Listen to this episode here.
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.
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
Transcript
Sam: Hello and welcome to another episode of Dice Exploder. Each week we take a tabletop mechanic and stuff it in our bindle. My name is Sam Donal and my co-host this week is Quentin Smith, AKA Quinns.
You probably know Quinns from Quinns Quest, his popular RPG review channel on YouTube. You may also know him from his former work at the premier board game review channel Shut Up and Sit Down, or his contributions to long form games journalism and People Make Games. In short he's one of the biggest analog games reviewers out there, and he's just a couple years into bringing his audience to RPGs.
So I wanted to have him on the show. I think Quinns is a smart guy, but we only get the occasional review out of him at Quinns Quest. So I thought maybe I could squeeze another out of him, you know? When I invite people on, I often send along a list of game mechanics I'm personally interested in eventually covering, and Quinns immediately jumped at the chance to talk about Mausritter's inventory system.
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 it's inventory system is the only inventory system I've ever actually liked. Does it work differently from other games? At a broad numbers, not really, but instead of writing down a list of crap, racing it over and over, and spending precious minutes, adding up item weights, Mausritter turns items into little cardboard squares, chits like board game pieces that you put in a grid on your character sheet.
It's so good. I hate tracking inventory until you turn it into a little toy that I can fiddle with. Quinns and I talk about all that, how the physicality of a game can completely transform your relationship to it and how this inventory system still feels like it's just barely cracking the door open on what could be something so much more.
and this is a great time for it Because for the rest of November, here it is still Mausritter month on BackerKit. If you like the sound of this little mice game, maybe head over to BackerKit and check out all the amazing adventures people are funding for it right now.
But with that, let's get into it. Thanks to everyone who supports Dice Exploder on Patreon, and here is Queen with Mouse writer inventory Tetris.
Quinns. Welcome to Dice Splitter. Thanks so much for being here.
Quinns: Sam. I'm excited. I'm a fan of the show and I'm ready to talk about inventories. God, what
Sam: Yeah,
Quinns: intro that sounds like
Sam: I just I've, this is one of those mechanics where I feel like inventory systems at large are so completely uninteresting to me that I'm excited to have found one that is really compelling to me so that I can like, tackle the topic at large.
But before we get into that, I wanna start with what's the game here? We're talking about Mausritter. What in your words is mouse Ritter? Pitch me it, like you're pitching it for game night.
Quinns: describe you the most important thing for the people at home before I get into what I would say to my players, which is if you wanna search for mouse riter, it's not spelled the way you expect. It's
Sam: Mm-hmm.
Quinns: Riter as well. So it's Mouse Knight in the onic tradition.
Sam: Mm-hmm.
Quinns: this is what I would say to my players now, mouse Riter is a game in the old school Renaissance tradition, meaning the school of role playing games that play like people think or want really classic role playing to
Sam: Mm
Quinns: like in the seventies.
So, That means that combat is often a failure state. Players are expected to use lateral thinking to get out of situations, which. May well otherwise kill your character. We're about as far away as we could be from like story gaming.
This is why I've never tried to define the old school renaissance on Quinns Quest 'cause it's frankly too much work and somewhat incoherent because despite the fact that it draws from lot of dungeons, there's a lot of a lot of high lethality play.
But at the same time, the old school Renaissance does have ideas on how to bring story and kind of lateral thinking into Dungeons.
Sam: Yeah.
Quinns: of which is to say Mouse Ritter is simple. It is creative, and you may well get yourself killed. What am I missing?
Sam: Did you do the part where your mice
Quinns: did I do the part? I probably didn't celebrate it enough. I recently did a Queen's Quest review where I described the old school Renaissance scene as, or like where I described fantasy RPGs in general as like crabs in a bucket, all trying to climb on top of each other, fantasy settings. And yet the fact that there are so many of them makes the scene feel like the furthest thing from fantastical. And a lot of members of the OSR community got very upset about that.
I will point out here on Dice Exploder that I didn't say this was like bad or that I didn't like the scene. Just that a lot of these games failed to distinguish themselves even though they're great designs from great designers.
Mouse
Sam: Yeah.
Quinns: we can celebrate because it actually does stand out because you play mice and while there have been
Sam: Yeah,
Quinns: role playing games where you play mice, but Mouse Riter stands apart even from those because its aesthetic is so beloved and strong and
Sam: yeah,
Quinns: Crunchy. And I'm absolutely here for it. Like
Sam: Yeah.
Quinns: I just think it immediately is very transportive to a group of players to say, you ought to play mice. And if rats coming towards you, like everybody understands that.
Sam: Yeah, there's two things on that note that I feel like are really what sets mouse reader apart from me. The first is I think it's so interested in the texture, like the physicality of the game. Like it comes in a box, we're gonna get into the inventory chits and the rip away character sheets here.
But even like the cover of the book has this like a hole cut in it and it's like you're looking through a tree stump at the mouse inside and you fold it out and the art like, expands like it's such a physical product and like, that's one of the things I really wanna dig into today.
Quinns: and
it, it's got like heft as well in terms of like, um, yeah, as a product because these are boxes, these are like thick card back books that even though the font is quite large and there's not necessarily a lot of text on the pages, it wants
Sam: well,
Quinns: up space. And I feel that heft is also contained in the mechanics where there this is a game which really wants to do a lot with very few rules and that's why we're
Sam: Yeah.
Quinns: system. But also one of my favorite things in the game is how it deals with factions. Especially if you
Sam: Hmm.
Quinns: of the campaigns that come from Mouse ri, it really wants your campaign to be a sandbox where there are several antagonists. And just by doing I think little more than rolling a D six, those antagonists work towards plots that a rule that is like barely longer than a few sentences is
Sam: Yeah,
Quinns: world a lot of life.
Sam: yeah. we're gonna get into all that, but the other thing that I wanted to call out upfront is I think Mouse Ritter is maybe it's maybe the best OSR game for conveying the play style of OSR.
I'm taking this bit entirely from my friend Idle Cartulary who like reviewed Meguey and talks about it being like, when you sit down at a table to play Dungeons and Dragons to do like a classic like Knights go and fight dragons kind of game, everyone expects that to be like very high pulpy. Like the Knights are gonna kill the dragon. But that's really not what OSR play is about. It's much more that highly lethality like the world is dangerous and scary thing you were saying earlier.
And like when people sit down at the table and they're mice and you're like an owl flies at you. Like they know that the owl is going to eat those frigging mice, right? Like the owl is a dragon. Like That's what the thing is. But like the metaphor of we are mice going up against an owl fits the play style much better than knight going up against a dragon.
Quinns: so right. If I've got a table of players, I actually had this just recently playing a shadow dark to use play adventure that wasn't even shadow dark. But when I was sitting my
Sam: Mm-hmm.
Quinns: down to have this fantasy adventure, I had to give them a little spiel of okay, now this isn't gonna be like other fantasy games you played. You
Sam: Yeah. Yeah.
