new game, but after you're coming back to that in like the second or third session, it just rolls. And the mechanics, like you said, are so, they're so visible.
And so many games try to make their mechanics invisible. And I can understand why, but having, having them so visible is really great because it also helps, like you said in a pacing mechanic, but also the help that you can see what part of the loop you're on, you know, it is so beautifully structured as a wonderful sort of container space so that the fiction can emerge in a really well supported way.
It's, it's one of my favorite games. So, one of the things that happens in a longer game is at least in my experience, there became also emergent language of not only the fan mail, where we're engaging with the mechanics specifically as designed, but because of when it came out in 2004 ish, that concept of like fan engagement in a game or a TV show it was really taking off. Like, suddenly there's all kinds of boards and all kinds of ways that you can communicate. And like people are on forums. And I mean, we have to acknowledge the existence of the entire, you know, BBS system, bulletin board system from the 90s, but let's be honest, the way that the internet in the 2000s exploded with social media platforms and ways to interact, even just if you're looking at like Facebook groups or whatever, suddenly the idea that you could engage in this parallel play, you know, situation of like following a TV show and create community around that, and like the whole idea of fandom was born in that. Like, there are definitely people who were like huge fans of, of different IPs going way, way back, but suddenly Fandom was a thing. And there's like fandom conventions starting to roll out in the 2000s.
So one of the parallel things that over a longer game is not only are there times when interacting with the mechanics of the game and like moving the poker chips around for fan mail and watching that, but in, at least in the couple of times that I've played it became this other kind of additional fictional level where... and there's like a finger motion the sort of finger motion where you put your fingers out in front of you and like pretend you're typing on a keyboard.
So not only would there be the actual physical fan mail moving around but the players who were not onscreen in the moment would occasionally do that little finger moment and like say a tiny thing.
Sam: Oh, yeah.
Meguey: like so you can see how that would structure like on the zoom in on the shoes like someone might put forward a fan mail poker chip of like, oh, that's a great detail, but somebody else might do the finger tapping keyboard motion and make some other comment of like, oh my God, what, brand of shoes are those?
You know, just something. So it almost, not intentionally, but almost created this additional level of fiction which just really added to it.
Sam: And it feels like you could end up with, like, a quote fanbase unquote that sort of has consistent opinions or consistent things that like, they are interested in. Like the shoes motif, where it's sort of, oh yeah, if you want more fanmail, you could almost even signal that by like, doing something cool with shoes, because we've established that that's something the fanbase likes.
Meguey: Because you can hit these roots and, and
Sam: that's cool.
Meguey: that makes for a whole more like holistic story, but what it, the effect is because Primetime Adventures is framed so well as a, as a TV series, You can do that sort of callbacks and recognition of, of things that are true in this TV show. And then you get kind of the recognition of like, Oh, this is a really well written episode,
Sam: Yeah.
Meguey: you know, so that you're recognizing different aspects within the framework of talking about TV shows. Really freaking cool.
There's a show out now called Only Murders in the Building .
Sam: Mhm.
Meguey: show starring Steve Martin and Martin Short, and Selena, what the heck is her last name? Gomez. Yeah. Fantastic show. And they have a similar thing going on because their show is about a podcast that they're doing. So they, there's a similar level of like how many different levels in fiction.
Sam: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Meguey: And that's something that Primetime Adventures handles pretty well because they're already doing a couple removes, right?
Because they're framing it up as we are the actors and writers and producers of this show. There's whatever fictional show they're putting on. There's the fan mail mechanic and whatever emerges around that. So there's a lot going on in this game.
Sam: Yeah, and I had more to say about my experience with it, and how it kind of went wrong,
Meguey: Oh, please.
Sam: and, everything that we're talking about so far really makes me think that, like, this mechanic, and the way it even felt in play, it really feels like this game is going to shine most in like a long term play where a lot of that stuff has time to develop and where people have time to get familiar with the mechanics.
Because, like in this one shot, I feel like the intended incentives behind the mechanic almost flipped on their head, where it got to a point where after we'd done kind of one cycle through that felt really good, people just understood that they needed fan mail in order to compete with the forces of antagonism in the story, that they needed to have fan mail in order to, enact the amount of control over the stakes that they wanted to have.
And so, instead of looking for reasons to compliment other players, or reasons to highlight the story and be like, that was cool that was cool, they would simply take fan mail give it to people and then be like what was the last thing that you said? Okay You deserve fan mail for that and then like just to get more fan mail in people's hands. And that really broke down the game.
