I love pregens! But why do I love pregens? I dug into this a bunch on an episode last year with Aaron Lim about the characters in Last Train to Bremen: I love being given a clear goal and baseline temperament when I sit down to play so I can get into drama as fast as possible. But the game Lady Blackbird goes a step further. Each character has "Keys" which lay out not just character traits and goals, but the central dramatic questions and stakes each character's arc is likely to concern itself with. And that, more than anything else, is probably what I want from my pregens.

Whitney Delaglio joins me to talk about Lady Blackbird's Keys (originally from The Shadow of Yesterday by Clinton R. Nixon). She's got her own game coming to Backerkit next month - The Old, The Cold, The Bold - which iterates on Keys. So today we get into not just how they work but how you can make them work for you.

Further Reading

Lady Blackbird by John Harper

The Shadow of Yesterday by Clinton R. Nixon

The Old, The Cold, The Bold by Whitney Delaglio - second edition on Backerkit soon!

Socials

Whitney on Bluesky

Sam on Bluesky and itch

The Dice Exploder blog is at diceexploder.com

Our logo was designed by sporgory, our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey, and our ad music is Lilypads by Travis Tessmer.

Join the Dice Exploder Discord to talk about the show!

Credits

Our logo was designed by sporgory, our ad music is Lilypads by Travis Tessmer, and our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey.

Austin Walker's new game Realis is on Kickstarter now, and it's been making splashes in the indie rpg scene since last year when the ashcan came out. The game's core mechanic, Sentences, feels like the exact kind of mechanic I love covering on this show. But where did it come from? I asked Austin to come talk to me about it and bring one of his influences, and he came back with another diceless, GM-less resolution mechanic: the token economy of weak, strong, and regular moves from Dream Askew / Dream Apart. So today we're completing Dice Exploder's accidental Dream Askew / Dream Apart trilogy (paired with the episodes on lures and setting elements from the past couple months) and then digging into what makes this system work and what Realis learned from it.

Further Reading

Realis is on Kickstarter now!

Follow Sam’s game Band-Aids & Bullet Holes on Kickstarter!

Dream Askew / Dream Apart by Avery Alder and Benjamin Rosenbaum

Socials

Austin on Bluesky

Sam on Bluesky and itch

The Dice Exploder blog is at diceexploder.com

Join the Dice Exploder Discord to talk about the show!

Credits

Our logo was designed by sporgory, our ad music is Lilypads by Travis Tessmer, and our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey.

This episode was edited by Em Acosta

Follow Band-Aids & Bullet Holes on Kickstarter!

The Awards are back! The rpg awards show with a bent towards indie games and the guaranteed worst SEO of all time is back for another around, and the current steward of The Awards - Nico MacDougall - is back on the show this week to talk through some of our favorite mechanics from the last batch of winners.

If you want to get involved in The Awards, you can apply to be a judge through the end of April and you can submit your games during the month of May! This year's Awards will cover games published between June 1, 2024 and May 31, 2025.

Further Reading

The Awards 2026 - apply to be a judge today!

Cloud Empress by Watt

Border Riding by Stout Stoat Press

This Maze Will Be Big Enough To Call Home Someday by Anna Anne Anthropy

Stirring the Hornet's Nest at Het Thamsya by Munkao

Socials

Nico on Bluesky

Sam on Bluesky and itch

The Dice Exploder blog is at diceexploder.com

Our logo was designed by sporgory, our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey, and our ad music is Lilypads by Travis Tessmer.

Join the Dice Exploder Discord to talk about the show!

Credits

Our logo was designed by sporgory, our ad music is Lilypads by Travis Tessmer, and our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey.

Bee and Barclay are the hosts of Tabletop Book Club, a podcast that is exactly what it sounds like. It’s a show with such fun energy, and of course good design talk. Because Barclay has a new belonging outside belonging game that's just come out - Begin Again, check the link below - today I'm talking with them about lures, maybe my favorite part of the belonging outside belonging engine, and specifically how they're implemented in Heave in the Dust...

Further Reading

Heaven in the Dust by Luke Jordan

Begin Again by Barclay Travis

Dream Askew / Dream Apart by Avery Alder and Benjamin Rosenbaum

Socials

Tabletop Book Club, Bee, and Barclay on Bluesky

Sam on Bluesky and itch

The Dice Exploder blog is at diceexploder.com

Our logo was designed by sporgory, our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey, and our ad music is Lilypads by Travis Tessmer.

Join the Dice Exploder Discord to talk about the show!

Credits

Our logo was designed by sporgory, our ad music is Lilypads by Travis Tessmer, and our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey.

This episode was edited by Em Acosta.

My friend Tristan Zimmerman is currently crowdfunding Ballad Hunters, a GUMSHOE game, meaning it’s based on a core mechanic built for investigation games and gathering clues. That mechanic goes like this: “always give the players the clue.” Simple! And I think so astute as to what the actual fun part of investigation is in RPGs: it’s not “can we roll high enough to progress,” it’s “once we have all these clues, how do we put them together and what do we do with them?”

Further Reading

Ballad Hunters by Tristan Zimmerman, now on Kickstarter

GUMSHOE by Cat Tobin, a list of resources for and articles about GUMSHOE

The Rule Book: The Building Blocks of Games by Jaakko Stenros and Markus Montola

Socials

Tristan on Bluesky.

Molten Sulfur Blog, Nations & Cannons, and Shanty Hunters from Tristan

Sam on Bluesky and itch.

The Dice Exploder blog is at diceexploder.com

Our logo was designed by sporgory, our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey, and our ad music is Lilypads by Travis Tessmer.

Join the Dice Exploder Discord to talk about the show!

Credits

Our logo was designed by sporgory, our ad music is Lilypads by Travis Tessmer, and our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey.

This episode was edited by Em Acosta.

I bet you’ve heard of this game Triangle Agency. Big exciting Kickstarter, super flashy product design, a game with… spoilers in the back? It’s corporate horror, it’s packed gorgeous art, it’s a game I spent 20 sessions with in 2025. And I… had a pretty frustrating time with the game. There is so much I love and admire about Triangle Agency, but also so much I struggled with, and I wanted to break it all down on the show.

And I didn’t want to do that without bringing on someone who could unabashedly sing this game’s praises, because I think the game deserves that too. So today I’m joined by the general manager of my campaign, moderator of the Dice Exploder discord, my friend Seraphina Garcia Ramirez, to talk about the voice of Triangle Agency's game text and really the whole game at large.

It's the longest episode of Dice Exploder ever. Let's go.

Further Reading

Triangle Agency by Caleb Zane Huett and Sean Ireland

Socials

Seraphina on Bluesky and itch

Sam on Bluesky and itch

The Dice Exploder blog is at diceexploder.com

Our logo was designed by sporgory, our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey, and our ad music is Lilypads by Travis Tessmer.

Join the Dice Exploder Discord to talk about the show!

Credits

Our logo was designed by sporgory, our ad music is Lilypads by Travis Tessmer, and our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey.

If the thesis of last week’s episode was “hey the fiction of your game matters a lot and can even have mechanical effects,” how do you know how deeply to define that fiction? Maybe no one in indie games has recently faced that question on quite the scale of Tim Denee with Blades ‘68, an expansion to Blades in the Dark. I wanted to have him on to talk about when you completely reinvent the setting, how do you think about what parts of the fiction are important and need to be kept vs what parts should evolve and change?

And to do that, we picked an old mechanic from Dungeon World that cuts to the heart of it: draw maps, leave blanks. But how detailed of maps, and how big of blanks?

Further Reading

Blades 68 on Backerkit

Blades in the Dark by John Harper

Dungeon World

Tim’s maps of Doskvol

Socials

Tim on Bluesky and olddog.games

Sam on Bluesky and itch

The Dice Exploder blog is at diceexploder.com

Our logo was designed by sporgory, our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey, and our ad music is Lilypads by Travis Tessmer.

Join the Dice Exploder Discord to talk about the show!

Credits

Our logo was designed by sporgory, our ad music is Lilypads by Travis Tessmer, and our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey.

This episode was edited by Em Acosta.

In Blades in the Dark, you play as criminals in Doskvol a haunted city where the ghosts are such a problem that they built giant lightning barriers around the whole city to keep them out. That sentence alone already makes me want to get the game to the table, and we haven’t even gotten to the rules of Blades in the Dark yet.

That’s the conversation I wanted to take a crack at today: rules are important, they can radically shape play, but the fiction a game brings is just as important. Doskvol’s lightning barriers mean you can’t just run away into the wilderness after you’ve committed some crimes, and that’s just as important for ratcheting up the tension and consequences of your campaign as the mechanic of devil’s bargains...

Further Reading

Blades in the Dark by John Harper

Mythic Bastionland by Chris McDowall

Apocalypse World 3e/Burned Over by Meguey & Vincent Baker

Wanderhome by Jay Dragon

Vincent Baker on How Apocalypse World Is Structured (like an onion)

In Praise of Legwork by Sam Sorensen

1d20 Diegetic Rules, 1d20 Hypo-Diegetic Rules by Sam Sorensen

The Rule Book: The Building Blocks of Games by Jaakko Stenros and Markus Montola

Socials

Nova on Bluesky. Nova’s blog, Playful Void.

Sam on Bluesky and itch.

The Dice Exploder blog is at diceexploder.com

Our logo was designed by sporgory, our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey, and our ad music is Lilypads by Travis Tessmer.

Join the Dice Exploder Discord to talk about the show!

Credits

Our logo was designed by sporgory, our ad music is Lilypads by Travis Tessmer, and our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey.

This episode was edited by Em Acosta.

There's many ways to decide who has authority over what in an RPG. Traditional games have a bunch of players with one PC each and a GM responsible for everything else, while Dreams Askew / Dream Apart by Avery Alder and Ben Rosenbaum takes a very different approach: divide that "everything else" up into flavorful pieces, like "gossip & reputation" and "the wild forest" and give everyone a piece. That choice has become one of the backbones of Belonging Outside Belonging games (hacks of Dream Askew / Dream Apart), and today I'm joined by my good friend Kodi Gonzaga, a designer making just such a game, to break down exactly how it works at the table.

Kodi's game Extra Ordinary is on Kickstarter now. Check it out!

Further Reading

Dream Askew / Dream Apart by Avery Alder and Benjamin Rosenbaum

Socials

Extra Ordinary on Kickstarter!

Kodi on Bluesky.

Sam on Bluesky and itch.

The Dice Exploder blog is at diceexploder.com

Join the Dice Exploder Discord to talk about the show!

Dice Exploder on Patreon

Credits

Our logo was designed by sporgory, our ad music is Lilypads by Travis Tessmer, and our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey.

This episode was edited by Em Acosta.

The Experimental Role-Playing Laboratory, or ERPL, was a thrice a year mini convention put on by students at my college back in the 00s and 10s and onward to this day. It's how I got into indie games. I still think about it, and the people I met there, to this day. They still mean something to me. What might I still mean to them?

Written, edited, and performed by Sam Dunnewold

Tristan Zimmerman at the Molten Sulfur blog

Steven’s newsletter and novels. Try Black Velvet to start.

Transcript available at www.diceexploder.com

Music by Blue Dot Sessions: https://app.sessions.blue/

My games: sdunnewold.itch.io

Follow me on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/diceexploder.com

It's the Dice Exploder 2025 year end bonanza! This year I'm joined by Lin Codega and Diogo Nogueira to go over a whole bunch of game mechanics that we think represent where rpgs were at in 2025 and where they might be going in the future.

Further Reading

Mythic Bastionland by Chris McDowall

Praise the Hawkmoth King by Sage the Anagogue

I want to fight my friends in the back of a moving truck by Seraphina Garcia Ramirez

Traffic Lights Are Communication Tools by Meguey Baker

Daggerheart

Draw Steel

The One Ring starter set

Sam Sorensen’s overview of Over/Under and one of Lin’s pieces on the aftermath

Apocalypse World 3e Kickstarter (now finished)

Socials

Rascal.news

Weird Games and Weirder People

Lin and Diogo on Bluesky.

Sam on Bluesky and itch.

The Dice Exploder blog is at diceexploder.com

Our logo was designed by sporgory, our ad music is Lilypads by Travis Tessmer, and our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey.

Join the Dice Exploder Discord to talk about the show!

Dice Exploder on Patreon

Mausritter is an old school dungeon crawling game where instead of playing as elves fighting dragons, you play as mice fleeing from owls. It’s not unlike any number of other old school games like Cairn or Into the Odd, but its inventory system is the only inventory system I’ve ever actually liked. Does it work differently than other games? At a raw numbers level, not really! But instead of a bunch of paper bookkeeping, Mausritter turns items into little cardboard squares like board game pieces that you put in a grid on your character sheet. That physicality makes all the difference.

Further Reading

Mausritter by Isaac Williams

The Lonely Oak by Victor Lane

Cairn by Yochai Gal

Blades in the Dark by John Harper

Quinns Quest on youtube and patreon.

Socials

Quinns on Bluesky.

