Listen to this episode here.
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
Sam Sorensen’s overview of Over/Under and one of Lin’s pieces on the aftermath
Apocalypse World 3e Kickstarter (now finished)
Socials
Weird Games and Weirder People
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Transcript
Sam: Hello and welcome to the 2025 Dice Exploder Year End Bonanza. Each year at the end of the year, we get together some cool people and we talk through a bunch of RPG stuff from the past 12 months and maybe this year and of the future. I'm changing up the format a little bit this year. I've got two friends with me. and we are gonna talk about three mechanics, looking back on what RPGs were kind of doing in 2025 and maybe before that. And then three more mechanics to ground a a Conversation in, like where we think RPGs are going in the future.
and to do that with me, I have, Lin do you wanna introduce yourself first?
Lin: Yeah. Hi everyone. I'm Lin Codega. I am a journalist, a writer, an author, and I am the person that drags Sam to go see such stunning films such as the Running Man and Roof Man. So yeah,
Sam: All all the the men movies,
Lin: the men movies, uh, one battle after another, like we really just, we go really hard on.
Sam: Banging them out.
Lin: man movies. But yeah, I'm here to talk about games because I love games. I'm really excited to be here. Thank
you, Sam.
Sam: and then
Diogo, do you wanna introduce yourself as well?
Diogo: Sure. want to say that Running Man is great, and I think it's a great movie for, today's audience and it's very informative. So yeah it's a great movie. I saw it recently too, and
Sam: Lin is making a lot of faces, which to me says that this could turn into an hour long conversation about the Running man. Which I would enjoy. I also enjoyed that movie. But let's breeze right past that and
introduce who you are that.
Diogo: So I Diogo Nogueira. I am the creator of Old School Publishing, which I publish my own independent games. I have a podcast called Weird Games and Weirder People, where I talk to creators on the tabletop RPG sphere about what that they do, how they do it, and how weird we all are. And I'm now the lead game designer at White Wolf, and I'm very excited
Lin: Woo.
Sam: Woo,
Diogo: and talk about games and RPGs, which is I am obsessed with, so, yay.
Sam: I am really excited to have the two of you here and let's just get right it. Diogo, I wanted to start with you. You what backwards facing mechanic have you brought in? Like where are RPGs at for you here at the end of 2025 and like what represents that?
Diogo: Well, something that is very dear to me and has been, constant revolution. I thinking the OSR scene in the, in the scene is having games that give you a lot of tools for you to set up your game and make it easier for the GM or referee to run it.
Because for a long time, like especially in the nineties and the early two thousands, we had this vision of the Dungeon master, referee, being the one that has to set up everything and prepares the story and responsible for all everybody's fun and have to spend hours and hours preparing a campaign or something.
And Mythic Bastionland comes one of the greatest ones that comes really well structured to help you create a setting that's gonna be unique for you, even though everybody's gonna use the same book like everyone's gonna make their own setting with their own locations and NPCs and opportunities for the venture and all these rumors, and the book is equipped with a lot of inspiration for you to make it to your own. And comes with fresh sheets for you so it's not something that you have to prepare yourself with a bunch of paper.
It's almost like it treats the GM and the referee as a player too. So like, as a player, have your character sheets and as the GM there, as the referee, you have a realm sheets for you to use and trigger and do things in your campaign and make it easier for you not only to create, but to run games with it.
So. I think it's something that's been growing over years in the sphere.
Sam: Yeah. I see in this a lot of trends like the, we're gonna come back to this at the end of the show because I feel like I picked a companion mechanic to this one for talking about where I see this stuff going in the future too.
But I, I see this as like part of a trend of crossover between like traditionally OSR adventure style play and the more like story game movement of the past 20 years where realm set up from mythic bastion land feels like, this is a game that has got most of its heritage in the OSR movement, in those adventure games. Like it plays out a lot like that at the table. It's designed by Chris McDowell and very clearly inspired by end of the odd and all of that.
But the realm setup stuff feels to me like a take on like what Apocalypse World is doing, right? Like all these tools, as you were saying, like four GMs to kind of help them set up and get ready at the table and do their prep, and not just throwing them to the wolves of like good luck and creating something that is like a procedure and not what the rest of the OSR has been doing of like, here's an adventure, now you don't need to do any of that. You don't need procedures for like making up a particular realm or a map when someone has just written an entire one for you.
