More on Apocalyptic Principles

Earlier this week I put out a post about Miller’s Law and principles in classic PbtA games. The thesis was basically “there’s too goddamn many of these things to remember and someone (me) should say something about it.” I’m pleased to report that after hitting send on that thing at 2:30AM and then immediately falling asleep, I awoke to a day packed with discussion of the thing, and I learned a bunch. Thanks Dice Exploder discord, Gem Room Games discord, and Bluesky! I thought it’d be fun today to go through how my thinking has evolved since.

This is going to be kind of scattershot, but who cares.

I’m also going to use Apocalypse World as my main example today because it’s big enough it can take the criticism. (I love Apocalypse World.)

1. There are actually two kinds of principles, and we shouldn’t call them both principles.

Here’s two great principles from Apocalypse World:

• Be a fan of the player characters

• Barf forth apocalyptica

These are both expanded on at length in the text, and they’re both great pieces of advice for running the game. Also, as far as I’m concerned, they’re completely different in kind.

“Be a fan of the player characters” is good advice, if you take the time to explain it, but it’s advice about the attitude you should carry to the table. It may inform every decision you make, but it is not in itself a specific thing to do. There is always going to be some mediating action between being a fan of the player characters and actually affecting the game world. You will not “be a fan of the player characters” alone.

Meanwhile, “barf forth apocalyptica” is something you can just do. You can just start describing fucked up end of the world shit, and this principle says you should do that. Done.

I think these are distinct things, and if you’re going to do the agenda/principles thing, you should separate these two things out into different labels.

Actually, maybe the thing I think is that there are a bunch of “principles” in these games that are better thought of as additional agendas. “Be a fan of the player characters” feels like an agenda to me.

2. Get your big picture advice off my reference sheet

When I’m actually at the table, feeling overwhelmed by what to do, and I look at my reference sheet for help, I actually don’t give a crap that my agenda is to “make Apocalypse World feel real.” That does not help me. I want to know that when I’m prepping, when I’m reading the book, but it’s useless to me in the moment.

Everything like this, all this good advice that nevertheless is not a practical thought I can implement at the table, shouldn’t be on my reference sheet.

3. I don’t actually want these games to have fewer moves. I want my moves chunked into groups.

Soft and hard moves is one way to do it. Downtime and score moves would do it. But really whatever splitting up you can do so that I can only pay attention to 5-6 options at once is going to super help me actually make a decision.

Apocalypse World actually does some chunking with threat moves: each threat type has a few moves unique to it. The problem is that these are all then mixed in with the regular MC moves, so you’re going from like 60 potential moves but chunking down to 20 at a time. Chunk further.

Here’s a great implementation from the beta version of Exiles (rest in peace):

This even has me make two moves every time I’m dishing out a consequence, but it makes it easy to pick. Plus the mixing and matching allows for a ton of customization in how it’s all going to feel. Great stuff.

I want to emphasize how much graphic design and layout plays into this. Even just chunking the moves out visually into loosely related groups gives my brain somewhere to start in my choosing of a move. Crowding 14 options into a tiny font single spaced list does not do that.

Another thought that came up: having a go-to move that you can always throw out there as a consequence is super helpful. As an MC, if you don’t want to take the time to go through the list of moves and pick the exact right one, it’s nice to be able to just tick a clock and move on or whatever. This isn’t chunking exactly, but it feels worth noting.

4. You can play more slowly.

Running Dino Island this week, I felt the need to pack the whole game into a single 2 hour session before our regular DM returns next week. I was rushed, hurried, and wanted help barrelling along. That’s not ideal. In a normal PbtA game, you can just take your time. Take 30 seconds and look at your moves list and pick a cool move. It’s fine. That helps with all this.

5. Do we need agendas, principles, and moves in the first place?

Lots of people think no. Or at least, we don’t need to call them out explicitly. Agendas can just be advice, moves can be embedded in other mechanics, and maybe we’re just left with principles. Or maybe the principles get embedded in the mechanics as design philosophy and we’re left with just moves. Who needs “give every dinosaur a gimmick” when the MC move is called “introduce a dinosaur and its gimmick”? Who needs “look through crosshairs” when you’ve got the MC move “destroy something they love”?

There’s clearly a million ways to design a game, and that’s basically all I’m saying here. But I think even if you’re staying pretty close to the agendas/principles/moves framework, you can find ways to consolidate.

6. People approach all this super differently.

Duh.

I talked with people who have none of the problems I have here because they consider all this guidance and don’t stick to it strictly. I talked with people who do the same thing because they’d never read a PbtA game closely enough to know principles and moves are supposed to be rules and not just vague advice. I talked with people who simply remember all the options because their brains are much bigger than mine.

Sick. Love it. All this is great. And also, as a designer, terrifying. What happens after you read this blogpost and start thinking this Sam D guy knows what he’s talking about and design to my tastes but alienate a bunch of other people in the process? Being an artist is hard.

I do think there was a running theme in the people I talked to that no one actually does internalize all the principles and moves and agendas of a game, at least not until they’ve been running it for months or years. There is just so much to remember. Whether you think that’s a problem is up to you as a designer, but I think my observation that there’s more principles, agendas, and moves than one person can keep in their head at once is by and large true. People just care about that different amounts and have different ways they deal with it.

Putting it into practice

In working on my upcoming game Band-Aids & Bullet Holes, I’ve been thinking about all this for months without really realizing it, and I’ve made a bunch of choices I think it’d be interesting to go over. So hopefully soon I’m gonna come back to agendas, principles, and moves, put my money where my mouth is, and talk about how I’ve approached these things in a design of my own. As I always like to say on Dice Exploder, nothing like specific examples to really show what you mean.

Apocalyptic Principles and Miller's Law

I had a riot running Escape From Dino Island at my weekly game this week. It was a welcome return to a classic PbtA game after what must be years away from the form. Dino Island does an excellent job getting a solid group of characters in a tight spot and with plenty of open questions to chew on all in like 15 minutes of setup. It’s also built effectively for very short term play, 1-3 sessions, while still packing action and character in. I could do a whole episode of the podcast on the move Tell A Story if The Hard Move hadn’t done so years ago.

But the experience clarified for me a problem I’ve long had with PbtA games: as a GM, the number of principles and moves I’m expected to remember at any time is completely overwhelming, and it makes running these games intimidating.

When running Dino Island in particular, I was struck by how often I looked at my GM sheet to remember what I was supposed to be doing, saw some incredibly practical principle, put it into practice, and was immediately rewarded with a better story. “Always target a specific character,” “give every dinosaur a gimmick,” and “force the heroes to choose between saving themselves and helping others” are all in particular fabulous and useable principles.

But I was also struck by how often I’d find the game dragging a little and realize I’d skipped a principle 5 minutes ago and now was paying the price.

So... the principles are good! Forgetting them is bad! But I think this is a constant problem in PbtA games, first because principles are so often mistaken for good advice rather than rules to be followed. It doesn’t help that so many of the classics (be a fan of the characters; ask questions and build on the answers) have ascended to generic good advice passed around the hobby even outside of the PbtA games they were popularized in. Players should remember that these things are rules in these games, and if they’re broken, they should be broken knowingly and with intention. It’s far too often I think people break them accidentally.

But second, forgetting principles is a constant problem in PbtA games because there’s just so goddamn many of them.

Looking back on the game tonight, I was reminded of Miller’s Law, the psychological principle that people can hold at most 7 +/- 2 things in their head at any given time. More than that and something falls out to make room. Of course people are breaking these rules accidentally all the time - who can remember them all?

A typical PbtA game has three GM agendas, 8-10 principles, and a dozen or more moves. Let’s set aside trying to track individual PC wants and goals, NPCs and other antagonistic forces, the real human beings at the table, and staying hydrated: Miller’s Law, and practical experience, tells me that there’s no fucking way I’m going to remember all of that. In Dino Island, even just making an GM move involves trying to fit 14 potential moves into your head at once before choosing the best one. No wonder the principles and agendas fall away with regularity.

I’m not sure what to do about this. I don’t know what agendas or principles I’d cut from any of these games, because they are by and large all excellent. (At the very least, there do exist games in which they’re all excellent.) I wish more games would have principles and agendas because I think they’re excellent tech - I love just telling players exactly what they’re supposed to be doing and thinking about. Maybe GMs, and designers, just need to accept that some principles are going to fall away, and that each GM will remember the few that feel most relevant to their tastes. Maybe that’s completely fine!

But I wish these games understood that a little better, or maybe just more explicitly. They always talk such a big game about remembering the principles and agendas that I feel like I’m letting them down when I very naturally forget them.

Dino Island is a game that knows so strongly what PbtA is and how it functions, and it condenses and polishes so much of it in the tight, easy structure of its setup, obstacles, and extinction event systems. I wish it brought that same understanding of where to carve away game for a slimmer, faster, more essential experience to its principles and moves.

Podcast Transcript: Fan Mail (Primetime Adventures) with Meguey Baker

This week’s episode of Dice Exploder can be found here.