Quinns: You maybe wanna think twice before getting into a fight. And you're totally right. I haven't considered this, but mouse Ritter, you don't say a word as the gm, the players just get it. We're mice, we're small by definition.
Sam: Yeah. And this is a topic for another episode that I'm hoping to record later this year with Id I think that's like a great way of demonstrating the way that like a game's flavor is also a part of, its like mechanical package, right? When you switch the flavor from traditional high fantasy to mice, the way players approach the game also changes.
Quinns: I had a player just this week talking about, we were talking about character sheets and he
Sam: Mm-hmm.
Quinns: before the GM has even started speaking, the players are already learning the game
Sam: Yeah.
Quinns: sheet. And I think like
Sam: Yeah.
Quinns: playing game community is starting to figure this stuff out now because it's a community made up of genius designers. But
Sam: Yeah.
Quinns: the cover of the book, the GM screen, if there is one, the character sheets, all of this stuff is actually like part of the players doing what they have to do, which is going to school to learn whatever the
Sam: Yeah.
Quinns: about to do.
Sam: Shout out to my Dice Explorer episode on character sheets that I did with Emanoel Melo last year. People should go listen to that. And also shout out to the Mausritter character sheet, which I think is extremely good. In part because it comes on a tearaway pad of character sheets. Talk about also conveying the, like high potential lethality of the game. You're literally given a pad of a hundred character sheets to go through in the box.
Quinns: never seen a character sheet with this much space to draw your character. And
Sam: Yeah. And people love that.
Quinns: my players are doodling that stuff all the time. I've also never seen such a good portrait frame for it, because usually at best you get like a box or I'm
Sam: Yeah.
Quinns: at the minute, which gives you an ID card to draw your character in. But in
Sam: Uhhuh.
Quinns: have a mouse hole which the old mouse is emerging from, and that's super
Sam: Yeah. Yeah. I love a character sheet with a ton of blank space on it like that because it also makes it like very clear what are the things that are gonna mechanically matter in this game. Like fully half the character sheet is taken up by the inventory system that we're like about to describe. It's like really wants to foreground that.
But I wanna, on the subject of the character portrait space here, I think it being a game where you play mice also really frees people up to do that doodling Like, I think people feel really self-conscious when they like, can't capture the human face very well. Like the standards of it are so much higher. But I've never had people not doodle their mice and be like, it looks great. You know, like,
Quinns: yeah. Wow. This is um, I hadn't considered that this is so welcoming in terms of its rules, in terms of its industry and also like it being
Sam: yeah,
Quinns: can draw a mouse, go on,
Sam: yeah, anyway I wanna talk about the inventory here. So, I mean, like, I just Pulled the tearaway pad of character sheets out of my box of mouse Ritter, and to do so, I had to sift past the hundreds of chits, inventory little objects that the game comes with.
Do you wanna describe for us, like what the inventory system looks like on the character sheet and how these external to the sheet objects fit into it?
Quinns: had love to. So the inventory you have on your sheet is divided into squares of a standardized size. You have an inventory with six slots of squares. And this is relevant and you're not gonna think it is, but it's mostly what I'm gonna talk about. That grid is two by three. So you get two rows, 1, 2, 3, then 4, 5, 6. You also have squares for what is in your hand, or as the game says your main pore, there's two slots for your body. There's your off pore. And then the game also comes with, as you say, a bunch of these chips, which all depict items you might have. So in the corset that's maybe a dagger or a torch or aroon that lets you cast little mice spells.
The magic system in this game is something we could probably do a whole dice exploiter about 'cause it
Sam: Yep.
Quinns: there's juice there. Or if you look at something I have have next to me right now, which is. The mouse riter boxed campaign set the estate, every adventure in that comes with its own sheet of little tearaway tokens. So if players gonna pull some random items out here. They might have a plump mushroom or a moth larvae or a bath bomb or a glowing tomato, or a book page. And then each of these are chits
Sam: Oh
Quinns: into your character sheet. But also your conditions in mouse riter are also chits. So from the
Sam: yes.
Quinns: be hungry, injured, frightened, exhausted and when you become, for example, exhausted, you are gonna rip away a little square of that sheet and place it on your inventory, meaning you can now carry less. So rather than being able to carry six items in your backpack, 'cause you're a weak, frail little mouse who really needs to lie down, you are instead going to be able to hold less items.
Sam: Yeah. Yeah. I think this is God, where do we even wanna start here? Yes.
Quinns: I was really excited that you suggested that we talk about this specific system for this episode, because two things, right? Listen up. First off, I love this. I think this is really good. I actually more than just finding it delightful. I think it's important to RPG design
Sam: Yeah.
Quinns: more designers to pull from it. Also, I think it is a massive missed opportunity. I think it is a
Sam: Mm-hmm.
Quinns: of the system that I actually wanna see. I may be overselling my feelings towards that, but
Sam: Yeah. Yeah. It's fun to take a strong stance. Yeah.
Quinns: to take a strong start. It's someone else's podcast. I'm gonna, come on, I'm gonna, I'm gonna throw a brick through your window and then I'm gonna leave.
Sam: Yeah. Um,
Quinns: Instinctive feelings
Sam: yeah. So, I looked at this system and I'm gonna walk through my, like, initial reactions. A couple of years ago when I first encountered it.
My first reaction was, hell yes. Like, this is so cool. I just wanna like, take the little squares and put them on the little spots. Ooh, that feels so nice.
My second thought was, this is mechanically identical to an inventory system that's like, kind of interesting, but like, I don't give a shit about this. Right, right. Like,
Quinns: from I believe Cairn, which has been the
Sam: yeah,
Quinns: of OSR games where you have a really limited number of slots, but in, can you
Sam: yeah,
Quinns: down the name of like Healing Potion and then that is one of the slots in your inventory.
Sam: exactly. This is exactly what I was gonna say. And then, in Cairn, if you know a spell and you cast a spell, you probably get a level of exhaustion and the exhaustion goes into an inventory slot just like it does in Mausritter, I think mater's innovation on the conditions front, is that having more conditions than just exhausted?
But like, fundamentally it's the same thing. And I like, don't give a shit about this inventory system at all when it's in Cairn. Right? Like something about the, like, turning it into a tactile thing is the thing that makes me go from another thing where I have to track all my stuff? Like, can't I just like, play the game to like, I cannot wait to like get the physical version of this game and mess around with it.
And then once I have gotten this to the table, like I, I run one shots of this fairly often at my local one shots meetup and it always goes over great people love the little inventory chits. And then like, almost no one uses the inventory system even during play, but just having the little chits there to fiddle with, like, they're like Settlers of Catan roads that you can like build little stacks out of. That is just something people like, like it keeps them focused so they could fiddle with it.
Like, yeah,
yeah,
Quinns: mouse riter one shot occasionally, and when you play it, your players, you, so typically I haven't played mouse Ri
But when you are running it, your players don't put their chits on the slots on the
Sam: they, put the chits on the slide. Well, like this is how it goes down, right? You do character creation.
