Listen to this episode here.
This is, at long last, the end of this Dice Exploder miniseries on larp. And I wanted to send it off by returning to the question I kicked it off with: what can tabletop designers learn from larp? To get into that, there’s few people I’d rather have on than Jay Dragon (Wanderhome, Yazeba’s Bed & Breakfast).
When I pitched Jay this topic, Jay wanted to bring in the 10 Candles from 10 Candles. This is a game best known for, what else, the 10 candles you light at the beginning of play. And the act of doing so, and then turning out the lights, sets a mood that feels like a ritual, something deeper and more visceral than most tabletop games, something not exactly larp-like, but that feels of a piece with the emphasis on environment and embodiment that larp often brings…
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10 Candles by Cavalry Games
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Transcript
Sam: Hello and welcome to another episode of Dice Exploder. each week we take a tabletop RPG mechanic and walk with it Into the Dark.
My name is Sam Dewald and my cohost today is Jay Dragon. This is at long last, the end of this Dice Splitter mini series on larp. And I wanna call back to the very beginning of this season where I laid out my biggest goal for it. I want the tabletop community to look at the LRP world and ask, what can we learn from this? That means playing more LARPs and just being generally more aware of the space. And those were other sub-goals that I had for this series.
But if we've hopefully done a lot of learning here over the course of this series, I wanted to end by facing that question head on. What can tabletop RPG designers learn from lrp?
There are a few people I would rather tackle this question with than Jay Dragon. If you're here, you probably know who Jay is, co-founder of Possum Creek Games designer behind breakout hits wander Home and Yazeba's bed and breakfast, author of several widely shared and influential RPG theory posts and LRP aficionado.
When I pitched this topic, Jay wanted to bring in the game 10 candles to discuss it. 10 candles is probably best known for. What else? The 10 candles you light at the beginning of play and the act of doing so and then turning out the lights sets a mood that feels like a ritual. Something deeper and more visceral than most tabletop games. Something not exactly LRP like, but that feels of a piece with the emphasis on environment and embodiment that L Rrp often brings.
And then of course, we also cover a hundred other things too. So let's get into it.
Thanks to everyone who supports this show on Patreon. That could be you. If you want to check out the Patreon and here. Is Jade Dragon with 10 candles from 10 candles.
Jay Dragon, welcome to Dice Exploder.
Jay: Thank you so much for having me.
Sam: It's such a pleasure. And I am so excited to like close out this series on lrp I have been doing by talking with you. normally I kind of dive right into the game in the mechanic. But I wanna like set up the framing on this conversation of like, I'm really excited to talk to you about, okay.
I've covered a lot of LRPs. Maybe people have like even found some LRPs to play by now if they've been listening along. what now can we take from LRP as a medium and bring it back to tabletop design?
Jay: and for me, for context, right before I did tabletop design, I played larp, and I laed for about a decade. a friend of mine once called this like doing ketamine before getting drunk. Um, uh, and Specifically for a long time I thought tabletop games weren't very good, or I thought they were like pale limitations of a truer thing, and 10 candles was the game that brought me over to being like, oh, and tabletop games can do something that is very good and is good in ways that both can learn from LRP and is different from lrp. So 10 candles for me is very much my baby, my like merger of these two discreet things. For me, I think that's it's a good pick for the end of of a season on lrp.
Sam: I can't wait to get into all that, but I do wanna unpack on that. Pale imitation feeling first. Because my experience, and I think most people's experience with LRP is that it is just so much more emotionally intense because you are like really embodying the thing. And I've covered some of that on other episodes in this series.
But I also think that like, that's one of the things that makes it a lot more intimidating as a medium and in some ways like. the pale imitation is like the preferred taste for a lot of people. Like, maybe, maybe they don't wanna get up to the spiciness level of
Jay: Well that, that was my thing initially was that, so if you think about tabletop as being purely about kind of like, oh, I want to experience being an elf, right? Like I wanna be my elf Jimbo, and I want to fully embody my elf. Jimbo, LRP is how you fully embody Jimbo. And then tabletop is how you partially embody Jimbo.
And so like obviously you can't larp every week. I think that would destroy your mind a little bit. But like you probably play d and d every week and that could scratch that same jimbo embodiment itch, but it wouldn't be actually like, like from that perspective, from the, the naive simulationist right?
The
Sam: Yeah. Yeah.
Jay: just here to perfectly be my guy. Right? you can't perfectly be your guy when a certain level, you are sitting around a table rolling dice. Like there's so much in, in LRPs there's a lot of degrees of abstraction there,
Sam: Yeah, totally. Let's get into 10 Do you wanna set up what is the deal with 10 candles for us?
How many candles
are in it?
Jay: Uh, I have no clue. I've never counted before. 10 Candles is a Story Game by Steven Dewey came out in 2015. It is a horror game, kind of, I think in the same category of like dread and
the alien RPG of like these horror games that are built for one shots. 10 Candles at the time was really noteworthy, I think for a lot of reasons. One of them was that your characters inevitably die, which changes I think the framing of a normal. Horror experience where you're trying to survive because you believe that out of gaming you'll survive. Whereas in 10 candles it says no, you, you will dine no matter what. But you still have to believe they'll survive.
It also does a lot of interesting late Forge, like if you're familiar with the period of the Forge and like, like especially like around like the closing point of it, you see stuff around like, oh, well, you know, who has narrative authority is an important inside of 10 candles. And also the fucking candles, which is like what everyone's here for, which is like not really a thing other RPGs have used.
So that's kind of the, it's a horror survival game where those tech candles serve as the timepiece for your demise that when you run out of candles, you die.
Sam: Do you have enough sort of historical knowledge about that end of Forge era to unpack the way they were playing with who has narrative authority?