And yeah, so I, I think it's an interesting kind of confluence of different design heritages
coming together.
Diogo: Now that you mentioned it, it kind of reminds me one of the early things that I saw doing, like the setups kind of stuff. It's one of the games that are very dear to me and have influenced, I think the way I do my own stuff is like fiasco, how they set up, you know, locations, relationship characters and objects.
You know, this kind of stuff that gives you very little things, but you can already see, much more than they give you, right? Because with small elements and how they interact, the complexity is born from these interactions. So it's, it's nice to see how this, different worlds that we're apart for so long are kind of talking to each other more and more.
Yeah.
Sam: Yeah,
Lin: actually reminds me a lot of, incursions in trophy dark. I don't know if you guys have ever.
Sam: Oh yeah.
Lin: Played that game. But when it was very, when it was published, the very first time in The Gauntlet, it included one incursion and then it in, it included a guide to how to write those incursions, and they held like a contest to, for people to like write their own incursions. But that was probably one of the first times, and this must have been 2017, 2016, but that was one of the first times that I remember. Kind of this OSR adventure, like giving you this really clearly prescribed, here's how you build an adventure in this game and here's why you build that adventure. And it went through like what each step of the incursion.
'cause there's five levels are supposed to like, represent psychologically and within the minds of your players. It was very good stuff. Jesse Ross did a really good job with that one.
Sam: All right, let's move on to the, the next one. Lin, what'd you bring in?
Lin: I brought in everyone's favorite game mechanic. The safety tool,
Sam: Yeah, great.
Lin: The thing that everyone loves and wants to talk about.
Sam: I did do like a 90 minute episode on this topic this year,
Lin: So you probably have a lot more to say about it than I do. But yeah, I just think that safety tools, people are really re-imagining what they can be, what they look like, how they act, and also what they're supposed to do. I think that people are realizing that safety tools don't necessarily keep you safe. They just set expectations.
So I think moving forward, we're gonna see a lot more, not inventiveness with safety tools. That's not what I'm trying to say. We're going to see something that like changes the way that we interact with safety tools as a method of keeping people comfortable and keeping people excited about the game that they're playing.
Sam: Can you say more about that? Like what do you mean in more detail?
Lin: So I think that one of the things that I've seen quite a lot, especially Jay Dragon does this quite frequently, is she adds conversation guides within her work where she's very specific about, remember this is like how to talk to each other as like human beings who love each other and wanna play games with each other. And I think that there's, this mounting movement where embracing some parts of discomfort or like realizing that discomfort is this very natural part of life that people are beginning to use safety tools to also like push boundaries within games themselves.
Like, one of the games I'm thinking of is Praise the Hawkmoth King,
Sam: Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Lin: where it's this very, erotic like, kind of disgusting, like pushing the boundaries of good taste game, where like you are playing as dead teenagers who have to like fuck demons in order to like save other people's souls.
It's a very weird, messed up game, and it's also very well written and it's a very good game, but it's deliberately built with minimal safety tools because it wants you to determine for yourself where those lines are and to find through exploration and play what is and isn't safe for you.
Sam: Yeah. I think we're in a really interesting place with it where, I'm thinking now of a piece y'all just published on Rascal by front of the show Seraphina. A couple of weeks ago about fight truck and that, that piece is this like very, very personal essay about her life experience and her relationship with her parents. And also it's like a call to actively play towards more difficult subject matter because taking those risks is exciting and fruitful. While also like acknowledging that that is dangerous in a way, and that you want to do that carefully and.
I'm also thinking of a 2024 piece, I wanna say by Meguey Baker talking about like safety tools are not her preferred nomenclature for what we talk about as safety tools. That she much prefers the term communication tools for a lot of these re reasons, right? Like safety tools can't keep you safe. There is no such thing as a hundred percent safe play. There's no such thing as like a hundred percent safe like conversation with anyone, just like out in the world, right?
Like the important thing is much more how do you handle things when they go sideways? Like how do you handle yourself when someone has been hurt, and how do you keep communicating and take care of each other?
I do feel like we are at a place now where people are learning this and not really sure what to do about it.
Like I remember earlier this year there was a lot of conversation around Hawkmoth King in the Read the Fucking Manual discord, a Discord like full of people who really like games that have a lot of sex in them, and it was all these people saying I really wanna play this game. I don't have anyone to play this game with. I don't know how to do that. Like I, not that I don't know how to do that, but like, I just don't feel like I, I have the community to do that with.