Quinns: worked up by this. Okay.
Sam: you randomly roll your, your stats, you roll your hp, you roll your Pips, which is the games currency, and then your HP and your Pips randomly give you a character background, like a ex gambler or something or a current gambler. And then that background gives you your starting inventory, right? So you get to choose a weapon and people will like, sift through the pile and like grab a dagger, right? And then they also get like a set of loaded dice and like a hand mirror or something,
And then they like take those chits, those are like custom ones. So they get to like write those down. They put the Chis on the, the inventory system, and they also have torches and rations. Everyone starts with torches and rations and they put those in there. And then we start playing and that's it.
Like, like do the conditions come up in play? Occasionally maybe do people look at their inventory and say like, I pull out my dice and like do the thing. Maybe. That does occasionally happen, but like for the most part, people just like look up from their sheets and start engaging in the back and forth of like playing through an adventure.
And so they've got this there in front of them. It's this like great table setting of like getting to know the character and like playing this little like mini game of like assembling the board for them. But then it's like that gets it out of their system, you know, it's like it's there if they wanna look down to it. If they're stuck, maybe they look back to the inventory system.
And I think that that's generally like a great use of an inventory system, like get outta your way. But it's there as a prompt if you need it. And like mouse Ritter being physical chits in squares instead of like tiny scribbled doodles on a compressed character sheet makes that easier.
But fundamentally the way mouse Ritter functions as a game is almost like the game doesn't happen, like the game disappear, the rules of the game disappear. And what we are doing is I am telling you about the two little prick rats who are running the outpost you've come to and you are yelling up at them and I'm yelling down at you.
And like, that's the game
Quinns: Okay.
Sam: like.
Quinns: But so with the, with the module, you, what model do you run and does it have its own custom sheet of these little boutique tokens?
Sam: Yeah, I typically run a module called The Lonely Oak, written by dice Exploder, discord moderator, Victor Lane uh, which I really like. It's like 20 pages long. They're tiny little pages. can get it on itch for free, I believe. And I really like the setup for this. It does not come with custom chits although it does have suggestions for some in various locations and the game comes with like blank condition Chis that you can like write in your own.
Quinns: Okay, gotcha. So we're coming at this from a funky angle, right? Because
Sam: Yeah.
Quinns: you are all about this module that you really like, which does not have the custom art. On the other hand,
Sam: Yeah.
Quinns: haven't played mouse richer is the estate, which is the box set that looks so exciting. It, it caused me to acquire the estate and the base game. And it comes with 12 dungeons and each of those dungeons is made by a different designer and it all takes place, this is why it's called the estate, in a big detached house in the countryside. So one adventure is like you going into a grandfather clock and in another is you going into the shed where there's a cult that's been
Sam: Yeah,
Quinns: a mouse. And you can explore all these places, but every one of these adventures has its own sheet with really. I need the people at home listening to Imagine how exciting this is. Each of these sheets is in a different lovely color, and it is covered with illustrations of stuff that you might find. Like
Sam: yeah,
Quinns: in a
Sam: yeah. I.
Quinns: clock has two items that kind of resemble swords, which are an hour hand and minute, hand of the clock. And then because they're large, they are two squares by one. In that same adventure, you could find glowing liquid blueprints and acorn scissors.
But the difference, like if, if I was describing this to you as stuff you could find in a dungeon in a more ordinary game, we have to write down your inventory. These items are not necessarily exciting, but having
Sam: Yeah.
Quinns: and if you do multiple
Sam: Yeah.
Quinns: having items that have different colors because they come from different adventures, like that is the color of the sheet for each dungeon is also a color reference for like, where did I get this from? Oh yeah, that tree that we went into that was on fire and all the
Sam: Yes,
Quinns: But when I
Sam: yes.
Quinns: at this game from a funky direction, you've played an adventure module that you like that doesn't have these items and I probably won't run
Sam: Yeah.
Quinns: 'cause I don't love the dungeon design, but I am desperate to use these items because
Sam: Yeah. Well.
Quinns: are maybe the best thing that come with the estate.
Sam: I think that strength of this inventory system and something that I've been thinking about a lot lately as a game designer and a player, which is the difference between stuff that exists in a game that is there to be like aspirational for that to like, like excite you about playing or excite you about going to a particular place in a dungeon or like to be aspirational versus stuff that you're gonna be like using all the time actually when you're playing the game.
And an inventory system typically feels like something that you're gonna be using all the time. And then in practice it's just like annoying bookkeeping that like it, it's certain styles of play, it does come up more often, but a lot of the time it in the kind of classic dungeon delving that I have done, people just don't care, you know.
Whereas when you make those little grandfather clock hands on little cardboard cutouts, suddenly it's not just you want to run the estate really bad, it's also your players want to go get those things. Like it. It makes it like those things matter, even if they then never come up in play. Like even if your, players never get their hands on those grandfather clock hands, and even if you never get mouse riter to the table, like those things matter.
Quinns: a hundred percent. I'm working, well, I'm not working on it, but I'm looking at a review of a game for Quinns Quest in 2026 that I had a peculiar time reading the book because it's gonna sound crazy. It's just fun. Like, there's stuff in the book that's just fun.
And it's not, that doesn't mean it's like a lighthearted game or the theme of it isn't quite dark. It just means that it's like, it, it, it was just this moment where I was, I was reading it in bed and I sort of sat up against my pillows a little bit because I was like. Jesus, when was the last time I read something that was just this straightforwardly joyous.
Sam: Yeah.
Quinns: ma feels to me, like getting these items that are
Sam: Yeah.
Quinns: a little picture and inside the material little inventory that's just so pleasing. But also
Sam: Yeah.
Quinns: like a fun bit of like history here because loot and now I'm like getting really highfalutin and I'm gonna disappear up my own ass. But
Sam: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Quinns: is part and parcel of the source material that the OSR is drawing from, right? Like in the
Sam: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Quinns: you leveled up by how much you could steal that wasn't bolted down and getting valuable treasure. And you can mechanize that. You can be like, Hey, if you find this necklace, it's worth a hundred gold pieces. And if you go and sell it, you can buy other things and you, you can have more choice. But this takes that foundational, maybe even forgotten about, but nonetheless, unavoidable foundation stone of the OSR, which is loot and items, and gives the players a reason to care.
Sam: Yeah.
Quinns: that like Ludo narrative uh, not dissonance, like assonance. That's not the worst
Sam: resonance. Yeah.
Quinns: go. Boom., Lead a narrative resonance that they're playing a character who's, why are they doing this dangerous thing? Why are they going to this dangerous place? Well, at least partially it's to get treasure and then giving up
Sam: Yeah.
Quinns: That moment of joy when they unplug the minute hand from the grandfather clock and you hand them a token with an item, like you say, that might never come up in a, an adventure as a solution to a puzzle. They might never sell it and turn it into pips, but they will have it on their sheet, and that can just make them happy.