Jay: So I have a bit of knowledge there and I can't speak for certain, and obviously maybe Steven Dewey himself will come and find me and be like, blah,
Sam: yeah,
Jay: My understanding is that there is a point in the Forge where they were very interested in the question of narrative authority, right? Which is to say that there's a difference between winning and losing, and then who gets to tell the story, and 10 candles plays with that by having the resolution mechanic, be it dice pool, and you roll a number of dice equals the number of lit candles pretty much.
But then the GM rolls. A number of dice equals a number of unlit candles, and if the GM rolls, more successes than you do even though you succeed. It's the GM who narrates what success looks like which means that at the start of play, you're able to make very confident choices. You're feeling good, you're feeling clear. As you begin to run out of candles, the GM starts more and more narrating your successes and curtailing and limiting and pulling you in into, in a more and more enclosed way. Yeah.
Sam: Yeah. Cool. So we are, as you said, everyone's here for the fucking candles. Walk us through how the candles are actually used in this game. Maybe like, let's start with the sort of opening ritual of it so we can kind of walk through what it's like to play a session.
Jay: So as you create your characters and you set up play, the candles get lit, and once all the candles are lit, the game has like in a very almost mystical sense, the game has begun. Right before that, you're kind of laying the groundwork. So each step of character, more candles get lit and then you record a voice memo to your future selves at the start of play.
That's kinda your first instance of speaking in character, which is something Alice is missing later uses. And then you go through play and then every time someone fails. The scene ends and a candle's extinguished. And then candles also get extinguished just by virtue of like being candles. So like if the game is taking too long or if there's a big wind, or if someone is a clumsy o and knocks over a candle, right?
That, that also still counts. So you do you get this like sense of deep, like respect around them and then. When there's only one candle lit, then what happens is if you fail, you die. And that's the final moments of the game.
Oh God, there's another fucking thing too. Sorry. There's a lot of like pieces of this game that's part of what makes it very smart, which are the establishing of truths. So you fail, you put a candle out and the GM says: these things are true. The world is dark. And going around the table, each player contributes a truth and to set the scene.
And this is an opportunity to wield a bit of narrative control, right? This is a further moment when you get to be like, oh, you know, like we have plenty of food, right? Or we, we found a stockpile of guns, right? You can utilize it almost strategically, but you say a number of truth, equal number of lit candles. And the final truth is always, and we are alive.
And so you're running out of truths. You're running out of candles. You get done to the last one. It's, these things are true. The world is dark and we are alive. And that's the final candle.
And then the final candle goes out and the GM says these things are true. The world is dark, and you're sitting in the darkness of the room and the GM hits play on the audio recording from the start of the session, and you all are sitting in the darkness with the tend unlit candles in front of you. You listen to yourselves at the start of play. And then you sit there in silence and the game has a little line about that in the rules. I'm gonna spoil the rule book of 10 counts a little bit. So if that's a problem for you, skip ahead like 30 seconds. But it says
often you may find that your players will be silent as the recording plays and after it ends. Let them have that silence. Allow the weight of the past hours to sink in and be felt. This moment is what 10 Candles is all about.
So the candles exist to be extinguished and to produce the darkness at the end of play. That is what the entire game is manufacturing. The game is a three hour experience to manufacture like 10 seconds of darkness.
Sam: Very great summary and setup. To me, that ending moment in that darkness after the voice memo was so powerful and meaningful, but almost as powerful to me, was the initial moment up front where we done character creation with the lights on, and then lit all the candles slowly and then the lights turn off and like, that moment was also like the, a very stark crossing, the threshold of the magic circle. Right. It's so clear that after that we are in the ritual in a way before that we were preparing for the
Jay: Not all RPGs are magic circles. I think, in fact, actually to be an RPG with Magic Circle, you have to do a lot of work and 10 Candles is a game that does that work. It truly, genuinely builds a magic circle and then like you sit with it for several hours and like in a way that other RPGs don't do like, that's not a universal thing, but that is a 10 candles thing.
Sam: Totally. Totally. So I, I mean, yeah, it is just so clear. I think even just from that description, how powerful this framework is right, like regardless of almost who you're playing with, like regardless of everything else going around you, like the format and structure of this is just so strong.
I wanna hear you talk about it so.
Jay: Yeah. I mean, when I, when I first encountered it completely blew me away because first, right. Incredible. Just a, a beautiful ritual thing. A ritual in a way that normally I would only experience in RP or a level of intensity that you normally only get from being out in the woods.
But then also, right, it is creating, it's not a literal simulation, right? Like obviously my character is not experiencing 10 candles before him, right? My character is running around in the world. But by setting up the candles and then turning them out, like, like extinguishing them, it creates a sensation of like an sensation of simulation that I am like.
Immersion is a very personal aesthetic experience. Immersion is not like a universal shared thing. There's no like way to quantify that. But for me, the non-literal immersion, right, the emotional immersion of being like, even though this is not literally what is happening to my character, this is emotionally what's happening to my character. And so I'm in sync with the emotional and the the Jungian world of my character right now.
And that's something that RPG can do that LARPs can't even do that. There's no way a LRP can be like, and we're gonna get in sync with that.
Sam: Yeah. I think a lot about how. I think maybe the best example of this is like in Star Cross, where you have the Jenga Tower, and this is sort of representing your relationship with the person that you're playing with and whether you're gonna actually act on the love between the two of you. But the like tower exists both in the fiction as the like relationship tension between the two of you and in reality, as a Jenga Tower at the same time, like it becomes that metaphor.
And in the same way the like candles and everything surrounding you in 10 candles. Y you know, on the one hand it feels like nice that it's dark and I can kind of better imagine maybe what my characters are feeling being in the dark 'cause they are also. But on the other hand, like that, it, it's this literal thing of hope almost that exists in real life as fire and in the game as hope.
Jay: yeah. The game has these like proclamations throughout the text and one of them that I often return to is this early one that is, page six. Though, you know your characters will die, you must have hoped that they will survive.
