Podcast Transcript: The Queen Is Under Attack (For The Queen) with Kimi Hughes

You can listen to this episode here.

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Among my favorite RPGs is Alex Roberts' triumph of minimalistic, elegant design: For The Queen. Today I'm doing just with along with Kimi Hughes of Golden Lasso Games. For The Queen is a card drawing prompt game, and one prompt is always the game's last: "The Queen is under attack. Do you defend her?" That's today's mechanic, but we cover most of this pretty small game at some point.

You can back ⁠Kimi's new game Starscape on Kickstarter now⁠!

Further Reading:

⁠For The Queen⁠ by Alex Roberts

⁠Starscape⁠ by Kimi Hughes

⁠Oh Captain My Captain⁠ by James D’Amato

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Kimi on ⁠Bluesky⁠ as well as ⁠Golden Lasso Games⁠.

Happy Jacks on ⁠YouTube⁠.

Sam on ⁠Bluesky⁠ and ⁠itch⁠.

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Our logo was designed by ⁠sporgory⁠, and our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey.

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Transcript

Sam: Hello, and welcome to season four of Dice Exploder. Each week, we take a tabletop RPG mechanic and decide whether or not to defend it. My name is Sam Dunnewold and my co-host this week is Kimi Hughes.

Two pieces of news at the top here. First, this is the start of season four. Hooray! Welcome back. And to support the season. I'm running another pledge drive over on BackerKit. Backers get to vote on a mechanic for the show to cover. Plus, there's a chance to buy a secret unreleased game from yours truly. It's a good time, please give me your money.

Number two dice Exploder has been nominated for an ENnie award. You can go vote now for it in the best streaming content category. There's a link for that in the show notes. Another great way to support the show.

Now today's episode: Kimi Hughes is the woman behind the happy Jack's RPG network, which creates great actual plays at RPG advice shows she's also a game designer publishing as Golden Lasso Games with a new game on Kickstarter right now. Starscapea tells the found family story of a star ship and its crew. Check it out. I've gotten a look at it and it's a really great and interesting game. There's a link to it in the show notes.

I first knew of Kimi through a mutual friend, but then before I had the chance to actually meet her, she just invited me to her birthday party. I was so thrilled and it was a great party. Kimi is so kind of welcoming. She's built this great local and digital community with Happy Jacks that's really just something wonderful.

And today Kimi and I are talking about a mechanic that I've wanted to cover on the show for a long time. The queen is under attack. Do you defend her? Answering this question is the last thing that you do in every game of For the Queen by Alex Roberts. And it's a perfect ending to a game that's to me just about as perfect as games can get.

I adore for the queen. It is such a magical game in so many ways that you're about to hear us gush about for half an hour. So honestly, let's just get right to the gushing. Here is Kimi Hughes with the queen is under attack. Do you defend her? From For the Queen.

Kimi Hughes, welcome to Dice Exploder.

Kimi: Thank you. I'm very excited.

Sam: I'm friggin pumped to talk about arguably my favorite roleplaying game of all time. For the Queen by Alex Roberts. Do you wanna tell us about For the Queen?

Kimi: Oh my gosh. So, For the Queen is a card based storytelling game. It can be a role playing game, but you can also kind of pull back from that a little bit if you want and just describe things. I've had games go both ways. This is like the perfect game to have in your bag whenever you go to a con or just, you know, a group of friends and you're just like, hey, it's two in the morning and I'm not ready to go to sleep yet. Let's do For the Queen. It seems like most of my games of For the Queen happen after midnight. I don't know what that says about me, but.

So it basically, the entire deck are custom prompt cards. And as you flip over the cards, it creates a story between the players. You're all serving a queen and throughout the game you create a world, you create your individual characters, you create your relationship to the queen, you create the queen herself and what she's like , and then at the end she is attacked and you have to decide if you are going to defend her.

And that is the mechanic we're talking about today.

Sam: Yeah!

The Queen is under attack, do you defend her? is probably the longest episode title that Dice Explorer has had yet. But I love that you the entire mechanic is like a question. This is the game that really taught me the power of questions, and really, really well written prompt cards, and you don't actually need more than that for a really quality game.