People talk a lot about how and whether RPGs emulate TV and movies, but this week cohost Meguey Baker (Apocalypse World, Under Hollow Hills) brings in a game that takes that sentiment to a compelling meta level. Fan Mail, from Primetime Adventures by Matt Wilson, is the core of the game's key metaphor: that players are simultaneously writers of a TV show, fans watching that show, and the characters portrayed on screen. We talk about the storygame scene in the early 2000s, how Primetime Adventures has influenced Meg's work, and how different this mechanic can feel in a one shot vs a full campaign.

This game feels like a classic. I wish I'd known about it ten years ago.

Further Reading:

⁠Primetime Adventures⁠ by Matt Wilson

⁠The Revolution Was Televised⁠ by Alan Sepinwall

⁠Inspecters⁠ by Jared Sorensen

⁠A Thousand and One Nights⁠ by Meguey Baker

⁠Ritual in Game Design⁠ by Meguey Baker

Meguey & Vincent’s new game ⁠Under Hollow Hills⁠

Socials

Meg on ⁠Twitter⁠ and ⁠Bluesky⁠.

The Baker family ⁠blog and games⁠.

Sam on ⁠Bluesky⁠ and ⁠itch⁠.

The Dice Exploder blog is at ⁠diceexploder.com⁠

Our logo was designed by ⁠sporgory⁠, and our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey.

Join the ⁠Dice Exploder Discord⁠ to talk about the show!

Transcript

Sam: Hello, and welcome to another episode of Dice Exploder. Each week, we take a tabletop RPG mechanic and gossip about what it might do next. My name is Sam Dunnewold and my co-host this week is Meguey Baker.

Meg's been designing games for at least two decades now publishing greats like 1,001 nights. And co-designing with her husband Vincent classics like Firebrands, Murderous Ghosts,, and their most recent work Under Hollow Hills, which I cannot wait to play available now from Indie Press Revolution.

Oh, yeah and Apocalypse World, the eponymous apocalypse in powered by the apocalypse, which makes Meguey one of the most influential RPG designers to have ever done the thing. Without her, I probably never would have made this show. So, thanks Meg. I got to meet her at Big Bad Con this past year, and let me tell us yet, she runs a game as great as she designs them.

When I asked Meguey what she wanted to bring on she immediately said fan mail, a meta currency with a great meta name from Primetime Adventures by Matt Wilson, a game from the mid aughts all about emulating network television dramas. We got to talk about the history of the game, how it's influenced Meg's design and how different the mechanic can feel in a one-shot versus a full campaign. This game feels like a classic and honestly, I wish I'd known about it 10 years ago.

One last note quick. We are off next week, but we'll be back after that with a final two or three episodes to close out the season. Anyway here is Meguey Baker with fan mail.

Meguey Baker, thanks so much for being here

Meguey: you are so welcome. Thanks for having me.

Sam: So, what are we talking about today? What mechanic have you brought in?

Meguey: The mechanic that I really want to talk about is the fan mail mechanic from Matt Wilson's Primetime Adventures, which I think is singularly brilliant. And I, I can see how it has influenced some of my play style, if not my writing and design style.

Sam: Yeah, can you tell me what Primetime Adventures is as a game abstractly? Like, what kind of stories is it trying to tell? And maybe even, like, what was the scene like when this game came out? Because it's, what, a 2004 game?

Meguey: Yeah. 2004. Sure. So in 2004 The Forge was still around and there was still a lot of, sort of forum culture was really big. G plus was just sort of a thing. Twitter wasn't really a thing. It just had a lot, it was a very different landscape. Critical Role didn't exist and all those other sort of like big, big, here's how you learn how to play a game places didn't exist.

So in 2004, everyone who was involved in independent design we'd like make all our games. And then February was everybody is play testing their game because everything got released at Gen Con. And that was just. This really recognizable cycle of it. And one of the funny things about 2004 is that, so Primetime Adventures, I believe came, came out in 2004. And I was pregnant with our youngest child, and Matt Wilson set up an email account for our baby to be and would send me emails from ScampleJay at, you know, Dog Eared Designs, which was just fantastically charming and uh, because I played Primetime Adventures several times by then, like in earlier stages, because of play, the playtesting mode of like, Hey, here's my rough draft. Here's my ash can. Here's my like change in mechanics. So Matt and I had that kind of relationship, which was really nice.

There was a lot of how do we do things differently in game design? How do we structure the conversation that is a role playing game to support the kind of stories we want to tell? How do we do this? What is going on here? And there's kind of a duality I think of like Primetime Adventures and Inspectors, Jared Sorenson's game Inspectors. I kind of think they mirror image each other in ways because both of them have a premise of we're going to do a little campaign, and we're following, you know, this is not new and different, we're following a little group of people, but what Primetime Adventures does is explicitly invite the idea that this is a television show, that we're doing a series. For the campaign is the series of the show. And so you're going to have over the course of eight to 16 episodes, you're going to have that sort of character arcs, that sort of story beats.

He introduced the idea of a spotlight episode that you plot out for. So in the session zero, or first session for Primetime Adventures, one of the things you do is together at the table you figure out what you're where your story arc is and whether you get your spotlight episode in session three, and then you're going to do other things and be supporting characters for other people, or whether you're a slow burn and you don't hit your like focus episode until session 10.

It's magnificent.

Sam: could do a whole episode on that mechanic. Also,

Meguey: It's so good. Oh my goodness. It's so powerfully good. It allows for players who by their nature step forward a lot, they can plot out their arc and recognize, oh, I step forward a lot. What if I intentionally put myself in a supporting, like, I just want to

Sam: Yeah. Yeah.

Meguey: lift so that they're in the spotlight. I know I'll get mine down the road. And the inverse is also true. Someone who's like, I often. You know, you just can support yourself as a player, you know, like, oh, I need several sessions to really feel a character, so I really don't want my spotlight to be until at least session five, you know, such an amazingly good tool.

And Jared Sorensen's, with Inspectors' opportunity to break the fourth wall was looking at the same sort of like, what if we understood this a little bit more as episodes of a TV show? What if we used the language around that as a way to convey what we mean by framing a scene or, where's the point of view shifting, how to cut a scene, like all these things that our language comes over from film and of course has its roots in live theater.

So that was a wonderful thing to see that all come through in Primetime Adventures.

My most memorable game of it, it was a detective game and it was me and Emily Care Boss and Vincent and think Joshua AC Newman. But one of the other things that Primetime Adventures does is it sets you up for that sort of TV series motifs.

So we had a recurring motif in this series of camera angle shots of people's shoes. It was awesome. Like you never get that as a focal point in a role playing game of like saying, okay, yeah, so underneath the table, we're seeing that it's kind of a wide shot and then it zooms in on my shoe and there's like a bit of brown mud and everybody goes, whoa, you know, because it means something. So cool. So cool.

And that's a fan mail moment, right? Where people are so excited about the idea, he's like, oh, that was wicked cool. It's cool enough that I'm going to give you a fan mail token.

Sam: That's a great point to transition into okay, what is this mechanic exactly and how does this mechanic work. So I think you're probably better suited to actually explaining the mechanic than I am, too, because I've played two one shots, and you've played it sounds like several campaigns, maybe,

Meguey: several campaigns, but also several campaigns a long while back. So why don't you say how it was for you in the one shot? And then I can say what I know from a longer campaign. How's that?

Sam: Sure. Yeah, so, fan mail, to my understanding I believe I read the third edition of this game, which came out in maybe 2014? The way fan mail works is you start with a little pot of basically poker chips in the middle of the table. And those are fan mail waiting to be claimed, as it were. And then whenever a player at the table, notably not the producer, is what they call the GM role in this game. So the producer can't do this, but the other players at the table, whenever any of them does something cool, they can take a piece of fan mail, like a poker chip, and hand it to the person who did something cool and say, wow, you did something really cool. Here's some fan mail.

And then those tokens can be spent for the resolution mechanic for every scene. Every scene builds to a thing where you flip over cards to determine how a scene went, and you can spend fan mail either to get an extra card on your draw for that procedure, or you can spend fan mail to appear in a scene that you were not otherwise in.

And when you spend fan mail, there's a chance that it ends up going back to the producer as budget, which is the producer's tool to influence these card draws on their end. They can spend budget to add more cards to their opposition to the scene.

And then when the producer spends budget it goes back into the pot into the middle as potential fan mail thus creating a sort of loop this resource that is called different things at different points around the loop, but it's sort of the fan mail loop. And some of it slowly disappears, too. So you sort of slowly have this pacing thing where the session winds down as more and more fan mail like ejects from the system But yeah, that's the overview on fan mail.

Meguey: And how did you find it when you played your one shots? Did you, did it, did you feel like it hit on all those different parts of the loop in a way that you could see

Sam: Yeah, so in one of the one shots that I played, I did get to experience the loop in full, I would say one time really effectively. And in that loop around, it felt really cool. It felt great to just, sort of, see the engine of the game chugging away so obviously.