And I think that's maybe a next evolution of this conversation too, is how do you find those people? Or how do you play these games with people you are a little bit less familiar with? Or do you want to do that at all? And everything there.
Lin: Yeah, it's tough because the, the very nature of play is how you can like transgress the boundaries of rules. Play is pushing up against rules. It's just, that's naturally how it works. So in order to find like a community of trust and a community of people who can buy into a game where you will purposely put yourself on the edge of dangerous situations that like emotionally is really tough.
And it's, I think it's one of those things where perhaps sometimes these games maybe like should not be played. Like, it's okay if it's okay if they're not.
But I think that like the act of playing them is important at the same time. But yeah, I think it's the community, the trust building up to that. It's something that needs to be done with a, a lot of conversation, a lot of communication, and a lot of like deliberate work to get to the place where you feel comfortable playing these kinds of games. It can't just be like, we're gonna go to a movie and have a good time. Like, that's not community building in the same way, that being a deliberate builder of trust in order to like get to this point where you feel comfortable enough to like play this game together is.
I think that some of this does stem from the fact that we are seeing such a crackdown on. Pornography on erotic material. There's a lot happening in the US specifically about credit card banning that kind of content and not allowing sites who host that kind of content, erotica, porn to get payment. Right. So I think that there is a part of games as kind of this counterculture movement just in general that is seeing that and being like, okay, well how do we, how do we fight this in our own way?
And I think that we're seeing people are more willing to embrace things like bleed, and people are starting to become, again, not that we haven't had this conversation for like 20 years, but people are starting to once again embrace that like bleed can be a very good thing and can be something that people really seek out when they play games.
Sam: Yeah. Alright. The backwards looking thing I brought in was Dagger Heart. I was gonna pick a specific mechanic from Dagger Heart. And then I was like, actually the thing I kind of want to talk about is how, like none of the mechanics in this game matter. Like, I don't need to like, pick a specific thing for the thing I want to talk about.
'cause Dagger Heart is full of like cool mechanics, like I think Dagger Heart is an improvement on Fifth Edition D&D for me, right, if I wanted to go back and play that kind of game again.
But Dagger Hart and Draw Steel are both games that came out this year that have their roots in a particular community critical role for Dagger Hart and draw steel from Matt Coleville and his YouTube channel.
Where these games were very large. They were kind of positioning themselves as like fifth edition killers. Like they, they wanted to like step up and like step into that slot in the hobby. And I don't know that anyone really expected them to like completely overtake and like. Like displace Dungeons and Dragons or even take like a huge bite out of it. But the fact that there were two really high profile attempts in the past couple of years feels really notable to me.
And the more I thought about it, the more I was particularly interested in the way that both of these games are so attached to their communities and like what does that say about what communities in our hobby look like right now. Like I think we've become very siloed and fractured by the nature of social media and how it has changed. And so like all the coolest design stuff is happening in like walled gardens on Discords, right? Or in like tiny little social communities.
And I think in the same way, like the games that have been inspiring the most exciting new design tech that are like pushing forward in new ways are also like mothership. And a couple years ago it was Blades in the Dark. It was communities like based around a particular game or a particular person.
And that, like I found it interesting that instead of a community like forming up around. Games like with Mothership or Mork Borg or like that, here we had two games coming out of their communities. That like with Critical Role's community and Matt Mercer's community, we kind of have like, these people that want to play Dungeons and Dragons in a particular way and have come together around that and are now creating a full product in order to do their take on what that looks like.
So I don't know exactly where I'm like going with all of that, but it feels like something that I've been observing over the past year.
Lin: Yeah, I think one of the things that you're describing is the difference between a fandom and a fan club.
So a fandom is. A group of people who are trying to iterate on a design or an idea, right? So I think that the borgs, all the borgs, all of the motherships, that's a fandom, right? They get into the design, they get into the structures, and they tinker and they play and they create new modules, new systems, new games.
And then I think that you're also describing here a fan club culture where people are really interested in emulating the play style that they are a fan of.
Sam: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Lin: so it's like a, a recognition of play desire rather than a recognition or a coalescence around design structures.
And I think that you're talking about the difference between like a play community and a design community.
Sam: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Diego, what's your relationship like with D&D at this point?