And I know some people like questions, well written prompts, provocative inquiries is not their thing, and that's fine, but it is remarkable to me that that is enough. That can be a whole game. And the format of For the Queen in particular is remarkable for its ability to be a complete roleplaying experience in 20 minutes.

Like, most of my games of For the Queen are 1. 45 to 2. 5 hours long, like movie length, but I play long with this game, I ask a lot of follow up questions, and a lot of people really can just pump out a whole game in half an hour, and have a great time, and boy do I wish more people did that and more games did that. I really love this game for its accessibility in that way.

And I don't think that was the intent behind the design of this game. I honestly would love a game Based on this framework that is trying to put accessibility to a broad audience as its, like, primary goal. And actually that game might be coming from James D'Amato OhCaptainMyCaptain. I believe he's sponsoring this episode in fact, you'll hear an ad about it later.

But yeah. I love this format. I love this game. I think it's super effective. Let's talk about this fucking mechanic.

Kimi: Yeah, and one of the things about it is, I have a bunch of friends who aren't really role players, and it's something that's really easy and accessible to them. Like, like you were saying, it, they don't have to feel the pressure of knowing a big system. They don't need to feel like, am I building this character right, or am I building this character wrong? They just have to sit down and answer the question that's in front of them, which most of us have been doing since elementary school.

And it's, it's, when you start in that micro level, it's just like a very gradual release, and they end up able to Contribute to a collaborative story and roleplay, but it's just like, all you have to do is just answer this one question first.

Sam: So, the queen is under attack. Kimi, do you defend her?

Kimi: I do defend her.

Sam: right.

Kimi: because uh, yeah. I feel like that's the answer that, like, happens the most rare, too. Like, in a lot of the games I've played, it ends up like, I'm the one who betrayed her, and blah blah blah.

Sam: I feel like I usually see a split, like, you take this one question, the queen is under attack, to the defender, you shuffle it into like the bottom half of the deck somewhere, and then once you get far enough into the game, like, oh, any card could be that card, we don't know when she's going to get attacked, and then eventually you get there. But everyone knows it's coming right away, so you're playing a little bit with that dramatic irony of knowing she's coming eventually, being able to play into that, similar to Trophy Dark, or Ten Candles, a game where like, you know everyone's gonna die at the end. I've talked about this on the episode I did with Jason Morningstar about transparency a lot.

But, something I really like that's different is that you are not playing to a predetermined outcome, you are playing to a predetermined question. And so, it's easier, I think, for people to sort of stake out different lanes around that question.

Like, I'm going to defend her, and I'm not gonna feel conflicted about it. Or I'm gonna defend her, but I feel conflicted about it. Or I'm, I'm the attacker, or whatever the things are, right? And love the way that very early on you start seeing people kind of stake out their individual relationship to the answer at the end of the game use that as a way to sort of define themselves in relation to everyone else

Kimi: Yeah, I agree. It's always fun, too, to play this for the first time with someone, because they don't necessarily have that, like, they know how it ends, because you go over the rules. You know, But they, access it in a very different way because they're not necessarily thinking that. They're focusing on the question in front of them, while people who've been playing a lot are, like, thinking, like, four steps ahead or trying to guess, okay, maybe I can do this, this, and this before the defend her card comes up and things like that. So it's, it's really interesting to also pull away and look at just what the card is itself too.

Because you're talking about and and this goes back to what we were saying about multiple play styles You're talking about people who ask follow up questions or why questions. And this is actually, and I think this is huge part of the mechanic, this is the one card in the deck that doesn't ask for information other than a yes or no.

Sam: Mm hmm.

Kimi: I'm a fourth grade teacher.

I've been in education for longer than I will admit to the public audience. good at, writing questions. I've taken classes on it. And there's always that question like, show this and explain why. So people share their thinking. And this deck does that in such a great way.

But the magic of the yes or no for the do you defend her card, it makes it feel final. No explanation is needed. And some groups totally go that way. I've also played games, even if they were really like descriptive and like, work, throwing things back and forth through the whole game, they get to that part and they're like, yes I do. No I don't. Yes I do. Yes I do. And that, that is sometimes even more powerful than, like, going through and describing things, because it's like, this is the end, and you all kind of just fill in those gaps, because in that moment, if the queen was really under attack, you know, no one really monologues in those moments, they're not going to be like, I am defending her because of blah blah blah, it's just like, boom, this is the moment.