Meguey: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Sam: Every piece of it is also so wonderfully named. Like the TV show vocabulary in this game, like you were saying.

It brings language that is so easy to use to the mechanics of the game that doesn't feel like you're breaking immersion so much because it has this sort of, like, layer of fiction where you are the writers and producers of the game which then helps frame how you should be approaching playing the game.

Meguey: Yeah, it's one of the best for that. Like, I could not agree more.

Sam: Yeah, and so I feel like the first time out in this game really went super well. Really just felt clean at every step of the way.

But as we kept playing in that session, you know, we didn't have a ton of time, and what started happening was everyone in that particular group I'm the really experienced RPG player. It's a group that I started with a bunch of people I met last year largely who had not played RPGs before or who had at least not played anything other than Dungeons Dragons. So I, as the producer role, kept seeing moments where I was like, ooh I want to award fan mail for that. And I would just kind of call them out to the table and be like, ooh that feels like something maybe someone should award fan mail for and then someone would like. Do it on my behalf, effectively.

Meguey: Totally fair.

Sam: but it did feel like I needed to remind people that the mechanic existed. And I think over a longer campaign, maybe they would have gotten into the habit eventually, but like I needed to see how the mechanic works so I could like talk about it today, so I was like poking people, and like so that that felt a little

Meguey: Annoying. Yeah, that definitely, does hit like anytime you're learning a new game, you're learning a new game, but after you're coming back to that in like the second or third session, it just rolls. And the mechanics, like you said, are so, they're so visible.

And so many games try to make their mechanics invisible. And I can understand why, but having, having them so visible is really great because it also helps, like you said in a pacing mechanic, but also the help that you can see what part of the loop you're on, you know, it is so beautifully structured as a wonderful sort of container space so that the fiction can emerge in a really well supported way.

It's, it's one of my favorite games. So, one of the things that happens in a longer game is at least in my experience, there became also emergent language of not only the fan mail, where we're engaging with the mechanics specifically as designed, but because of when it came out in 2004 ish, that concept of like fan engagement in a game or a TV show it was really taking off. Like, suddenly there's all kinds of boards and all kinds of ways that you can communicate. And like people are on forums. And I mean, we have to acknowledge the existence of the entire, you know, BBS system, bulletin board system from the 90s, but let's be honest, the way that the internet in the 2000s exploded with social media platforms and ways to interact, even just if you're looking at like Facebook groups or whatever, suddenly the idea that you could engage in this parallel play, you know, situation of like following a TV show and create community around that, and like the whole idea of fandom was born in that. Like, there are definitely people who were like huge fans of, of different IPs going way, way back, but suddenly Fandom was a thing. And there's like fandom conventions starting to roll out in the 2000s.

So one of the parallel things that over a longer game is not only are there times when interacting with the mechanics of the game and like moving the poker chips around for fan mail and watching that, but in, at least in the couple of times that I've played it became this other kind of additional fictional level where... and there's like a finger motion the sort of finger motion where you put your fingers out in front of you and like pretend you're typing on a keyboard.

So not only would there be the actual physical fan mail moving around but the players who were not onscreen in the moment would occasionally do that little finger moment and like say a tiny thing.

Sam: Oh, yeah.

Meguey: like so you can see how that would structure like on the zoom in on the shoes like someone might put forward a fan mail poker chip of like, oh, that's a great detail, but somebody else might do the finger tapping keyboard motion and make some other comment of like, oh my God, what, brand of shoes are those?

You know, just something. So it almost, not intentionally, but almost created this additional level of fiction which just really added to it.

Sam: And it feels like you could end up with, like, a quote fanbase unquote that sort of has consistent opinions or consistent things that like, they are interested in. Like the shoes motif, where it's sort of, oh yeah, if you want more fanmail, you could almost even signal that by like, doing something cool with shoes, because we've established that that's something the fanbase likes.

Meguey: Because you can hit these roots and, and

Sam: that's cool.

Meguey: that makes for a whole more like holistic story, but what it, the effect is because Primetime Adventures is framed so well as a, as a TV series, You can do that sort of callbacks and recognition of, of things that are true in this TV show. And then you get kind of the recognition of like, Oh, this is a really well written episode,

Sam: Yeah.

Meguey: you know, so that you're recognizing different aspects within the framework of talking about TV shows. Really freaking cool.

There's a show out now called Only Murders in the Building .

Sam: Mhm.

Meguey: show starring Steve Martin and Martin Short, and Selena, what the heck is her last name? Gomez. Yeah. Fantastic show. And they have a similar thing going on because their show is about a podcast that they're doing. So they, there's a similar level of like how many different levels in fiction.

Sam: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Meguey: And that's something that Primetime Adventures handles pretty well because they're already doing a couple removes, right?

Because they're framing it up as we are the actors and writers and producers of this show. There's whatever fictional show they're putting on. There's the fan mail mechanic and whatever emerges around that. So there's a lot going on in this game.

Sam: Yeah, and I had more to say about my experience with it, and how it kind of went wrong,

Meguey: Oh, please.

Sam: and, everything that we're talking about so far really makes me think that, like, this mechanic, and the way it even felt in play, it really feels like this game is going to shine most in like a long term play where a lot of that stuff has time to develop and where people have time to get familiar with the mechanics.

Because, like in this one shot, I feel like the intended incentives behind the mechanic almost flipped on their head, where it got to a point where after we'd done kind of one cycle through that felt really good, people just understood that they needed fan mail in order to compete with the forces of antagonism in the story, that they needed to have fan mail in order to, enact the amount of control over the stakes that they wanted to have.

And so, instead of looking for reasons to compliment other players, or reasons to highlight the story and be like, that was cool that was cool, they would simply take fan mail give it to people and then be like what was the last thing that you said? Okay You deserve fan mail for that and then like just to get more fan mail in people's hands. And that really broke down the game.

Meguey: Yeah. I mean, that, that's, that is a thing that can happen with any mechanic, I think especially where that's where there's a tangible component, right. Where is really big and where people can see you stripping away the fiction from the mechanics and then just engaging with the mechanics.

Sam: Yeah,

Meguey: And that happens,

Sam: I think also the time pressure was a huge part of it for us, that like, in a one shot, people really felt like, Oh, we have to wrap this up, I'm not gonna be able to save for next time, I have to just keep plowing forward, and i, I need to use these mechanics like a cudgel in order to do so. And that's clearly not their mechanics at their finest, right?

Meguey: Right, right, that's very clear. So, I mean, that's great motivation for you to find a longer campaign of this game. It really is great, you know. I would say, like, from my experience, in terms of length of sessions, trying to run a campaign of primetime adventure in less than five sessions really short changes the spotlight mechanic, which is so smart and so good. And also I wouldn't want to put it more than 15 or 16 sessions. It would, that would be like, what are we doing here? You know, how many character arcs do we go on?

Sam: Yeah, I think the game calls out, you must play either five or nine sessions. Those are the numbers that you are supposed to play. I found that interesting too. Like, there is something that feels right about those numbers to me, which is odd. but yeah, the game clearly knows what it is.

Meguey: Yeah, it does. It's very, it's such a great game. And, I mean, I definitely think there are things in that game that definitely influenced some of my design

Sam: Yeah. Do you want to talk about that at all?

Meguey: Yeah, I mean, real briefly, and then we'll see if there's, like, other things that are on your mind. So my game Thousand and One Nights comes out of the same era of really thinking about how we're structuring the story and how we can reward different parts of storytelling, basically and the fail and mail it mechanic of, oh, that was cool, here's a poker chip and that loop that you've described so well is how Matt did it.

And for me, I have a very similar thing where in Thousand and One Nights you have the gems and the sultan, blah, blah, blah. There's all these mechanics, gems and sultans, just put all your pretty dice in a pretty bowl. But that if there is something that the storyteller specifically, you know, the GM specifically does that you think is above and beyond, you can award the GM a die for their eventual use in the mechanics.

And that's something that doesn't happen in Primetime Adventures. It's really about the other players and rewarding their contributions. So we have slightly different goals, Matt and I, of what we're incentivizing in the game design for the two games. But they're definitely those two mechanics, the fan mail mechanic and the gems mechanic in Thousand One Nights, there's definite conversation going on between those mechanics, you know, his game came out a couple, like two years before mine, so I definitely was aware of that and going, huh, that's neat, incentivizing people to say cool stuff by dealing with the mechanics. How do I want that to inform my game design?

Sam: Yeah, I haven't actually talked explicitly enough about how cool I think it is to make that incentive towards a particular kind of conversation at the table explicit, like, believe once I had a table that was comfortable with these mechanics, that fanmail would do a great job of incentivizing people to listen in each other's scenes, even to scenes they're not in, to watch for moments to award fan mail. To then compliment each other, which is great, I always love just more compliments anywhere in my life. And to make, it's like an avenue for people to make really explicit what they want out of a story and what part of the story is interesting to them.