Sam on Bluesky and itch.

The Dice Exploder blog is at diceexploder.com

Our logo was designed by sporgory, our ad music is Lilypads by Travis Tessmer, and our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey.

Join the Dice Exploder Discord to talk about the show!

Dice Exploder on Patreon

Apocalypse World 3rd edition is on Kickstarter right now. In many ways, it hasn’t changed much. In many ways, it's a whole new apocalypse. So I thought it'd be fun to have on the Bakers and go through a playbook - the Brainer in 2e vs its equivalent the Brain-Picker in 3e - and ask them about every single change on the sheet, from updating the basic moves all the way down to a single name on a single picklist.

Further Reading

Apocalypse World: Burned Over 3e on Kickstarter and a preview of The Brain-Picker

Apocalypse World 2e handouts, including the Brainer

Designing a seduce or manipulate replacement on the Dice Exploder Patreon

Preview the Bakers’ seduce or manipulate replacement on their Patreon

Socials

Meguey and Vincent on Bluesky.

The Baker House Blog

Sam on Bluesky and itch.

The Dice Exploder blog is at diceexploder.com

Our logo was designed by sporgory, our ad music is Lilypads by Travis Tessmer, and our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey.

Join the Dice Exploder Discord to talk about the show!

Dice Exploder on Patreon

To close out this miniseries on actual play, I wanted to feature a game that I think uses actual play as a game mechanic. Hear me out. Void 1680 AM is a solo playlist-building game in which you create a fictional radio broadcast. Except when you're done, you can send it to the game's creator (this week's cohost Ken Lowery), and he'll broadcast it out onto the real radio via the AM antenna in his garage (and on YouTube).

Obviously it feels different to play the game knowing it's going to go out on air. But I think it feels different even just knowing that it could go out on air. And while most actual play feels first and foremost like an act of performance, Ken's broadcasts feel more like an extension of gameplay and an act of community building. How's it feel to be inside all that? Come take a listen.

Further Reading

Void 1680 AM by Ken Lowery

Void 1680 AM Community Broadcasts archives on YouTube

Sam’s Void Community Broadcast

Chinese larp of Void on Instagram

Characters Without Stories featuring Sam

Socials

Ken on Bluesky and itch. You can purchase physical copies from his imprint Bannerless Games.

Sam on Bluesky and itch

The Dice Exploder blog is at diceexploder.com

Our logo was designed by sporgory, our ad music is Lilypads by Travis Tessmer, and our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey.

Join the Dice Exploder Discord to talk about the show!

Dice Exploder on Patreon

Last Train to Brooklyn is an actual play from Twice Rolled Tales where they play Last Train to Bremen on a New York City subway car. It's also probably my favorite actual play full stop. Why? I think because it leans into what I'm most excited about this medium: treating capturing the act of play more like a documentary than a means towards fiction. It's excited at least as much about its nonfiction story as its fictional one.

Today I've invited Linnie Schell, one of the main creatives behind Last Train to Bremen, to come give me a beat by beat director's commentary on everything that went into it, all building to the moment I really wanted to highlight: its ending.

Further Reading

Twice Rolled Tales

The RuPaul videos Linnie mentions

Comedy Book by Jesse David Fox

Last Train to Bremen by Caro Asercion

Socials

Maia on Bluesky

Sam on Bluesky and itch

The Dice Exploder blog is at diceexploder.com

Our logo was designed by sporgory, our ad music is Lilypads by Travis Tessmer, and our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey.

Join the Dice Exploder Discord to talk about the show!

Dice Exploder on Patreon

One of my favorite parts about these episodes where I'm highlighting a single moment from an actual play is how many practical lessons I can bring back to my own table by going beat by beat through a significant moment in play. And today, Maia Wilson has brought a particularly significant moment from her show Maia's Game Room in which one character, in desperate straights, is pressured by an NPC to pay for his help with sex.

It's an intense moment. It may not be for you (and this episode may not be, either). But I think there's no better way to learn about how to establish good communication and try to keep people safe at the table than by breaking down a specific example. Plus, when you get this right like I think Maia and her table do, the results can be cathartic and compelling. Let's get into it.

Further Reading

Maia's Game Room: Electric State, episode 5

The Battle of Primrose Park: Playing for Emancipatory Bleed in Fortune & Felicity by Jonaya Kemper

The Electric State rpg

The Electric State art book

Socials

Maia on Bluesky

Sam on Bluesky and itch

The Dice Exploder blog is at diceexploder.com

Our logo was designed by sporgory, our ad music is Lilypads by Travis Tessmer, and our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey.

Join the Dice Exploder Discord to talk about the show!

Dice Exploder on Patreon

In The Wildsea, you play as sailors on a sea of trees in a climate post-apocalypse where the climate won. And in the My First Dungeon mini series of this game, today's co-cohost Brian Flaherty took it on himself - along with co-player J Strautman - to write an original song, a “tree shanty,” that played on each episode.

Today Brian and I, along with his Talk of the Table cohost and Wildsea GM Elliot Davis, break down one of those tree shanties: how it came to be, and how this moment blends together preproduction, production at the table, and post production in a bunch of compelling ways. We also get to see some lessons on display about how to pace a campaign and how when you know you can trust your fellow players, you can take more risky creative swings. Take a listen!

Further Reading

The Wildsea by Felix Isaacs

My First Dungeon: The Wildsea episode 5

Talk of the Table podcast

Socials

Brian on Bluesky

Elliot on Bluesky and his games

Sam on Bluesky and itch

The Dice Exploder blog is at diceexploder.com

Our logo was designed by sporgory, our ad music is Lilypads by Travis Tessmer, and our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey.

Join the Dice Exploder Discord to talk about the show!

Dice Exploder on Patreon

It's a new series on Dice Exploder all about actual play. For five episodes, instead of breaking down one mechanic, we're going to break down one moment from one actual play show. And to kick things off, I'm joined by actual play critic and all-around-writer Rowan Zeoli of Rascal and Polygon. We cover an overview of actual play as a medium and the current state of the scene, we dig deep into the fine line this medium walks between fiction and nonfiction, and then we get to our moment: the very beginning of My First Dungeon's six episode miniseries on Orbital Blues. How can you make the most of those precious opening moments when there's so much to establish?

Further Reading

Orbital Blues by Sam Sleney, Joshua Clark, and Zachary Cox

My First Dungeon: Orbital Blues episode 1

Em Friedman on Patreon

Socials

Rowan on Bluesky and Rascal News

Sam on Bluesky and itch

The Dice Exploder blog is at diceexploder.com

Our logo was designed by sporgory, our ad music is Lilypads by Travis Tessmer, and our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey.

Join the Dice Exploder Discord to talk about the show!

Dice Exploder on Patreon

Last summer a hot new game hit the indie rpg scene: You Will Die In This Place, a surreal and experimental... dungeon crawler? Technically? ...that seems to have more in common with House of Leaves than it does many roleplaying games. And for a couple weeks I saw so many discussions about this game that I eventually broke down and was like, do I need to do an emergency podcast about this?

No. I did not. I was busy with a hundred other things. But past cohosts Merrilee Bufkin and Jay Dragon did. So I invited the two of them to take over the show for a special bonus episode where they talk all things, or at least some things, You Will Die In This Place. It’s a dense text. They get into House of Leaves, gender, autism, misogyny, the state of the games industry, and a ton more. Take a listen.

Further Reading

You Will Die In This Place by Elizabeth Little

YWDITP on Gamefound

Socials

Jay on Bluesky and Possum Creek Games on itch and Warehouse 23

Merrilee on Bluesky and itch

Sam on Bluesky and itch

The Dice Exploder blog is at diceexploder.com

Our logo was designed by sporgory, our ad music is Lilypads by Travis Tessmer, and our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey.

Join the Dice Exploder Discord to talk about the show!

Dice Exploder on Patreon

AP season "reading" list:

My First Dungeon: Orbital Blues, session 1

My First Dungeon: Wildsea, episode 5

Maia's Game Room: Electric State, episode 5 - CW: sexual coercion

Last Train to Brooklyn

Void 1680 AM broadcasts

Today we’re wrapping up the Dice Exploder series on love, sex, and romance with Will That Be All? by Graham Walmsley, a game about the social relationships between the downstairs staff at Melton Hall, a fictional British estate, over the course of about a decade between the first and second world wars.

It’s a lovely game about finding solace and community even as the world outside feel deeply uncertain - and that’s what Kim wanted to talk about: how setting, and in this case the spectre of war, can encourage and affect how not just romance but relationships of all kinds can play out in a game.

Further Reading

Will That Be All? by Graham Whalmsley

Breaking the Ice, and The Romance Trilogy, by Emily Care Boss

Rosenstrasse by Jessica Hammer and Moyra Turkington

Downton Abbey

Socials

K Lam on Bluesky and itch

Sam on Bluesky and itch

The Dice Exploder blog is at diceexploder.com

Our logo was designed by sporgory, our ad music is Lilypads by Travis Tessmer, and our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey.

Join the Dice Exploder Discord to talk about the show!

Dice Exploder on Patreon

I’m back! Alex and Sharang have done an amazing job talking love, sex, and romance over the past month but I have plenty to say on the subject myself. In particular, I wanted to approach the conversation Alex and Sharang started about the quantification of romance from the perspective of how I feel when I’m actually at the table playing these games. Because that quantification makes me feel kinda weird… but what do I want instead?

Because freeform romance is tough for me. Romance is scary! I want some help, some guidelines, some dare-I-say rules and mechanics for it. But if not quantification... then what? What else might help alleviate my fear and awkwardness? Or is that awkwardness part of the fun and charm of romance, and really we should leave it in?

Today, Tasha Robinson returns to the show to talk it all through with me.

Further Reading

Steal My Heart by Sam Dunnewold

The King Is Dead by Meguey and Vincent Baker

Socials

Tasha on Bluesky

The Next Picture Show podcast

Sam on Bluesky and itch

The Dice Exploder blog is at diceexploder.com

Our logo was designed by sporgory, our ad music is Lilypads by Travis Tessmer, and our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey.

Join the Dice Exploder Discord to talk about the show!

Dice Exploder on Patreon

In this final episode hosted by Sharang and Alex, perhaps their climactic episode, they are turning up the heat on sex mechanics all the way to physical contact, both as a way to simulate sex acts through other kinds of physical touch... and through actual sex acts being used as game mechanics.

This stuff is fascinating, I think much more broadly applicable than you might believe at first blush, and I think also very obviously under discussed in the way that all things sex and sexuality are under discussed. Let's get into it.

Further Reading

The Sleepover by Kat Jones & Julia B. Ellingboe

This interview by Lizzie Stark with Emma Wieslander, who created Ars Amandi for the 2001 larp Between Heaven and Sea

A Place to Fuck Each Other by Avery Alder

Kirigami Dominatrix Display Simulator by Aura Belle

Praise the Hawkmoth King by sage the anagogue

Vice & Violence by Scalli

ORKFUCK by SympatheticSapphic

Sapphicworld by Darling Demon Games

Socials

Alex on Bluesky and carrd

Sharang on Bluesky and itch

Sam on Bluesky and itch

The Dice Exploder blog is at diceexploder.com

Our logo was designed by sporgory, our ad music is Lilypads by Travis Tessmer, and our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey.

Join the Dice Exploder Discord to talk about the show!

Dice Exploder on Patreon

Our series on game mechanics centered around sex and romance continues with returning champions Alex Roberts and Sharang Biswas, and today they are talking about dicks. “The phallus.” Or more generally, physical objects. I did some episodes on physicality earlier this year and how the physicality of a game undeniably affects how it feels to play it. But Alex and Sharang go a step further, talking about how in a game you can use an object as almost a vessel for player emotions. Take a listen.

Further Reading

Tales of the Fisherman’s Wife by Julia Bond Ellingboe

The Beast by Aleksandra Sontowska

Just a Little Lovin’ by Tor Kjetil Edland and Hanne Grasmo

Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire

Let These Mermaids Touch Your Dick Maybe by Riverhouse Games

Socials

Alex on Bluesky and carrd

Sharang on Bluesky and itch

Sam on Bluesky and itch

The Dice Exploder blog is at diceexploder.com

Our logo was designed by sporgory, our ad music is Lilypads by Travis Tessmer, and our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey.

Join the Dice Exploder Discord to talk about the show!

Dice Exploder on Patreon

Alex Roberts and Sharang Biswas are back for round two, this time with “roll to seduce,” that classic action so many people try and even succeed at taking across any number of games. If I roll high enough on my persuasion check, surely the dragon will fuck me instead of killing us, right? In some games, yes! Right indeed!

This is such a weird dynamic, but clearly so appealing to so many people, and today Alex and Sharang get into the why and how of it all. That leads to all kinds of places, but in particular the seductive choice to quantify sex and romance, but put a number to all these ephemeral and scary ideas about sex and romance, presumably so we might better understand them or be able to avoid dealing with how potentially embarrassing and messy they can be.