And the game leaves it open that neither way is wrong, but there's that finality to, this is the one time you're not adding stuff to the story, necessarily.

Sam: Yeah. Ah. it really is this wonderful end of character arc for everyone in that way, because it's got that finality to it. And then it also ends the sort of character arc, or I guess the story arc of the whole group but it's also rarely like a clean ending, because you stop the game there, don't know quite what happens in the future, and you can all start speculating on that, but it feels like speculation in a way that I really love. I love that sort of open ended, We've concluded the important question, which was how does everyone feel about their relationship to the Queen? we don't need to know the events after that, we just need to know, like, how people felt in that moment.

Kimi: Yeah, it's a, it's like the, the perfect cliffhanger, like, oh, and then we're done. Mm

Sam: For the Queen really is a game so much about power, and love, and your relationship to this figure, the Queen, and by proxy, your relationship to everyone else in the little party that is accompanying her on this long and perilous journey to a distant power to broker a peace.

And this question all by itself establishes that, too? Like, everyone kind of gets immediately after they read this question, intuitively, that the game is about those power dynamics, and that they should be playing around with that. And it helps that every individual question in the game really, really reinforces that, maybe even more than this particular question.

But, again, I just love how clear this game is in not just what it is asking you to do, but like what ideas it is asking you to think about and consider and re evaluate over and over with every new question.

Kimi: there's so many questions that can be read multiple ways, like, When was the last time the Queen showed you real kindness? And that was maybe, maybe it was five minutes ago. Like, if you have a kind Queen that you're developing together maybe it was, years ago, when we were children and I've served her ever since. Like, there's so many avenues to go down.

But no matter what, the Queen is always the one who is really in power. Until that moment, again, at the end, where are you going to be the one, are you going to defend her? You know, because suddenly that's also the moment where you are the one in power and not the queen for the first time in the game.

And I don't know, I love that aspect of it too.

Sam: Yeah.

is there's one that's like, there's something on this journey that only you can do for the queen. What is it? And that clearly gives you some sort of power. Bualmost everyry answer to that question also comes with She doesn't really need you. Like, it'd be great if you did this, but like, you are lesser than her still. All you are is this one function that she needs done that no one else can do that gives you this power, but like, she's still the queen, you are still subservient to her, and that, I don't know, that's just, eh. It's just so Alex Roberts, to be honest.

Kimi: It really, yeah. And yeah, everything is so passive up to that point. Like, you are depowered by the very fact that you are describing things and information, but you can take no action on them. Which is so different than most RPG experiences, because so many RPGs are about what do you do in this moment, and this has nothing to do with that until the end.

Sam: It's all about how you feel. And that's, I love that because my favorite parts of RPGs are making hard decisions and reflecting on how you feel. And I love a game that is just an hour and a half of reflecting on how you feel in increasingly difficult circumstances, building up to a single excruciating choice.

Kimi: Yes.

Sam: That's just, that's the medium.

Kimi: good, yeah, it's all the feels, I love it. And one of the neat things about it is also the unpredictability of the whole thing. I know we're supposed to be focusing on that one mechanic, but as you're going through the story, you can't really, like, metagame or anything like that because you have no idea what card you're going to pull up next.

And you can X out cards if there's one that, you know, you've already answered or it doesn't feel like it fits or whatever like that. But, so it's like, oh, okay, you're, you're planning, oh, I'm gonna love the queen, she's gonna be the best, and then you flip over a card that's like, what did the queen do to make you hate her? and, just suddenly it changes the entire course of what you might have thought your character was.

And those are such amazing moments, because you get to feel those deep feelings, but you also have to be very nimble with them, and able to change course, and oh, okay, well, maybe I really loved her before, and then this one thing happened, and now I'm in a different place.

Sam: Yeah, that constant re evaluation is, I mean, that's what the game's about. I find it really compelling and interesting.