And I think that's really cool too. The fact that the producer is left out of being awarded fan mail really gives the players in Primetime Adventures an opportunity to, like, push the direction of the story, at least on the small scale, where they want it to go as a group. It gives them that power, explicitly, mechanically, in a way that is really not true in a lot of games from this time.

Meguey: Yeah. And there's, a piece of what you just said that I want to underline, which is about listening.

Sam: Mm.

Meguey: because the, ability of the players to have some control of where they want the story to go is so great, but there's a second piece that the listening does, which is allows them to go there a little more slowly because since you are listening for cool stuff, you're paying attention to your fellow players, which means that players who are by their nature a little quieter or a little more reticent, or they just want to take a minute to really think about how am I going to frame up this shot for this scene in Primetime Adventures, it gives them that space a little bit. Not so much in a time crunch situation like you were saying, but in the fuller game, it provides breathing room in a way that a lot of other games fail to because everybody's just either so eager to do what they're gonna do or they feel like they gotta quick say something or they gotta quick fill the space if there's space, instead of just let the other player have a couple beats to put together something really cool.

And you know, you can chart out in Primetime Adventures, you can chart out the rising and falling arcs of each different character to see whose spotlight episode is whose. And that can be a guide for that whole thing to go. Okay, my spotlight episode is in two episodes, so I need to be beginning to build toward that, right? Or I know your spotlight light episode is next, so I'm going to hand you this cool little something that can set you up for next time.

And so that part of the way that the primetime adventures mechanics support the conversation in a much bigger way is really appealing to me.

Sam: Yeah. I had one other major bump on this mechanic come up in the other one shot that I played, which was, I had a player who really viscerally disliked the idea of, like, the way it felt to her was like, I'm voting on which of my friends say cool stuff. That like, in fact, to min max the game, I am being incentivized to say cool stuff, and that, that feels really bad to me. That it feels like we're gonna end up with some people at the table, who, like in that one we were playing more of like a comedy, like a sitcom kind of setup, and she felt like the people who are the funniest are gonna get all the fan mail, and then we're gonna have a situation where everyone at the table feels really bad, unless they're the person who's making all the jokes. And like. I feel really bad about that, it just feels icky to me.

And, that was not my experience with it, but I felt like it was really another way for the incentives of the mechanic to sort of flip, and I could really imagine a table working that way, and it being a pretty unpleasant table to be at.

Meguey: Yeah, yeah. And like comedy is hard, you know. One of the hardest and most stressful creative jobs is stand up comedian, you know. It's not easy, especially on the fly under pressure when you're creating the world out in front of you and you're trying to like make jokes on that. So yeah, I can totally see that.

And that, that would come back to figuring out what the character arcs are, what the people at the table need, and maybe like, okay, it's a comedy, but what's the show about,

Sam: Yeah,

Meguey: You know, it can be a comedy that's about dealing with loss. It can be a comedy that's about struggling to be heard, you know, all these different things.

Sam: and it you don't have to award fan mail just for jokes in that situation like you can do other things Yeah.

Meguey: Like if it's a comedy... so here's another thing. There's a, Oh shoot. What is it called? Harrison Ford was just in a recent, in a show really recently.

Sam: Shrinking

Meguey: yes, so like Shrinking is technically a comedy. You can have a comedy and then like everybody's cracking jokes left and right, and you award fan mail points for someone talking about okay, it's a side shot back in the hallway and you just see it hitting me, the results of this test, and I'm just weeping, and now all of a sudden it's like fan mail, hell yeah, you know? That's, it's a way to, to, to deal with that, but I think that would take a conversation at the table,

Sam: Yeah,

Meguey: and figuring out how to navigate that, which is all games and all mechanics really. For any show or any genre, you need a lingo. You need to know what it is. Right. And like the way the lingo we were using in my most memorable run of Primetime Adventures was very much noir detective show.

Because we had a shared lingo for that. for some of us, it was a more familiar lingo than others. And that meant, yes, Emily could say something that was clearly, because she's deep in the noir, and we would be like, Oh my gosh, that's so great. Because it was clearly a cool detail that we wouldn't have brought. I wouldn't have brought. that's again, I don't know, it's just a neat part for me of dealing with games that are about genre. And like, Primetime Adventures is so set up to do so many different genres because it's genre is television show.

Sam: yeah, yeah.

Meguey: There was a kid's show. Oh my gosh. One of the formative games of this was a kid's TV show that Vincent was in at Gen Con. And like, then Vincent and Matt told me all about it afterward. And it was called Moose in the City. And it was about this, a moose who suddenly is now living in the city and having to figure out how they operate in the, this weird city world.

Sam: you said the title and I could, like, hear the theme song for

it huh. Uh huh. Fish out of water kids show. We got to love them. They're great. We all feel that way as kids. It's perfect. But the point of that is that like there's so many different things. If you look at Moose in the City, and you look at our Noir Detective Show, and we look at the comedy you just described, and then I don't know what the genre was for your other one.

Meguey: And like, all of those are held by Primetime Adventures. You know it's, it's, it's great.

Sam: Yeah, it does feel like you do need some amount of genre fluency with television, which most people have, right? Because you're right, it can be any kind of television, really. But do wonder how hard it would be for someone to come into this game who doesn't really watch TV and what their experience would be like.

Meguey: I hear you and I counter with Drawfee, Good Mythical Morning, You Suck at Cooking, any of these great, video shows because we may, we may not have the same 1980s version of television, which just given our age, that's what I think Matt was reacting to is growing up with part time television.

So, while those specific things of like, and now we cut to a commercial break may not necessarily come over, I think that the experience of the youngs today, meaning, people 15 to 25 or 45 or whatever, totally scales to anything that you're watching online.

Sam: and

Meguey: a structured, scripted, you know, there's sets, there's camera angles, there's people off stage, you know. I'll

Sam: like you could do Critical Role. with this, right, like, uh, it feels like you could do reality TV with this, too, like, yeah,

Meguey: Instead of, you know, that would be a fun primetime adventures game.

Yeah.

Sam: Alright, is there, is there anything else you wanna talk about with this game before I, I wrap us up here?

Meguey: I just think it's wicked cool. Everybody should play it. I had the incredible fun moment at Gen, one of the Gen Cons right around after it was released where Firefly was the big going thing that All, everybody was talking about was Firefly.

Sam: That was the other one shot of mine, incidentally, was

just doing Firefly, so,

Meguey: oh, there you go then. And I wound up I'm going to blank on his name, the actor who played Shepard Book.

Sam: Ron Glass

Meguey: Thank you, yes. Ron Glass. He was there as a guest.

Sam: I remember that, Gen Con, I was there too.

Meguey: okay then. So I got to I got to be present while Matt talked about Primetime Adventures

Sam: Oh, yeah.

Meguey: and saying, Hey, we really love your, really enjoying your show. And I get to say, you know, yeah, we're. There's this game, Primetime Adventures, to make television shows, and we really appreciate great stuff like yours that makes us able to play great games like this. It was neat. It was a neat moment. I don't know, yeah. Are there other things from, like, that you,

questions that you have?

Sam: No, I just want to say, like, I've enjoyed sort of taking a antagonistic approach towards the mechanic of this episode, but like I really did have a lot of fun with this. Like I do think that this the I I've I've often looked down on generic systems. Like I have this whole episode of this show that you can go into the archives and find with wendi Yu talking about Fate and our problems with how generic Fate is.

And this game, in some ways, feels like a very generic game, in that you can do kind of any genre with it, but it is also, as we've discussed, I think, at length like, it's so specific in the kind of thing you can do with it, too. Like, network television really is its own genre, and this game is so good at getting the like hooks in there that it really subverts a lot of my traditional problems with generic games. And I think that's really impressive. I think the whole framework is just really interesting and compelling.

I've really appreciated hearing you talk about what it's like on more of a campaign level because I could feel playing it this should work, and it's not working for me in these one shots, and was just really excited to come in here and hear the long term experience of it, so I

Meguey: hmm. It's a neat framework because everything we do as game designers, like it's all reflective on each other. Everything's in conversation with each other. It's really neat to look at Primetime Adventures and use that as a lens to examine television.

Sam: Yeah.

Meguey: Because then I'm like, okay, if I look at this show I'm enjoying through the lens of primetime adventures, suddenly I can see I can see where the mechanical feedback loops are or where they're hoping to like the character back into the story back into, you know, how, how that interweaves, I can see when the writers have a plan for the arc of the character, and when they don't. Just, it's really interesting.

It's not quite so calculating as being able to see when the writers are planning for the social media moment of what becomes a meme and things. But, when you can see that in a show, oh my goodness is it revealing.

Sam: Yeah.

Meguey: Like, they think this the thing.

Sam: Yeah.