Further Reading

The Book of Erotic Fantasy by Gwendolyn F.M. Kestrel and Duncan Scott

Love and Sex in the 9th World by by Shanna Germain

Strixhaven: A Curriculum of Chaos

Alex Roberts on Dice Exploder discussing Kagematsu

Fog of Love by Jacob Jaskov

Bluebeard’s Bride by Whitney “Strix” Beltran, Marissa Kelly, & Sarah Doom

Socials

Alex on Bluesky and carrd

Sharang on Bluesky and itch

Sam on Bluesky and itch

The Dice Exploder blog is at diceexploder.com

Our logo was designed by sporgory, our ad music is Lilypads by Travis Tessmer, and our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey.

Join the Dice Exploder Discord to talk about the show!

Dice Exploder on Patreon

Love, sex, and romance: huge human topics, wildly under-discussed in roleplaying games. At least in my opinion. So today on Dice Exploder we’re kicking off a new miniseries on the subject hosted by NOT ME. Instead, for the next four episodes, Alex Roberts (Star Crossed, For the Queen) and Sharang Biswas (editor of Honey and Hot Wax) are taking over the show to bring you all things love and sex.

And today they’re kicking off with an episode on sex moves from Apocalypse World and Monsterhearts, classic PBTA moves that trigger when two characters have sex. Let’s get into it!

Further Reading

Apocalypse World by Meguey & Vincent Baker

Monsterhearts 2 by Avery Alder

My Girl’s Sparrow by Troels Ken Pedersen

How Do Aliens Do “It”? by Kieron Gillen

Pop! by Alex Roberts, found in Honey and Hot Wax, edited by Sharang Biswas and L. Kahn

Socials

Alex on Bluesky and carrd

Sharang on Bluesky and itch

Sam on Bluesky and itch

The Dice Exploder blog is at diceexploder.com

Our logo was designed by sporgory, our ad music is Lilypads by Travis Tessmer, and our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey.

Join the Dice Exploder Discord to talk about the show!

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Moira Joy "MJ" Smith is the Dungeon Master for the Try Guys D&D actual play show "The Die Guys". She created the show in 2024 along with the Try Guys, and I was her right-hand dude during production and the show's video editor.

Today, ahead of a whole series I have planned later this fall on actual play, MJ and I sit down to talk about how we made The Die Guys. We start with a bunch of background - how shows get made for YouTube at large, how the Try Guys specifically make shows, and how this show came about - but we get granular to, all the way down to how I made choices in the edit about whether to leave in or cut individual jokes.

Further Reading

The Try Guys streaming service, where you can find The Die Guys season 2

The Die Guys episode 1 on YouTube

Socials

Sam on Bluesky and itch

The Dice Exploder blog is at diceexploder.com

Our logo was designed by sporgory, our ad music is Lilypads by Travis Tessmer, and our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey.

Join the Dice Exploder Discord to talk about the show!

Support Dice Exploder on Patreon!

I have a box full of memories that lives in my closet, a pair of drumsticks, a half smoked cigar, a thimble full of sand from a beach I've never been to. If I passed away and you were cleaning out my closet, you would look at this box and you would know it was important, but you wouldn't know why. You wouldn't know whose funeral I played at with those drumsticks, or on which rooftop in my hometown, I smoked that half a cigar. But you would feel their weight all the same...

Written, edited, and performed by Sam Dunnewold

Transcript available at www.diceexploder.com

City of Winter at Heart of the Deernicorn

Music by Blue Dot Sessions: https://app.sessions.blue/

My games: sdunnewold.itch.io

Follow me on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/diceexploder.com

When I was in the third grade, there was this cartoon that aired while I was coming home from school, so I could only ever watch the second half of episodes. The name of that show was Yazeba's Bed & Breakfast... or was that the name of a tabletop roleplaying game?

Written, edited, and performed by Sam Dunnewold

Transcript available at www.diceexploder.com

Music by Blue Dot Sessions: https://app.sessions.blue/

My games: sdunnewold.itch.io

Follow me on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/diceexploder.com

Party by the Apocalypse is Dice Exploder’s first foray into actual play, and the whole thing is out right now wherever you get your podcasts.

In the full show, we over any number of mechanics and how they play out at the table: character creation, violence and combat, player vs player, prep, and more. But today on the Dice Exploder main feed I wanted to bring you a taste of the show featuring a part of Apocalypse World I find people are often intimidated by: the sex moves. What does the conversation look like around a sex scene in Apocalypse World, both mechanically and just as people? For one answer, come take a listen.

Party by the Apocalypse is:

• Sam Dunnewold of Dice Exploder, a podcast about rpg design
• Aaron King of RTFM, an rpg book club podcast
• KeganEXE of PlusOneEXP, a publisher of rpgs
• Essay of Three of Hearts, an actual play podcast

Theme music: Phantasm by Purely Grey

Nothing on the show should change much, but today I wanted to sit down with Brian Flaherty, a co-founder of Many Sided Media, to talk about what this network is going to look like.

In the unreliable urban fantasy world of Changeling, Clarity is a mechanic that measures... well, for now let’s go with a character's ability to trust their own reality. But finishing that sentence is kind of what this episode is all about, because Clarity has deep ties to various sanity mechanics from any number of Call of Cthulhu inspired games, even as it’s trying to do something different, maybe a little more nuanced and less obviously offensive as measuring a person’s sanity with a flat number.

There’s any number of metaphors you might find meaning in with Clarity. It’s not clear to me that that makes it much better than sanity. And yet, today's cohost MintRabbit loves this game and this mechanic dearly, sees so much of herself in it. And seeing yourself in a flawed game, still finding beauty in it, that's what makes today's episode interesting.

Ad Links

Spectacula by Jeremy Melloul

Kiss Me If You Can by me, Sam Dunnewold

Further Reading

Changeling the Lost 1e by White Wolf Games

Changelings, Trauma & Gaming by Mint Rabbit

A second post from Mint about Changeling

Dice Exploder on safety tools

Socials

Mint on Tumblr, Bluesky, itch, dice.camp, and ko-fi

Sam on Bluesky and itch

The Dice Exploder blog is at diceexploder.com

Our logo was designed by sporgory, our ad music is Lilypads by Travis Tessmer, and our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey.

Join the Dice Exploder Discord to talk about the show!

Support Dice Exploder on Patreon!

For the two year anniversary of Dice Exploder, my first ever cohost Ray Chou returns for what starts off as a brand new episode about Stoneburner by Fari RPGs and that game’s oracle mechanic: a way to use dice, random tables, and the careful framing of stakes to adapt the game for solo play.

But at some point the conversation morphs into a deserving sequel episode to our first go around on rolling the dice in idie rpgs more broadly. When do you roll dice? Are partial successes good? And how does all of this change for solo and GM-less play? We didn’t ask all these questions last time, and we didn’t have great answers to the ones we did. So let’s check in on the state of rolling the dice!

Further Reading

Stoneburner by Fari RPGs

Apocalypse World by Meguey and Vincent Baker

Blades in the Dark by John Harper

Socials

Mythworks homepage

Mythworks on Blueksy

Sam on Bluesky and itch

The Dice Exploder blog is at diceexploder.com

Our logo was designed by sporgory, our ad music is Lilypads by Travis Tessmer, and our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey.

Join the Dice Exploder Discord to talk about the show!

Dice Exploder on Patreon

This is, at long last, the end of this Dice Exploder miniseries on larp. And I wanted to send it off by returning to the question I kicked it off with: what can tabletop designers learn from larp? To get into that, there’s few people I’d rather have on than Jay Dragon (Wanderhome, Yazeba’s Bed & Breakfast).

When I pitched Jay this topic, Jay wanted to bring in the 10 Candles from 10 Candles. This is a game best known for, what else, the 10 candles you light at the beginning of play. And the act of doing so, and then turning out the lights, sets a mood that feels like a ritual, something deeper and more visceral than most tabletop games, something not exactly larp-like, but that feels of a piece with the emphasis on environment and embodiment that larp often brings…

Ad Links

Spectacula by Jeremy Melloul

Make a Scene festival

Further Reading

10 Candles by Cavalry Games

Yazeba’s Bed & Breakfast by Possum Creek Games

Wanderhome by Possum Creek Games

Game Design Study Buddies on Addiction By Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas by Natasha Dow Schüll

Dice Exploder on Ribbon Drive by Avery Alder

A Dozen Fragments On Playground Theory by Jay Dragon

Socials

Jay on Bluesky and Possum Creek Games on itch and Warehouse 23

Sam on Bluesky and itch

The Dice Exploder blog is at diceexploder.com

Our logo was designed by sporgory, our ad music is Lilypads by Travis Tessmer, and our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey.

Join the Dice Exploder Discord to talk about the show!

Dice Exploder on Patreon

Here near the end of Dice Exploder's larp series, I wanted to have on Caro Murphy (Galactic Starcruiser) to talk about experience design, and specifically how to think about curating all those parts of an experience bigger and larger than most of us at home will ever have access to. How do you design the set a game is played on? How do you design something for hundreds if not thousands of participants?

And Caro delivered so much more: we get into bleed and empathy and how Caro sees games as an inherently educational medium. Let's get into it!

Ad Links

Vesta Mandate by Story Games Chicago

Sign up for the Spectacula pre-release newsletter from Jeremy Melloul

Further reading

Meghan Gardner at Guard Up Adventures

Club Drosselmeyer

Caro on Imaginary Worlds and then Again

Galactic Starcruiser on Wikipedia

Socials

Caro’s website

Sam on Bluesky and itch

The Dice Exploder blog is at diceexploder.com

Our logo was designed by sporgory, our ad music is Lilypads by Travis Tessmer, and our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey.

Join the Dice Exploder Discord to talk about the show!

Dice Exploder on Patreon

Safety in RPGs and larp is a huge topic, one I’ve wanted to cover on Dice Exploder for a long time, but one I’ve avoided it because it feels hard to approach inside the “pick one mechanic” format of this show. Even more than most mechanics I cover on Dice Exploder, I feel like most safety mechanics are in conversation with each other in both logistical ways—how they compliment each other—but also in the philosophy behind their existence in the first place, how including these mechanics at the table is ideally a statement about how we’d like to treat each other both at the table and away from it. So today we’re gonna name that underlying philosophy and call that our mechanic: “players are more important than the game” is something I hear in conversations around safety all the time, and that’s this episode.

To break it down, I’m joined by Sarah Lynne Bowman. She studies all this professionally, and she has so much to say and to share about how safety tools work in theory and in practice, how no tool can ever guarantee your safety (even if we should still definitely use them), and how building good communities around our games is at least as important to safer play as any individual tool.

Finally, content warning in this episode for mention of sexual assault and emotional abuse in rpg communities. We don’t get deep into any specifics, but they come up.

Further Reading

Your Larp’s Only As Safe As It’s Play Culture by Troels Ken Pedersen

Dice Exploder on accessibility in game design

Creating a Culture of Trust through Safety and Calibration Larp Mechanics by Maury Brown

Larp Design, the book

Bibliography from Sarah Lynne Bowman

Koljonen, Johanna. 2019. “Opt-out and Playstyle Calibration Mechanics.” In Larp Design: Creating Role-play Experiences, edited by Johanna Koljonen, Jaakko Stenros, Anne Serup Grove, Aina D. Skjønsfjell and Elin Nilsen, 235-237. Copenhagen, Denmark: Landsforeningen Bifrost. 3 pages.

Koljonen, Johanna. 2020. “Larp Safety Design Fundamentals.” JARPS: Japanese Journal of Analog Role-Playing Game Studies 1: Emotional and Psychological Safety in TRPGs and Larp (September 21): 3e-19e.

Hugaas, Kjell Hedgard. 2024. “Bleed and Identity: A Conceptual Model of Bleed and How Bleed-Out from Role-Playing Games Can Affect a Player’s Sense of Self.” International Journal of Role-Playing 15 (June): 9-35. https://doi.org/10.33063/ijrp.vi15.323

Bowman, Sarah Lynne. 2015. “Bleed: The Spillover Between Player and Character.” Nordiclarp.org, March 2.

Bowman, Sarah Bowman. 2022. “Safety in Role-playing Games I: Introduction -- Sarah Lynne Bowman.” Transformative Play Initiative, February 4.

Bowman, Sarah Bowman. 2022. “Safety in Role playing Games II: Before the Game -- Sarah Lynne Bowman.” Transformative Play Initiative, February 4.

Bowman, Sarah Bowman. 2022. “Safety in Role playing Games Part III: During the Game -- Sarah Lynne Bowman.” Transformative Play Initiative, February 4.

Bowman, Sarah Bowman. 2022. “Safety in Role playing Games Part IV: After the Game --- Sarah Lynne Bowman.” Transformative Play Initiative, February 4.

Bowman, Sarah Bowman. 2022. “Safety in Role playing Games Part V: Cultivating Safer Communities -- Sarah Lynne Bowman.” Transformative Play Initiative, February 4.

Socials

Sam on Bluesky and itch

The Dice Exploder blog is at diceexploder.com

Our logo was designed by sporgory, our ad music is Lilypads by Travis Tessmer, and our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey.