I was thinking about the tension, specifically, that builds up in that moment there's always a moment at the table. where you look at the deck and like everyone kind of feels it at the same time like how close are we to the end here? Someone will like pick up the deck and just sort of like look how many cards are left here and that feeling is also generated by this mechanic and I find that really, really compelling too, that like, in the same way that you are constantly reevaluating your relationship and like, building up the complexity there, you're also constantly ratcheting up the tension of every question is one step closer to what's gonna happen at the end, like she's, it's coming, like, like that feeling is so wonderful and created perfectly by this mechanic.

Kimi: You mentioned Ten Candles and that's such a great comparison because that's another game that you don't really have any control over the clock. It can take as long or as short as you want. Depends on what, you know, brand tea candles you buy, I guess, and how breezy the room is.

But with this, it's just there. There's always like this, this feeling of time. I guess, the feeling of not being in control of time and maybe being, running out of time. Which I think pairs so well with this, you know, is the Queen out of time? Like, are you going to defend her? is this where her story ends? But there's just like this great pressure there of, you just know it's going to happen.

Sam: Yeah.

So I talked about this when I had Mo Nuncio on to talk about travel in RPGs and Uncharted Worlds specifically, but a thing that I love that For the Queen does is you're, so you're on this journey as a group, you are going to broker an alliance with a distant power, and every card feels like a day or like a beat on the journey. Like, it feels like a moment of travel.

When you draw that first card, you know, you might be flashing back to 10 years ago, but implicitly you, you feel like you've just stepped out of the palace or whatever the queen's home is, and this is the thing that you're thinking about right now.

And once you're like, 30 questions in, you're like, we're deep in enemy territory, an attack could come at any moment. Like, we come a long way from home, and some of that happens literally on camera, so to speak, in the answering of the questions about the present day, but there are so many of these questions about the past and your history with the Queen, too, that it really does a good job of giving you that feeling of being on a road trip and reflecting on the past.

Kimi: Mm hmm.

Sam: And that's sort of a side effect of the basic mechanic of shuffling this card into the bottom of this deck, and I, I find that, it's such a remarkable slick little like, symptom of like a different mechanic really supporting the feeling of something else, it's doing so much, it's not accidental, but it feels accidental, and I admire that so much.

Kimi: Yeah, it's, yeah, it gets back to that, like, time thing, and you're right, like, I hadn't thought of it in that context before, but it does, it feels like beats. And you do, you start getting that, oh, we're about to be attacked, like, as you get farther and farther into the deck. Yeah, no, that's totally true, that's amazing. Yeah, and it's, I don't know, there's just, love elegance, mechanics and things that are simple, but still very effective.

I mean, who doesn't love mechanics like that, I guess? But, but yeah, like, if you can make something really simple that way, I feel like it's always so much more powerful. And, yeah, it's just, yeah, it's just brilliant. I love it.

Sam: I feel like the more things one mechanic is doing, it feels like the more meaning or emotion, like, comes in that one space and, like, hits you all at once. Because by the time you draw this question, it feels like you've been traveling for a long time, like you've built up all this history, you've been remembering about the Queen, you've been thinking about the future about the Queen, and finally, here it is, the final choice to make, what do you do, do you defend the Queen, and all of that really is coming from a single mechanic one time.

And like, a dice roll can get there through like the story building up to that point, but when like the mechanic itself has all of that embedded inside of it, it ensures that that moment is just packed with meaning, and I, that's, that's the shit, that's the give it.

Kimi: Well, I think it's also, whole design of all the mechanics in the game, they all lead up to this moment so perfectly. It's like this amazing ramp up to this climax of this card. And it's subtle, and it's it's a very gradual buildup, but behind every very simple mechanic in For the Queen, there are tons of these little micro mechanics that, you're not doing anything else, but just the design, the word choice, all those little things.

Yeah, exactly, all of that creates and like, has a ripple effect on other mechanics leading up to this great moment. And it's just this, like, so much planning involved. And it's just, it's just just this beautiful little through line, no matter how you play, you get this beautiful little timeline of a game that has this very emotional ending, and that's just so difficult to do.

Sam: yeah.