Yeah, I am a screenwriter and I'm doing that whole thing and like working on TV a lot and I like play the first time I played this and made characters and the way it talks about your flaws in your characters and the way it talks about your character's issue and framing scenes specifically around either is the character going to be able to overcome their issue or is the character going to be able to get what they want? I was like, I need to go rewrite my pilot. Like, it really, really nails it. Yeah, and I think that

A thing that I talk about all the time with my writing friends is how hard it is to find the engine of a television show. And this game is remarkable in the way that it creates an engine for you so easily. it's,

Meguey: I'd really love to hear, I'd really love to hear what your insights and experiences would be after you got a chance to play a five session game,

Sam: Yeah, well, I, you know, that might be a really fun thing to revisit, maybe in a year when I've found time for that, I'll come back and, and do an episode

Meguey: that sounds awesome. We should do like a pinky swear it, within the coming year, we will each do a five session

Sam: Oh, yeah.

Meguey: Primetime Adventure game, and then we'll come back a year from now and talk about it.

Sam: that sounds

Meguey: excellent? I'm excited. I would love to do that.

Sam: Great. Well, listen, then, any other things we have to say we can hold off until then. Uh, Me Meg, thanks so much for being on Dice Exploder, it was a pleasure to

Meguey: Absolutely. Thank you so much. It was a real pleasure. I'm happy to come back anytime, but definitely in a year.

Sam: Thanks again to Meg for being here, you can find her on Twitter at night sky games or on blue sky at MegueyB.

Meguey and her husband Vincent Baker's new game Under Hollow Hills is available now from Indie Press Revolution, and her other games and occasional blogging are at lumpley.games. I put a link to one of my favorite of her blog posts about rituals and games in the show notes.

As always, you can find me on socials at S Dunnewold or on the Dice Exploder discord. Our logo was designed by sporgory. Our theme song is sunset bridge by purely gray. And our ad music is by my boy, Travis Tesmer. And thanks to you for listening. See you next time.

Dice Exploder After Show: Rules For Your Cool Sword

A tiny bit of my conversation on Dice Exploder this week with Moe Poplar had me thinking about cool swords.

So you want your game to be about cool swords. Neat! But that could mean a bunch of different things. What makes a sword cool?

• It rolls with a big number

• It’s got a neat special ability attached

• It can talk

• You worked your ass off to get it, and the memories of that work are inseparable from it

• You chose it from a number of swords, each with potential benefits and drawbacks

• It says “ow” every time it stabs someone

All of these are fine answers, but they all suggest really different games. That’s great. Diversity is beautiful. Just, you know, design your game with intention, and play games where your sword is the right kind of cool for you (or where cool swords don’t enter the picture in the first place).

Playbooks specifically are a framework that could highlight any of these, but they’re much more likely to be the right fit for the big number, special ability and “can talk” kinds of cool, and those are probably three different playbooks.

Anyhoo, as usual, my big advice is to make every decision with intention.

Highly Structured Games Are Good

I noticed recently that the RPGs that most reliably give me their intended experience, regardless of who I’m playing with or how experienced and familiar with the game the facilitator is, have an enormous amount of structure to them. At any given point, it is always clear in these games who is responsible for taking the next action and what their options are for that action.

A bunch of examples:

For The Queen: on your turn you draw a card, answer its prompt, and then optionally take questions from the rest of the group.

Dialect: on your turn you create a new word (or do something else allowed by the cards in your hand), then you frame a short scene around its use. You optionally feel out that process with the table. Additional precise procedures kick in to evolve the world between each go around the table.

Most Firebrands games: on your turn you pick a minigame and follow its instructions, which are detailed and particular in what options they allow and for who.

The Quiet Year: on your turn you draw a card, answer its prompt, follow any other instructions, and then choose one of three specific game actions. No one else speaks. At any time anyone may taken a Contempt token.

Microscope. Desperation. Even something like Fall of Magic, as open-ended as it is in the details of and manner in which you frame scenes, provides a clear structure and scaffolding for whose turn it is and what is expected of them on that turn.

You can even branch out in the OSR, or at least the post-OSR, for examples of games like this:

Errant is chock-full of tightly-controlled procedures, and it encourages you to add your own for whatever’s important to your table that it’s missed.

Barkeep on the Borderlands is a module about pub-crawling through a Mardi Gras style carnival with a pretty tight procedure for keeping the game moving. Everyone in the party takes one turn (it is left up to the group and referee to decide what that means, but my tables have fallen into an intuitive rhythm quickly) and then the referee rolls to see whether a random encounter occurs, everyone needs a new drink, or time passes. This keeps the story’s momentum forwards always at top of mind for everyone at the table.

Anyway, that was a smorgasbord of examples of the kind of tightly structured game I’m talking about here. They have turns, they have restrictions around what you’re allowed to do on your turn, and as a result they are in my experience remarkably consistent.

I adore this style of game. There’s nothing that kills momentum at the table for me more than everyone looking around and going “okay, now what?” If it’s not clear who is responsible for the next moment of play, or if it’s clear who but they haven’t been given any handholds for what to do with it, you’re fucked. People become paralyzed by choice and by the vastness of an empty page, infinite possibilities. Maybe not permanently, but this kind of moment is a huge speed bump on play.

Compare to D&D: when are you actually supposed to roll dice? What are you actually supposed to do next as a player and as a character? The game does not have great answers. At best, it has an implicit conversational procedure. At worst, it leaves you completely high and dry to figure all this shit out on your own.

Compare to an open-ended PBTA game like Apocalypse World or Dream Askew. These games give you mechanical signposts to steer into, and they otherwise trust you to carry on a conversation (or The Conversation). These tend to work great for me once they get rolling, but they also often leave my tables unsure how to get started or what to do next.

Compare to Blades in the Dark: the rules are heavily structured, forming a tight loop from scores to aftermath/entanglements to downtime and back to scores. But the game says there’s another phase in there, “free play,” between downtime and scores, where “characters talk to each other, they go places, they do things, they make rolls as needed” and “During free play, the game is very fluid—you can easily skim past several events in a quick montage; characters can disperse in time and space, doing various things as they please.” There’s even this chart from the game that implies free play should be like a third of play:

In practice, I see many tables skip over free play entirely, minimize it, or get confused what they’re supposed to do when they’re in it. Players gravitate towards the phases of play that are more structured. There’s nothing wrong with that style of play, but if you want something different, you have to push against the current and figure out how to do so for yourself.

In my experience, the learning curve in more open-ended games comes from getting a feel for when to actually engage with the rules and when to slip back out into just talking with each other. Games where the answer is clear and easy to remember tend to be my favorites, and games where you are never not in the middle of a procedure of some kind (even if that’s a Fiasco-style “play the scene out”) are the clearest and easiest to remember of all because there’s never any question about the answer.

Looser Procedures Demand Stricter Fiction

There is a circumstance under which games with very loosey goosey rules and procedures end up working fine for me: when the fictional world around them is heavily detailed.

When running modules written for games like Cairn, Mothership, and Mausritter, I find I almost never need to bring up mechanics. Instead of the rules of game making it clear what to do next, the fiction of the world serves that purpose.

There’s a whole argument here, that is I think both self-evident and worthy of its own book, about how procedural rules and truths about the fictional world aren’t meaningfully different in the way they frame the act of playing pretend with your friends. But I do see a trend in my tastes related to this: I really want at least one.

Meanwhile if there’s not much of either, it’s hard to grab onto anything and make a story happen. Taken to the extreme: not many people are out there just completely freeform making shit up with their friends.

In Conclusion,

Games that are super structured procedurally remove so much uncertainty from play and deliver the most consistent experiences. I think they’re best for people new to the hobby, and as a player I find that clarity reassuring myself.

The less structured your game is procedurally, the more I prefer it to be super specific fictionally. You gotta give me something to hang on to.

These highly-structured games are not the end-all-be-all of RPGs. Obviously. But I think this kind of game should be called out, appreciated, studied, and drawn from by more designers. Try a more tightly structured experience for your game during design and see what happens.

The Dice Exploder Podcast Style Guide

I’ve mentioned this several times on the Dice Exploder discord and to many folks in private, but here’s a first official public announcement: I’m actively seeking out people to come take over Dice Exploder as the primary host for 3-4 week runs. (This is not a solicitation for submissions; I’ve been reaching out to folks personally.) I’m hoping to get two or three of these out this year.

As part of that, I wrote up a style guide for the show, basically a document describing everything I do to make an episode.

While talking with folks on the discord, it sounded like people might be interested in this document just as a general “here’s some advice on making a podcast” thing. So here it is for your reading pleasure! If you’ve ever been curious how the show gets made, or you’re looking for advice on making a show yourself, here’s like 70% of what I have to say about it.

Note that this is written as if you’re taking over Dice Exploder, and I’m not bothering to go through and change that.

Rule Zero

Make the show your own. Lol I can’t believe I’m doing a rule zero but it’s true. If you want to change the music, if you want to interview people about their own games, if you want to publish 10 minute episodes, do it. Short episodes are preferable, even. Do yourself the favor - they’ll be less work on your end, and listeners like them.

The one thing I encourage you not to change is the core concept of the show: this is a podcast about the nuts and bolts of RPG design, and it’s about going deep on specific examples.

(Even that guideline I break sometimes, though my favorite episodes all stick to the format hard. I think you should stick to it.)