Join the Dice Exploder Discord to talk about the show!

Dice Exploder on Patreon

Last week, indie rpg YouTube essayist Aaron Voigt and I delved into Heart: the City Beneath, a surreal and maximalist dungeon crawler with lots to love. But when I ran the game, I had some trouble with it from a mechanic that by all accounts I should love: beats, little nuggets of story, little goals your character takes on that they advance by achieving. I’ve always found it strange I didn’t love beats in practice, and I today I wanted to break down how and why they left me overwhelmed and unsatisfied. I think there’s at least as much to learn from looking at what doesn’t work in games as what does, especially in games and other art that feels so close to exactly for you…

Further Reading

Heart: the City Beneath by Rowan, Rook and Decard

Spire: the City Must Fall by Rowan, Rook and Decard

Socials

Aaron on Bluesky, itch, YouTube, and Patreon

Sam on Bluesky and itch

The Dice Exploder blog is at diceexploder.com

Our logo was designed by sporgory, our ad music is Lilypads by Travis Tessmer, and our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey.

Join the Dice Exploder Discord to talk about the show!

Support Dice Exploder on Patreon!

Heart: the City Beneath. It’s a surreal and bloody dungeon crawler full of so much to love… plus some bits that drive me up the wall. This week and next I’m devoting TWO episodes to it. Today, it’s everything I love about Heart as seen through the lens of zenith abilities: epic things that let players take control of the game and do something gigantic and fucking cool… before killing their character.

I’m joined by ardent Heart-lover Aaron Voigt, aka the guy who makes the indie rpg video essays on YouTube. We get into Heart’s spectacular setting, the act of handing story agency over to players, and the joys of playing to lose. Then come back next week for part two with more Heart and more Aaron!

Ads

Rust Never Sleeps, a solo blackjack mecha rpg

Further Reading

Heart: the City Beneath by Rowan, Rook and Decard

Spire: the City Must Fall by Rowan, Rook and Decard

Sanfielle by Friends At The Table

Agon 2e by Sean Nittner and John Harper

Socials

Aaron on Bluesky, itch, YouTube, and Patreon

Sam on Bluesky and itch

The Dice Exploder blog is at diceexploder.com

Our logo was designed by sporgory, our ad music is Lilypads by Travis Tessmer, and our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey.

Join the Dice Exploder Discord to talk about the show!

Support Dice Exploder on Patreon!

Over on the Dice Exploder discord, we welcome new members by asking them what their favorite mechanic is. It’s a great tradition, kicks off a lot of great conversations, but I have largely avoided having it turned my way. So today I thought let’s just get it out there in an episode: what is my favorite mechanic and what do I think about it?

Further Reading

Elf Motors

Socials

Chris’s podcast How to Be a Better Human

Sam on Bluesky and itch

The Dice Exploder blog is at diceexploder.com

Our logo was designed by sporgory, our ad music is Lilypads by Travis Tessmer, and our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey.

Join the Dice Exploder Discord to talk about the show!

Dice Exploder on Patreon

Last week was a show about how it might work to frame a scene when you get to decide whatever you want that scene to look like. But this week, we're looking at the reverse: what happens when you're given a very detailed scene and must figure out how to incorporate it into your story?

This episode brings together a bunch of threads I’ve been building up throughout this larp series: immersion, the separation or lack thereof between player and character, safer play, and more. I couldn't ask for a better cohost for that than Sharang Biswas.

Ads

⁠⁠⁠Extra Ordinary on Kickstarter now!⁠⁠⁠

Preorder Sharang’s book The Iron Below Remembers

Further Reading

House of Craving by Tor Kjetil Edland, Danny Wilson & Bjarke Pedersen

Lumberjills by Moyra Turkington

I Say A Little Prayer by Tor Kjetil Edland

Just a Little Lovin’ by Tor Kjetil Edland and Hanne Grasmo

Uncertainty in Games by Greg Costikyan

Rules of Play by Katie Salen & Eric Zimmerman

 The Self Reflexive Tabletop Role Playing Game by Evan Torner

 The World is Born from Zero by Cameron Kunzelman

Socials

Sharang on Bluesky and itch

Sam on Bluesky and itch

The Dice Exploder blog is at diceexploder.com

Our logo was designed by sporgory, our ad music is Lilypads by Travis Tessmer, and our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey.

Join the Dice Exploder Discord to talk about the show!

Dice Exploder on Patreon

When you’re playing roleplay-heavy D&D, what does a scene look like? Since the game doesn’t give you much in the way of tools for doing so, are you framing scenes intentionally or just kind of letting them happen? And if the latter, is that serving you well?

You very well might be, but I’ve become obsessed lately with how we frame scenes in roleplaying games, and today I want to talk about a mechanic that does so very firmly: spotlight scenes, a procedure in which each player in the game gets a turn to say what they want the next scene to be.

To do that, I’m joined by Mo Turkington, designer of many great structured freeform larps including the well-lauded Rosenstrasse and her latest release Lumberjills. We get into the history of spotlight scenes, the pros and cons of including rules for framing and ending scenes in your game, and how even a mechanic like this one that feels so structural and procedural, when used int he right context, can have a beautiful, thematically resonant message in it about agency and self-actualization.

Ad Links

Song of the Scryptwyrm by Almost Bedtime Theater

Further Reading

Lumberjills by Moyra Turkington

I Say A Little Prayer by Tor Kjetil Edland

Just a Little Lovin’ by Tor Kjetil Edland and Hanne Grasmo

Rosenstrasse by Moyra Turkington and Jessica Hammer

Montsegur 1244 by Frederik J. Jensen

Red Carnations on a Black Grave by Catherine Ramen and Juan Ochoa

Socials

Moyra’s games on itch

Sam on Bluesky and itch

The Dice Exploder blog is at diceexploder.com

Our logo was designed by sporgory, our ad music is Lilypads by Travis Tessmer, and our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey.

Join the Dice Exploder Discord to talk about the show!

Dice Exploder on Patreon

Shadows are a metatechnique in larp where you have players in the role of something other than a traditional larp or rpg player character. Maybe they’re stagehands turning out the lights because there’s ghosts in this house. Maybe they’re the characters’ worst fears who wander around and whisper into players’ ears to egg them on into terrible actions and choices. They’re special effects, or ghosts, or whatever else you want them to be. Let's talk about them!

Ad Links

⁠⁠Extra Ordinary on Kickstarter now!⁠⁠

Socials

Elin on Bluesky

Sam on Bluesky and itch

The Dice Exploder blog is at diceexploder.com

Our logo was designed by sporgory, our ad music is Lilypads by Travis Tessmer, and our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey.

Join the Dice Exploder Discord to talk about the show!

Dice Exploder on Patreon

There's this period of time between when we've all agreed we're going to play a game now and when we start "actually playing." We've got to learn the rules, learn the setting, maybe go over safety or characters. Maybe we order the pizza in here, too.

This part of a game is just as much something that can be intentionally designed as gameplay itself, but I don't see much of that in ttrpgs. Meanwhile in larp, workshops to set up a game are standard practice. What do they look like, and what can we learn from them?

Ad Links

Extra Ordinary launches on Kickstarter March 10th!

Further Reading

The Art of Gathering by Priya Parker

Bleed on the Nordic Larp wiki

Playing to Lift, Not Just to Lose by Susanne Vejdemo

The Battle of Primrose Park: Playing for Emancipatory Bleed in Fortune & Felicity by Jonaya Kemper

Space Train Space Heist by Sam Dunnewold

Veins of Corruption, Marc's itchfunding mega-zungeon

Socials

Marc on Bluesky and itch and actual plays on youtube

Sam on Bluesky and itch

The Dice Exploder blog is at diceexploder.com

Our logo was designed by sporgory, our ad music is Lilypads by Travis Tessmer, and our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey.

This episode was edited by Chris Greenbriar.

Join the Dice Exploder Discord to talk about the show

Support ⁠Dice Exploder on Patreon⁠!

The show is on Patreon! There's not going to be a lot behind the paywall, but there is right now a pilot episode for a new podcast that's part play report, part games criticism, and part personal memoir. This pilot is about the excellent game Yazeba's Bed & Breakfast, and you can listen to it now on the brand new Dice Exploder patreon.

https://www.patreon.com/DiceExploder

In a lot of tabletop rpgs, to do something in the fictional world, we engage with abstraction: to pick someone’s pocket, we describe picking their pocket, or we roll a die to see how well we pick it. But in larp, sometimes the action is the action. I pick your pocket... by picking your pocket.

This embodiment of play, where my real life actions equal my fictional character's actions, might be what many people understand as the core difference between larp and tabletop games. Today, Kate Hill and I get into the good, the bad, the ugly, and the beautiful of embodied play.

Further Reading

Playing to Lift, Not Just to Lose by Susanne Vejdemo

Bluebeard’s Bride

New World Magischola

Chasing Bleed – An American Fantasy Larper at Wizard School by Tara M. Clapper

Golden Cobra Challenge

Find Larp Shack on Facebook!

Two Hand Path and the Dice Exploder episode about it

Ad Links

We Three Shall Meet Again by Sam Dunnewold

Socials

Kate on Bluesky.

Kate’s actual play Path of Glory on twitch.

Sam on Bluesky and itch.

The Dice Exploder blog is at diceexploder.com

Our logo was designed by sporgory, our ad music is Lilypads by Travis Tessmer, and our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey.

Join the Dice Exploder Discord to talk about the show!

Larp! It’s that thing where you dress up like wizards, go into the woods, and hit each other with sticks. Right? Well.. yeah! Except no, because it’s a million other things, too.

Today I'm gonna introduce you to the world of larp. If you've ever been intimidated by it, this is a place to start. Because I think tabletop designers have so much we could learn from larp, so much that this is the start of a big series on larp.

And where better to start than with a mechanic that makes getting into larp easier than ever: just pick up a card and read what it says.

Further Reading

Ghost Court by Jason Morningstar

We Are Roommates Now by Wendy Gorman

Space Larps by Jason Morningstar

Welcome Guests by Jason Morningstar

The Climb by Jason Morningstar

So Mom I Made This Sex Tape by Susanne Vejdemo

Behind the Magic by Randy Lubin

The Hench Union Larp by Sam Dunnewold

Socials

Randy onBluesky

Randy’s foresight games are at leveragedplay.com

Randy’s consumer games are at diegeticgames.com

Randy’s online games platformStorySynth

Sam onBluesky anditch

The Dice Exploder blog is atdiceexploder.com

Our logo was designed bysporgory, our ad music is Lilypads by Travis Tessmer, and our theme song isSunset Bridge by Purely Grey.

Join theDice Exploder Discord to talk about the show!

Pregens! They're not just a tool to get started playing quicker, they're also a way for a designer to take you by the hand and guide you to a very specific place, and they're a shared language across every table that picks up your game. Today, Aaron Lim and I break down all the joys and beauty of pregens, up to and including Aaron's meme charts.

Aaron’s Kickstarter

Ithaca in the Cards: Second Expedition and What Should We Have Tomorrow? Full Course

Ad Links

A Perfect Rock 

Growing Thylacine: A Pamphlet Zine TTRPG

Further Reading

Last Train to Bremen by Caro Asercion

Caro Asercion on Dice Exploder

Yazeba’s Bed & Breakfast by Possum Creek Games

Lady Blackbird by John Harper

Larp Design and the chapter BASICS OF CHARACTER DESIGN by Juhana Pettersson

Socials

Aaron onBluesky anditch.

Sam onBluesky anditch.

The Dice Exploder blog is atdiceexploder.com

Our logo was designed bysporgory, our ad music is Lilypads by Travis Tessmer, and our theme song isSunset Bridge by Purely Grey.

This episode was edited by Chris Greenbriar and Sam Dunnewold.

Join theDice Exploder Discord to talk about the show!

What’s the best way to convey the emotional experience of being a post-apocalyptic demon-fighting wizard action hero? Did you say “a coloring book with some Yahtzee on the side?” Because that’s what Two Hand Path designer Mikey Hamm landed on.

Last week was an episode all about the joy of destruction and transgression, and I wanted to balance that out today with another episode on physicality in games and the act of creation. But because I’m joined by the wonderful and prolific Jeeyon Shim, this spilled out into so much more: Jeeyon's background in child education, solo games that ask you to do a verb other than journal, how important it is for our humanity to take breaks and touch grass sometimes, and just how much fun art can be.

Further Reading

Two Hand Path by Mikey Hamm

Making Comics by Linda Barry

Field Guide to Memory by Shing Yin Khor and Jeeyon Shim

A Mending by Shing Yin Khor

Ad Links

Sock Puppets

Mission ImPAWsible

Socials

Jeeyon on Patreon, Bluesky, and itch.

Sam on Bluesky and itch.

The Dice Exploder blog is at diceexploder.com

Our logo was designed by sporgory, our ad music is Lilypads by Travis Tessmer, and our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey.

Join the Dice Exploder Discord to talk about the show!