This episode of dissect splutter. It is sponsored by Oh Captain My Captain, a quick play RPG following the story of a legendary captain and their crew designed by James D'Amato and based on the innovative Descended from the Queen system created by Alex Roberts. Hey, look at that. Oh Captain My Captain can be learned in just 15 minutes and played to its end in under an hour. It's a perfect game for introducing new players to the hobby and with 50 prompts and four different ending questions, it's endlessly replayable. Oh Captain My Captain releases on September 22nd, but you can pre-order it now at bit.ly/ohcaptainrpg.

This episode of Dice Exploder it's brought to you by Starscape, a scifi tabletop RPG, where you're part of a Starship crew journey and through space, bonding through adversity, and becoming a found family.

Built on a powered by the apocalypse foundation with some fun additions, individual game sessions might focus on exploration obstacles are facing threats. Long-term the stories are about how the crews trust in each other changes. Star scape was created by golden lasso games. That's Kimi Hughes. cohost of this episode. And it is kick-starting right now, visit golden lasso games.com/kickstarter to download the Quickstart and check it out for yourself.

Now. Star scape. I want to talk about so in For the Queen, if the two of us are playing, there's Sam's relationship to the queen, there's Kimi's relationship to the queen, and those are really well thought out and explored. And we really get this interesting, clear picture of who the Queen is from a bunch of different angles, because everyone's relationship with her is different. It's almost like a Rashomon kind of effect, I love that.

But, I have found playing the game that the Kimi Sam relationship is really not explored typically. Like, it's really a lot lighter. There are some, a couple of questions maybe about it. I think maybe a couple got added in the new edition of the game that I haven't gotten my hands on yet. But like, I love that we're all exploring our relationship to the Queen, but I often do wish that there was more exploring our relationships to each other in For the Queen, too.

And on the one hand, I think that would take away from a lot of the clarity and single mindedness that I was just praising for a lot of other reasons, but after playing the game dozens of times, I, I'm always like looking for new stuff to do, and that is something I have found sometimes hard to make the game do, and I find, I find that interesting.

Kimi: Well, I think that's part of the design, because again, very different from other role playing games, the players are not the main character. Like, we are the supporting cast, we are the NPCs that, you know, give the quests or whatever. It is about the Queen, and all the questions that create those relationships between the players are things that still focus on the Queen.

So it's like, you have started a relationship with someone else, why are you hiding it, I think is one of the cards. So it's, it's still about the Queen's power over you. The minute you start to build up those relationships, you start One, taking action, so that it gets really hard to have PC PC relationships if you can't take any action.

Sam: that's true,

Kimi: So you know, that's a difficult thing to build up. You could do it in past tense questions, but again, it's not quite the same, I don't think.

Sam: yeah,

Kimi: And I think again, like the power of the Queen being so central and kind of the foundation core of this game. The minute you start having loyalties other than that, that don't revolve around her power over you and your resentment towards her or your service of her or your wanting to protect her or wanting to be her favorite or whatever that is. It starts pulling away from that really, really beautiful focus.

Sam: Totally. That's a great point, and I'm also very aware that like, you don't need the PC to PC relationship thing before you've played the game a dozen times, like some of us freaks. So yes. that is a great point.

Kimi: Yeah, I mean, I've, I've also done that, again, like, I've also played, so many times. And, we have done it where you were talking about indescribing and fleshing those things out a bit more that aren't necessarily part of what's on the card. I had a lover in one game who we'd gotten the card that was like, why are you hiding it from the queen or whatever it says.

And it ended up that we were the ones who betrayed the queen at the end and things like that together. So we had a little bit more because we took the initiative to add it in ourselves. So it can be done but again, I think everything's still revolving, around, you know, the bright sun or the, black hole that is your queen.

Um,

Sam: You don't want to distract from that too much.

Kimi: yeah, you don't, because then it starts pulling away from other people's stories. Because then when they get a card, are they going to start adding into your story like a good collaborative storyteller? Or are they, going to talk about the Queen again and just kind of ignore what's happening over there?

So that focus on the Queen also gives everyone a direction ahead. And it's hard to do that in a game where everyone's answering their own questions to herd of those cats in that direction and keep them all going and focused on a single, you know, storyline. I think that's really pivotal to that.