Pre-Production

Tech

Worried about your microphone? Don’t be. People are pretty used to listening to low quality audio on podcasts these days, and post production can clean up a lot. A headset is better than a raw laptop or webcam, but you’ll be fine.

That said, it’s always physically worth moving away from persistent hums: air conditioning units, fans, refrigerators, open windows, and so forth.

Also try and record in a room that isn’t echo-y. You can listen for this by literally just listening to yourself talk. Carpet, furniture, and other large soft objects do wonders for dampening the sound in a room. Sometimes I just grab all the couch cushions in my house and lean them against the walls of my office to record.

If you do want to invest in a good mic, I use a blue yeti. A snowball ain’t too bad either.

Inviting people on / choosing mechanics

Pick mechanics and cohosts however you want.

• Invite people on because they’re cool and let them pick whatever they want.

• Invite people on because you want to talk about a specific mechanic, game, or genre and you think they’d be a good fit.

• Whatever.

The one broad rule I’ve held about cohosts is to try and make sure I have <50% white guys on the show. I aim for 3/8 tops. If you’re doing three episodes, make sure you don’t have all guys or all white people. I’ve done a particularly medium job on getting PoC on the show recently, so I especially encourage you to seek out non-white cohosts.

The one specific rule I’ve held is don’t let people bring a mechanic they designed. If they want to talk about their design, great, but ask them to bring something that inspired them as a way into it. The Mork Borg graphic design -> talking about Dukk Borg episode is a good example of this. There’s a lot of shows that ask people about their own process, and they’re good shows, but I think focusing on third party work encourages people to dig deeper into the technical side of the craft and yields great results.

Don’t be afraid to just ask whoever to come on. I’ve found that everyone says yes, no matter how big a deal they are. The RPG scene is a friendly community.

When choosing mechanics, I have found that my favorite episodes are ones where one of us loves the mechanic and the other... doesn’t. Episodes where both of us love the mechanic are perfectly good, as are ones where we’re both mixed. There’s something really exciting about taking something you almost love and talking about what might get it over the finish line for you, or something you think is good but could be great.

I’ve never done an episode where we’re both dunking on a mechanic, but I don’t like the idea of that so much. I’d encourage you to avoid it.

Outlining

I outline some things to say ahead of time. I take the mechanic we’re gonna talk about, I write down every thought I can think up about it as a bullet point (usually 6-10 things), and then I ship the outline to my cohost for them to add stuff to.

The outline isn’t a blueprint, it’s a safety net. If you get off topic, good. The outline is just there for when you’re searching for what to say next.

If you don’t care about having an outline, that’s fine.

Production

Recording

Use the Dice Exploder Squadcast account to record. It automatically does backups and everything. Good stuff. Comes free with the editing software I pay for (Descript). If you need help using it, let me know.

Short episodes are good, actually. If you’re running over an hour, look to wrap up unless you want to make that much extra work for yourself. If you only recorded for 25 minutes, that’s a feature not a bug.

Interviewing

I usually start every episode by asking my cohost why they chose this mechanic to bring on. The whole secret of any interview, and maybe most conversations in life, is to get the other person talking about something they’re passionate about. We know they’re passionate about whatever the mechanic is, so get them riled up by asking why.

When I’m not starting that way, I’m starting by asking my cohost about the history of the mechanic. Sometimes this backfires and they don’t know, in which case I cut the question and start in on why they like it as usual.

When I don’t know what to say yet, I refer to my prep (thanks Apocalypse World) and look at the outline.

When I’m finished with things to say, I always ask “is there anything else you want to say about [the mechanic]?” This almost always leads to a great concluding thought, and occasionally 20 more minutes of discussion. Sometimes people were holding something in.

Post Production

Host intro and outro

Write these yourself after you record.

• Intro template

• “Hello and welcome to another episode of Dice Exploder. Each week on the show, we take an RPG mechanic and [tortured metaphor about examining it, often loosely connected to the concept of the featured mechanic.] My name is [your name], and my cohost today is [cohost’s name.]”

• Introduce cohost, including whatever plugs they wanted you to make. Maybe your relationship, maybe just their credits, maybe why you reached out to them specifically.

• Introduce the mechanic. Assuming it’s from a specific game, cite the game, designer, and publisher.

• Couple sentence overview of what y’all talked about.

• “Here is [cohost’s name] with [mechanic].”

• Outro template

• “Thanks to [cohost] again for being here!”

• Re-plug cohost stuff

• Plug your stuff

• “Our logo was designed by sporgory [spore-gore-ee], our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey, and our producer emeritus is Sam Dunnewold.” 

• “And thanks to you for listening. See you next time.”

Show notes

Whatever you and your cohost talk about on the episode, put a link to it in the show notes. I sometimes put other stuff I thought of while editing in there. I don’t know that anyone looks at these, so it’s not super important beyond citing sources.

Social links and stuff can go here too. Whatever.

Descript

I edit the show using Descript. Hopefully you’ve gotten my login info from me and can figure it out yourself. Some near-mandatory tips and tricks:

• If your raw audio clips are longer than 60 minutes, cut them up in half before you import or you won’t be able to use the “studio sound” effect, aka the “poke one button to make the audio sound gud” feature.

• Put the “studio sound” effect on every clip and set it to 70%. I’ve found more than that starts clipping off the ends of people’s words.

• Use the “remove filler words” feature to zap all the ums and uhs from your edit with one button. Damn that’s cool.

Project template

When you start a new edit, copy the project template, rename it, and go from there. This includes all the standard music and sfx as well as a temp intro and outro from an old episode.

Start with the intro explosion sfx and opening music. Bring in your intro when the music fades down. Fade out music at end of intro and use the “intro to meat” sfx to transition into the meat of the interview.

At the end, use the “intro to meat” sfx to end the interview, and fade up the outro music beneath it. Then bring in your outro. When it’s over, close out with the closing sfx.

Actual editing

In general, I edit a lot. You don’t have to, but this is what I do:

• I go through and cut tons of filler words and phrases (“like,” “you know,” “sort of,” stutters, etc. Everyone has different vocal tics.) This is tedious. I like having done it, it makes me feel powerful and in control to polish the show up real nice like that, but you don’t have to rise to my level if you don’t want to. It’s a lot of work and not a lot of people notice or care.

• I also cut sentences that are just someone repeating themself. Some people are worse about this than others. I certainly have my moments.

• I will take large sections of podcast and just cut them out entirely. If a topic seems boring? It’s out. If I’m restating the same thing a second time? Only keep one of them.

• Be kind to your cohost and give them the spotlight. If I say something and my guest basically repeats it back to me, I’ll often cut my thought and let them have it. If I go on a 2 minute ramble and they have little to say in return, I’ll often cut the ramble. It’s their episode, not mine.

• After I’m done, I export and listen down to the whole edit while doing the dishes or driving or whatever and see if I’m ever bored. If so, I go back and cut that section down (or cut it entirely).

Publishing / scheduling episodes

Send me your final cut + show notes, I’ll listen down to the cut to make sure there weren’t any export errors or anything, and then I’ll handle scheduling for release. Hooray!

If you’re not actually hosting Dice Exploder, I use Spotify for Podcasters. It’s free, and it’s easy to set up and figure out. Have fun.

The Ink That Bleeds: Review and Response

The Ink That Bleeds by Paul Czege is a 38 page zine about Paul’s experience playing solo journaling RPGs. It’s essentially a long essay on what Paul sees as the point of solo games, how to take that point and approach these games to get the most out of them, and techniques for taking care of yourself along the way. It’s a great read, and it was my gateway into finally understanding the point of solo RPGs, even though I ultimately disagree with many of the assumptions and conclusions Paul puts out there.

(Paul doesn’t sell The Ink That Bleeds as a pdf, but there are 35 physical copies remaining as of this writing, and you can pick one up here. You can also read an excerpt on the Indie Game Reading Club. You don’t have to read it to get the gist of what I have to say here, but it’s still worth reading.)

For the longest time I did not understand solo RPGs.

From my conversations with others, I think this is a very common condition. The thought goes “I play RPGs to tell a story with my friends. If I wanted to tell a story to myself, I’d write a novel.” And for many solo games, the act of playing them can feel this way. I feel obligated to take a game’s prompt and, as instructed in a “typical” journaling solo game, write a proper and thorough response. Maybe I shouldn’t feel that way, but I do, and most of my friends who’ve tried the medium feel similarly.

But I wanted to understand them better, so I invited Seb Pines on the podcast to talk solo games, figuring it’d be a kick in the butt. I picked up a bunch of Seb’s recommendations, and then I discovered The Ink That Bleeds.

Paul Loves His Unconscious Mind

Of the many things Paul has to say about solo games in The Ink That Bleeds, the one I heard loudest is that he believes the point of solo RPGs is less to tell a story and more to be tools for self reflection. They’re guidance for getting in touch with your unconscious mind and hearing what it has to say. He contrasts the temporal world (taking a shower, commuting to work, eating dinner with friends) and your analytic mind that lives in that state with your unconscious mind and unconscious desires.