Don't you hate it when one card in a deck gets a little bent? You ever have someone spill their coffee on your cards while you're playing and wish death upon them? What if I told you there was a game that told you to do these things and worse... on purpose?

We're kicking off season 5 of Dice Exploder with two episodes on physicality in games. Today that's Wreck This Deck, and the transgressive feeling you get when the core mechanic of a game is to fuck up a bunch of playing cards. Specifically, we're talking about the revenge demon Flauros and what exactly he demands you do to your deck.

Further Reading

Audrey’s podcast Alone At The Table podcast and the Wreck This Deck episodes specifically

Thousand Year Old Vampire by Tim Hutchings

Birds Love Dirt by Emily Jankowski

Under the Autumn Strangely by Graham Gentz

Balatro

This video about a particularly infamous Magic: the Gathering commander deck

Rookwood by Nerdy Pup Games

Ad Links

Sword Opera

Shownotes

Sam on Bluesky and itch.

The Dice Exploder blog is at diceexploder.com

Our logo was designed by sporgory, our ad music is Lilypads by Travis Tessmer, and our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey.

Join the Dice Exploder Discord to talk about the show!

It's the Dice Exploder 2024 year end bonanza! This year I'm joined by Aaron Voigt, Rowan Zeoli, and MintRabbit plus a cavalcade of friends of the show to go over games and adjacent things we loved from 2024. Come reminisce about the year with us!

Aaron on Youtube and Bluesky

Rowan on Bluesky

MintRabbit on Tumblr

Aaron’s picks

• Last Train to Bremen by Caro Asercion 
• Fealty by Michael Elliot and Galen Pejeau
• Helvetia by Bully Pulpit Games/Jason Morningstar 
• Rascal News/Scrying on Iran's Tabletop Scene
• The Most Important Essay in RPG History 

Rowan’s picks

• The Time We Have by Elliot Davis
• Seven Part Pact by Jay Dragon
• Oceanie 2084
• Voices in The Wood, a Void 1680 Actual Play. Rowan’s article on Voices in the Woods.
• Former World of Game Design Employees Claim Tabletop Company Exploits Workers and Clients

Mint’s picks

• The Gas Station, by DNGNCLUB
• shadow/giant by PsychHound Games
• Flyover Country, by Headstone Hills
• In Defense of Fiction, by MeatCastle Games
• Mint Plays Games: Rotted Capes (And the Lesson I Keep Learning This Year)

Sam’s picks

• Two Hand Path by Mikey Hamm
• Florilegium by Nick Wedig
• A Visit to the Lonely Oak by Victor Lane
• The Disc 2 jam, organized by Ken Lowrey, and specifically the Wanderhome designer commentary
• Kiss Me If You Can by Sam Dunnewold, and actual play from Third Floor Wars
• 
  
• Other Picks

Kurt Refling’s pick: Yazeba’s Bed & Breakfast by Possum Creek Games

Michael Elliott’s pick: Two Hand Path by Mikey Hamm

Alex Roberts on The Highlander II: The Quickening Unofficial Roleplaying Game by Adam Decamp

Jason Morningstar on The Big Store by Nathan D. Paoletta

Randy Lubin’s pick: the Dice Exploder Discord

Hendrik ten Napel on Eat the Reich by Rowan Rook and Deckard

Sharang Biswas’s pick: Combat in Dungeons & Dragons by Evan Torner

Audrey Stolze’s pick: Band-Aids & Bullet Holes by Sam Dunnewold

Sydney Icarus’s pick: Working the Case by Randy Lubin

Seraphina’s pick: Triangle Agency

Socials

Sam Dunnewold 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!

A few weeks back, a conversation on the Dice Exploder discord lead to a new game jam: the Femininomenon Jam, a jam about femininity and whatever that means to you, happening now on itch.io through February 11th. To help kick off your thinking on what a game in this theme might look like, today two of the hosts of that jam sit down to talk about the challenge deck from Wickedness by M. Veselak. In this game about a coven of three witches, the challenge deck is a bespoke oracle for conflict resolution. And right out of the gate we get to dive into the deep end with this jam's topic as we ask: is this mechanic "feminine"? What would that even mean?

Further Reading:

Wickedness by M. Veselak

The Femininomenon Jam

Socials

Audrey Stolze / Lady Tabletop on itch and tumblr

Seraphina on itch and bluesky

Audrey’s solo games podcast Alone At The Table

Sam D 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!

I usually like to think of Dice Exploder as a pretty focused show with a pretty tight format. Yeah we may sprawl sometimes, but we’re not here shooting the shit, we’re here to talk game mechanics. But sometimes, a guy wants to stretch out like a dog in the sun, hang out for a while, and just yap the day away while answering a bunch of listener questions. And there’s no one I like yapping with more than my friend Merrilee Bufkin. So this week, it’s casual times on Dice exploder as the two of us answer a bunch of listener questions.

Further Reading:

Aaron Voigt’s youtube essays

Kurt Riefling on itch

Sam's favorite games blogpost

Exiles by Ema Acosta

Jiangshi by Banana Chan and Sen-Foong Lim

Fiasco by Jason Morningstar

The Forge book by William J. White

Secco Creek Vigilance Committee by Keith Stetson

Killing Time by BrewistTabletopGames

Socials

Merrilee on Bluesky and itch.

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!

It’s a Dice Exploder EMERGENCY POD! Less than 24 hours ago as of recording, John Harper, designer of Blades in the Dark, released a brand new official supplement for the game: Blades in the Dark: Deep Cuts. It’s 110 pages packed full of new setting and new mechanic ideas, and I really wanted to talk about it! I love Apocalypse World’s concept of “advanced fuckery,” and I’ve never seen such a good and extended example of it all in one place.

Further Reading:

Deep Cuts by John Harper

How to Overcome Your Hyperdiegesis Allergy by Idle Cartulary

Errant by 

Otherkind Dice on Dice Exploder, with John Harper

Socials

John on Bluesky and Twitter.

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!

Hello from the between-season malaise! Today I'm joined by Aaron King, back again, who interviews me about my new zine Dice Forager: a 50 page collection of games, manifestos, and mini written-out episodes of Dice Exploder. We talk about how setting goals is great and people should do it for, what counts as a manifesto, and how making art meant just for your friends can be just as if not more rewarding than for any other reason.

Preorder Dice Forager now! (if you live in the US, otherwise DM me and maybe we can work something out)

Further Reading:

Dice Exploder blog: Hospitality, Safety, and Calibration 

Traffic Lights are Communication Tools by Meguey Baker

World Ending Game by Everest Pipkin

Your public library

Socials

Aaron King on itch and the RTFM podcast.

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!

This week I’ve got James D’Amato (Campaign: Skyjacks, the Ultimate RPG book line, and the upcoming Oh Captain, My Captain) here to talk about custom oracle decks. Yeah a Tarot deck is cool, and great for doing Tarot, but James makes the case that it’s the “custom” in “custom oracle deck” that will really bring the not-quite-but-feels-like magic of an oracle to your table. But before we get into that, we dig deep into a mysterious black cube to get to our specific custom oracle deck: the Sooth Deck of Invisible Sun.

Further Reading

Invisible Sun

Invisible Sun on the One Shot podcast

Spindlewheel by Sasha Reneau

Campaign: Skyjacks

Oh Captain, My Captain preorder link

Socials

James on Bluesky and Twitter

Sam D 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.

This episode was edited by Chris Greenbriar.

Join the Dice Exploder Discord to talk about the show!

Ad Links

Characters Without Stories, including my episode

Indie Press Revolution

Today, Caro Asercion (i'm sorry did you say street magic) brings us a game and mechanic all about instinct and physical embodiment: Keys from the larp Keymaster. This game isn't like most games. It’s so much about physical embodiment and exploring group identity rather than pesky shit like “storytelling”. Physicality! Larp! The Golden Cobra Challenge! We've got it all.

Further Reading

Keymaster by J Li

The Golden Cobra Challenge

i’m sorry did you say street magic by Caro Asercion

Socials

Caro on itch

Sam D 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!

Ad Links

Oh Captain My Captain by James D’Amato

Stout Stoat Press

Thrilled this week to have on one of my favorite movewrights, it’s Aaron King of the RTFM podcast. Aaron brought on Love Letters from Apocalypse World, a kind of custom move the GM can write when it’s been a while since we played and everyone might need a refresher on what was going on to get the ball rolling again. I think custom moves are a wildly overlooked part of Apocalypse World, and today we go deep on why that is and how and when to write your own.

Further Reading

Apocalypse World by Vincent and Meguey Baker

Aaron King’s Worksheet Manifesto

The SF Ultra podcast

Reading the Apocalypse by Aaron King

Socials

RTFM podcast and Patreon

Sam D 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.

This episode was edited by Chris Greenbriar. Thanks Chris!

Join the Dice Exploder Discord to talk about the show!

Ad Links

Jukebox by Jar of Eyes

Oh Captain My Captain by James D’Amato

It’s the crossover event of the season! This week I’m joined by Jeff Stormer of the Party of One podcast to talk about the core mechanic of Desperation by Jason Morningstar. In this game full of dread about a small Kansas town struggling through a never-ending winter, instead of deciding what happens, each turn you draw a card and decide who the thing on the card happens to. It’s a super slick mechanic. Meanwhile over on Party of One, you can listen to Jeff and I actually play the game.

Further Reading

Me on the Party of One Podcast

Desperation by Bully Pulpit Games

Socials

Sam D 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.

This episode was edited by Chris Greenbriar.

Join the Dice Exploder Discord to talk about the show!

Ad Links

Spectrum Roleplaying by Nat Knight

Sock Puppets by Kurt Refling

For this final episode of the Dice Exploder D&D miniseries, I wanted to go back to the source, to my first experiences playing the game. And I figured who better to do that with than someone else who was there, my first DM, my very own father.

We get plenty nostalgic for back when I was 8 years old, but I also made him talk to me about THAC0, early D&D's needlessly opaque and complicated version of an attack bonus. I made him do this because I think of THAC0 as so representative of how D&D's rules have worked for me over the years, and because my dad has never given a crap about any of those rules. When we played, he barely even read the rulebooks. So how did we still end up playing D&D? What were we even doing?

Further Reading

Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, second edition

Dice Exploder on Theorize from Brindlewood Bay, and the pros and cons of a fixed world vs one you’re making up together at the table.

E.T. (1982, dir. Steven Spielberg)

Ad Links

Reacting Consortium

Fractals Co-op

Socials

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!

I have a list of mechanics I’d like to cover on Dice Exploder, and I’d say about a third of them are jokes. One of those jokes is Rule Zero, a maxim that says "the DM (or GM) is always right." I think of Rule Zero as originating in D&D culture, and as part of this D&D miniseries, I thought it'd be interesting to use as a way into talking about the play culture around the game, how it's actually played at the table, and how many of its rules people actually use.

There's no one I'd rather talk with about "do rules matter" than returning cohost Em Acosta (Exiles, Crescent Moon) who's spent a lot of time thinking about what rules they find actually useful in play. And in the end, we find yet another answer to my series-long quest for an answer to the question: "what actually is Dungeons & Dragons?"

Further Reading:

Rule Zero on TV Tropes (I do not endorse this but interesting context)

Neverland

Quest

Pathfinder

Errant

Em’s Patreon

Em’s banger games Exiles and Crescent Moon

Socials

Hire Em

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

This episode I'm joined by Sam Roberts (Escape from Dino Island) to talk about prestige classes, special classes from D&D 3e that you could only take by multiclassing into them. Sam thinks of these things as a noble failure: a very cool idea whose execution almost immediately dropped the ball. But what can we learn from their corpse?

We get into that, along with a boots-on-the-ground discussion of what our experiences were like actually playing D&D 3rd edition and an exploration of advancement as a concept at large: how does it work in most games, and how might it work instead?

Further Reading

The Game Left Unplayed, blogpost by Jay Dragon

D&D third edition

D&D 3.5 edition

Sam R’s game Escape from Dino Island

Socials

Sam D 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

Welcome to the D&D miniseries! I wanted to kick this off with a look into the mechanical heart of D&D, but I didn't really know what that meant. So I asked my friend Tristan! Designer of the award winning game Shanty Hunters and author of the Molten Sulfur blog, Tristan now spends his time as a designer on Nations & Cannons, a hack of D&D set in the American Revolutionary War.

Tristan brought on a mechanized design principle underpinning D&D, the Adventuring Day, which says the game should be balanced for parties to go through 6-8 combat encounters between each long rest. It’s an interesting idea... even though absolutely no one in the known universe actually plays D&D like that. So where’d it come from? And how do you approach it as a designer?

Further Reading:

From the Dice Exploder blog: D&D Is A Comedy Game

Molten Sulfur Blog

Shanty Hunters

7th Sea

Mork Borg

Errant

Nations & Cannons

Socials

Tristan on Bluesky.

Sam on Bluesky and itch.

The Dice Exploder blog is at diceexploder.com

Our logo was designed by sporgory, our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey, and our ad music is Lilypads by Travis Tessmer.

Join the Dice Exploder Discord to talk about the show!