Meguey: Yeah. I mean, that, that's, that is a thing that can happen with any mechanic, I think especially where that's where there's a tangible component, right. Where is really big and where people can see you stripping away the fiction from the mechanics and then just engaging with the mechanics.
Sam: Yeah,
Meguey: And that happens,
Sam: I think also the time pressure was a huge part of it for us, that like, in a one shot, people really felt like, Oh, we have to wrap this up, I'm not gonna be able to save for next time, I have to just keep plowing forward, and i, I need to use these mechanics like a cudgel in order to do so. And that's clearly not their mechanics at their finest, right?
Meguey: Right, right, that's very clear. So, I mean, that's great motivation for you to find a longer campaign of this game. It really is great, you know. I would say, like, from my experience, in terms of length of sessions, trying to run a campaign of primetime adventure in less than five sessions really short changes the spotlight mechanic, which is so smart and so good. And also I wouldn't want to put it more than 15 or 16 sessions. It would, that would be like, what are we doing here? You know, how many character arcs do we go on?
Sam: Yeah, I think the game calls out, you must play either five or nine sessions. Those are the numbers that you are supposed to play. I found that interesting too. Like, there is something that feels right about those numbers to me, which is odd. but yeah, the game clearly knows what it is.
Meguey: Yeah, it does. It's very, it's such a great game. And, I mean, I definitely think there are things in that game that definitely influenced some of my design
Sam: Yeah. Do you want to talk about that at all?
Meguey: Yeah, I mean, real briefly, and then we'll see if there's, like, other things that are on your mind. So my game Thousand and One Nights comes out of the same era of really thinking about how we're structuring the story and how we can reward different parts of storytelling, basically and the fail and mail it mechanic of, oh, that was cool, here's a poker chip and that loop that you've described so well is how Matt did it.
And for me, I have a very similar thing where in Thousand and One Nights you have the gems and the sultan, blah, blah, blah. There's all these mechanics, gems and sultans, just put all your pretty dice in a pretty bowl. But that if there is something that the storyteller specifically, you know, the GM specifically does that you think is above and beyond, you can award the GM a die for their eventual use in the mechanics.
And that's something that doesn't happen in Primetime Adventures. It's really about the other players and rewarding their contributions. So we have slightly different goals, Matt and I, of what we're incentivizing in the game design for the two games. But they're definitely those two mechanics, the fan mail mechanic and the gems mechanic in Thousand One Nights, there's definite conversation going on between those mechanics, you know, his game came out a couple, like two years before mine, so I definitely was aware of that and going, huh, that's neat, incentivizing people to say cool stuff by dealing with the mechanics. How do I want that to inform my game design?
Sam: Yeah, I haven't actually talked explicitly enough about how cool I think it is to make that incentive towards a particular kind of conversation at the table explicit, like, believe once I had a table that was comfortable with these mechanics, that fanmail would do a great job of incentivizing people to listen in each other's scenes, even to scenes they're not in, to watch for moments to award fan mail. To then compliment each other, which is great, I always love just more compliments anywhere in my life. And to make, it's like an avenue for people to make really explicit what they want out of a story and what part of the story is interesting to them.
And I think that's really cool too. The fact that the producer is left out of being awarded fan mail really gives the players in Primetime Adventures an opportunity to, like, push the direction of the story, at least on the small scale, where they want it to go as a group. It gives them that power, explicitly, mechanically, in a way that is really not true in a lot of games from this time.
Meguey: Yeah. And there's, a piece of what you just said that I want to underline, which is about listening.
Sam: Mm.
Meguey: because the, ability of the players to have some control of where they want the story to go is so great, but there's a second piece that the listening does, which is allows them to go there a little more slowly because since you are listening for cool stuff, you're paying attention to your fellow players, which means that players who are by their nature a little quieter or a little more reticent, or they just want to take a minute to really think about how am I going to frame up this shot for this scene in Primetime Adventures, it gives them that space a little bit. Not so much in a time crunch situation like you were saying, but in the fuller game, it provides breathing room in a way that a lot of other games fail to because everybody's just either so eager to do what they're gonna do or they feel like they gotta quick say something or they gotta quick fill the space if there's space, instead of just let the other player have a couple beats to put together something really cool.
And you know, you can chart out in Primetime Adventures, you can chart out the rising and falling arcs of each different character to see whose spotlight episode is whose. And that can be a guide for that whole thing to go. Okay, my spotlight episode is in two episodes, so I need to be beginning to build toward that, right? Or I know your spotlight light episode is next, so I'm going to hand you this cool little something that can set you up for next time.
And so that part of the way that the primetime adventures mechanics support the conversation in a much bigger way is really appealing to me.