That is the, like the guiding like thing to write in big letters above the gate. You know, abandon all hope. All you hand are here. No, no, no, no. Though you know your characters will die. You must have hoped they will survive, right? You must believe that through this game they can live. Like you must, when you see the light of the candle, believe it can remain lit eternal, even if you know that the candle will inevitably be extinguished.
Sam: Yeah. Yeah. It's uh, I mean, that's thematically what the game is about too, right? And I, I feel like it is making a thematic statement about what it means to be a living human being. Right? Like you have to like have hope that like right now, that you know you'll live forever. What we do matters. You know, we'll be here and like, you have to believe both that that is true and also inevitably confront the reality that like, everyone's gonna die.
And like the world isn't always full of hope and I, I, it feels so human to have to do both of those things at the same time.
Jay: Absolutely. Yeah. And I think it's it's not a way in which the game forces you to experience that. There's like this really annoying, I'm sure you've seen the argument where like certain various spurious unserious people on, blue sky and Twitter will be like, oh, you know, like dread, the Jenga tower doesn't compel me to feel fear or whatever.
Right? It's this kind of sense of like, the idea that, oh, well mechanics can't actually do that. Right? Mechanics aren't, aren't special in that way, and maybe I'm jousting with windmills right now. But I think that 10 candles is really special because it says like, well, you know, like you do have to go into it and take it on its own terms and you have to believe in it. But like if you allow it to fill you with splendor, it will fill you with splendor.
Right. In a very, like, it's hard to resist feeler of the flame in the dying of the flame. Right. It's a very fundamental, very like. Core to our ancestral history, human experience. And so I think that it does kind of say like, Hey, like, yeah, I mean, of course no mechanic can compel you to feel anything, but I do think 10 candles shows very elegantly the depth and the breadth to which mechanics can enable you to feel, if you will allow them to, if you let it into your heart, what it can do to you.
Sam: Yeah. Yeah, I'm, that makes me think about. Playing the game. And another sort of component of it is your character is kind of made up of index cards with traits written on them. And as you use those traits, you burn the index cards uh, over the course of play. And every time that I burned an index card while playing, it's this moment of beauty, right?
Because you're, you're watching fire this beautiful, beautiful
Jay: And the, the light in the room gets brighter because you're struggling to read by like the, there's like five candles left and you can't really read, and you're like sliding your, your index card up to trying to read it, and then suddenly the room is full of light and then it, it's consumed and it gets darker again, and you're like, oh, shit. What did I, what did I, have to give up to do this?
Sam: And it's exactly what you were saying about that, like the primal feeling. First of Wow. That's beautiful. And then exactly that, what did I have to give up to do this? That the loss that immediately comes after
Jay: Yeah. Which is like the joy of burning things, right?
Like it's why, like, yeah. I think like if you've ever like had a Wiccan friend at some point or another, they've probably invited you to like burn your troubles away in this, you know, like, let's on the full moon, let's all go out and let's write our troubles down on pieces of paper and then burn them.
And like yeah, if you've got a trouble and you write it down on a piece of paper and then you burn it and you feel that, like the release, the catharsis of like, oh, this thing that once weighed on me is now ash and cinders in the air. But tying that also be like core components of yourself, like. This is my character's, like last hope. This is my character's. Like vice, this is my character. This is like what makes my character a good person. And I'm like, all dust in the wind. Right?
Sam: Until your whole character is too. Yeah.
Jay: exactly. And then, yeah, 'cause eventually it's just, you know, these things are true. The world is dark.
Sam: Yeah. The other sort of big experience for me playing the game was the gradual realization over the first couple of candles going out and the becoming familiar with that stating of truths procedure. When I realized what the end of the line was gonna
Jay: Yes. Oh,
Sam: it was like, 'cause it's not like they tell you upfront. And then the last one, it's gonna be just like the world is dark, it's just like at candle six or something. I'm like, oh my God. The last one is gonna be just, the world is dark and it's gonna be terrible. Like,
Jay: Well, it's brilliant 'cause it's, it's all these like ritual phrases, right? And it's this process of building a thing that to me feels very critical, right? It's not just being like, oh, I'm just gonna throw you into it. It's like we are building a magic logic. We're building a fairytale logic, which is that when in the fairytale, we recite the words in this order.
And then by the end of it, that leads to an inevitable conclusion in which the words produced have a different meaning than what they meant at the start of play. But the words produced are an inevitable result of this, like fairy logic that gets us there in a way that I think feels, again, very magical. Like it's a very, like, yes, of course that's how it works, but when you realize that it's like, ah, Jesus Christ, you know?
Sam: Yeah, you have done a lot of design work with ritual phrases also, I feel like. And I've done a very little bit with it. And what, what do you see as like the power of ritual phrases at which you just touched on, and then how they can be used like more broadly in RPGs than just as they are here.
Jay: I feel a lot of the strength of virtual phrases comes from their ability to be recontextualized that i. A strong ritual phrase to me is one where
you know, like elite motif, like when, like, you are like, and like you're, you're watching a TV show and you're five seasons in, and a character has a moment that is evocative of an earlier moment or like says line or like, here's the, you know, like the music plays, but because of the context it has a completely different sensation. I think that a good ritual phrase can do that.
So like in Wander home. There are four questions that are asked at the start of each session, and I don't remember them off the top of my head, but the fourth one is when you answer silently to yourself, which is where is my home?
And that you answer silently and so effectively, it's not a question, it's a statement, right? I, I say, where is my home? And then we begin play, but we treat it as a question. So I ask, where is my home? And everyone thinks to themselves about where their character's home is, but like, what does that mean? That's such a broad ask question, right?
Are you thinking about your family? Are you thinking about your future? Are you thinking about like the people you're with right now? Like, and the, and you don't share your answer, which means that it feels very personal and very it gets recontextualized when you play. And so if you've been playing Wander home for like a year or whatever, where is my home is like such a different question than when you do a one shot, you know?