Transcript

Today I'm kicking off a miniseries of Dice Exploder episodes all about the Tarrasque in the room: Dungeons & Dragons itself. But before we get into that, I wanted to lay out for context where I'm coming from, what my relationship is like to "the world's greatest roleplaying game™" is like, and what questions I was hoping to answer with this series.

If you listen to this show, you probably come from a community that's skeptical of D&D. I'm not personally a fan. But it's unquestionably doing something for many people, and I don't buy that they simply don't know any better. So what's the deal? What's good about Dungeons & Dragons?

Further Reading

At 50 Years Old, Dungeons & Dragons Is An Artifact post by Lin Codega on Rascal News

Dungeons & Dragons Is A Comedy Game on the Dice Exploder blog

Homage to the Players Handbook by Tim Hutchings

Rascal’s pledge drive

Socials

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

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

Socials

Kimi on Bluesky as well as Golden Lasso Games.

Happy Jacks on YouTube.

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!

It is still designer commentary season on Dice Exploder, and today I'm talking with Jason Morningstar (Fiasco, Night Witches, a million other games) about Northfield: a game we co-designed about when Jesse James tried to rob the bank in my home town, we shot the hell out of him and his gang, and then we started an annual small town fair to celebrate our victory. You play as both a member of the James-Younger gang and as a person in the present day portraying your gang member in a reenactment.

It's a weird little game, much like its subject matter, and surprisingly personal to me (Jason was not surprised). On this episode, we break down the process of our collaboration and how we feel about the results (very positively).

More than any other designer commentary I've done, I hope you check out this game. I'm really proud of it. You can get it on the Bully Pulpit Patreon now for $5.

Further Reading

Northfield, the game, on the Bully Pulpit Patreon

Video of the Defeat of Jesse James Days reenactment

Official Defeat of Jesse James Days website

Photo of (allegedly) Charlie Pitts’ ear

Wikipedia articles on Northfield and the James-Younger gang

Socials

Sam on Bluesky and itch.

Jason on ⁠Bluesky⁠ and ⁠dice.camp⁠.

⁠Bully Pulpit Games⁠

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!

For Ken Lowery’s Disc 2 jam, I decided to finally release the game I’ve been working on for nearly four years: Space Fam.

This is a game about, you guessed it, found family in space. In particular, it takes a lot of inspiration from The Long Way To A Small Angry Planet in that you’re the crew of a ship escorting a traveler from point A to point B, and along the way you deal with your feelings of guilt and stress about living under an oppressive government.

It’s a hack of Our Traveling Home by Ash Kreider, and it’s like 90% of the way to really great. But that last 10% is always the hard 10%, and I decided it was time to let this game just be what it is and push it out into the world.

As a part of that, I wanted to look back on the design process. What went well, what didn’t, what would I change if I was going to spend another 30 minutes or 30 years on this thing. To do that, I sat down with two of my friends who playtested the game, and we talked about all things Space Fam.

Further Reading

Space Fam on itch

The Disc 2 jam.

A commentary podcast episode for Space Fam is available here.

I wrote about the design of Space Fam's "scenes menu" here​.

I wrote about the design of the Space Fam character sheet here​.

Our Traveling Home by Ash Kreider

Stewpot: Tales from a Fantasy Tavern by Takuma Okada

Space Post by Jason Morningstar

The Watch

Night Witches by Jason Morningstar

Socials

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!

The first ever Dice Exploder game jam came to a close about a month ago, and today I sit down with the three hooligans from the discord who put it together and go through some of our favorite entries. If Dice Exploder is a show about concrete examples, this episode is as Dice Exploder as it gets.

All the games we talk about are pretty short, so it should be easy to follow along at home. Check out all the jam submissions here.

Thanks to Audrey Stolze (aka Lady Tabletop), Chris Greenbriar, and Sam Roberts for running the jam!

Further Reading:

Game Exploder full list of entries

Sam D's late entry: World Ending Game (Sam's Version)

Socials

Sam D on Bluesky and itch.

Sam R's game Escape from Dino Island.

Audrey on ⁠Tumblr⁠, and her podcast ⁠Alone at the Table⁠ about solo games.

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!

What if your D&D adventuring party settled down and opened a tavern, and the vibes went from dragon murderers to Bob’s Burgers? That's my pitch for Stewpot: Tales from a Fantasy Tavern, one of my favorite RPGs. It's currently on Backerkit, and you should check it out.

This week I'm talking about a super simple unnamed mechanic from Stewpot, and presumably other games before it, that's inspired much of my own work: everyone goes around and adds a detail about the scene at hand or whatever we're talking about. Simple but effective.

I think of this mechanic, and Stewpot generally, as especially welcoming to people new to the hobby. And so I brought on my favorite new to the hobby person: Lee Conrads, acclaimed theater director (there's a lot of theater and audience theory in this one) and also my spouse. It's a very special episode.

Further Reading:

The Stewpot backerkit campaign

Circle X theater company

Great Reckonings in Little Rooms

Comedy Book by Jesse David Fox

Socials

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!

Is sharing music with your friends an RPG? It sure is when you're playing Avery Alder's game Ribbon Drive. Takuma Okada, the designer of Stewpot: Tales from a Fantasy Tavern (⁠on Backerkit right now⁠), joins me this week to talk about music, contemplation, and unconventional ways to inspire players.

Further Reading:

⁠Ribbon Drive⁠

⁠Spindlewheel⁠

Everything Is Illuminated, the book and film

⁠Ten Candles⁠

⁠Dread⁠

⁠Star Crossed⁠

⁠Our Radios Are Dying⁠

⁠Void 1680 AM⁠

Sam’s ⁠playlist⁠ from playing Ribbon Drive

⁠The Awards⁠ website

⁠The Awards interview on Yes Indie'd⁠

Socials

Takuma on Twitter and Bluesky.

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

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!

What's the deal with Playbooks? That's a question that's way too big for one episode. But Moe Poplar, of the RPG Academy podcast Show & Tell, had a very particular effect of playbooks that he wanted to talk about on the show today: how playbook choice can be a line of communication between players, GM, and designer.

This is one of those episodes that's as much play advice as it is about design. I should do more of those.

Further Reading:

Monster of the Week

Blades in the Dark

Socials

Moe’s website, including his games.

Moe’s podcast via The RPG Academy, Show & Tell

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!

This week, now that the part of season 3 that was funded by Kickstarter is over, I’ve got a treat for you: the backers-only bonus episode with Mikey Hamm, designer of Slugblaster. You didn’t think I was gonna just hold on to an episode this good forever, did you? It’s the show’s namesake mechanic!

Mikey is currently Kickstarting Two-Hand Path, a solo game roll-and-write dungeon crawler. Check it out.

While I thought this episode would be a big of a goof about a goofy mechanic (and it is), it also brought out some of the most thoughtful thoughts on deploying mechanics with precision and purpose that I’ve had on the show yet. Also, we had a blast.

A slug blast.

List of Games with Exploding Dice

Middle Earth Roleplaying Game

Shadowrun

Earthdawn

Luck of Legends

The Burning Wheel

7th Sea

Heart (Deep Apiarist class)

Renegade Racers

Kids on Bikes

Armello

Socials

Back Two-Hand Path and buy Slugblaster now!

Mikey on Bluesky.

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!

This week's cohost is James Wallis, cohost of the Ludonarrative Dissidents podcast, a show a lot like this one that's Kickstarting their third season now, and designer of one of the first story games: The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen.

Today we're breaking format: instead of talking about one game mechanic, James brought in the concept of innovation in game design. What does it look like, is it important, and how can we do more of it?

The show notes for this one are friggin packed.

Further Reading:

Ludonarrative Dissidents podcast and season 3 Kickstarter

The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen and on Wikipedia

Nordic Larp book by Jaakko Stenros and Markus Montola

Nordic Larp wiki

Fairweather Manor, the Downton Abbey larp

The Diana Jones award

Dominion, the deckbuilder board game by Donald X. Vaccarino

Blades in the Dark by John Harper

My blog post Calvinballing a Whole Campaign

Star Crossed by Alex Roberts

Dread by Epidiah Ravachol

Apocalypse World by Meguey and Vincent Baker

The Beast by Naked Female Giant

The Crew by Thomas Sing

Thousand Year Old Vampire by Tim Hutchings

Bluebeard’s Bride by Marissa Kelly, Whitney Beltrán, and Sarah Doom

The Well Played Game by Bernie de Koven

Socials

James Wallis on Bluesky and dice.camp.

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.

This episode was edited by Chris Greenbriar.

Join the Dice Exploder Discord to talk about the show!

There's already at least one more episode of Lyrical Ludology published, so if you like this one, go subscribe and take a listen!

It’s the solo games episode! Hopefully the first of many. I’m joined by Seb Pines, designer of The Awards winning game Dwelling and haver of MFA in basically solo games, to talk about prompts in solo games.

This is a broad survey of solo games. We talk about a bunch of games (listed below) that all behave differently. If you’re curious about this side of the hobby, this is the primer for you.

Further Reading:

Dwelling by Seb Pines

Thousand Year Old Vampire by Tim Hutchings

Horse Girl by Babblegum Sam

Artefact by Jack Harrison

Project ECCO by Elliot Davis

Notorious by Jason Price

Void 1680 AM by Ken Lowery

I Eat Mantras For Breakfast by Maria Mison

The Ink That Bleeds and an excerpt on the Indie Game Reading Club

My response to The Ink That Bleeds

Socials

Seb Pines on Bluesky and itch.

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!

This is an intensely visual episode. If you'd like to follow along with the sheets we mention and get some extra commentary from me, you can do so at https://www.diceexploder.com/blog/2024/2/22/dice-exploder-aftershow-character-sheets

I’m fascinated by character sheets, mostly because there are so so so precious few that I think do a good job. I don’t mean this to call anyone out - I think the job of making a good character sheet might genuinely be impossible. They just have so much they have to accomplish.

Today I'm talking to Emanoel Melo, designer of CBR+PNK, about what we like in character sheets and whether there are any we would actually go to bat for.

Further reading

Aftershow blog post featuring all the character sheets we talk about plus extra commentary on diceexploder.com

CBR-PNK

Mothership

Bruno Prosaiko, the artist behind the beautiful ornate sheets we talk about, on Instagram

A collection of Brazilian tabletop games on itch that Emanoel curates

Socials

Emanoel on Twitter and Instagram. His website, Cabinet of Curiosities.

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!

Alex Roberts, designer of Star Crossed and For the Queen, joins me to talk about pity points from Kagematsu, a mechanic that doesn't actually do anything itself beyond evoke a particular feeling when put in opposition to love points.

This episode is what I always dreamed Dice Exploder could be. We start from a simple game mechanic, but we get into power dynamics at the table in the past and the future, how people treat you when you’re disabled, cultural appropriation, my personal techniques for flirting, details of a new game Alex is working on, and of course “what is the true nature of love?”

Happy day after Valentine’s Day.

Further Reading

Kagematsu is no longer available in print or online

Kagematsu actual play, featuring Alex, on the One Shot podcast

What Dice Do blogpost by Graham Walmsley

The Quiet Year by Avery Alder

Alex’s finished podcast Backstory

Star Crossed by Alex Roberts

For the Queen, second edition coming May 14th from Darrington Press

Socials

Alex’s personal carrd page

Sam on Bluesky and itch.

The Dice Exploder blog is at diceexploder.com

Our logo was designed by sporgory, our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey, and our ad music is Lily Pads by my boi Travis Tessmer.

Join the Dice Exploder Discord to talk about the show!

This week I've got designer and illustrator Strega Wolf van den Berg on to talk about money and the Mork Borg third party license. What, if anything, is the difference between making RPGs for fun, to pay rent, and to be paid fairly? And what is the cost (aha) of bringing money into making art?

On the flip side, this is also an episode about community, and how the shape of Mork Borg’s license fostered a community around it that allowed Strega Wolf to find a space in this hobby. Community can give us so many things that money can’t.

Further reading:

The Mork Borg third party license

Lichoma

The Origin Of My Depression by Uboa

Socials

Strega Wolf's website and itch page

Bogfolk, and on itch

Sam on ⁠⁠Bluesky⁠⁠ and ⁠⁠itch⁠⁠.

The Dice Exploder blog is at ⁠⁠diceexploder.com⁠⁠

Our logo was designed by ⁠⁠sporgory⁠⁠, our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey, and our ad music is Lily Pads by my boi Travis Tessmer.

This episode was edited by Chris Greenbriar.

Join the ⁠⁠Dice Exploder Discord⁠⁠ to talk about the show!

This week I've got Nova, aka Idle Cartulary, of the excellent Playful Void blog among other places linked below. Nova's one of my favorite writers in the, as she puts it, DIY elf game scene, and I knew that was a world I wanted to cover more this season.

Nova brought on the rumor table from Zedeck Siew's Lorn Song of the Bachelor, an excellent elf game adventure. We got to talk about what makes a good random table at large, our taste in how adventures are written, and how point of view is the thing that often turns serviceable fiction into real primo shit.