Sam: Yeah. I had one other major bump on this mechanic come up in the other one shot that I played, which was, I had a player who really viscerally disliked the idea of, like, the way it felt to her was like, I'm voting on which of my friends say cool stuff. That like, in fact, to min max the game, I am being incentivized to say cool stuff, and that, that feels really bad to me. That it feels like we're gonna end up with some people at the table, who, like in that one we were playing more of like a comedy, like a sitcom kind of setup, and she felt like the people who are the funniest are gonna get all the fan mail, and then we're gonna have a situation where everyone at the table feels really bad, unless they're the person who's making all the jokes. And like. I feel really bad about that, it just feels icky to me.
And, that was not my experience with it, but I felt like it was really another way for the incentives of the mechanic to sort of flip, and I could really imagine a table working that way, and it being a pretty unpleasant table to be at.
Meguey: Yeah, yeah. And like comedy is hard, you know. One of the hardest and most stressful creative jobs is stand up comedian, you know. It's not easy, especially on the fly under pressure when you're creating the world out in front of you and you're trying to like make jokes on that. So yeah, I can totally see that.
And that, that would come back to figuring out what the character arcs are, what the people at the table need, and maybe like, okay, it's a comedy, but what's the show about,
Sam: Yeah,
Meguey: You know, it can be a comedy that's about dealing with loss. It can be a comedy that's about struggling to be heard, you know, all these different things.
Sam: and it you don't have to award fan mail just for jokes in that situation like you can do other things Yeah.
Meguey: Like if it's a comedy... so here's another thing. There's a, Oh shoot. What is it called? Harrison Ford was just in a recent, in a show really recently.
Sam: Shrinking
Meguey: yes, so like Shrinking is technically a comedy. You can have a comedy and then like everybody's cracking jokes left and right, and you award fan mail points for someone talking about okay, it's a side shot back in the hallway and you just see it hitting me, the results of this test, and I'm just weeping, and now all of a sudden it's like fan mail, hell yeah, you know? That's, it's a way to, to, to deal with that, but I think that would take a conversation at the table,
Sam: Yeah,
Meguey: and figuring out how to navigate that, which is all games and all mechanics really. For any show or any genre, you need a lingo. You need to know what it is. Right. And like the way the lingo we were using in my most memorable run of Primetime Adventures was very much noir detective show.
Because we had a shared lingo for that. for some of us, it was a more familiar lingo than others. And that meant, yes, Emily could say something that was clearly, because she's deep in the noir, and we would be like, Oh my gosh, that's so great. Because it was clearly a cool detail that we wouldn't have brought. I wouldn't have brought. that's again, I don't know, it's just a neat part for me of dealing with games that are about genre. And like, Primetime Adventures is so set up to do so many different genres because it's genre is television show.
Sam: yeah, yeah.
Meguey: There was a kid's show. Oh my gosh. One of the formative games of this was a kid's TV show that Vincent was in at Gen Con. And like, then Vincent and Matt told me all about it afterward. And it was called Moose in the City. And it was about this, a moose who suddenly is now living in the city and having to figure out how they operate in the, this weird city world.
Sam: you said the title and I could, like, hear the theme song for
it huh. Uh huh. Fish out of water kids show. We got to love them. They're great. We all feel that way as kids. It's perfect. But the point of that is that like there's so many different things. If you look at Moose in the City, and you look at our Noir Detective Show, and we look at the comedy you just described, and then I don't know what the genre was for your other one.
Meguey: And like, all of those are held by Primetime Adventures. You know it's, it's, it's great.
Sam: Yeah, it does feel like you do need some amount of genre fluency with television, which most people have, right? Because you're right, it can be any kind of television, really. But do wonder how hard it would be for someone to come into this game who doesn't really watch TV and what their experience would be like.
Meguey: I hear you and I counter with Drawfee, Good Mythical Morning, You Suck at Cooking, any of these great, video shows because we may, we may not have the same 1980s version of television, which just given our age, that's what I think Matt was reacting to is growing up with part time television.
So, while those specific things of like, and now we cut to a commercial break may not necessarily come over, I think that the experience of the youngs today, meaning, people 15 to 25 or 45 or whatever, totally scales to anything that you're watching online.
Sam: and
Meguey: a structured, scripted, you know, there's sets, there's camera angles, there's people off stage, you know. I'll
Sam: like you could do Critical Role. with this, right, like, uh, it feels like you could do reality TV with this, too, like, yeah,
Meguey: Instead of, you know, that would be a fun primetime adventures game.
Yeah.
Sam: Alright, is there, is there anything else you wanna talk about with this game before I, I wrap us up here?