Sam: Yeah. I, several years ago, got it into my head, what would this game be like if someone at the table was the Queen? Like, played as the Queen? And I think that would be really interesting, also. And I made a hack of this game very early on in its life cycle, I was obsessed with it,

And my hack is like, you're D& D adventurers, someone in the party has been cursed, you're all traveling to some place to get that curse removed. And I was like, I'm making a game about being disabled. Like, I'm making a game about how your community changes when someone gets sick. I want someone to be in that role. And so I, I made that person a player at the table.

And that, I found that experience really different and interesting, and really effective for my game. Like, I, people really do feel the personalness of that. It feels relatable in a way where the queen is supposed to feel unrelatable. Like, it's clearly the right choice to have the queen not be a PC because she's this mythical figure that's like part of the whole premise of the game. But I also I have liked this hack where you mess with that particular choice in the game and like what that does to the system.

Kimi: Yeah, the power dynamic there.

It's interesting, too, because in For the Queen, the queen, it starts off neutral. Even if you pick a really scary looking picture, she can be a, you know, a wonderful person underneath. So, having that flexibility and having that build in with the story is something that I've seen like a lot of hacks and a lot of friends who are like inspired and they do like their partial hack or whatever and a lot of times that element's missing.

And if you start off the game with a prescribed, you know, friend or foe as the person that it's centered around, it's a very different experience because you don't have that fun, nebulous, kind of as people are feeling out the answers at the beginning, and like, well, am I gonna be the one to make her evil, or am I gonna make her good, and I don't know, there's a lot of power and enjoyment in the first couple rounds of the game as you're

settling into that.

Sam: Well, and playing out all those nuances, like, is the game. Like, that's what For the Queen is about. And if you take that away, if it's very clear that the figure we are building the game around is a horrible death knight that we're all going to kill, like, what's the game about instead? We better figure something else out to put in there.

Kimi: Yeah.

Sam: we have kind of moved into talking about hacks. you made a hack of this game? If so, what is that like? Or do you have any favorite hacks of this game? And what do you like about them?

Kimi: Oh, yeah. so I love Decaying Orbit by Sydney Icarus, who we were lucky enough to meet at Strategicon fairly recently. And basically Decaying Orbit really utilizes that time element we were talking about, and it's basically about a failing space station that's falling into a star. So in the same way you get the Queen is under attack, well you defend her and you know it's coming, there's like this inevitable end that's coming. You know? It's just really, it works beautifully with this, with this

Sam: Sydney did a interview on the Yes Indeed podcast with Thomas Manuel a couple of months ago, where they talked in detail about the design of Decaying Orbit and some of the choices they made on it, and I found that interview really, really compelling, so I definitely recommend people check that out too. have you made a For the Queen game?

Kimi: I have not made a For the Queen game. For the Queen very much was one of the games that inspired Decuma, which is, my pregame, like, session zero world building game. And that one, and then A Quiet Year is also something that really, like, fit in there and then, like, like, Microscope, there's, like, there's all these little things Companion's Tale, so it's, like, like, any good game designer, like, I took a lot of things I liked and, like, put them together and made a new thing,

Sam: every game I've ever made is a hack of For the Queen just because I put provocative questions in all my games now, right?

Kimi: I love that it, there is that kind of trend happening now, and not just with card based games, but, like, Wanderhome is very much about answering questions, and it's, like, involved in that, and I've started utilizing a lot more question things to build characters and for character sheets and things like that. It's just, it's so easy and space effective, like, as you're designing character sheets, that matters a lot. And again, as a teacher, it's just something I'm very comfortable with, and I'm really good at writing a question that gets a specific thing, because I've been doing it for so many years,

and it's just, simplifies things. People can know how to answer questions. We've all always done it. So as you go through and you answer questions, you create something without having to stress about it. You don't have to count the number of points or make decisions. You know, there's parameters. And I know you were talking in, I think, one of the more recent episodes about how sometimes having limits actually increases creativity.

I don't know if that's a recent episode or just the most recent episode I've been listening to because I've kind of been going back to the old

Sam: it's a Mark Rosewater quote and I talk about it all the goddamn time.

Kimi: perfect.

So, and I think that really helps if you have a very specific question that has very specific parameters, there's going to be more creativity there. People are going to still try and make it their own without just having like a blank box where it's like, describe yourself.

Sam: Yeah.

Kimi: Okay. Okay.