“Your unconscious mind is perceptive and inspired and it’s on your side,” Paul says. “But for most of us the temporal world and our analytic brain shuts it down, with skepticism and doubt, with gaslighting and self-gaslighting... [My unconscious mind] tells me what it wants me to do with my creativity and talents. It gives me ideas. It’s bolstering and constructing me as who it wants me to be.”

Paul recommends playing solo games as your “approximate self,” a version of you that exists as a time traveler or witch or beast-fucker or whatever is required by the premise of the game, so that your unconscious mind doesn’t have to pretend to be someone else as it tries to come out through play and writing. It can react to the story that emerges more directly, and hopefully it’s easier for you to hear what it has to tell you about yourself. Paul recommends playing several games at once, alternating prompts, so that you have a larger braided narrative for your unconscious mind to react to and speak through. He goes into much more specific (and beautiful) description of this process and how and why it works for him.

This goal, using solo games for self reflection, makes perfect sense to me. It explains how to approach these things - not as “I’m playing a game to make up a story with my friends but without any friends,” but rather “I would like to know more about myself and why I am drawn to the premise of this particular experience.” I write daily - screenplays, RPGs, blog posts, podcast intros - but before reading Paul, I did not experience writing and gaming as something I could do for myself. It was only something to be perfected, something to carefully craft before giving to other people, something to polish and edit, or something that was a transitional document in the way that a screenplay exists only to describe a hypothetical movie.

I wanted to try this. I wanted to write not to be understood by others but to understand myself. I picked up Artefact, Project ECCO, and Void 1680 AM, and I tried to play them like this.

Stream of Consciousness

It was challenging. It has always been true that the activation energy required to get me to pick up a solo game is pretty enormous. When I spend all day working, I want to decompress, and these are experiences that require activity and brain function. They are not passive. Especially when I’ve spent a day writing, often the last thing I want to do is... more writing, even if it’s for myself instead of a client or artistic audience.

But once I open one up, oh boy do I love these things. I love the freedom of “first thought best thought,” of spewing forth whatever immediately comes to mind in reaction to a prompt and seeing where it takes me. There’s a freedom in turning off the part of my brain that is here to critique and simply letting whatever comes come.

Paul’s suggestion to “write to find out” helps with this. Instead of needing every sentence and word to matter, Paul says, you can write down your thoughts as you search for the right idea in the same way that a group might kick around a few options for what an NPC is like the first time they show up on screen. You don’t have to be precious. I could just turn on the faucet of thoughts and let it all out.

After playing some games like this, it occurred to me that many of my favorite pieces of art that I’ve created came about like this in a stream of consciousness. Two of my most personal short films and two of my favorite pieces of game design. In all of these cases, I dumped out a draft and then did some light edits but found there was little I wanted to change. And in each case the resulting work has been something I was extremely nervous to show to anyone (I haven’t even linked the short films here they feel so vulnerable), but they have been among my best-received works of art.

This line of thought feels beautiful and dangerous. Beautiful because it suggests that listening to your gut is a powerful creative tool. Trusting yourself when you can feel you’ve got something right is worth doing. You get a rawness that’s so, so hard to get to if you’re revising and revising and revising (I say this as a professional editor who is extremely in favor of a revision-heavy process).

But also dangerous because this is a thought that immediately pulls the whole activity back towards “writing is for other people. Writing is for creating Great Art™, not for yourself. I’m glad solo games let me practice this process. I’m also glad that every solo game playthrough doesn’t have to live up to such standards, and that I don’t have to share my playthroughs with anyone. They’re just for me and my brain to consider.

The Language of My Unconscious Mind

As I played these games, there were times when I felt like I most entered a flow state, or a moment where I knew I was playing them “right.” I could feel my mind kick into gear, thoughts forming in my head more quickly than I could write them down. It felt like my unconscious mind had opened a door and I could hear it clearly when normally it whispers through the walls. Or at least, it felt like the thing I wanted to be getting out of these games. I think it’s the same thing Paul wants me to get.

I reflected on these moments in relation to The Ink That Bleeds, and I found there was a particular enormous difference. Paul recommends strongly writing in dialog with characters, that your unconscious mind will most easily speak to you through the voice of others, and writing dialog is a great way to dig to there as quickly as you can.

But in my experience, these moments were always iconic visuals. A lone bard playing the fiddle at a funeral, surrounded by people who no longer wanted her there, but no one having the courage to interrupt the piece. Getting time-mugged by myself and left alone in the rain feeling betrayed by my own future. A grove of trees all turning their leaves from green to orange simultaneously. A dead man on the road, a threat to my companion and myself.

I think my brain has always worked like this. In college, my filmmaking clique and I had a mantra: pictures not words. One of those short films I’m not going to link is basically a progression from awkward conversation to a single striking visual moment that changes everything.

I’m not a writer, not a really. I’m a transcriber of visual iconography.

This is the language my unconscious mind speaks to me, and I love that about it. It’s where I’m comfortable. It’s what I’m fluent in more than English or some other flimsy bundle of “words.” Writing dialog in these games was nice at times, a good tool in the toolbox, but it didn’t get me to the beating heart of anything in the way it seems to for Paul.

Did I Play the Right Games for This?

It is entirely possible that the games I’ve played do not lend themselves naturally to the kind of play Paul advocates for, and as a result this whole response I’ve written is out of context.

Artefact is a game about being a sentient magical item passed from owner to owner over generations. For that reason it’s not a game that lends itself to dialog particularly well, nor playing as your approximate self.

Project ECCO is a time travel game played in a year planner that intentionally limits how much space you have to journal your prompts via the medium in which it’s played. This makes the kind of writing Paul advocates for harder than ever.

Void 1680 AM never even asks you to write or journal. It’s a game about being a radio DJ, and you play it by making a playlist, imagining callers, and speaking into a microphone while in character. Is there a place in it for Paul’s writing process?

But I loved these games, and The Ink That Bleeds still felt relevant to the way I played them. Artefact gave me so many visuals that I feel came straight from my unconscious mind. I fucked up my playthrough of Project ECCO immediately by listening to my gut and writing to find out the way Paul suggested, and it lead to an incredible experience even if it was wildly different from what I’d have predicted The Ink That Bleeds (or Project ECCO) would lead me to.

Even Void was a place I could bring these lessons. Playing as my approximate self was wildly more fun and meaningful to me than when I played as a character from an old campaign. And once I started journaling the parts where I was supposed to speak into a mic, they felt so much more authentic and exciting. For me, the act of thinking about my relationship to music and remembering my past felt at least as effective as tapping into my unconscious mind as journaling, and combining the two was more effective yet.

Bypassing the verbal part of my brain entirely is the key to accessing my subconscious. For games that seek to do this, I think asking players to use verbs other than “write” is a boon. Sharang Biswas turned me on to this concept on our Year End Bonanza episode of Dice Exploder, of thinking about what verbs a game is asking of you as a player. I’m enamored with it at large, but especially in this context, I think there’s a lot of meat to be found on bones other than “write.” For solo games in particular, I think other verbs would lower the activation energy required to play the game for a lot of people and might help slip past people’s conscious minds. I’d be curious what Paul thinks of such games, where “writing to find out” might not be an option but the end goal of the game may still be a similar delve into the unconscious mind to the kind he’s pulling for.

No Medium Is This Narrow

The other solo game I’ve spent a lot of time with is Thousand Year Old Vampire, a game in which you are a vampire who loses your memory again and again over your long lifespan. It’s a challenging game, not just in activation energy, but in the content it asks you to engage with. The game will simply state that you commit a horrible atrocity and then expect you to move on. The experience of playing it is distinctly not about getting in touch with your unconscious mind, but to sit with the jarring emotional experience of having everyone and everything you’ve ever loved pulled out from under you at a moment’s notice, lost to the sands of time. Every bit of story and continuity you might have begun to construct can be ripped away like it’s nothing. This is not how you do the thing Paul talks about in The Ink That Bleeds. It’s the opposite, in fact, and Paul writes about his dissatisfaction with it.

But I don’t think that doesn’t make it a bad solo game. My experience playing Thousand Year Old Vampire was not unlike watching a harrowing movie, or playing a video game like Pentiment or Disco Elysium. This is an authored, intentional, interactive experience that the artist(s) has laid out before me. It’s not offering a trip into my unconscious mind, it’s offering a trip in its designer’s mind, conscious and I believe unconscious alike.

When I watched Mulholland Drive for the first time, it fucked me right up. It dragged me into the supremely distressing dream it wanted me to engage with and demanded I respond. It slipped straight past my conscious mind and attached a live wire to my unconscious. That’s what good art does. Thousand Year Old Vampire did something similar: it set out a fucked up experience and challenged me to deal with it, and deal with it I did.

This is all to say: I love the method that The Ink That Bleeds lays out for playing and engaging with solo games. But I don’t believe this is the only means by which to get in touch with your unconscious mind, and I don’t believe that listening to your unconscious mind is the only thing that solo games are good for. Sometimes I want my unconscious to listen to someone else’s. That’s just as beautiful and valuable a goal.