Sam: Totally, totally. I think another power of ritual phrases that I've experienced playing any number of RPGs is the ability to bind the group of players together as like a unit.
Jay: absolutely.
Sam: especially because in 10 candles, you know, you say we are alive together as a group. And that feels like such an important part of it too.
Like when we all say it, it is a punctuation mark at the like, end of that thing and it all like. It, it gels us together. It like brings us more into the like collective experience we're creating, and like the world that we're creating in our minds together and not just sort of leaving us alone.
Jay: Absolutely. And it, it also serves as like a, almost a unifier across tables. Like there's a feeling of when you do it, you feel suddenly like, oh, and I'm doing this with the other people who have done this before. It allows to play to kind of bring you outside of outside of the immediate Right.
It kinda allows you to move into another, like. I think that there's a lot of ideas around play as escapism that don't always gel with me, but I think the idea of like play serving as an invitation to go into another space really does it for me.
At my lrp, we had like a half hour long series of like concentric ritual circles we do. And one of the most important ones was we had so many, all these ritual phrases we had, like, you know, for arriving at camp or leaving camp for like, saying goodbye for saying like, we'd all these like ritual phrases we'd incorporate.
But one of them we would do is before we'd play, we'd all be in a big circle and we'd all hold hands, thumbs to the left, you know, thumbs to the left, you know, everyone repeats that. Then you all take your hands, thumbs left, holding your hands, and then you're shaking your hands back and forth. You know, there's some like, you know, like say thank you to the land, da, da, da. Everyone says all health and then 1, 2, 3, and then everyone throws their hands up in the air and says, let us play.
And that like, invocation is so important to me. I have a tattooed on my wrist. I have like, let us play on my left wrist for that exact reason. And a lot of folks at camp have like, let us play or all health tattooed somewhere on their body for that. Right. It's, it's a, it's a, there's a way in which it almost becomes like. Think negatively it would be cult-like right, but it becomes, like if it feels like, oh, and I'm not just playing right now, but I'm playing the other 200 times I've played before, I'm suddenly playing again.
And it really threw me when I went to like a con larp or whatever, and everyone just was like, all right, let's start playing. And then we did. And I was like, oh, what the fuck?
Sam: yeah,
Jay: Where's the ritual circle?
Sam: You know I started this season with a few episodes that were allegedly not about lrp, but were actually about lrp. So one of those was wreck this deck, and I had this whole conversation with Lady Tabletop about, making objects your own and in that game through sort of destruction and fucking them up and whatever, but how there's this fear of taking something beautiful and like ruining it
Jay: That's crazy. I have a lot of feelings about that.
Sam: Yeah, I mean, listen, we, we spent 50 minutes on it, but like the what we feel and what we talked about is how. up a deck of cards while you play that game allows you to put your mark on it. It becomes more meaningful because it becomes imbued with the meaning you've given it and like the history around it. The context around it that you've imbued into it.
And I feel like ritual phrases are not physical in the same way, but they feel like something you can do that same thing with because they become bigger than you when they're this collective experience like that. I feel like that's the thing that feels so magical about all saying we are alive together, or the kinds of phrases that you're talking about is that they represent more than just me. They represent the whole group, and I know that the meaning behind them is not just what's in my head.
It's also in what my fellow players are thinking and how they're gonna take that home and what they're gonna do with it and, you
know, being a part of something bigger. Yeah.
Jay: And the fact that at the very end we don't say it right. We say, you know, on the last candle we say these things are true. The world is dark and we are alive. and, and, and notably These things are true. The world is dark, is an unfinished meter, right?
There's, there's a meter. There's almost, i, I believe the world is dark, is I ambi, but it's, it's only two I ams. And then, you know, like these things are true is kind of two I ams, but so like, it, like, you know, like, you know, like it leaves, like these things are true. The world is dark, feels like.
There's something else that's supposed to come like in the rhythm of it.
Sam: And in the rhythm of it. But it also says these plural, right? Like these things are true. And then there's only one statement like it. It's leaving the door open for there's something else. And almost like inviting you. Like it may not be true anymore that we are alive, but it's still inviting you to fill in
Jay: Because you play the recording, 'cause you play the recording and so it's, these things are true. The world is dark and then you hear what you thought at the beginning, so full of naivety and hope, like you didn't even know how to play your character yet. You didn't know your character. You're like speaking clumsily because you're like learning how to role play your character immediately on the spot. And it's like, you just have to be like, I'm gonna figure out how to fucking talk like this guy. And so you kind of sound goofy and you're giggling a little bit and your friends are giggling and they have no idea they're about to go through like three hours of like, you know, you know, but like there's a feeling of like, yeah.
Sam: But the ca, if the characters clearly don't, and then the other piece of context around the voice recording is like, it's set up as you're gonna record a message if you all die, like, and then someone finds this message, that's gonna be what this message is for. And so you as a character are like speaking into the recorder as if someone might find it.
And then at the end it feels like you are the people who found the recording. It's like inviting you to imagine those people and how they found the recording and what comes next and what their story might be.
Jay: Which is a really perfect pacing as well because you reach the end of play and it's time for you to begin moving out of the headspace of your character.
And so you just spent several hours kind of so in deep present with them, and then that final moment enables you to begin moving outside of your own imagination.
And then you can return to the world. Right. It's, it's a mechanism of it divorces you from the character
Sam: Droll. Yeah.
Jay: Exactly. Wrong. Exactly. Literally there's and like, yeah, there's a ton of, you know, like, that's so much a question in, in Lars, like, just as much as building Magic Circle is how do you comfortably take people out of Magic Circle, right?
how do you go that way?
Sam: totally,
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Jay: I think one thing I wanna note just to people who have not kind of engaged with the text at all, the game is immediately post bot elliptic, right? Like, the setting doesn't really matter, but it's a nice setting. The sun has gone out and the world is falling apart, and so there's a very literal, like the darkness that is consuming us is like the darkness of the sun going out.