Further Reading:

Nova’s kickstarter for The Curse of Mizzling Grove

Dice Exploder on pick lists

Lorn Song of the Bachelor

The Isle, in print and on itch

Socials

Nova’s blog, ⁠Playful Void⁠

Nova’s podcast, ⁠Dungeon Regular⁠

Nova’s games ⁠on itch⁠

Sam on ⁠Bluesky⁠ and ⁠itch⁠.

The Dice Exploder blog is at ⁠diceexploder.com⁠

Our logo was designed by ⁠sporgory⁠, our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey, and our ad music is Lily Pads by my boi Travis Tessmer.

Join the ⁠Dice Exploder Discord⁠ to talk about the show!

On the season 3 premiere, I’m joined by John Harper, designer of many games featured on past episodes of Dice Exploder including Blades in the Dark, Lasers & Feelings, and Agon 2e.

John brought in the Psi*Run risk sheet, a fairly complex dice resolution mechanic, known generically as Otherkind Dice. The risk sheet is such an elegant piece of design, packing essentially a whole game onto a single sheet of paper, and being so clear in both how it works and how you might tear it apart for your own ends. If you’re a new designer, or even just looking to get back in touch with the basics, John and I agree that hacking this thing is a great place to look.

It’s good to be back.

Further Reading:

Psi*Run’s risk sheet

Vincent Baker’s original 2005 post on Otherkind Dice

Vincent’s 2022 Otherkind Dice SRD

Psi*Run by Michael Lingner, Christopher Moore⁠, and Meguey Baker

Annalise

Socials

John’s website, onesevendesign.com, and itch page.

Sam on Bluesky and itch.

The Dice Exploder blog is at diceexploder.com

Our logo was designed by sporgory, our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey, and our ad music is Lily Pads by my boi Travis Tessmer.

This episode was edited by Chris Greenbriar.

Join the Dice Exploder Discord to talk about the show!

Transcript

Hello and welcome to the Dice Exploder 2023 end of year bonanza! I love me a good ranked list of movies on an end of year movie podcast, but ranked lists are bad and this show’s about RPGs not movies, so you get this instead. It’s me, Aaron King of the RTFM podcast, Lady Tabletop of the Alone at the Table podcast, and Sharang Biswas of winning tons of Ennies this year and being a games academic, and the four of us (plus a half dozen other special guests) are here to tell you about a bunch of cool games shit we played, read, and listened to this year.

Hope you had a great year in games! Come on down and listen to ours.

Our picks:

Aaron’s games

* GREED by Gormengeist

* Undertree Temple of the Elf Gods by Happy Chthonian

* Crush Depth Apparition by Amanda Lee Franck

Audrey’s games

* Void 1680 AM by Ken Lowery

* Wreck This Deck by Black Armada Games (Josh Fox and Becky Annison)

* Extreme Meatpunks Forever by Sinister Beard Games

Sharang’s games

* Fight With Spirit by Story Brewers Roleplaying

* The Silt Verses by Gabriel Robinson and Jason Cordova

* The Broadcast by Jason Morningstar and Lizzie Stark

Sam’s games

* Eating Oranges in the Shower by Hazel Anneke Dixon

* Barkeep on the Borderlands by W. F. Smith

* Exiles by em acosta

Game adjacent things

* Aaron: Grog the Frog by Alba BG

* Audrey: Roleplaying Games Enter the World of Ballet in a Unique New Performance by Linda Codega

* Sharang: The Dungeons & Dragons players of Death Row by Keri Blakinger

* Sam: The Ink That Bleeds by Paul Czege (here’s an excerpt from the Indie Game Reading Club)

Thing we’re proud of

* Aaron: RTFM, Speedrune, and Aaron’s annual list of favorite books

* Audrey: Behold: A Game

* Sharang: Winning 3 Ennies: Judges choice for MOONLIGHT ON ROSEVILLE BEACH and Best Rules/Best Family Game for AVATAR

* Sam: you’re lookin at it

Picks from friends of the show:

* Ray Chou: Decuma

* Thomas Manuel: A.A. Voigt on Youtube, Daydreaming About Dragons podcast by Judd Karlman, the Indie Game Reading Club, and Aaron Marks at Cannibal Halfling.

* Mikey Hamm: Picturepedia and other coffee table reference books

* John Harper: Girl By Moonlight

* Em Acosta: The Zone and Blades in ‘68

* Nova / Idle Cartulary: mindfulness fantasy map drawing (see her Dungeons Regularly vols. 1 and 2)

* Moe Poplar: the Dice Exploder podcast

Further reading:

* Meakpunk manifesto by Heather “Flowers” Robertson

* Sharang’s piece about Brindlewood Bay

* Amanda Lee Franck’s Comradery

* Alba BG’s Instagram

* BALLETCOLLECTIVE presents THE MOMENT IS IMMINENT

* RTFM patreon episode on VOID 1680 AM

* LadyTabletop’s VOID 1680 AM broadcast

Socials

Aaron can be found on, like, just listen to RTFM, linked above.

Audrey on Tumblr, and her podcast Alone at the Table about solo games.

Sharang is on itch and Twitter and Bluesky.

Sam is @sdunnewold on all socials and itch.

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!

Today I’ve got for you another between-season bonus episode. This time we’re breaking format to talk about i know the end, a module I published earlier this year about going back home after a long time away and all the horrors that entails. Because if you can’t occasionally publish something self-indulgent in your podcast feed, what’s even the point of having one?

My cohost for this is my friend Nico MacDougall, the current organizer of The Awards, who edited i know the end and had almost as much to say about it as I did.

For maximum understanding of this episode, you can pick up a free copy of the module here and follow along (or skim it in advance).

Further reading:

The original i know the end cover art

The “oops all PBTA moves” version of i know the end

Three of my short films

My previous written designer commentaries on Space Train Space Heist and Couriers

John Harper talking with Andrew Gillis about the origins of Blades in the Dark

The official designer commentary podcasts for Spire and Heart

Aaron Lim’s An Altogether Different River, which comes with a designer commentary version

Camera Lucida by Roland Barthes, a photography theory book that we talked about during recording but which I later cut because I remembered most of the details about it incorrectly

What Is Risograph Printing, another topic cut from the final recording because I got basically everything about it wrong while recording (the background texture of the module is a risograph printed texture)

Before Sunrise by Richard Linklater

Questionable Content by Jeph Jacques

Socials:

Nico’s carrd page, which includes links to their socials, editing rates, and The Awards.

Sam on Bluesky, Twitter, dice.camp, and itch.

The Dice Exploder 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!

It’s a bonus between-seasons Dice Exploder! Wowie!

As promised back in my episode with Gem Room Games about Mork Borg, today I’m talking about accessibility in game design using Mork Borg’s graphic design as an example. My cohost is Marc Muszynski, a friend and screenwriter with low vision, and we talk in detail about his experience with Mork Borg. Is this game, with all its important and loud art, accessible to people who can’t see? Like with most accessibility questions, It’s Complicated™!

Further reading:

Mork Borg

Accessibility in Gaming Resource Guide by Jennifer Kretchmer

TTRPG Accessibility Drive 2023 game jam on itch

Contrast checking tool for visual design.

Color checking tool for colorblindness.

Sylexiad, my favorite Dyslexia-friendly font:

Fate Accessibility Toolkit by Evil Hat

Two articles about “sanity” mechanics in RPGs (don’t put “sanity” mechanics in your games)

Socials:

Marc on imdb (lmao)

Sam on Bluesky, Twitter, dice.camp, and itch.

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!

On this episode I’m joined by Nychelle Schneider, also known as Mistletoe Kiss, a moderator from the Blades in the Dark discord and contributor to The Wildsea, the upcoming Dagger Isles supplement for Blades, and Underground Maps & Passkeys among others.

Nychelle brought on the idea of customizing existing games, homebrewing mechanics for your table (or even publication). This is... a big conversation, chock full of cool ideas that I hope people take and run with. There are so many games out there, and I think there’s so much to be gained by making stuff that can plug into and enhance other people’s art.

Nychelle also has so many interesting trains of thought about in this episode, many of which I didn’t follow up on as much as I wish I had. So I encourage you to listen to what she says, and then take those ideas an run with them. I hope that every week, but especially with this one.

Further reading:

A post-show blogpost about Sam’s joke Blades playbook The Boogeyman

Blades in the Dark

Nychelle’s Blades playbook The Surge

Vincent Baker’s blogpost Apocalypse World Custom Advancement

Tim Denee’s Dogs in the Bark

Sam’s Blades crewsheet Spirit Chasers

Sam’s Blades downtime hack Doskvol Breathes

Several zines by Aaron King of PBTA moves that exist outside of games: Reading the Apocalypse, PbtA23 January Digest, and PbtA23 February Digest

Socials:

Nychelle’s website, Twitter, and itch.

The Blades in the Dark Discord

Sam on Bluesky, Twitter, dice.camp, and itch.

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!

Thomas Manuel of the Indie RPG Newsletter and the Yes Indie’d podcast joins me to talk about Secondary Missions, a mechanic from Band of Blades by Off Guard Games.

In Band of Blades, a grim military fantasy forged in the dark game, you and your party go off and do missions. Meanwhile, there’s a whole other squad out there doing a whole other mission! What’s up with them? This mechanic tells us. It’s such a change in the mouthfeel of Band of Blades compare to other forged in the dark games.

We get into how it supports the genre and themes of the game, all the tough choices it puts in front of players, and how mechanics like this one that couldn’t exist in any other game are often our favorites.

It’s a classic Dice Exploder deep dive this week. Enjoy.

Further reading:

* Blades in the Dark

* Malazan Book of the Fallen

* Band of Brothers

* Darkest Dungeon

* The Watch

* Dream Askew // Dream Apart

Socials:

Thomas on itch and Twitter.

Sam on Bluesky, Twitter, dice.camp, and itch.

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!

This week I’m joined by Tasha Robinson, film editor at Polygon, Games on Demand aficionado, Golden Cobra honorable mentionee, and author of this excellent piece about today’s game and mechanic: Fall of Magic and the five and a half foot long handprinted scroll at its heart.

There’s a lot to say about such a unique physical object, and also a lot to cover about maps in RPGs at large. We get into all of it. Consider this the third part of the travel series this season opened with.

Pack your bags. It’s a heck of a journey.

Further reading:

* Fall of Magic by Ross Cowman

* Tasha’s article about Fall of Magic and City of Winter

* Tasha’s article about larps about AI

* Tasha’s archive on Polygon

* Tasha’s Golden Cobra honorably mentioned larp The Regency Committee on Decorum and Punchbowl Poop Prevention

* Rusalka by Nick Wedig

* Wild Beyond the Witch Light

* Doskvol Street Maps by Tim Denee

* Blades in ‘68 on Twitter

* Beak Feather and Bone, another mapmaking game from Possible Worlds Games

* Dread by Epidiah Ravachol

Socials:

Tasha on Bluesky and Twitter.

Sam on Bluesky, Twitter, dice.camp, and itch.

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

Join the Dice Exploder Discord to talk about the show!

In the year of our lord two thousand and twenty, many things occurred. But one of those things was the cultural event known as Blaseball.

Blaseball was, more or less, a simulated baseball league that ran one game an hour, one season a week, that players could bet on and then use their winnings to vote for global rules changes. It got... weirder from there. And bigger. And memeier. It became nothing less than a lifestyle.

And then, this past summer of 2023, it ended.

What made it such a phenomenon? What made its fans so passionate? Was Blaseball even a game? And what will we do with ourselves now that it’s gone?

This week Sam is joined by Chris Greenbriar, former moderator of the team discord for the Core Mechanics (that’s one of the teams from Blaseball) to reminisce and celebrate Blaseball’s legacy and everything that made it beautiful.

Further reading:

Blaseball’s website

The Blaseball fan wiki

The Seattle Garages bandcamp and the Fourth Strike Records website.

The Great Soul Train Robbery in both original two page and zine length.

Empires of EVE: the EVE Online history book series

17776, which we didn’t mention but which you should give a glance

Socials:

Join the Dice Exploder Discord if you need to talk with Chris directly.

Sam on Bluesky, Twitter, dice.camp, and itch.

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

This week Sam is joined by Jason Morningstar of Bully Pulpit Games, known for Fiasco, Night Witches, and many other excellent games.

Jason brought on transparency, a concept originating in the Nordic larp community, which describes the separation of player knowledge from character knowledge (similar to dramatic irony. We go through a whole library of example games in this one as we talk through genre, safety tools, playing to lose, and the deployment of secrets. Jason’s enthusiasm for this topic is infectious - there’s so much to think about here! If you’re listening and a designer, I’m pumped to hear what shenanigans you find to get up to with transparency in your own games.

Further reading:

The Mixing Desk of LARP

The Golden Cobra Challenge, live now!

The Fool’s Journey

Fiasco second edition

Welcome Guests

Paranoia

Bluebeard’s Bride

Montsegur 1244

Star Crossed

Socials:

Jason on Bluesky and dice.camp.

Bully Pulpit Games and their Patreon.