Sam: Well, and the way you're saying that too, like, when that gambler like gets those set of loaded dice during character creation, that puts the little thought into their head, I'd like more cool things, like maybe I should go into a dungeon and like look around for stuff, you know? I wanna get into some more of the like, details of the, like, choices here, like really granular, because I also think that it's not just that like the little chits look cool and are exciting and like brightly colored and all of that. The, like, color coding, even in the base game, I think is really good. You have these sort of standard cream beige colored, rations and torches and kind of normal items, but then the, injuries, the exhaustion, the conditions are all like bright orange and really stand out and like, it makes you want to go get this off my sheet.
Quinns: Yeah.
Sam: know, like, and you mentioned earlier that like color coding, the items from particular estate modules lets you like, remember where you got those items. I think that's like a fun thing. But I also think the, like the number of slots is really well chosen.
the six inventory grid is like a nice stable number, but it is also like really pretty small. It's like not many things. Like in Cairn you have like a 10 inventory slot and.
Quinns: even in Cairn I could be wrong, but I think it might scale with your strength in can as well.
Sam: Oh yeah, it, I certainly, there are other games
Quinns: Yes,
Sam: this genre where that is how it functions. And technically in mouse, you know, you have 10 slots, right? You have main paw off paw, body body, six slots in your backpack. But it feels like you just have six slots because they visually chunked it out so nicely for you in a way where, like in Cairn, it's all clumped together in one section that makes it harder to parse.
And that like only six slots actually in your backpack, feels really appropriate because your small little mice, mice, you know, yeah, you just can't carry very much. But it also means I can actually remember everything I'm carrying because I can remember six things. I can't remember 10 things.
Quinns: Yes. Now, okay, so agreed that this is cute. And I think it's important because any system that can take some of the most awful shit in role playing, which is in terms of at least new players getting involved and trying first time,
Sam: Yeah.
Quinns: is that awful onboarding of rules and
Sam: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Quinns: and immediately just deletes it and not only deletes it, not only makes it so you
Sam: It inverts it, it makes it the exciting part. It's the draw of the game is like putting these in front of people.
Quinns: Yes. And so for that reason, I, I think this isn't just cute, it is genuinely important.
Sam: Yeah.
Quinns: same
time, If, if we got to the point that we can complain about
Sam: Yes, yes.
Quinns: okay, so complain isn't the right word because this to me feels like, like a great first draft of a system that I wanna see in other games. But, so like, made a
game where, like you say, like the point of the game, I mean, depending on your, your mileage may vary, but certainly if I was running it, I'd wanna celebrate this, which is maybe the coolest individual part of a system.
Sam: Mm-hmm.
Quinns: and I don't think the game they've designed celebrates it systemically.
Sam: Mm-hmm.
Quinns: when we talk about the OSR, you said when your players are playing this, they don't necessarily look down at their inventories a lot. Right. But
Sam: Yeah.
Quinns: games that I've chosen to celebrate on Queens Quest, so that's Mythic Bastian land and mothership, the items in those games have been overwhelmingly important.
And truly like, yes, you might not use a particular item. but I don't know. I think about like one of my characters who spawns in mothership and on the random table they had a six pack of beer and then that ended up becoming this like, laughable thing initially, but then a six pack of beer you can do quite a lot with
Sam: Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Quinns: of role playing because other players kept asking for a beer and she would be like, no, sorry, that's my last one. But then they would, she would produce another one later
Sam: yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.
Quinns: a tin of beer if you think creatively, I mean, in the game, my players ended up emptying the beer and filling it with nitroglycerin. But, the item design in, in the OSR, like it wants to be broad rather than specific. So whatever circumstance your players are in, they can come up with a use for it. And I think this is
Sam: Mm-hmm.
Quinns: magic items or mothership being sci-fi is really beneficial because if my players have a remote control drone or a pack of C
Sam: Yeah.
Quinns: you know, or a magic item that functions basically as either of those two things, then you can get creative and
Sam: Yeah.
Quinns: all of the like, colorful design of a lot of its items. there's only so many ways you can use an acorn, There's only so
Sam: Mm-hmm.
Quinns: can use a tuning fork. And so they have, got the spotlight pointed at this system, and then there's no actual sort of dancing on the stage. If I can really labor that analogy.
Sam: Yeah, I mean, I wonder, how much of that for me is just my play style, a GM and like the scenes that I am setting up and the scenes that I'm interested in. Like, I wonder if I'm just not encouraging that or I'm playing with players who are not used to trying to make interesting creative use of objects.
'cause I think sometimes like the fun of the game is not just that the six pack of beer is flexible, but also in doing the like, thinking of like, okay, how can I use this six pack of beer to get past a locked door? You know, like doing that kind of creative thinking.
Quinns: well,
I, I'm kind of gonna save you here because you're like, oh, maybe I'm not GM it. Right. I think.
Sam: no, it's not that I think I'm jamming it wrong to be clear. Right?
Quinns: in, in
Sam: Yeah.
Quinns: games should be gMed. But the point I was gonna make is that when you look at the items that come with mouse riter,
they're like the bare bones of what you'd expect from a dungeon delving game. It's like you can have a boat or a knife, some rations or a torch. You can have armor. You can have the spells. And the spells are interesting and I'm a huge fan of them. But that's for another dice explode episode.
But then you look at the adventure that comes in the mouse box, which is honey in the rafters it has a lot of candy themed items. Like you can have a candy cane, but that's a club. You can have a sugar shiv that's a knife. have a slow fall pedal. That's interesting.
But part of the problem they run into here, I think, is that the thing with mice is that my mouse sized objects are not as multifaceted as,
what mothership can get to with a sci-fi game where a single object in your hand could do like eight different things.
Sam: Yeah, I'm skimming through the like, list of starting items here and it is a lot of like, that's another knife. That's another knife. Like that's, a cook pot. Yeah, that's another cook pot. And then occasionally you do get something really interesting, right? Thread, a spool of thread.
Quinns: but that's your rope, right? That is like the,
Sam: Oh yeah, you're right. You're right.
Quinns: there is nothing
Sam: Yeah. Yeah,
Quinns: OSR than that. And the
reason that rope and 10 foot poles are interesting is 'cause there is a lot of stuff you can do with them, but I don't think that the mouse designers have thought like, okay, why is the rope in the 10 foot pole and like, you know, the light source, why are those such interesting things to play with in the OSR?
Sam: yeah,
Quinns: what can we do that's like that
Sam: totally.
Quinns: like eight different uses.
Sam: Totally. Yeah. And I think, we should talk about, I don't want to get too deep into the spells, but I do think the spells the way they work, you get like a tablet that's one item in your inventory and you can cast the spell in the tablet and that maybe takes up a use or two or three of the tablet. Typically they have three uses and then they are discharged. You can't use them again until you do some sort of little mini side quest to recharge them. Like they need to bathe in moonlight while at the bottom of a river, or you need to plug them into an electrical outlet or like, whatever the thing is.
Right.
Quinns: And
I like that because it forces your players to be on the lookout for opportunities to do those
Sam: yeah.