Meguey: I just think it's wicked cool. Everybody should play it. I had the incredible fun moment at Gen, one of the Gen Cons right around after it was released where Firefly was the big going thing that All, everybody was talking about was Firefly.
Sam: That was the other one shot of mine, incidentally, was
just doing Firefly, so,
Meguey: oh, there you go then. And I wound up I'm going to blank on his name, the actor who played Shepard Book.
Sam: Ron Glass
Meguey: Thank you, yes. Ron Glass. He was there as a guest.
Sam: I remember that, Gen Con, I was there too.
Meguey: okay then. So I got to I got to be present while Matt talked about Primetime Adventures
Sam: Oh, yeah.
Meguey: and saying, Hey, we really love your, really enjoying your show. And I get to say, you know, yeah, we're. There's this game, Primetime Adventures, to make television shows, and we really appreciate great stuff like yours that makes us able to play great games like this. It was neat. It was a neat moment. I don't know, yeah. Are there other things from, like, that you,
questions that you have?
Sam: No, I just want to say, like, I've enjoyed sort of taking a antagonistic approach towards the mechanic of this episode, but like I really did have a lot of fun with this. Like I do think that this the I I've I've often looked down on generic systems. Like I have this whole episode of this show that you can go into the archives and find with wendi Yu talking about Fate and our problems with how generic Fate is.
And this game, in some ways, feels like a very generic game, in that you can do kind of any genre with it, but it is also, as we've discussed, I think, at length like, it's so specific in the kind of thing you can do with it, too. Like, network television really is its own genre, and this game is so good at getting the like hooks in there that it really subverts a lot of my traditional problems with generic games. And I think that's really impressive. I think the whole framework is just really interesting and compelling.
I've really appreciated hearing you talk about what it's like on more of a campaign level because I could feel playing it this should work, and it's not working for me in these one shots, and was just really excited to come in here and hear the long term experience of it, so I
Meguey: hmm. It's a neat framework because everything we do as game designers, like it's all reflective on each other. Everything's in conversation with each other. It's really neat to look at Primetime Adventures and use that as a lens to examine television.
Sam: Yeah.
Meguey: Because then I'm like, okay, if I look at this show I'm enjoying through the lens of primetime adventures, suddenly I can see I can see where the mechanical feedback loops are or where they're hoping to like the character back into the story back into, you know, how, how that interweaves, I can see when the writers have a plan for the arc of the character, and when they don't. Just, it's really interesting.
It's not quite so calculating as being able to see when the writers are planning for the social media moment of what becomes a meme and things. But, when you can see that in a show, oh my goodness is it revealing.
Sam: Yeah.
Meguey: Like, they think this the thing.
Sam: Yeah.
Yeah, I am a screenwriter and I'm doing that whole thing and like working on TV a lot and I like play the first time I played this and made characters and the way it talks about your flaws in your characters and the way it talks about your character's issue and framing scenes specifically around either is the character going to be able to overcome their issue or is the character going to be able to get what they want? I was like, I need to go rewrite my pilot. Like, it really, really nails it. Yeah, and I think that
A thing that I talk about all the time with my writing friends is how hard it is to find the engine of a television show. And this game is remarkable in the way that it creates an engine for you so easily. it's,
Meguey: I'd really love to hear, I'd really love to hear what your insights and experiences would be after you got a chance to play a five session game,
Sam: Yeah, well, I, you know, that might be a really fun thing to revisit, maybe in a year when I've found time for that, I'll come back and, and do an episode
Meguey: that sounds awesome. We should do like a pinky swear it, within the coming year, we will each do a five session
Sam: Oh, yeah.
Meguey: Primetime Adventure game, and then we'll come back a year from now and talk about it.
Sam: that sounds
Meguey: excellent? I'm excited. I would love to do that.
Sam: Great. Well, listen, then, any other things we have to say we can hold off until then. Uh, Me Meg, thanks so much for being on Dice Exploder, it was a pleasure to
Meguey: Absolutely. Thank you so much. It was a real pleasure. I'm happy to come back anytime, but definitely in a year.
Sam: Thanks again to Meg for being here, you can find her on Twitter at night sky games or on blue sky at MegueyB.
Meguey and her husband Vincent Baker's new game Under Hollow Hills is available now from Indie Press Revolution, and her other games and occasional blogging are at lumpley.games. I put a link to one of my favorite of her blog posts about rituals and games in the show notes.
As always, you can find me on socials at S Dunnewold or on the Dice Exploder discord. Our logo was designed by sporgory. Our theme song is sunset bridge by purely gray. And our ad music is by my boy, Travis Tesmer. And thanks to you for listening. See you next time.