Diogo: well, I probably the addition that I made played the most was 3.5,
Sam: Yeah.
Diogo: Then I got to college. I stopped playing to do art and stuff 'cause I thought that I had to do that. But when I got my job and started getting some money, I bought all the D&D for tradit edition books. Reading them all. They seemed very well made. But when I got them to the table, they played very different from what I remember. 'cause I I played about, you know, second edition. And like, the black blocks, like Ru Cyclopedia era of basic and even third edition, like was a little bit more dynamic. So fourth edition, like I played a campaign for a year and a half and we couldn't finish three ventures 'cause every combat would take five hours or something.
Lin: Great.
Diogo: But then I, that kind of forced me to look for what else is out there, right? So I discovered like the forge. The more narrative games and the War star stuff.
Sam: It's, it's interesting to hear you talk about like various other traditions that have taken D&D and then been like, this isn't working for me. Like, what are we doing now? And like people are just still fucking doing that in 2025, right?
Like that's still what Dagger Heart is. It's still what Draw Steel is. It's like this hobby is just never gonna be anything other than. People looking at D&D and being like, whoa, this is not working for me anymore. What do I do instead? Yeah, I
Diogo: Yeah, and I mean, I, the game feels very different, so I, I always wanted something more gritty, more dark more adventurous and less heroic. players to be more. Personal centered and like their own goals. And I'm like, oh, we have to save the world.
Like every time it's like, I gotta save the world. Like yeah, I'm kind of tired of saving the world. Like, what, what do you wanna do tonight?
Sam: let's switch to talking about looking forward a little bit. So, Diogo what is the first mechanic you brought in there?
Diogo: uh, I'm talking about some of the games are exploring a little bit of how board games, attract the attention of players to the. Table. You know, cause I'm really interesting. I, I know about how streaming is, is something very popular and how a lot of people play online, but I'm very interested in games that makes you look at the table, like you have to be at the table. You have to touch stuff, you have to pray with pieces there. You have to bring in some elements of board games to RPGs and make it a little more tactile and, and interacting in this way. And I think in this world that we are ever more connected and isolated at the same time. We, we were always talking to someone or always on the internet, right? We're always singing stuff, but you're a lot more common to to play alone, like solo games or play online and you don't see people.
So I'm interesting in seeing how games are trying to, recover this aspect of yeah, you have to be on the table, you have to, that stuff, you have to be in the presence of other people. cause I think it's healthy now more than ever. We have to seek opportunities to be close to people, as much as you can.
So, you know, the ring announcers that have things to put on the table, there are visual and they're attractive and have your pieces to, to facilitate prey and, makes you look at it.
And one of my games Primal Quest try to do something like this to have to, like, at the end of the game, you have to go for people that you played with and you draw together something. You produce something that's kind of a diegetic piece and, and also something that you can remember that you did on the table, you know?
Sam: Yeah, I.
one of my original picks for backward looking mechanic before I saw you'd picked this, and I, I thought there was too much overlap, was the idea of box sets. That the past couple of years we've got the mouse riter box set, we've got the mothership box set. But even before that, I feel like we were getting a certain kind of designer really interested in like card-based rPGs, like, the bully pulpit, like re-releasing Fiasco or their Desperation a couple years ago. For the Queen is another card-based one that I know a lot of people have played.
And for me that has been a really cool direction for games to go both because I think there's a lot of just like interesting design space in, in that direction. Like I think the making games more tactile as opposed to like on a million different pieces of paper that you have to keep track of just like makes them potentially easier to play and keep track of too. And then on top of that, all the kind of social stuff that you were talking about.
But I didn't want to pick it for forward looking, because I feel like in the US like the tariff situation is like fucking up this direction of design and that, like I, I have a game coming out next year that has character cards and is kind of card based and maybe wants like a play mat. And I really wanted to do like a boxed version of, and it also just didn't make sense to keep pursuing it because the cost is is going up there. And I talked with like publishers who might be interested in it but we're not because of that.
So I think there, there's like, the energy for this socially is like really there. I think like this is also such a better way to introduce RPGs to people is when you can attach it more to the idea of a board game that people are probably more familiar with right now. And like, this is what I want to be playing and what I wanna be making. I think it's so, like cards in particular are such a compelling medium.
And also I'm sad that the physical realities of globalization right now are getting in the way of it.