Quinns: It's a
Sam: Yeah.
Quinns: quest, but without a location. Like they're often locational based side quests where you need to be in a place or in a
Sam: Yeah.
Quinns: but it's up to the players to create those situations. And ideally you're doing that in the dungeon, so like, can
Sam: Yeah.
Quinns: some of the bark of this tree that we're in so the moonlight gets in here? And I think that's just juicy.
Sam: Yeah. And I, think that those spells tend to be flexible in the way that you are looking for from the items. Right.
Quinns: Yeah.
Sam: I'll also say on the nature of the little side quest there, the way you get rid of conditions in this game is by doing some sort of little side quest.
Like in the adventure that I like, you can get covered in tree sap, and the way you get rid of the tree sap is to take a bath and like, okay, maybe you just go back to the inn and take a bath, but maybe you're like looking around the little dungeon for a pool of water that you can wash off in. Right.
Quinns: I've just
seen the starter adventure again, honey in the rafters. Um, hadn't seen this before. So you can get the condition, foggy eyes and you
Sam: Mm-hmm.
Quinns: by staring at the sun for an hour. But then it also says do a willpower save or gain blind condition. And
Sam: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Quinns: cannot see all attacks impaired. And you clear the blind condition with the tears of a fairy, which is a fabulous, like, playful, silly thing to put in front of players. That's a
great start adventure thing.
Sam: yeah. I love the like, chain of conditions there too, like that you can imagine that just becoming the whole main a plot of the adventure. It's like, we gotta make this guy not blind anymore.
Quinns: really nice. Yeah. okay. So now, so long as I'm like looking at the system and getting so overexcited that I criticize it, right? I don't think this is a criticism because I don't think, what I'm about to describe is what Mausritter should have done. Mouse rid is a straightforward game where like sometimes an item takes up two slots.
But I cannot look at this game and see that they've got some items like big weapons or armor that take up two slots 'cause it's like a two by one rectangle. Want someone to make the role playing game that does resident evil four and five style inventory management. Like did you
Sam: Yeah,
Quinns: about that when you were looking at
Sam: a hundred percent. Immediately it's like the third thought right after this is so cool. And wow, if this wasn't chits, I'd be bored with it.
Quinns: you want to just I'm, I'm always in my work trying to like think about, welcome people in, do you wanna describe Resident Evil inventories to people who might not have played those games?
Sam: mean, I actually haven't played Resident Evil, so what I think of is like Diablo two inventory management, which I believe works fairly similarly where you're picking up items just like you are here, but each one is taking up different slots. So some of them are like two by three, squares.
Some of them are like five by one squares. You have like a five by 10 inventory grid, and you're like, trying to carry the most valuable magic items that you've picked up from slayed demons, like back to town, so you can sell them, but that requires doing some Tetris to like, make everything fit in your inventory properly.
Quinns: is fabulous. this might sound annoying and I can only describe it as simply not at least in the hands of the right
Sam: Mm-hmm.
Quinns: but finding a rocket launcher in Resident Evil and being like, oh my God. And then you open up your inventory and it's just the longest item and you are like,
Sam: Yeah.
Quinns: God.
The thing with Resident Evil though is that in Diablo, you ultimately, like, you, it's like packing a suitcase and then you go back to town and you just unload everything and then you have an empty inventory, then you go back out with
Sam: Yeah.
Quinns: You are in a constant process of juggling this stuff around. It's like
Sam: Yeah,
Quinns: and then if you want to leave something behind, it's, it's, you know, just gone.
Sam: Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Quinns: of course it uses a grid based system Exactly. Like mouse Riter and Yeah, I think so. You and I are both just fantasizing about the game where the items are like awkwardly shaped. And you have to
Sam: yeah,
Quinns: who's going what. Also this game,
Sam: yeah.
Quinns: Crying out for a character. Well, again, maybe not this game, maybe just the game in my imagination. But I am desperate for character classes. or maybe a mule that is a
Sam: Uhhuh.
Quinns: like let's say the mule is, too high and four wide, whereas the characters
Sam: Yeah.
Quinns: three wide, which means if you ever find an item that's four squares long, it has to go on the mule or it has to go to the
Sam: Yeah.
Quinns: is differently
Sam: Yeah.
Quinns: And I just, I, I would love the moment as a GM to give my players a chi that long and be like, how are you gonna
Sam: Yeah, yeah,
Quinns: even
Sam: yeah. Good luck kids. Yeah,
Quinns: but just have them look at their inventories and go, it
Sam: yeah,
Quinns: like, well then I guess you can't
Sam: yeah, yeah. The, it does some um, interesting stuff, even in the base game, like one of the suits of armor and like a shield, I wanna say that you can get is two squares wide, but it's two squares wide with like a little extra in the middle so that it fits perfectly on the body and the off paw squares, which are not exactly next to each other on the sheet. And so you can't actually fit that in your inventory in two squares. You can only fit it in aha and body.
And I can imagine the situation where you get a four or even a five by one thing. And it's like, yeah, okay, this is taking up three of your backpack slots and also a body slot and a main pause slot. 'cause you,
But you know, I think the problem here is the total number of objects issue, right? Like, first of all, there's like a production problem. It'd be really hard to like, make items on a tearaway sheet like this that are different shapes. Yeah,
Quinns: gonna ruin my blue sky thinking where the world is. Great. And I can play the game I want
Sam: I know, I know. Well,
Quinns: actual problems.
Sam: know, I know, but like, I am gonna do that. But the other, the other thing is like, if you have like a bigger grid, then you can fit more things in there. And I have to remember more things and I don't care again, you know,
Quinns: you
think so? I think I, would if I,
was playing this game
and. Like I would a hundred percent If this game had character classes and it's like you could be a fencer who
Sam: Mm-hmm.
Quinns: much. I'm in that game. I'm not choosing the character class where it's like, you are a bit slow, but you've got a bigger inventory. I want to play the character class that can't fight at all and just carry stuff. Like, I wanna be a porter,
Sam: Yeah.
Quinns: play a role playing game where I've just got a four by four inventory. I'm carrying everything. And what I do in combat is throw potions or weapons to, and throw books.
Sam: at people. Yeah.
Quinns: Like, like basically. But, but that has real world precedent. It's not absurd. 'cause that's what
Sam: Uh,
Quinns: right? Like they just carried the night's shit and
Sam: Uh,
Quinns: when they needed
Sam: yeah. Yeah, totally. I mean, yeah. And like I think, I think I would still be enamored with the system, but I think a more complicated grid would make it harder for my brain to keep track of what was in my inventory. so I would keep the sort of aspirational parts of the mechanic, but it would get muddier in the, like, usage at the table.
Part for, for me personally.
Quinns: For me, if we're talking about my dream game, in this sort of like, desert art and discs of the mind,
Sam: Uhhuh.
Quinns: game that so centers this inventory system, that it discards other parts of the rule set.
Like I,
Sam: Yeah. Yeah.
