Did you know Dice Exploder, this blog’s very own podcast, is Kickstarting a third season in October? You can follow the launch page now!
And speaking of Kickstarters, this week on the podcast is Gem Room Games! The wonderful Kali Lawrie and Dan Phipps. Publishers of Subway Runners, The Weaver’s Observatory, and of course the hilarious Dukk Borg which is Kickstarting a print edition right now. It’s an absolute pleasure to have them on this week talking TWO mechanics: Mork Borg’s graphic design AND The Calendar of Nechrubel. Double the cohosts, double the fun!
But also, it feels strange to now count Kali and Dan as friends after the drama we got up to this spring, and stranger to have them on the show without mentioning any of it. If you were lucky enough to miss this one: I was a judge for this awards show, as a part of that I published an anonymous essay that that people read as me hating on Dukk Borg, and it became a whole thing.
We’ve all talked it out and publicly come to a happy conclusion, but I still think it’s weird to have them on the show without a fuller recounting of what happened from my perspective, what mistakes I made, and what I’ve learned from it all. Plus I love seeing people publicly talk about how and why they were wrong in good faith, and I might as well lead by example.
So if you’re curious, here’s the long version of The Awards, Dukk Borg, Gem Room Games, and me, plus a bunch of opinions about comedy in RPGs, criticism, and awards shows at large. And, of course, my full review of Dukk Borg.
The Awards
In 2022, I was a judge for The Awards, a new RPG awards show then in its first year. 20 winners, unranked and uncategorized. A wide variety of winning objects d’art. Us judges decided to not award anything that made six figures or more when crowdfunding. I think we took a good crack at recognizing a bunch of weirdo work on the edge of the hobby, and I’m proud of that. You can listen to me and a few other folks talk about our experiences with the show on the Liber Ludorum podcast.
I loved this experience. If you ever have the time and money to get together with eight strangers (or friends), read 200+ indie games in two months, and then talk about them for two more months, take it. You too will learn an unbelievable amount about yourself, your taste, and the indie RPG scene. If you’re then handing out awards afterwards, you might also make some people’s days.
Towards the end of the judging process, we collectively decided to write essays about all the winners. The idea was to not just assemble a cross section of all these public works that we loved but to spend some time engaging with them and taking them seriously. For reasons I never understood, we decided to publish these anonymously.
I wrote several essays, including one about Dukk Borg.
I’m not going to reprint that original essay here, but this is how it was structured:
I laid out a taxonomy of two kinds of comedy RPGs: those that create a system that tries to make space for comedy to happen at the table and those that are funny to read or otherwise full of written jokes.
I claimed it was a lot harder to create the first kind than the second, and that the first is much more likely to lead to good gameplay.
I put Dukk Borg in that second category, and laid out a number of criticisms I had of the game. I came down on it pretty hard.
Despite all that, I said I loved Dukk Borg (and that second category of game) as a piece of comedy writing if not as a game, and that I loved seeing comedy writing coming out of the RPG space.
I knew at the time I was being harsh on the game in order to try and make those last points: a game doesn’t have to be a good game for it to be a good and worthy piece of writing. And as a person working in comedy professional, a game-as-comedy-piece was something I’d love to see tons more of. Good thing I was anonymous and didn’t state my profession in the essay.
Anyway this thing got published, and Gem Room Games was disappointed to read it. It was a mean essay, and no one had told them that they’d signed up for anonymous critique. In retrospect, I enjoyed this tweet (rewritten from memory) from someone who I believe has since deleted their account: “We give out awards to the sixth graders I teach every year, and my favorite part is the moment when we whack them with a newspaper and tell them they did a bad job right before we give them their award.”
I heard about this pretty quickly but third hand. I was so confused. I thought I’d been clear how much I liked Dukk Borg. I decided not to worry about it.
Months later I happened upon an online conversation in which a dozen+ people dunked on this essay and its author for writing such a scathing critique of this game. I thought that was very interesting. That meant that this wasn’t going away, people were mad about it, it was going to affect The Awards in the future, and I had written an essay that didn’t actually convey the thing I had meant to convey.
Revisions
As one does, I stewed on this for a week. I reread the essay, found problems with it, rewrote a new version for my own peace of mind, and again decided to do nothing. What was I supposed to do, anyway? Break the blood pact of anonymity I had forged with my judge-siblings for reasons I still didn’t understand? Unfathomable. I decided I would instead stew in my own despair and regret for the rest of my life.
In my reflection, I came to several conclusions.
First, the idea that it’s harder to make a system that engenders comedy than it is to write a zine’s worth of jokes is ridiculous. I’d made the claim to try and strengthen my argument, but when I revisited it for two seconds, I decided it was trash. I worked at The Onion, I should know how hard many people have to work to come up with 12 passable headlines for the week. I was right in the middle of writing a packet for a late night show and struggling to come up with a single one liner joke I thought was anywhere close to funny. Are the skills of making a game that sets players up for comedy and of writing jokes different? Yes. Does that make one harder than the other? Dubious. As I wrote about two weeks ago, ranking this is probably a bad idea unless you admit what you’re doing is silly.
Second, there are several criticisms of Dukk Borg I make in that original essay that I do stand behind. I think it’s taking on a graphic design challenge even harder than Mork Borg’s by attempting to combine that style with the style of Saturday morning cartoons, and I don’t think it fully succeeds. The pages largely work for me taken individually, but they don’t cohere in total the way I’d like. But also: who’s going to ever match the quality of Mork Borg’s visuals?