I always really love that. I always love getting inventive with the monsters. There's some great little tools for that. The way inventory works is your character's inventory is what's ever in your, the player's pockets right now, which is a wonderful little bit of like larp bleeding in, right? It's like, oh, surprise.
Sam: Just surprise, a little embodiment. You know, just like take stock of yourself. Yeah.
Jay: Exactly. Yeah. And it's like, whoa, hey, you know, like, but you thought it didn't matter what you were wearing or what's in your pockets, but it does. The game loves to like keep you on your toes a little bit. It's almost a little trixie that way. The, like, you write down your virtue and vice and then you pass them off to other people and so you get two other people's virtues and vices that like you combine and make a character.
It's very. I think, yeah, I think playful is the, it's, it's a game that is kind of like keeping you on your toes at the beginning in a few very strategic ways. And then you get into it and suddenly you are just fully earnestly in it, which is a really great, like little bit of alienation at the beginning, pulling you in fully and then kind of letting you divorce at the end.
Sam: How do you feel about the dice rolls in this game? Because I did feel like at times there was a little bit of like, I am so in the ritual and the world of 10 candles, and like now I'm making a d like a Dungeons and Dragons skill check. Like now I'm just kinda like doing this thing and, and like I think there's benefits to that. And I don't know exactly what you do instead. But I don't know. I'm curious how you feel about it.
Jay: Yeah. I. The dice are kind of odd, right? Like it's a little bit of like, okay, dice pool, you gotta roll the dice, you gotta count them the, it's getting dark. It's hard to see how many dice there are. There's kind of some fiddly odd stuff with like obtaining bonus dice in certain ways, or losing dice. It feels a little um, in that way almost.
There's a version of the game that doesn't have dice, but I do think that the concessions to being a tabletop RPG are maybe healthy for it in its moment as well, especially like 2015, right? Like this, the year blades in the dark is coming out. This is the like, belong ass of belonging hasn't happened yet. There hasn't really been kind of like a dice less resurgence in that way. People are still kind of in the immediate aftermath of Apocalypse World. I think that like having the dice is a nice little concession to like, hey, and sometimes your character's gonna do something and you won't know if you succeed or fail.
I think there was a way you could do it where you could kind of elide the dice and make it be much more about narrative control. Right? You could kind of instead be like. Oh, does the GM know? Right? Like the question becomes who gets to decide when it happens? But I think that like,
I think there's, maybe, maybe it gives it also a little bit of a feeling of like, and we're playing a game that is like a survival horror, right? Like, hey, you know, you care about whether or not you can get a hold of ammunition of food or whatever, right? Like there's a little bit of like the. They'll like, let's be concerned with the practical for a second. That I think is maybe nice. Like I think if, if there wasn't dice rolls, I would want there to be ways to count all your resources and that might clutter it up in its own way. So maybe the dice kind of
Sam: Yeah. As much as it feels to me a little bit, as you were saying, like a concession to the time, like the, this, what's a tabletop? RPG without dice rolls? I guess Fiasco did it. And maybe I've heard of Amber Deis list if I was around in the nineties and like that's it.
But I also, in thinking
Jay: Funny to call fiasco a, an RP two without dice, by the way. I think that's,
Sam: oh God, that's a great point. I'm so, I'm so second edition pilled on uh, fiasco where there literally aren't dice, but they're also like, they're not a resolution mechanic.
Jay: no,
Sam: Um, But the, the other piece just hearing you kind of like talk about speculate on the dice a little bit is like, they're a nice breather from the intensity of the truth's ritual that like, sort of being in that, you know, when I played this game we failed our first like four rolls in our of the game.
And so yeah, it was like very unlikely odds, but also then a lot of time spent in
the ritual.
like, the really intense
Jay: what is that? Yeah. Like 30 truths in a row.
Sam: Yeah. Yeah. And once that finally the dice kind of like leveled off a little bit and we started having a little bit of a breather, the breather was really nice. It was really welcome and it felt like nice for the pacing of the game.
Jay: When I've played often the first couple of scenes when you've got like 10 dice and you got nine dice feel very low stakes. Like they're kind of an opportunity to like establish character and like get familiar with where you are. And like I. there's almost a sense of like generosity to the dice. Like it's like, oh, 10 dice is a lot of dice to be able to roll. Surely we won't fail them immediately, I guess.
And so that I think is nice that they're kind of generous at first and it is nice to have a dice mechanic that like begins generous and gets exceedingly not generous towards the end.
Sam: yeah, yeah, yeah. I wanna zoom out a little bit and return to the sort of like big picture question that we came into this with. But maybe start with it, like, in your work, I'm curious, you know, we've talked a lot about 10 candles as like, I think a great example of a game that's got a foot in LRP and in tabletop and in this ritual space in the middle.
But I'm curious, taking whatever game of yours you'd like to, like is that something that you have approached game design aiming for? Is that something that comes out of your practice and like what, how do you think about it as you're designing?
Jay: Yeah. I think for me, I'm very much thinking about like, okay, why is this a tabletop game and what does it mean that it's a tabletop game and not a LRP? Right? So what does it being a tabletop game give me that a LRP can't have? Whereas I think a lot of people are just kinda like, like, that's not really a question on their mind. Whereas for me, it's a, it's a pretty consistent question.
And also I think a strong willingness to be like, like in Sleep away, there's moments where you burn cards and you dunk things under water and you crumple things up. And then like even into like Yazeba's where like your relationship with the book becomes almost love like, right? There's like a book object that you are playing with and like I've talked about the game as being like around the book.
And then my wizard game that I've been working on for a thousand years, and we'll work on for another thousand more, is very concerned with like the physicality of objects and such, where it's like when you play it in a physical space, you've got like eight board games set up simultaneously.