Quinns: want stats, I just want items. And then I want to figure
out how to carry and,
what to carry
Sam: and the, the game that is entirely about that, even at the expense of like dungeon delving, you know, that's like the, the game that's like, okay, here's your pile of treasure. What are you taking home? Like, that game is also really appealing to me. Like I, I think inventory systems are interesting in that I think for the most part they want to get out of the way.
Like intuitively it feels like the role of an inventory system should be to get out of the way so you can do the quote unquote real thing. And if the game said no, no, no, no, no, this, this whole game is doing inventory Tetris. Like if the game is about packing your car, like if the game is about dec
Quinns: Yes. No, there needs to be a car in the middle of the table or like a horse, which is
Sam: Exactly.
Quinns: of your
things. Yeah.
Sam: Yeah. If, the point of the game is dealing with the inventory system instead of the point of the game being like exploration into interesting dungeons of which inventory system is like one component, then I, I am much more on board with your Blue sky dream.
Quinns: I, I think that's kind of what I'm thinking about. But of course, the point you make about, like, ideally inventory systems just get outta the way.
Sam: Yeah.
Quinns: Not mention, you know, the, I believe it Blades in the Dark created it, but I could be wrong there. But, other games, have run with where you decide what you're carrying later. You wanna decide if I'm,
Sam: Yeah.
Quinns: carrying loads of stuff, which means I can decide on the six things I've got, and I will decide that later. That's just
Sam: Yeah.
Quinns: clean.
Sam: I, I love the way that, Blades does this to some extent. I know Trophy Gold does this to some extent of you, like lock in some of your inventory and then you have some quantum inventory and because like the, the best part of the mass reader inventory system, when you are actually in the middle of play, is that ability to be like, huh, I don't know what to do here.
I guess I will look down and see what I'm carrying. And when your entire inventory is quantum, you can't do that, right? You have to just go like, uh, I don't know. Like you lose the joy of like figuring out how to open a door with a beer can, because you can just have the beer can be a key instead.
Quinns: Oh, I see what you mean. If you, you can always choose the correct tool for the job.
Sam: Yeah, exactly. And so I, I think there are benefits to not quantum inventory and the games that are sort of splitting the difference on it I think is a good way to do it because you still get some of that okay. what if I don't wanna spend one of my like get outta jail free inventory slots. what can I do with what I've already got?
Quinns: you know, uh, another thing that that stands out from this, when I look at it is this is like. I dunno, this is me being say to masochistic in the same way. I want to give my players an item that they can't actually carry. But the fact that
Sam: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Quinns: Sheet has slots for main, poor, off, poor and body, you know what I want on this is like a belt slot as well because personally I think it's interesting, not just like, do you have the slots to carry this, but what slots does it go into?
Sam: Mm-hmm.
Quinns: And something on your belt that you can actually use, like okay. So if the joy of these chits is receiving them and placing them in their place, then also give players a reason to fiddle with them. Give players a reason to like, be
Sam: yeah. Yep.
Quinns: belt. Let players slide things around all
Sam: Yeah,
Quinns: would even go as far as to be like, if you've got a backpack, what's at the bottom of your backpack? Which makes me a lunatic, but
Sam: yeah. Totally.
Quinns: the, the imagery starts to look like a backpack and then it's like, oh, it's at the bottom of your bag.
It's gonna take longer to take out. But then the
Sam: Yeah.
Quinns: an action sequence, nobody's allowed to touch their inventory because if you were like sliding things around and then in your off paw, you put the candy cane,
Sam: Yeah.
Quinns: I want, I want that to become mechanized. I want that to be a game.
Sam: I think that is the intended purpose of the body slots. it is. I'm just saying
yeah,
Quinns: as I want the inventory to
be bigger and I want more of these items in different
Sam: yeah,
Quinns: want more
because I'm a nerd
Sam: I a hundred percent agree. And like, I actually don't think in practice there is often enough incentive to move around the little squares. cause like basically you like make a call on what do I think needs to be in my body slot or your body slot is like filled up with armor and then it's like, okay, well I can't now I've lost the access to that mechanic. You know?
And it's only when you get like a new item where you really you're like, is this important enough to go in the body slot? No, into the bag it goes and, eh.
Quinns: you, I I, I mean imagine if you had 'cause we have these square tokens that are things like, you know, scab, bloated, dreamless, really can't tell you how many of
Sam: Yeah,
Quinns: 'cause every adventure comes with its own ones as well. Sneezing fit is one I can see here. Give me things that affect my hand. Like, what happens to your fighter who
Sam: yeah.
Quinns: when one of their hands is,
you
Sam: Mm.
Quinns: or
has
Sam: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah. An injury that has to go in a pause slot. Yeah.
Quinns: Just, I don't know, I just, my mind can't stop racing. Like, what about an incredibly awkwardly shaped inventory item that is cursed? So you place it down and then it's like, it's, it's made out of glue. or like, I mean, I guess I think
Sam: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Quinns: by this because I was reviewing board games before for like 10 years before I moved on to role playing. And there are so many board games that do really cool stuff with tiles. Like I think the,
Sam: Yeah, yeah,
Quinns: specifically is in lots of games of like, once you put down this wonky shaped Tetris tile, it cannot be moved. But there's loads of stuff you can do there. Like,
Sam: yeah,
Quinns: I don't know, like what about an item in your inventory that will make any item it's touching.
Like you can teleport them to other players in your party. Or,
Sam: yeah, yeah,
Quinns: if we're
playing Tetris, then let's, let's pay Tetris, let's have magic items that specifically relate to the line they're on, or the row or connecting items or.
Sam: yeah.
Quinns: a a a, a cursed
Sam: A series of magic ruins that change what they do when you put them in a different order or, yeah, yeah,
yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
Quinns: play with tokens. We've been writing stuff with pencils for too long and we've been suckers. Ev
Sam: yeah,
Quinns: maybe I'm just
reverse engineering role playing
into board games.
Sam: I mean, I do think this is, I think, a benefit and a weakness of this system. Like I, I think we've laid out a bunch of ways in which this system inspires so much imagination, like immediately in everyone who looks at it and then like doesn't live up to all that ex imagination
Quinns: yeah, and of course
it's not trying to, it's just, it's
Sam: right.
Quinns: chips
instead of inventory because it's, that's a cool, simple way to do it that's more fun. But we're
Sam: Yeah.
Quinns: what
if
Sam: Yeah,
Quinns: was obsessive about it, got their hands on it, and then.
Sam: I think the other thing that is like baked into this system as built and that like you also gain a little bit by leaving the promise of it so open-ended is I feel like it is really easy as a GM to make up stuff for this inventory system.
Like the game comes with a bunch of blank inventory shits and you can just say here's the item that you found, put it on a chip. Go nuts. But also the conditions in particular the format of them, of like, here's the name of the condition, here's what happens to you while you have that condition, and here's how you get rid of the condition. It is really easy to come up with those on the fly and have them be pretty effective.