Third, an awards show was not the place for this heavy of a critique. Mentioning this kind of thing off hand? Maybe. Focusing on the negatives for 3/4s the length of the essay? Not a great look. Awards shows at their best are supposed to be a celebration of the works they are awarding. A bunch of essays about a cross-section of the bleeding edge of the hobby might be a sick-ass annual thing, but if those essays are going to push against the goal of celebration, is it the best thing to pair with an Awards show? As my partner told me when I described all this to her: “Awards shows are silly, you should never have agreed to judge one, and including essays along with Awards that contain anything but praise seems like a terrible idea.”
Fourth, the source of criticism matters. All evidence suggests that for many readers, my piece didn’t convey the message I wanted it to convey. In that way, it wasn’t written as well as it should have been. But I suspect it read much more clearly if you know the author works in comedy professionally. And why were we anonymous again?
For my own peace of mind, I rewrote the essay to be clearer, just for myself.
Two months later, Gem Room Games reached out intending to just ask for the essay to come down. This drama had gotten out of hand in their spaces, too many people were grumbling about it, and they didn’t want their future Kickstarter mired in it. I immediately was like “yes, please, can we redo this essay so people actually understand what I meant in it?” and a day later we published my new essay.
Since then, I’ve heard from at least one person who thinks I was the one wronged here. From their perspective, I got bullied into retracting a perfectly reasonable essay because it was a little negative. If you feel this way, (1) I’m glad my original piece worked for you and (2) I see what you mean, but you are wrong. No one pressured me to do this rewrite. Dan and Kali are smart enough folks to not be offended by one bad review and just wanted all of us to get out from under the shadow of this drama. People involved with The Awards told me they would stand by me regardless. Honestly, more people in my life encouraged me to stand by the piece than retract it.
Now am a sad little gremlin boy who can’t sleep at the thought of anyone not liking me? Yes. Did that contribute to me rewriting this essay? Certainly. Maybe that does mean I was pressured into it. But I was the one who decided to rewrite it, and I did so to make it clear how much I wanted to celebrate Dukk Borg, not because my opinion buckled under pressure.
Because I do love Dukk Borg. It is worthy of celebration. It is not perfect, because art is not perfect, and because how could anything live up to the perfection that is the name “Dukk Borg” anyway? Or Mork Borg’s graphic design.
In conclusion: Kali and Dan rock, back Dukk Borg on Kickstarter, listen to this week’s Dice Exploder, and here is the essay on Dukk Borg that I do stand behind:
Dukk Borg Would Deserve An Award Even If It Was Just The Pun
Here’s a binary taxonomy for comedy games:
The first kind is designed to create a funny experience but may or may not be funny to read. Think Fiasco, a game of bad people getting in worse trouble, where the rules themselves are breezy in tone but still fairly technical. You get to comedy by playing the thing.
The second kind is more about funny writing. A text loaded up with jokes sets a comedic vibe, and ideally you ride that vibe into comedy at the table.
For me, I think the first of these categories is more effective for actually creating comedy at the table. Writing comedy is fucking hard, and it’s a lot easier to do when you’re given a set of rules and structures to help guide you towards comedic situations than to be told “write some jokes like these” and hope you’re playing with your coworkers at The Onion.
But. While I don’t think a text full of jokes and little structure often leads to a satisfying play experience, if the jokes are funny enough, who cares?
I don’t need a McSweeney’s article to give me eight sessions of story with my friends to get a satisfying amount of entertainment out of it. I think about It’s Decorative Gourd Season, Motherfuckers more than most full RPG campaigns I’ve run, and I’ve derived about as much joy from it. The part of the RPG community that has embraced lyric games understands this well; reading a text is just as valid a form of engagement as bringing it to a table, particularly in a hobby where most rulebooks are read an order of magnitude more often than they’re played.
To my mind, Dukk Borg belongs to that second category of game. While I’m sure it would run just fine using its parent game Mork Borg, I don’t have much interest in playing it. I suspect it would wear thin for me by the end of a four hour session. But again, who cares? This thing is fucking hilarious.
The duck skeleton on the character sheet. The “Merchant-Emperor’s Clan” artwork (the artwork is so bangin across the board). There’s jokes in the smallest details: fonts, text borders, and the map. Behold the two page spread dedicated to writing the DuckTales theme in the style of an RPG tome’s religious tome scrawl. Is this commentary on how we treat cartoons in America like religious texts? A loving parody of Mork Borg’s hyper-seriousness? Or “just” a shitpost? Yes. It is all these things.
Seeing this module when it was released was the reason I finally read Mork Borg and thought about playing it on its own merits. Like a lot of good parody, it helped me better understand the tone of the thing it was parodying. Any module that can do that, make me laugh out loud a half dozen times, and hold my attention for its full length (it’s the perfect length) has accomplished something impressive.
So. I’m not sure Dukk Borg makes it to the same level as the rest of our winners this year when it comes to play experience. Game design is hard! But I don’t know that Dukk Borg was ever going for that, and I don’t care if it was. Because you know what else is hard? Writing funny jokes. Dukk Borg succeeds wildly in that regard.
The hobby of indie RPGs has become so broad in the past few decades. You can play anything from Honey Heist to Stars Without Number to All Options (which I write about the merits of in another essay). Creators can contribute to the hobby in any number of media: game systems, supplements, adventures, art, podcasts, magazines, and dice-rolling apps. I’m delighted to recognize comedy in that list.