And it feels like a larp, that you're at the control panels of this horrible machine. And I think there's something about like thinking very strongly about we are sitting on a table with a book. And maybe some supplies. What does that like, mean tactilely that is really important to me in my game design, even for games that people end up playing online?
Right? That like, ultimately when we play, we're engaging with the physical object of the book in particular ways. And that becomes a prop that is almost in its own sense larp like. And when we play, we engage with the dice in particular ways or you know, the, whatever the hells and the cards, you know, those become props in a larp like way.
And so that relationship we have with them is the relationship we have with props and LRP and how does that change how we engage with them physically.
Sam: Yeah, so you started that answer with question, why is this a tabletop game and not a LRP and I hear you sort of concluding that thought with like, what, what, we have these props, but LARPs also have props, right? So like, I, I'm curious to hear you dig into like the, a more specific answer to
Jay: absolutely. So, like with Wander Home, for example, why is Wander home a tabletop game and not a larp? Well, for one reason, because we're gonna be going to many different places, and LARPs struggle to make many different places feel real, right? I want us to experience a village of goats in the mountains, and then also, you know, like an underground city beneath the desert.
And both of the LRP can't do that. LRPs not doing that. Like LRP can give us the majesty of the nature in the land we play on, but it cannot then like extend that further.
And then also because when we play Wander Home, we have a copy of Wander Home open amongst us, and when we lrp, we don't have a book open amongst us that is showing us images of what it can be like, like an illuminated folio depicting to us this world.
With Yazeba's. Right. Why is Yazeba's an RPG and not a larp? Well, first off, because you need to be able to play it at an hour and to LARP something in an hour is a big challenge. And then another thing is that the bed and breakfast is contained in the book. It's not in the world We're playing and it's in the book in front of us, and we modify the book to reflect our escapades.
And in l Rrp it's like, yes, you can have a space here in that you're continuously modifying for reflect your escapades, but here we, we've put that into the book with the rules and so it has a different relationship with us. And both those things, like you couldn't really do Yazeba's as a LARP because it would require.
It would still require a copy of Yazeba's or you could play Yazeba's where we larp a chapter instead of sitting on a table. But at the end of the day, we'd come back to the book and we have a relationship with the book that's different than the relationship rules have to larp.
Sam: Yeah. Even if we built a full-size set of the bed and breakfast, there's something about all of the characters and the. World of the bed and breakfast, and the time around it that is kind of contained and implied by the book that would not be implied by a physical space.
Jay: Like the book enables a different relationship, right? The book has a scavenger hunt in it that's mechanically relevant.
like larp could have a scavenger hunt in it, but it's very different than what it's like to look through a book to find things
Sam: Totally. Totally. A book has a different relationship to a scavenger hunt than an escape room does.
Jay: Yes, exactly. Yeah.
Sam: There was something else in there you were talking about of talking about the different locations in Wander Home and I feel like a large part of my experience playing Wander Home, maybe like 40% of most sessions, was just sitting around in third person talking about that place and making up that place.
Jay: it's
Sam: And like
Jay: the best part. Wander home for sure.
Sam: It rules. It's so good, obviously, but it's also like very, very, obviously not l rrp, right? It's we're all in this third person. Like, I'm Sam, I'm not my little Otter guy. I'm, you know, I'm, me talking and imagining the world rather than trying to act inside of that world.
Jay: Absolutely. Yeah. It's the um, so lrp frequently in my experience, assumes in character and then indicates out of character. Whereas tabletop games assume out of character and indicate in character.
Sam: Yeah. Extremely.
Jay: And so when you're assuming out of character instead of assuming in character, that enables a lot more like you can step back in writer's room it a little bit and then come back into it in a way that lrp, you can't really do, you can't really writer's room in a LRP without like no longer LARPing, right, for like a protracted period of time.
Sam: I've certainly been in LRPs where, we are like in space and we're like having some sort of, dune like melodramatic negotiation over the world and people are just like establishing truths by implication in the conversation that we're saying. And it's cool, it's fun. And it also is sort of like I have to react in character to this like deluge of new information about the world that like my character is not surprised by, but I am.
And it's very fun but like overwhelming and disorienting process.
Jay: One of the biggest challenges of LARP design is that you're running the game off of people's memory, right? Even more so than tabletop. That tabletop, there's a book that people are referencing and in larp. It's like, okay, if I make a game mechanic and no one can remember that game mechanic, it doesn't exist. Right?
If I write 50 pages of world building and I recite them to you and you immediately forget them, they don't exist. Right? And so like you have to rely so much on pedagogy. You have to rely so much on like. Okay. How do I teach you things? How do I get things to stick in your head? How do I, conserve information so delicately because I have such a, like your working memory is like the huge average human beings. Ram is pretty fucking small. So like I don't have that much space to work on.
And then in tabletop games, there's a luxury of being like, I'm trying to put a little thing in a corner of a book. And if people use it, they use it. And if they don't, they don't, because the book is kind of a thing you're referencing through all that.
And in lrp, like you can kind of establish truths because again, like the game only exists with the truths that people have of it. So someone can just be in, come in and be like, I am X, Y, Z. But it also means that there's no space for dilutions I guess? Like in a L rrp a challenge in LRP is that if I come in and I say, I am the king of, of California, right?
people they need to know if that's true or not. They need to
Sam: Yeah.
Jay: truth, value of
that. Um,
and maybe I'm lying, right? And like maybe I'm making something up and if I'm making it up, well what now? Because people. That's very disorienting. And their characters would probably know I'm making it up, but like, how do they know?
Sam: Yeah.
Jay: whereas like in a tabletop game, I can have someone come in and be like, I am the king of California. And then we can all be like, is that true?
Sam: yeah, yeah,
Jay: Like, I would know if that was true. What's going on here?
Sam: yeah. You can step out to that third person. Yeah.