Quinns: And not only that, if you get poisoned in a game and then the GM has to explain what that is, that's tedious. But in this, I can
say, you're sc then the player says, what?
Sam: yeah,
Quinns: them a token
and then we
Sam: yeah,
Quinns: next player in combat
Sam: yeah,
Exactly.
Quinns: player can read it and be like, oh no. That's so clean.
Sam: Yeah. I have an idea for a module where like. we're going into the like cave full of poisonous mushrooms. And if you hang around the poisonous mushrooms too much, you get the condition that says poisoned with mushroom stuff.
But if you hang around even more, you get a second condition that's like poisoned question mark. And then if you hang around even further, you get the third condition that's like actively hallucinating and now can talk to the mushrooms. And like
Quinns: fantastic.
Sam: the, the idea of actually, what if I wanted to accumulate some conditions because there was a benefit to having them. Like I think that also is like a fun way to play on this.
Quinns: cool. Yeah. While you were talking about like gathering more and more conditions, you gave me another idea because there's so much room to play. What about like, we have to transport a moth, lavee, to
Sam: Yeah.
Quinns: but the moth lavee, not only do we have to feed it, but it's growing constantly. So it literally goes from like one to two, to three to four, and eventually
Sam: Yeah.
Quinns: by two thing that a player is carrying by themselves. Or like your
Sam: Yeah.
Quinns: spread.
Sam: and it's also, it's also fragile, right? So if you get hit while it's in your inventory, then it, then it takes a condition or it becomes something else, or like, yeah, yeah, yeah,
Quinns: me a combat where I have like, oh no, the, the toads are running towards me. I'm gonna throw the moth lava at you, and then in order to catch it, you have to drop whatever you're holding. Which means your bow is now on the floor. And also this chi system, if we're playing on a battle map or even just a sketch thing, like it's the worst illustration of all time, which is how I play any
Sam: yeah,
Quinns: a map. if someone drops an item, it just goes on the map.
Sam: yeah, yeah,
Quinns: means it's not just, not tedious, but actually fun to have mechanics where players have to drop things and pick things up.
Sam: yeah, yeah. Totally.
Quinns: my God,
Sam: Uh, the.
Quinns: I, I'm sorry. I can't stop some kind of
Sam: I,
Quinns: sword that gets hotter every time you use it, which means you
Sam: yeah. Until it gives you a burned condition. Yeah.
Quinns: then you drop it and then someone else has to go and pick it up and come on.
It's too good.
Sam: Uh, it's so easy. I mean, like, that is the magic of this system, because everything that we're describing, you don't need this system for that. Like, like you can do that in like Cairn's inventory system, but the, like, physicality of this and like the particular format of conditions. I think it just inspires all of that thinking. It inspires you to like hack the game, the inventory system, the moth thing that you're talking about. That's all adventure. I can like go run that right now. And it's came from an inventory thing, you know, like.
Quinns: and it just shows that, wow, we've got so excited talking about this, but like if I, if like your mushroom adventure, if, if you tell me you're poisoned, I'm like, oh, okay. What's the GM putting down if you hand me a private tiny chip with words written
Sam: Yeah,
Quinns: You've taken bookkeeping and you've made it exciting. And that is
Sam: yeah,
Quinns: of what this hobby needs to do because. traditionally, certainly the OSR community, roleplaying in general, Dungeons Dragons, it's bookkeeping the game.
Sam: yeah,
Quinns: just get away from that a
little bit with, well look at what Dagger Hart is doing, right? trying to reduce
Sam: yeah.
Quinns: much of roleplaying into
cards you
Sam: Yeah.
Quinns: them the best of luck.
I haven't played Dagger heart. but this just, whether Dagger Heart Succeeds or not, the Chit system in Mata is such a great clean example of, of what Dagger Heart is trying to achieve there.
Sam: Yeah, well that, that's an interesting thing to bring up specifically. 'cause, my friend Em Acosta, who actually illustrated and designed the like river race estate adventure here. they made this game called exiles, which is a fortune in the dark game. my friend Em Acosta who actually illustrated and designed one of the the, the like river race estate adventure here. They made this game called exiles, which is a fortune in the dark game. but it used this master inventory system early on development, at least I did the process of developing it turned into a hand of cards.
And I found that really interesting that like suddenly you're carrying around your gear in your hand, but you're also carrying around conditions in your hand. And it had a little bit of that feeling of like. Dominion curses all of a sudden. And, and that little bit of like, okay, my character is a deck of cards. Maybe this feels a little bit like a deck builder and like, what can we do with that instead of a inventory grid?
And you know, I think we could do 45 minutes of spit ball, like cool ideas with that right off the cuff too.
Quinns: just, oh my God. A game where you don't have an encumbrance mechanic, so there's not a hard limit on what you can carry. But if you have 40 items, that's 40 cards or 40 chits, and if you want to
Sam: Yeah.
Quinns: in particular, you have to
Sam: Yeah. You're just like, oh,
Quinns: as you're like, yeah. Throwing stuff over your
Sam: yeah, yeah, yeah,
Quinns: Come
Sam: yeah. Or like, I've got a, I've got a game coming up where your character's a little like deck of cards and it's not inventory based, but when you take. Wounds. You shuffle them into your deck as decks of as uh, you shuffle them into your deck as cards.
But then the wounds are Trump, like they're higher than any other card because the more beat up you get, the more of a badass you are. 'cause we're doing John Wick, right? And like, you know, like just simple stuff like that feels, That's so natural. It's so obvious. It's so easy to do, but only if you are playing with cards, right?
Quinns: is the word to use, like all too often. I mean, I don't know. I was talking, in a YouTube short about Warhammer fantasy role play third edition recently, which, used cards and tokens on mass to, try and create new sort of like mechanics and systems. And it all felt a little bit bloated.
Sam: Yeah.
Quinns: wasn't a fan of it, but the
idea of using cards and Chis to lower the overhead is immediately
Sam: Yeah.
Quinns: tremendously exciting to me.
Sam: Yeah. But then, this is gonna be kind of a downer to like go out on but then you come back into the world of like actually physically producing the fucking thing. You know? Like I have a lot of friends who have designed games for cards and then either made those games or tried to get those games made and found that it is just so much harder and more expensive than getting a book made.
And if you're a publisher, you can do that. And I hope that we get more publishers and more people who are picking up box sets like this and decks of cards and like all that good business. But also when so much of this scene is hobbyists making games, I do understand why we haven't seen more of that, you know?
Quinns: feel like a luxury item to me, and fun bit of
Sam: Yeah.
Quinns: found out when I worked in the board game space. But, whatever your history of like tabletop games knowledge is, it's a fact worth knowing that only got the ability to create custom cards in something like either the late nineties or the early noughties.
Sam: It was like magic, the gathering really figured out how to do it and like broke a lot of ground there is my understanding.
Quinns: Yeah, that makes perfect sense. But so when we're talking about like yes cards, luxury items drastically increase the cost of your game. Great. What Mausritter does, and I would love to know about how expensive this was to produce, because we've
Sam: Yeah,
Quinns: the word shit
we mean that very literally.