Diogo: I like the idea of making them more like toys, you know?
Sam: yeah. totally.
Diogo: ification of, of the games, I dunno.
Sam: There's another related piece to everything you're saying there socially of like the the past couple years. Something that's become really important to my practice of playing these games is a every other week, Monday night in person meetup at the game store where people just show up and play one shots.
And I found these like box set, board gamey kinds of games tend to be pretty good one shot experiences and lend themselves really well to showing up at that kind of scene. And that kind of event, that kind of scene is really good for creating a sustainable practice of playing the games in person. That like if you miss one week everyone is still coming, without you. Right? Like the event takes care of itself in a way where like, if you miss a couple of weeks in a row of your home game, maybe the whole thing just like falls apart and you need to like set it back up again.
And so, yeah I think that might be another future looking thing here is like more like come to the game store. Like let's all bring a larger than one table community together
Diogo: in Brazil has been a really like, uh, popular games that are set up to be like open table games that you can play one night. Like I was designing a Sword Source game, like in kind of situation, like every session is just one night. So if you're, if you show up your character doing something that night, but if you don. Maybe he's busy this night, so the next session's gonna be just another night. You know, you don't miss an entire adventure, like, because it's personal. Like what do you wanna do tonight? And they do that tonight and next session's another night. Yeah.
Sam: Yeah, totally.
Lin: Yeah, so Sam and I attend the same group every time I go, I try and bring a game and the games that I brought that have done really well or stuff like the zone, revolts, hearts blazing. I hold up a little box and I'm like, I'm going to teach you what to do. And everyone's like, sold. It's so easy to just bring something very physical and show people like, here it is a real thing, not just a book, I promise. And it works really well. People are very eager for it.
Sam: Yeah.
Lin, what have you got for us looking forward?
Lin: So Sam Diego, as you know, I spent 30 days playing as High Gardner Otso in Over Under, which is this Discord based, play by post LRP, mega game for Mothership Month.
It was wild. It was so intense. There were, I think about a thousand people actually playing the game and 1600 people, like in the Discord. It was way too big. It was very intense, very emotional. It took a huge emotional toll on a lot of people who were playing.
But the result of that, which happened mid-October to mid November of this year was everyone came away from it thinking I wanna do that too. So now we're seeing tons and tons, dozens of Discord servers pop up where people are adapting the rules of the games that they want to play to a discord play by post forum based text format.
Which I think is really cool. I think we're gonna see a lot of those happen in 2026. Hopefully we'll see more, games supported by
Diogo: Supporting that. Yeah.
Lin: over under was directly like financially supported by Sean McCoy and Tuesday night games for mothership month. So they were able to pay moderators, pay design, the designer.
Diogo: Oh, nice.
Lin: So it was this really fascinating experience, not just as a player, but as someone who's like really interested in the industry of gaming and the industry of game design where it feels like such a success. Right?
And to misquote my friend Caleb Zane Hewitt, writer Triangle Agency, who was also playing the game with me he was fond of saying they caught lightning in a bottle. They were expecting rice.
And it was just this incredible moment of community and freeform gaming that I think is going to inform a lot of the ways that people try and engage with community and build community in 2026. And I think a lot of that comes from a little bit about what you were saying, Diego, where people want keepsakes, right?
They want something that feels very physical, that feels very permanent and games are kind of by their nature, pretty ephemeral. Like you sit down, you have this event, the event is over, you leave. And in something like a discord everything is is there. You can go back and reread
You can reread the scenes that you had with these people. And I think that there is something, even though it is digital, that is
Diogo: there's a record there, right? You can look back and you can remember
Lin: Exactly. Very anti ephemeral.
And I think that people are also leaning into the idea of like wanting to improve, They want to improve how they play
games. And writing is always a practice, right? So you, if you write and you write with people and you learn more, you can more clearly think through what your character's going to do when you have time to respond. And I think that people are really like going to learn how to be better storytellers and better gamers by taking it a little bit slower in their games, right?
Anyway, so I think that there's like an interesting avenue forward where discussion, collaboration, practice, and this kind of like recorded. Game becomes much more popular in 2026.
Sam: Yeah, I feel very strongly about this also. If you had not picked this, I would've picked this. I feel like I'm going to certainly do at least one episode on over under in 2026, but it was such a, like profound experience and part of that was because. it was poorly run, I think, in ways that like really affected people.