I'm really curious now about like, what is how could you take. That world building sort of framework that we're talking about with Wander Home or, you know, a game like Microscope or Street Magic or something and bring that larp like ritual kind of feeling to it.
I, I don't know. I just like, I wanna, I think I am so excited to try to do is like, put out into the world more ideas of how to like blend the chocolate and peanut butter here.
Jay: yeah. I think to me. So that's almost, it's interesting because it feels very much like the opposite direction that I've been thinking and I've been in a very, like playing with canon mindset. Like my Wizard game as seven part packed as I continuously hint at, is a game where the books are full of lore and then like, looking up the lore in the moment is an important part of play because that's what it is to be a wizard, is to be flipping through a book looking for lore.
And so I've kind of been right, like that's
such a way, like literally like the way magic works in Embo practice, you have a of a gir of like a hundred spells and each spell is two pages and you're like, fuck, I need to find the right spell and you know all the spells. So you're just trying to find the right one.
And that's so wizard, right? To be like, ah, fuck, where's my spell? Right?
Sam: taking the most annoying part of playing Dungeons and Dragons and making it the point of gameplay. Like, wait, incredible. Love it. Yeah.
Jay: that combined with the joke I've been making about prosocial rules lawyering with seven Part Pact really feels that all feels very connected there.
But so like seven part pact is a little like, what if like the annoying parts of d and d were the, like immersive parts? Like what if you were a wizard deal with that?
But I think that the flip side, right? Like, well, I want to really make you feel present in the act of creation in the world. I think that the quiet year starts to get at that, which is why people, for some godforsaken reason, keep using it to build their RPG settings, which I think is a pretty ridiculous use of the quiet year. But also, who am
Sam: agree.
Jay: Yeah.
But I think that like in that space of like we are gonna draw a map, we're gonna do so in particular ways. I played a game at Metopia, which by the way, if you ever get the chance to go to Metopia, that's like the con to go to, in my opinion. It's a small con and it's play testing focused. And so everyone's got all these unfinished games and it, it unlocks your brain game designwise in six different dimensions, right? It
Sam: Yeah.
Jay: phenomenal. I literally, I like got back from Italy on Friday and the con was going on and I was like, fuck this. I'm driving up for a day just 'cause I wanna like, play some games.
And I played a great game by, oh, I don't remember his name. And I'm, I'm scared to say the wrong because I have face blindness and so I'm scared to say the
Sam: Oh.
Jay: name and be rude. But it was a, it was a wonderful game where we took a piece of paper and we crumpled it up and then we un crumpled it.
And we had a map, and that's not the first time I've seen that before. But it was a great use of it because it had holes in it, right? We ripped holes in the paper, so there
Sam: Hmm.
Jay: the map, and we figured out where our little guy was, and we started moving him around. And as we moved around, we collectively articulated what we found there, and then we marked it on the map.
And eventually he died. And a new little guy appeared and we described from there and that had that quality of like building the world in the writer's room way ritually. And that was really great.
So I think there's like a lot of good ways to do it. I think the trick is just to like really think about what does it mean to be looking down on a map and also think about what are the ways in which a map is not actually reflective of the place it maps. Right, that there's always both an infinite fractility to maps and the limitation of a map is never the territory. And I think those ritualizing, those truths will make the, the game really work well.
Sam: So you talked a little bit in there about like what you have been thinking about. I would love to hear you expand on that more. Like what, what are you thinking about where do you think you are going to be spending time in the realms of thought in the next like five years, two years, six months of design for you?
Jay: So the biggest thing for me has been thinking about simulation. I've become really simulation pilled. I'm really invested in games that model for me the relationships between things.
So a game that says, all right, you know, here is a map of the place we're in and the map has clouds on it, and we're gonna track the position of clouds. Right? Here is the game. You know, we're gonna do trains, we're gonna figure out where the trains are. We're gonna model their movement, right? We're gonna figure out, you know, like we're gonna, we're gonna create this kind of intricate, beautiful little machine.
And then specifically also the other half of that is that this beautiful machine is something we don't necessarily want to be in, that it is a limiting and frustrating thing that we're trying to work against, right? Like we've built a beautiful intricate machine for modeling the world and it is a cage that we're trying to break out of. And that, for me has been the fruit of a lot of my brain thinking.
And to me it's all very larp like, because in lrp, you know. You could lark with no rules. And so every rule is an imposition. It's a complication. It's a muddying of the waters. And so the rules become a thing that they, they limit how you relate to others, right?
If there's a rule that says like, if you touch someone, it hurts both of you, right? And it changes immediately how you move physically through the space. And you desperately want to touch other people without the agony of what that touch means.
And so you know, what are the real world systems that I feel constrained by? And how do they tell me the world is? And then how do I want the world to be? How do I know the world is independent of what they've taught me the world is? And yet here I am in a game, right? If I, if I'm playing a game that says, oh hey, and by the way, there's two genders, you know, figure it out. And I'm like, okay, well I know there's more. So like, let me bang on this, the friction, the, the tension between what the map is saying, what the territory is saying, feels to me very fruitful.
And also something that again, you can get that in lrp, but in tabletop because it's being constructed from nothing, the system is all you have to understand the world by, and if the system is full of shit, then suddenly it's like a door opens up.
Sam: Yeah. Yeah. It feels like good practice.
Jay: Yeah. Yeah. We're recording this in February of 2025. I can only imagine what the intervening couple of months are gonna look like.
Sam: Games at large I think are so good at trying things on and practicing
know, all kinds of things, but,
Jay: The great strength of games is that they're very good at reaffirming a worldview. The great weakness is that they're not very good at changing your worldview. I can't make a game that can teach people to be better people, but I can make a game that enables them to explore being better people, right? Or to explore resistance, right?
If people are already on my page, I can make a game that opens further doors for them. And I think that is uh, a very necessary quality, especially because in the same way that I can make a game that opens further doors, there will also be many hundreds of games that teach us how we're supposed to be right.