Like what you
Sam: yeah,
Quinns: very thin
piece of cardboard, which has punchlines printed into it, so you can easily rip off the chits you need.
Sam: yeah. Yeah.
Quinns: like something that is cheap, oh, I'm really talking out my ass here. But something that is cheaper to having the, well, having the back of a book, someone has to put it there and you have to print it. Hmm. I would tell
you what though. I would
do, I would
print and play for
this, like this is a
very trivial thing to print and play.
Sam: Although, like when you print and play the Chis, they are like, I want 'em to be a little thicker. I want 'em to be nicer and like When I write on them with the little like dry erase marker that the game comes with, they don't erase very well.
Like, I want something that feels better and like it comes with enough of them. And you only use so many when you play that like, if I'm losing a few to dry erase, like who cares? It, it's, it's fine. You know, I've got plenty, but, i, this, the print and play version is gonna feel even worse, right? Because the print and play version is gonna feel disposable, but moving little pieces of paper around on your character sheet feels like a mess in a way that moving little pieces of cardboard around feels great.
Quinns: when I was talking about prints and play, what I meant is that you print out a sheet and then you'd have to glue it to a very
Sam: Yeah, yeah,
Quinns: But then that's,
Sam: yeah. Yeah.
Quinns: something that's
very hard to cut. So you'd have to like
Sam: Yes.
Quinns: it, and cut it, and to be honest though,
of the things that I genuinely have really loved about Queen Quest, let me get into role playing games, is I spend so much more of my time with scissors than I did before. Like scissors, glue pens,
Sam: yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
Quinns: that I can stick on notebooks. I am here for this stuff. I
Sam: Yeah.
Quinns: wonder much less marketable it would make a game.
Sam: I keep making games that are like decks cards and you know, they come on a print and play kind of situation. 'cause I ain't dealing with production. I got a bigger fish to fry. But like, they work really well for me to print and play because I have a box full of magic cards in my fucking closet. And I have decades and decades of sleeves that I'm not using. And so it's really easy to just like, print out the stuff and sleeve up the cards. And now I have a very good feeling thing.
And not everyone has that, you know, like, like yeah. Maybe the thing that I should do is like, ask people to go buy a deck of bicycle playing cards from the grocery store and like a, a pack of clear sleeves from their local gaming store and like, come home and print out my game and, put it together. And there are people I know who have done that, and I think they really like those games. I think those games feel more successful and not just mine, that's just the, the experience I have had hearing about this. Right.
But it is also like usually be really dedicated for that. Like, you can't just buy the game and then sit down and play it and like,
Quinns: Okay,
Sam: yeah, yeah,
Quinns: here's what I'll end on. This is my last sales pitch for,
Sam: yeah,
Quinns: for the imaginary world in which someone is considering making a print and play for that inventory TEUs
Sam: yeah. Yeah.
Quinns: yet.
the reason I would be okay doing that prep is that I already have to prep stuff as a GM anyway, that's
Sam: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Quinns: but the.
difference for me between Fun Prep and Annoying Prep is am I prepping something that I know is gonna bring a smile to my player's face? Like if I'm writing a villain or a scene
Sam: Yeah.
Quinns: that I
Sam: Yeah.
Quinns: players are gonna love, that's not work. That's joyous. And if you've
Sam: Yeah.
Quinns: of stuff that I know I'm going to be giving to my players, like,
have I got
Sam: Mm-hmm.
Quinns: a
spooky marble is one item in mouse riter.
Sam: Mm-hmm.
Quinns: There's, a moth Idol, a skull helmet, you know, plump mushroom. Like that sheet
Sam: Yeah.
Quinns: that every individual little thing that I've sticking to cardboard and then cutting out I'm gonna see that play a smile that's no longer work for me. That's something I'm just excited to do.
Sam: Yeah. You know, something I've been thinking about for a year, two years now, I heard some interview with Tim Hutchings of Thousand year Old Vampire and other RPGs talking about his process as a game designer. And what he said was like I don't think of myself as a game designer. I just think of myself as a guy who throws little parties for his friends and that some of those turn out to be like products that I can make.
And I've really been trying to like, embrace that both like in my role playing game life, but also like in my life at large. Like I do just kinda like throw little parties for my friends and like putting a little effort into that, like a little elbow grease into that. It's like really fun.
I did this, you know, I was, I played like seven part pact this summer We did a little weekend of it and I just made everyone show up with a costume and it was great. It ruled like that little bit of extra effort from everyone went so far.
Quinns: with seven Part Pact like,
Sam: yeah,
I've been thinking of like, like, you know, print and play as being much more of like a logistical thing of like, you know, putting together the food for this weekend or seven part pack.
But you are right, it can be on the same side as like wearing a costume or like making little piece of food that's gonna be eaten in the game or whatever.
Quinns: You know, this is maybe TMI, but Quis quest, I deal with burnout a lot. Like certainly
Sam: Yeah.
Quinns: first year of the project was fine, but now it's like, ooh, I'm starting to get a little tired from running all these role playing games.
Sam: Yeah.
Quinns: know, the GM
prep that I've had to teach or I've just recently learned is very important.
and you, you just reminded me of this, with the Tim Hutchins quote about the rental parties, my GM prep that I've started doing that's more important than. Any adventure, like I will not prefer an adventure, so I can do this instead, is to put myself in a good mood,
like,
Sam: Oh, yeah,
Quinns: my players show up, I smile and I'm happy to see them.
Sam: yeah,
Quinns: evenings are better than if I'm stressed out and I prepared an adventure, and the adventure's good, but I'm stressed.
Sam: yeah.
Quinns: want to come to those evenings less.
and so I guess like, yeah, I'm gonna sit down and cut out lots of little different candy shapes to go and my players mice inventory, because I don't know, that's like cocktail party behavior.
Like that's, that's like getting the napkins set up, you know, that's
Sam: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Quinns: for people. That analogy kind of
Sam: Yeah.
Quinns: me, but I think you pick up roughly what I'm putting down.
Sam: Yeah. Yeah. Totally. It, it feels like hosting. I mean, it feels, it just feels, I love being able to give a gift to the players.
Quinns: Yes,
Sam: To my friends. that feels like a wonderful note to go out on here. So Quinns, thanks so much for coming on Dice Exploder.
Quinns: this has been a blast. I feel like I got way too excited this episode. So huge. Thanks to your audience for, uh, for tolerating my enthusiasm.
Sam: thanks again to Quinn for being here. You can watch Quinn's Quest on YouTube right now or support the Quinn's Quest Patreon for even more. From Quinns. Thanks to everyone who supports Dice Exploder on Patreon. As always, you can find me on Blue Sky at Dice Exploder, or on the dice Exploder discord.
And you can find my games@sdunwell.it.io. Our logo is designed by Sporgory. Our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Gray. And our ad music is Lily Pads Palm of Boy Travis Tesser. And thanks to you for listening. I will see you next time.