And part of that was because it was magical, because of the way it was run, and like, because of everything that was set up with it. And I think there's nothing that's more catnip to a game designer than, this is great, but I know how to do it better. And over under was just so perfect for that feeling for a lot of people. Like, I love this and also I think I can do it better.
And so many people I think are looking to recapture the best feelings that they had from the experience. And I really hope that as, I mean, I'm one of these sickos, but I hope as all the over under sickos, like look towards doing that, that they look around the other people and other communities that have been doing really similar things in the past.
Like I think at the start of over under, there were a lot of people being like, I've never experienced anything like this before. Like, what is this? This is new. No one's ever done this. And in fact, like people roleplaying in Discords and on forums and in IRC channels has been going on for as long as those things have existed.
And I also remember there was a particular large server wide event that was going on that was causing some drama. And I was describing it to my friend who was not in the game, but who was very familiar with Blockbuster larps, and I got like a quarter of the way into the story and they were like, oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And then X, Y, Z things like happened, right? And I was like, oh yeah, how did you know that? And they were like yeah. Because that's always what happens at this kind of situation in blockbuster LRPs.
And so I think that like I think that there's a lot to learn from these existing communities in and pulling into this, but I also think that like OSR people and story game people like bringing new ideas and new energy. To those old communities, like bringing forward what blockbuster larp people have been doing and like trying to see what happens when it becomes digital or trying to bring more of their sensibilities and rules and all that kind of stuff to the sort of like live role playing on discord at that particular strand of play by post, I think that there is a lot of room for us to learn from this medium to get exploded by us. All these things to like mix together in really exciting ways.
Diogo: Yeah. Well,
Lin: Y. Yeah.
Diogo: each people will see those things a little bit differently, even though they're like doing the same thing, the outcome of different baggage. And we will interpret the same thing in different ways. And, and we, probably can all learn a little bit from each other, like, you know,
Sam: Yeah.
Diogo: steal like an artist.
Just, get all those experience, mixing it up and see what sticks.
Sam: Yeah.
Yeah,
Lin: Yeah, I think that over under very specifically was really interesting to see the OSR play culture and the story game play culture really clash. And clash is maybe not the correct word, but come together in really interesting ways to make something very new because
collide. Yeah, they collided because of course the. The game was built as a Meguey game. It was never intended to be a lrp. And then as soon as people started joining, they started playing in character. And I'm just like, no plan survives first contact with the enemy. And that was literally what happened in this situation.
But yeah, I think that in the future, I would hope, again, to what you said, Diogo, where people are learning from each other. And to what you said, Sam. Yeah, let's learn from larps. They've solved a lot of these problems. They've been doing this for like 20, 30 years. Like, let's get Jeep form Nordic LARPs. Let's figure out ways to enact a more structured play culture within these technological spaces.
But yeah, I think it's we'll see a lot of it in 2026.
Sam: I mean, listen the L cultures, like, they've certainly thought about a lot of these ideas a lot longer than people in the OSR and story game communities have. And also like, they've got their own drama, they've got their own hangups, they've got their own like system matters kinds of debates, that are like, maybe we can come in and contribute to, and like, ignore or, like there's there as much as there's like a ton there that I think. It will be really fruitful for people exploring post over under style games to work with,
Lin: yeah, sort of my la My last idea about this, it'll be interesting because there is a part of this that is kind of, violently anti-system in its own way where the, you're really only limited by the constraints of the technology and whether or not a ahad will come up and slap you on the wrist.
And I think that's really fun. I think again, we're seeing a lot of the ways in which people are pushing against rules and pushing against the ways that other people have told them to play. Because play is what you do when you don't, when you have fewer barriers, when you have less rules. So I think it's fascinating to see like what rituals, what rules are allowed and what rules you are able to push against by using other rules and breaking other rules.
I like rules, guys. I think they're fun.
Diogo: Yeah, yeah, yeah. They, They they help, they put a direction on the phone, like it's something,rules s are stories. Like, I like to see rules as stories like how. Can I play with this rule,
Lin: Mm-hmm.
Diogo: Like if my game is about seduction, how I make a toy about seduction that we can pray and this kind of stuff.
So
yeah, I have rules in some way.
Sam: I found it really interesting and over under, where someone pointed out early on that like, okay, in D&D, if you give people a bunch of rules for violence then like the game becomes about violence, right? And what happened in over under is there was a discord bot that had some hard coded in rules for currency and money. And so the entire game became about hustling that like everyone was just like trying to make money.