That, that instill that in us.
Sam: Well, and that it feels very fruitful in a time when I think so many people I know feel unsure what to do next, like how to. How, like they, they have a lot of things that they believe and they don't know what to do with those beliefs and, and practicing doing something
Jay: Well, what would also I think stands out right, is I've been thinking a lot about games that make you think. That I've been hearing a lot of people saying they want games that are just pure escape fuel that just they kinda lose themselves in. I'm realizing, really, no, I don't want that.
Because to me, the ultimate escapist game is the slot machine. There is no more efficient act of escapism than a slot machine. The slot machine is in a lot of ways, the perfect game. And I also think it's an object of pure evil.
And so I don't want to
Sam: I, can I tell you a story about the one
Jay: please.
Sam: played slots?
Jay: Oh God, yes,
Sam: I, I had a friend who lived in Vegas. Me and a college buddy went to visit. And uh, the college buddy and I are like standing in a casino and he's like, we're gonna put $20 into this slot machine.
And I'm like, this sounds like the worst time of my life. And he's like, now we we're gonna do it and so I'm like, okay. So he is like, he the, there's 20 bucks in the slot machine. Pull the lever. So I pulled the lever and I like won $3 or something, I'm like, amazing. We've won $3, we got three free dollars, now we can stop. And this is the best thing that's ever happened to me. And I never have to engage with a slot machine again.
And my college buddy goes, no, pull the lever again. And I'm like, but I, I don't want to. And he, he was like, no, no, no, no. I'm gonna make you lose all of the money on this slot machine. Like, keep pulling the lever until you don't have any money left.
And I, I did, I was like, this is horrible. I hate all of this. It just, you know, the money just like dripped away. And he was like I enjoyed spending $20 to see you have a terrible experience with slots and. That that is what that I think about that all the like, that's what slot machines
Jay: That is what slot machines are. They are. Have you read Addiction by Design, by Shul
Sam: No, I
Jay: Game Design Study Buddies did a great episode on it. It's about the game design of slot machines. And I've never reading it, never in my life have I gotten close to being like, oh, are we the baddies? Right?
Like, there, there's so many elements of like, oh, get them in the flow state and to make them wanna play one more game, right? Like, like make it so that you know, d and d is their lifestyle, right? Like all these things that are like, oh yeah, well the end point of that is the slot machine, right? Like we are just trying to build. Like League of Legends is just a complicated slot machine that obscures the middle part, right. It more, it less efficiently is a slot machine, but it, it is a slot machine. And that's horrific.
And I think that, I don't wanna make a game that is just losing yourself in the, the turning of the lever and the watching of the spinning and the da da da boom. There's the money internal lever and blah, blah, blah.
I wanna make a game that like you playing, you're thinking about it and you stop for a moment. You're like, Hey, wait a second, did we just like reinvent like colonialism? And it's like, oh yeah, we kind of did. Like, let's talk through what that means. Oh, that's like, let's take 20 minutes and think about the consequences of the things we're doing.
I'm like, you know, oh, whoa. Hey, did my, is my character abusing that NPC? And it's like, oh shit. Yeah, you felt like a toxic relationship. Let's like, talk about that and think about that and like. At the end on the other side of it, let's be like, we have like reflected on what we've learned and we've like processed, like we're not just losing ourselves in escapism, but we are like discussing it as an ongoing work of art that we are like self critiquing and examining in ways that like are good and fruitful and deep.
And that's the thing that I think is that's special at tabletop, that lrp frequently elides and tries like the magic of the ritual also is the escaping of the conversation about, well, what does it actually mean? Right? You don't stop in 10 candles to go like, oh, well wait a second. How does this all add together? You're just lost in the moment of 10 candles and so on the other end of it, right, like you've experienced something beautiful but also. You must self-reflect afterwards. There's no in the moment processing.
And I think that's something that tabletop can do that is very powerful and very special, and that I'm finding myself drawn to more and more is to make games for people who, who want to think about what's going on.
Sam: I think that's an excellent place to end. But I do wanna leave open the door if there's anything else that you wanna say about LRP and tabletop or about 10 candles in particular.
Jay: You should play 10 candles in person. You can't play it online. And that 10 candles and Ribbon drive by Avery Alder are kind of my two like phenomenal games nightmares to bring to the table for that exact reason. But I think Ribbon Drive is a good game to put in conversation with this if you are interested in Avery just put it up on itch.io, a great game for thinking about the environment beyond the, like
I have sometimes joked like, oh, would a system matter? Does system not matter? System matters as much as the people at the table and the book and the room you're in and the weather. And ribbon drive is like, oh, well yeah, the room you're in matters a lot. Let's think about that. And that's very, it's a very cool quality for a game to have and puts it in relationship with 10 candles.
Sam: Yeah. I did an episode on Ribbon Drive with Takuma Okada that people can go back and listen to too. It it very good. And they have a lot to say about it.
Jay: Great. Amazing. Good. I'm glad. Thank God that game needs to be talked about more.
Sam: Jay Dragon, thank you so much for being here on Dice Explode. This was such a, a wonderful episode. I loved talking with you.
Jay: Thank you so much for having me, Sam. This was an absolute blast.
Sam: Thanks again to Jay for being here.
You can find J on blue sky at J drag Sky. You can find Possum Creek's games for sale at Warehouse 23, and there's more links in the show notes.
Thanks everyone who supports DYS Exploder on Patreon That could be you. As always. You can find me on Blue Sky at Dice Splitter or on the Dice Splitter Discord, and my games are@sdunwell.itch.io. Our logo was designed by Spore. Our theme song is Sunset Bridge, By Purely Gray. And our ad music is Lily Pads. Blah, my boy, Travis Tesser. Thanks Travis, and thanks to you for listening.
See you next time.