Sam: the formula of, like, establish a truth about the world or your character that we didn't know before now, but leaving space for you to incorporate that in whatever way you want, like we learn there's something that you do for the queen that only you can do. What is it? Like, there's a very clear box that you have to answer this question in. It's a big definition around your character, what your character's role is here. But, there's also still a ton of room for you to play, and bounce off the walls of that question, and leap over the walls of that question, like, every question in this game, I feel like I could do a five minute episode on.

Kimi: Absolutely, and they are very exact and get very specific information from you while being really general so that you can take it either way. One of my favorite cards is the queen lights a fire in you. What is it? And that's such general phrasing that maybe it's a fire of love. Maybe it's a fire of anger and hatred

Sam: I've played with the golem who was run by fire that the queen lit.

Kimi: Yeah, there's so many ways to take that. So you know it's about a big emotion. Your character is going to be very affected by whatever it is because it's a fire in you. You have to describe what it is that creates that feeling in you, but that feeling can be so many different things. I mean, it's just like this perfect amount of space to take it either way.

Cause that's the beauty of all the cards too, cause all the cards have to work, whether she's great or whether she's terrible or whether she's mediocre or whatever she is, every card has to work for that. And as someone who's written a card game and, like, gone through all the years of playtesting every single question to make sure every single question works, I am just blown away by that specific piece.

Like, what brings out the Queen's kindness? She could be a terrible necromancer, and there's, like, one thing, like, it just, it, that takes so much work to get such specific information, while still leaving people plenty of room to follow the fiction that they've been collaboratively creating with their group.

Sam: yeah.

The last thing that I'll say about this that we've kind of already touched on is this game feels so easy to hack. Like, all you have to do is write new questions. And writing questions is a real skill. I've read some For the Queen hacks that are not good because the questions are not very good. But it is also true that it's really easy to just get out there and write 40 questions about your premise, and that's wonderful. Like, I love that all those hacks exist. There's just so many hacks in this format because it's so easy,

but really if you are listening to this and you are looking to get started in game design and you have any kind of idea for a way to make your own version of this format of game, I highly recommend it. It's a great way to to make something that's pretty good, like, it is it is hard to make something that's truly unplayable here, right? You're answering questions is fun, even if you aren't Alex Roberts, hitting a grand slam on every question, but like, this is such a great place to start as a game designer.

It's so reliable. It's so effective. It's so flexible. Go make yourself a Descended from the Queen game.

Kimi: Absolutely, yeah, and it's, it's great to playtest. Like the graphical elements, if you end up wanting to like, put it online somewhere, like, very minimal, you can do a great job.

Sam: StorySynth. org is this website that has this amazing toolset for just running For the Queen games right in your browser using a Google spreadsheet that you've created ahead of time to list all the questions. And it looks beautiful, it makes your game look great. Check it out.

Kimi: so good, yeah. And, and, and. There are so many amazing possibilities of stories to tell like this, because, you know, of something that's powerful, that a lot of, you know, people are, are, you know, orbiting around, or following, or just, like, the center of so much activity, and it could be a thing, it could be a person, it could be a place, it could be all these different things, and mixing that with just, like, an element of time, those are such simple elements that are part of pretty much every story in some way.

Let

Sam: Yeah.

Alright, well I haven't answered, the queen is under attack, do I defend her yet? I'm not gonna defend her fuck the queen, she can die by my hand tonight for what she did. And with that, we'll bring this episode to a close.

Kimi: absolutely.

Sam: Thanks again to Kimmy for being here. Again, you can find her game star scape on Kickstarter. Right now. There's a link in the show notes. If you want to hear from the designer of, For the Queen, Alex Roberts, you can find an episode I did with her in the Dice Exploder archives. It is one of my absolute favorites, much like her game. And I highly recommend checking it out if you haven't.

Once again, you can vote for Dice Exploder in the ENnies. There's a link in the show notes. And I'm running a BackerKit campaign for season four right now you can find a link in the show notes. If you love the show. and you have money to spare, give it to me.

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 Lily Pads by my boy, Travis Tesmer. And thanks to you for listening. We'll see you next week.

Podcast Transcript: Fan Mail (Primetime Adventures) with Meguey Baker

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.