And that in, in a lot of ways that was a toy for people to play with, was the game's economy and. That is what you saw. It felt less like people playing with the rules of the game and more like this toy had been dropped into a discord along with a cultural expectation for role playing and like, where does that take us?
I wanna call out a couple of things here. First if people are interested in learning more about larp, I did like a 12 episode series on larp this year. So go back in the Dice
Explorer archives and check that shit out. And second of all, like, I said I had problems with the way that over and under was uh, poorly organized. And I, I do stand by that, but I also really want to give those guys credit really explicitly, like I think Sean and Sam like the work that they did do, like none of what made the game magical would've been possible without the stuff that they were doing. And I think that they learned a lot and handled themselves really well publicly. So I just wanna make sure they don't feel like I'm shitting on them. Over, under was fabulous.
I want to take. A lot of the ideas that we have been talking about over the past 45 minutes and maybe try to tie them together. In my last looking forward mechanic here. This is gonna be most similar to where we started with realm setup and mythic bastion land.
I wanna talk about Apocalypse World Third Edition Hard Zones. So this is a mechanic where it's new to Burned Over. If you know that version of Apocalypse World or to third edition here where they're basically like, here's 10 locations in an environment biome for you to play around with. Right.
So, Lin and I are playing in a game of Apocalypse World right now that's set in the frozen wastes. And one of the locations on the frozen wastes is Halter's Town, which is a town built above a frozen lake where they drill down into the lake and fish giant demonic fish. Cool. And another one is the shatters, which is a vast plane of of snowy wastes where weird storms happen and stuff like that.
And so you have all these, you just have some like baseline setting material to work with in your story game.
And I think this feels pretty not new to me. I mean, other like huge games have done this, right? Blades in the Dark comes with a huge setting, even though it feels very story gamey. It comes with just like all this specific stuff, all these factions that in a lot of ways you could run Blades in the Dark without any of the rules just pulling this sort of like module flavor of the game, right?
And And also like mythic bastion land. I was originally gonna use mythic Bastion land's 72 nights as the like starting point for this conversation, rather than the hard zones thing of like the game just comes with here's 72 player characters, and they don't feel like classes in the same way. They feel like full people. Wanderhome. Another game I feel like is doing this right, it's like 20 pages of rules and then like hundreds of pages of tables of stuff that you can like pull into your game.
And I feel like the past few years we've seen the OSR and NSR like kind of adventure game communities do like a ton of cool innovating around what does it look like to bring pre-generated material to the game text, right? Like what do modules look like and what do like games with kind of modules inside of them, like baked in, like bring to the table. Like what can we do with all of that?
And I, I'm hoping in the future, like the reason I'm putting this in my forward looking thing is I think it's finally time for story games to start figuring out how to do that shit ourselves too. That like in the way that like over under was a game that was kind of like, Here's some, like, characters at the boss level. Here's some loose war game rules, and then here's like the Prospero's Dream, a pound of flesh, setting material for you to just like run with.
And that's what people did whether that was the intent of the, the authors are not like, that's really cool. That says to me that you can like just put all that shit in your game and like all that flavor in your game. And that can be like a load-bearing part of your game. Like you can take Apocalypse World and make it better by saying don't just like invent the setting material yourself. Here's 10 sick locations for your setting of Apocalypse World.
And I would really love to see more of the story game people who have, I think these great systems who have like great tools for telling particular kinds of stories. And to bring in here's. not just like your game for telling some noir story. Here's a game for telling this noir story. Here's the 30 people involved in this noir story and what this mystery is, and here's some like PBTA style rules for interacting with all of that.
I think that just that specificity of material is really effective at the table and is something I hope we see story game people starting to take and build on.
Diogo: feels very plug and pray too, like people Beginning, like constructing something even though they have tools help, like this framework and stuff, maybe they just wanna see how it's played so they can, can do something with it.
So if they have examples there, they feel like, oh, this is the kind of stuff that they can do with this. This is the kind of adventures they kind of set ups, the kind of city or relationships that they can set up with these tools and it feels very plug and play. Like you can just get the game, put it on the table, and, and, and start. Without having to grow to those steps. And it's easy to onboard people, I
Sam: Yeah, totally.
