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!

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.

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…