Sam on Bluesky, Twitter, dice.camp, and itch.

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!

Double the cohosts, double the mechanics, double the Kickstarters to back! This week, Sam talks with Kali Lawrie and Dan Phipps of Gem Room Games about Mork Borg by Pelle Nilsson and Johan Nohr: its graphic design and the Calendar of Nechrubel.

Mork Borg is famous for the absolute assault on the eyes [complimentary] committed by its graphic design. In this season of the podcast about how mechanics can be more than just rules, I really wanted to cover it. And who better to do that with me than Gem Room Games, authors of Dukk Borg, the mashup of Mork Borg and DuckTales? We talk about the look, comedy, and sheer commitment of Mork Borg in this double-stuffed episode.

Dukk Borg by Gem Room Games is on Kickstarter right now.

Further reading:

Mork Borg: https://morkborg.com/

Sam’s other favorite Gem Room Games game Subway Runners: https://gemroomgames.itch.io/subwayrunners

Socials:

Kali on Bluesky and Twitter.

Dan on Bluesky and Twitter.

Gem Room Games on Bluesky, Twitter, and itch.

Sam on Bluesky, Twitter, dice.camp, and itch.

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

Join the Dice Exploder Discord to talk about the show!

This week, Sam talks with Tan Shao Han about stress from Brinkwood by Erik Bernhardt, a character resource originally from Blades in the Dark by John Harper.

This is one of those episodes where to talk about the mechanic in question, we kind of have to talk about the whole-ass game around it because so much of Brinkwood is tied up in stress. And in this case, we really had to talk about two whole-ass games, because so much of what makes Brinkwood stress interesting is how a few small tweaks from Blades in the Dark ripple out through the design and lead to big changes in play.

Get ready for the full firehose of mechanics: this is an episode jam-packed with delicious, crunchy examples.

Further reading:

Brinkwood by Erik Bernhardt: https://brinkwood.net/

Blades in the Dark by John Harper: https://bladesinthedark.com/

The Blades in the Dark discord: https://discord.gg/uXwCKq3

Thoughts on Forging in the Dark by Small Cool Games: https://smallcoolgames.itch.io/thoughts-on-forging-in-the-dark

An Amateur’s Guide to Hacking Blades in the Dark by past cohost Michael Elliott: https://notwriting.itch.io/an-amateurs-guide-to-hacking-blades-in-the-dark

Socials:

Shao on Bluesky, Twitter, and his personal website.

Sam on Bluesky, Twitter, dice.camp, and itch.

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

Join the Dice Exploder Discord to talk about the show!

This week, Sam talks with his middle school buddy David Block about We Are But Worms: A One Word RPG, other lyric games, and experimental art at large.

Some topics discussed include:

* Art

* Games

* Poetry

* Lists

The best place to find David is on the Dice Exploder Discord.

But No More: A One Letter Supplement for We Are But Worms: A One Word RPG

You can find Sam on Bluesky, Twitter, dice.camp, and itch @sdunnewold.

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

This week, Sam talks with wendi yu about the Fate Point economy, a meta currency system from Fate by Fred Hicks and Rob Donoghue and published by Evil Hat. Some topics discussed include:

* Getting into storygames

* “Generic” RPGs

* When crunch kills the vibe

* The Hero’s Journey

* The (lack of) difference between rules and flavor

* Writing good aspects: it’s hard!

* wendi’s game here, there, be monsters!

You can find wendi on Twitter @wen_di_yu, and you can buy here, there, be monsters! digitally on itch or physically from SoulMuppet.

You can find Sam @sdunnewold on Bluesky, Twitter, dice.camp, and itch.io, and by subscribing to the Dice Exploder newsletter.

You can find Fate at Evil Hat.

The Dice Exploder logo is by sporgory, and the theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey.

Join the Dice Exploder Discord to talk about the show!

This week, Sam talks with Morgan Nuncio about cramped quarters, a move from Uncharted Worlds. Some topics discussed include:

* Travel in story games

* Making this move at the beginning, middle, or end of a scene

* Moves as training wheels

* Stonetop’s “keep company”

* Wanderhome

* For the Queen

You can find Mo on Twitter @SirenaBesos.

You can find Sam on Bluesky, Twitter, dice.camp, and itch @sdunnewold.

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!

This week, Sam talks with Clayton Notestine about hexagons and hex maps. Some topics discussed include:

* The birth of RPGs out of wargaming

* Avalon Hill’s hex map

* The vibes of different numbers

* Why hexes and not squares?

* The hex’s modularity

* How RPGs create stories in the fiction and at the table

* Leaving hexes empty

* Travel in RPGs

* Hex flowers

Clayton can be found @ClayNotestine on Twitter, @ExplorersDesign on Bluesky and dice.camp, at explorers.itch.io, and of course at explorersdesign.com. That’s also where you can get his sick layout templates and join the explorers design discord. I’ll see you in there.

You can find Sam on Bluesky, Twitter, dice.camp, and itch @sdunnewold.

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!

(Here’s a transcript of this trailer.)

That’s right, we are back next week with an all new season. It's 12 new episodes, 13 new co-hosts diving face first with me into the world of tabletop RPG design one mechanic at a time.

This is gonna be a season that's a lot about flavor and vibes and how those things themselves are fundamentally mechanics in these games. We've also got a trio of episodes about different ways to depict travel, and of course a few deep dives into crunchy grindy bits of games.

Our longest episode yet. Our shortest episode yet. Splorts!

Tell your siblings and your niblings! Join our Discord if you can’t wait that long.

See you soon.

This week, Sam talks with Ash Kreider about character creation picklists, a common feature of most (all?) PBTA games, as well as many others. Some topics discussed include:

* Character creation speed runs

* Gender lists

* Are pick lists mechanics?

* How Wanderhome doubles the length of its pick lists with This One Cool Trick

* Are pick lists poetry?

Games mentioned

* Apocalypse World

* The Watch

* Blades in the Dark

* Dream Askew // Dream Apart

* Maid RPG

* Wanderhome

* Space Train Space Heist

* Under Hollow Hills

You can find Ash at peachpantspress on itch and @wundergeek on Twitter. Their website is peachpantspress.com, or here’s direct links to There Is Only One Bed and Queer Sir.

You can find Sam @sdunnewold on Bluesky, Twitter, dice.camp, and itch.io

The Dice Exploder logo is by sporgory, and the theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey

Join the Dice Exploder Discord to talk about the show!

This week, Sam talks with Ryan Khan about Whispers, a player resource from The Wildsea by Felix Isaacs, but really about a whole bunch of mechanics from The Wildsea. Some topics discussed include:

* Setting as game design, and open ended lore

* Open ended prompts

* Twists vs Devil’s Bargains

* Player agency

* Long skill lists: pros and cons

Games mentioned:

* The Wildsea

* Apocalypse World

* Blades in the Dark

* Heart: The City Beneath

* Spire

You can find Ryan Khan on Twitter @theOneTrueK and on itch.io at the-one-true-ryan-khan.itch.io

You can find Sam @sdunnewold on Bluesky, Twitter, dice.camp, and itch.io, and by subscribing to the Dice Exploder newsletter.

You can find The Wildsea at thewildsea.co.uk

The Dice Exploder logo is by sporgory, and the theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey

Join the Dice Exploder Discord to talk about the show!

This week, Sam talks with Greg Soper AKA sporgory about Divine Favor, one part of the dice pool mechanic from Agon second edition by Sean Nittner and John Harper. Some topics discussed include:

- Having a family drama stapled to your character sheet

- Greek Gods: bad parents

- What makes hacking Divine Favor hard

- Endeavor

- Odyssey Aquatica

- All Quiet No Peace

- Starbones

- The setting elements mechanic from Dream Askew // Dream Apart

- ~HACKING LIVE ON AIR!!!~

You can find Greg on Twitter and itch.io at sporgory

You can find Sam @sdunnewold on Twitter, dice.camp, and itch.io

The Dice Exploder logo is by sporgory (!!), and the theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey

Join the Dice Exploder Discord to talk about the show!

This week on the Dice Exploder podcast, Sam talks with Ema Acosta about Change The World, a move from The Watch by Ash Kreider.

Some topics discussed include:

* The Watch: it’s depressing!

* The Watch and its gender dynamics

* A lot of people will never see this bit of design and that’s okay

* Balancing misery with hope and beauty

* “Just tell the players to do the thing”

* Inducing emotions from technical language

* “Rail shooter RPGs”

* Crying

Games mentioned:

* The Watch

* Night Witches

* Wanderhome

* Stewpot (currently unavailable)

* Our Traveling Home

* Blades in the Dark

* World Ending Game

You can find Ema’s games at ema-acosta.itch.io

You can find Sam @sdunnewold on Twitter, dice.camp, and itch.io

The Dice Exploder logo is by sporgory, and the theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey

Join the Dice Exploder Discord to talk about the show!

This week, Sam talks with Victor Lane about the Theorize move, originally from an idea by Oli Jeffrey and popularized in Brindlewood Bay by Jason Cordova. Some topics discussed include:

* The history of solving mysteries in RPGs

* The Three Clue Rule

* Jason Cordova’s blogpost discussing Oli Jeffrey’s original Theorize move

* Writing mystery stories VS reading or watching mystery stories VS playing a mystery RPG

* Bullshit

* Quantum villains

* Victor’s advice on running Brindlewood Bay (he’s got great tips)

* Structured surprise vs emergent surprise

* Mechanical clues, as distinct from diegetic clues

* The butler did it

* Complexity (the mechanic)

Games mentioned:

* Brindlewood Bay

* GUMSHOE

* Extreme Meatpunks Forever

* Apocalypse Keys

* The Between

* Fedora Noir

* Sleepaway

* Blades in the Dark

* Avatar Legends

* Thirsty Sword Lesbians

Movies and TV mentioned: Knives Out, Glass Onion, Murder She Wrote, Fedora Noir, Speed, Father Brown, Columbo, Poker Face, Agatha Christie

You can find Victor on TikTok and itch.io at ThisIsVictor. His website is thisisvictor.com.

You can find Sam @sdunnewold on Twitter, dice.camp, and itch.io

The Dice Exploder logo is by sporgory, and the theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey

Join the Dice Exploder Discord to talk about the show!

This week, Sam talks with Pam Punzalan about Devil’s Bargains, one part of the dice pool mechanic from John Harper's game Blades in the Dark. Some topics discussed include:

* Rulebooks as guidelines and play philosophy more than proper rules

* DBs as a safety tool

* Generic DBs

* Do DBs slow down the game? Is that good or bad?

* Retconning in RPGs (it's good)

* Putting DBs into any old game

* Our favorite DBs

Games mentioned:

* Blades in the Dark

* Navathem's End

* The Exiles

* Belonging Outside Belonging games such as Dream Askew // Dream Apart

You can find Pam on Twitter, dice.camp, and itch.io at TheDoveTailor. You can find their newsletter at thedovetailor.substack.com. Her website is thedovetailor.carrd.co.

You can find Sam @sdunnewold on Twitter, dice.camp, and itch.io

You can find Blades in the Dark at bladesinthedark.com.

The Dice Exploder logo is by sporgory, and the theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey.

Join the Dice Exploder Discord to talk about the show!

This week, Sam talks with Michael Elliott about Composure, a player resource mechanic from Ash McAllen’s game Antiquarian Adventures.

Michael is currently Kickstarting his game Nasty Brutish and Long, a simple RPG about lives complicated by revolution.

Some topics discussed today:

* Failure and conflict, why they're great, and mechanics that encourage players to embrace them

* Genre and mechanics that support it

* Simplifying mechanics when hacking, with Blades in the Dark as an example

* Passing the spotlight at the table

Games mentioned:

* Antiquarian Adventures

* Blades in the Dark

* Fiasco

Sam’s blog post whether conflict is necessary in RPGs

James Mendez Hodes’ website and blog

Pam Punzalan’s blog post “The Unbearable Otherness of a Global South Creator”

Asians Represent podcast on Twitter

Michael’s on Twitter, dice.camp, itch.io, and other places @NotWriting 

Sam is @sdunnewold on Twitter, dice.camp, and itch.io

The Dice Exploder logo is by sporgory, and the theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey

Join the Dice Exploder Discord to talk about the show!

This week’s cohost is Ray Chou, who brings Rolling The Dice from John Harper’s iconic one page RPG Lasers & Feelings.

Topics discussed include:

* Minimalism

* Underlining genre through mechanics

* Episodic vs serialized stories

* When you should roll dice

* Randomness and fate in real life

* Beer & pretzels gaming

Games mentioned:

* Lasers and Feelings

* Cows and Boys

* Honey Heist

* 316 Carnage Amongst the Stars

* Heart: The City Beneath

* Couriers

Sam’s designer commentary on his own Lasers & Feelings hack, Couriers, can be found here.

You can find Ray's publishing company at myth.works.

You can find Sam @sdunnewold on Twitter, dice.camp, and itch.io.

The Dice Exploder logo is by sporgory, and the theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey.

Produced by the Fiction First Network.