Lin: I think that there are some story games that do already have this, and I think that you're right to see more. Slow Knife for example, has like three or four different specific settings that you can play with. Dialect comes with,
you know, Four or five different.
Sam: it's like 15. It's a lot of 'em. Yeah.
Lin: Oh yeah. It's, it is a lot. It's a ton. And I mean, even something like trophy dark right? Comes with a ton and ton and ton and ton dialect. Yes. So I think that a part of this is not just embracing it, but also a matter of scope.
Sam: Yeah.
Lin: Like if an indie game or a story game can figure out how to do that without having 72 nights, you know, I think that, that, that's probably more of a limiting factor than the desire to create these sorts of modular systems that you can then plug stuff into.
Sam: And like there, there are plenty of people, as you say, like, doing this, right? Like, I, I don't wanna say that this is not happening. I'm thinking about, gena's Wonder Tales is the latest bully pulpit game that I'm really excited to receive in my mailbox, which is, 18 cards per play set. And it like tells one fairytale and it's a very specific fairytale.
You know, all, all that kind of specificity has been around and will continue to be around. But I do think like so much of the energy that I have seen in the hobby over the past year, year and a half has been with this kind of material specifically in the like NSR movement. And I just I think the story game, people are finally starting to look over there and be like, oh shit, that rules, like, and I, I think maybe we're gonna get like a boom of this kind of, of thing into the future.
On that note before we like totally close off here something we've done in the past on these end of year episodes is like, look back at something that each of us were proud of over the course of the year.
So Diogo, like what's something that you did in 2025 that's games related that you're proud of
Diogo: Yeah, I put that in in the document that we kind of prepared was for me some was proud of, is to get back into writing and, and make my, my thing and working on the second edition of my first game, cause in 2024. Like my life was in like an upheaval and I thought I would never write games or draw anything again. And I was happy by the end of February to finally get over the stuff that was kind of blocking me and I was able to get back to writing and I was able to write every day and draw stuff and, have new ideas again and be excited to create new stuff.
Sam: Yeah. Yeah. Lin, what about you?
Lin: I'm really proud of Rascal.
Sam: Mm-hmm. Yep.
Lin: I'm really proud of Rascal. Uh, We got nominated for the Diana Jones Award this year and then we lost it. Journalism really lost this year in a lot of ways, but Rascal's doing good. And I'm really, really proud of. The kind of work that we do and the community we've created and the people who support us are just really incredible.
And I think that it's something that, that will last a long time. Also uh, I, I did a lot of writing this year.
published my first book at the beginning of this year, and I
also, oh,
Sam: I got a moth eater on my uh, counter right here. Look at that.
Lin: thanks Sam.
Sam: well, the thing I was proud of this year, was an episode of this very show called After Image City of Winter. So after Image was a new series that I kind of put together that is trying to do. actual play adjacent, like, it's like game recaps trying to like convey to an audience through an audio medium, like what a particular moment at the table was like and what the emotional experience of that moment was like. very much pulling from like this American lifestyle, like, just personal essays or like personal memoir almost in the writing of these things. And I've done two of 'em.
I'm really proud of how they came out. This one in particular, like a lot of people listened to, I got a lot of compliments on and that, kept me going when the other writing I was doing this year was a huge pain in the ass.
So I don't know. That was cool. It's been a good year for me with a lot to be proud of. I'm really happy with the state of dice explode right now. And part of that's uh, thanks to the TDU. Thanks for being
here.
Diogo: Thank you very much. I'm honored to be here and, and, and honored to be among such amazing people. You know, Rasco is, is, it's really something amazing and important in our community and like your, podcast exploring game design in all sort of ways and, and, and going all over the place is, it's awesome to see.
'cause sometimes, as you said, like we can get really into our niche and see only what is surrounding us and having this opportunity to. Beyond your frontiers is, is very important. So your Thank you very much.
Sam: I mean, thanks for being here and being one of those horizons for us to, to look over into, you know, That's it.
We did it. We talked for an hour. Look at
us.
You can find Lin and Diogo on Blue Sky links in the show notes. Subscribe to Rascal News at Rascal News and listen to weird games at weirder people wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks to everyone at Sports 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@sdewald.itch.io.
Our logo is designed by Spore. Our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Gray, and our ad music is Lily Pads by my boy. Travis Tesmer, thanks to you for listening, and I'll see you next year.