A Final Aside

Paul has some brilliant, brilliant safety tool minigames that he lays out in The Ink That Bleeds. They are so good. I can’t imagine playing more solo games without them. I hope he publishes them separately on their own and that they become as ubiquitous as the x-card. Amazing stuff.

Conclusion

This zine rules. Pick it up if you can. It’s an inspiring way to think about solo games, and I have had a blast playing them. I like so much of what Paul has to say, I disagree with him some, but there’s one thing we are both completely agree on. The words he ends with:

Pick a game. Start playing.

Dice Exploder Aftershow: Character Sheets

This week on the podcast I’ve got Emanoel Melo talking to me about character sheets. It’s such a visual subject, and there were so many more sheets I wanted to talk about than we had time for, that I thought I’d put together a companion blogpost here with some bonus thoughts and content.

I’ll start off by repeating what I say in the intro of the podcast: I’m fascinated by character sheets, mostly because there are so so so precious few that I think do a really good job. I don’t mean this to call anyone out - I think the job of making a good character sheet might genuinely be impossible.

It has to accomplish SO MANY things. Be a quick reference document, but also contain every piece of information a player could conceivably want at the table, and also be visually compelling, convey the tone of the game, AND ideally fit on a single sided US letter page while having font large enough that it’s still legible. Woof.

Still, I think there are a few real winners out there, and some stinkers worth learning from (or just really basking in the stink of).

Let’s start off with what we cover on the podcast. First up, Mothership:

This is the 0-edition sheet, and it’s the first character sheet I ever saw that I really loved. It looks like shit, but that’s kind of the point. As characters, you’re blue collar workers dealing with technical manuals that are gonna look like this. It’s extremely functional (if you don’t get lost in the arrows), and it fits character creation right on the sheet in a visual way. It’s fabulous.

This is a sheet for 0e from community member Quadra. Quadra takes the original sheet, curves up all the corners (pleasing), makes all the flowchart lines cleaner, and compresses everything down so there’s room for a notes section.

Personally I think the fonts have gotten too small and claustrophobic here. I’d have liked to have a little more breathing room and less space for notes. But the rest of the flourishes are so nice. Your basic info looks like an ID card. The Health slot looks like a pill you’d take. Everything about the setting vibes of the original is still present. There’s a lot less black ink. This sheet is functional, clean, and evocative.

One change that could potentially be its own blogpost worth of discussion: Quadra has changed the flow of character creation so you choose a class before you roll stats. I’ll leave it as an exercise for the reader (or a conversation for elsewhere) to talk that one through.

And the current 1e sheet. I can’t believe this game still has a sanity mechanic. This really is like the Quandra sheet with the exact changes I wanted it to make. As Emanoel points out on the show, the box made of arrows at the bottom is a particularly nice touch. The whole thing feels like a corporate rebrand, like the Mothership universe at large was collectively moved forward by a decade. Slightly more pleasant to read, same harrowing corporate manuals to comb through.

Let’s compare to Trophy Gold, a sheet that I think is very good at convey information but also carries almost zero tone:

There it is. Nice vibey logo. There’s some amount of “looks like a page from an ancient tomb” implied by the cool borders. Looking it over now, I’d maybe rearrange some of the pieces so that all the downtime stuff (hoard, library, drive, household) are all in one place while all the stuff you’ll actually use during an incursion is also collected together. In practice, I’ve found this a solid sheet where everything is easy to find.

I wrote this paragraph and then on a hunch went looking and, yes, this is actually an old sheet from the original zine release of Trophy Gold. The current one looks like this:

Even fewer vibes, but more printable. This is a sheet designed for practical use at the table. I still question some of the sorting. I’d put drive / hoard / household over on the left and shift everything else over, or possibly move ruin / burdens / gold all the way to the left for the same reason - get all the downtime stuff in one place away from the incursion stuff.

This also loses some of the walkthrough text. It’s a cleaner look, but it’s also a little more intimidating to look at. I dunno. I’d want to use this in play to know which I preferred.

Here’s a look at the incredible dry erase pamphlets that Emanoel designed himself for his game CBR+PNK:

It’s hard to convey how good these things feel to hold in your hand. They’re a perfect size - not too big, not too small. They have a just enough heft to them that they don’t feel like they’re going to rip or give out on you. And then… you just write on them! Plus the font! The colors! The layout! It’s all gorgeous.

If you can tolerate Twitter these days, Clayton of Explorers Design did a great thread on the visual design of this game that’s well worth your time.

Next we get into the beautiful, ornate sheets of Bruno Prosaiko, starting with Mini BX:

It’s gorgeous, just look at it. But there’s so much detail that I personally find it hard to track what’s going on.

Compare to Inevitable’s sheet, also by Prosaiko:

This sheet fucks. For me at least, this is gorgeous, it conveys exactly what to expect from the game, and it’s very clear where all the information you need is.

I haven’t read Inevitable so I can’t speak to this 100%, but it seems to me that a sheet like this is only really possible when you have a pretty small amount of information you need to convey to people in the first place. If there were twice as many mechanics in the game and you tried to keep the cool revolver image, everything else would get crowded out. You’re probably better off ditching the revolver... but then you lose the cool image! This is the problem. Smaller games for the win once again.

Finally for sheets we covered on the show, I mentioned Quest:

Clean and cool. But wait, this game has a lot more mechanics! Where do they live?

On cards, of course. The obvious drawback here is you either have to buy their deck of cards or print them all out yourself. But I also worry about the way in which having a hand of cards makes your brain think those are your only options. If you can only duel, disarm, or overpower, you’re rarely going to think about sneaking or outwitting your way through a problem.

I’ve played a short campaign of Quest, and there was a little of this, but largely we just ignored the rules entirely and relied on the module we were running through for our good time. That worked! Just having a mad lib to fill out and little bit of special ability on a card when we needed something weird to happen worked.

Even if I’m right that this is going to restrict the options that some people consider, maybe that’s a good thing for Quest’s target audience of new players. Open world RPGs can be overwhelming.

That’s most of what we talked about on the show, but let’s keep the “physical components” train rolling with Mausritter:

I’ve been using blank sheets for most of these for clarity, but I think you have to see this sheet in use to fully appreciate it. Image is taken from the Mausritter website.

The little punch out cardboard components for inventory are amazing. I’ve always hated inventory management, but playing Mausritter makes it a delight. Just moving those little bits around is fun! And look at the way light armor stretches across two categories of slot... UGH. So good.

You can’t see it from this image, but these sheets also come in a tear-away pad, which is brilliant. Characters are disposable in this game, check. 

I do think there’s room for better flavor here. The cracked wall of a mousehole is nice, but... I dunno. It’s a double for me, not a homerun.

On that note, I’d be remiss to talk about character sheets and vibes without mentioning Mork Borg’s sheet.

This thing does everything the rest of Mork Borg’s graphic design is doing. It’s loud, it sets a tone, and it’s... actually I think this one is pretty useable! I wish the font on the stat names was a little more legible, but broadly speaking, I can’t believe how function this thing is when you get it to the table.

While we’re at it, Dukk Borg:

I LOVE this sheet. It’s got that Mork Borg “too much design” vibe, but it’s also riddled with jokes. The duck skeleton alone tells you everything you need to know about the game. “Tuffness.” “$ilver.” All the little cartoony icons. The tongue coming out of the presence horn! It’s just really good and really funny. This is up there with Mothership for me in terms of favorite character sheets.

Here’s another banger from the always-amazing Gontijo that I happened to see on bluesky while writing this post:

Love this. I see more boxes than I’d like to for most games, but the design lays them out so clearly. I feel taken care of, like I’m not going to lose track of everything.

On top of that we’ve got some really cool visuals on a world war one setting. The airplane blueprints beneath the game title are at the top where the planes would be flying. You character portrait is in a fucking locket?? There’s more sketchy weapons in the middle to underscore the weapons section, and all that background blueprint feeling stuff contrasts with the strong silhouettes at the bottom acting out the game’s title and marching along to war.

Wow, what a beauty. Surely a game like Pathfinder, with the budget it’s working with, can live up to that, right?

Anyone up for some tax returns? I dunno, I shouldn’t dunk on other people’s fun. But this sheet... it’s not for me.

One last personal favorite set of sheets from Dream Askew // Dream Apart:

First, the playbooks. These are SO EASY to use. You look at the first column for a brief overview. Second column for character creation. Third column for play. It’s an absolute breeze to get started, and basically all the rules you need during play are right there on the sheet. The fact that the game is so well designed is a big part of what makes that possible. They didn’t even have to shrink the font down to an unreadable size.

The white space is nice. The writing, both in the intro paragraph and in the pick list options, is amazing. There’s not much in the way of visual vibes here, though the header font helps, and the vibes in the writing make up for it.

If you’re going to rely mostly on text instead of graphic design, this is how you fucking do it.

We continue on to the setting elements, basically the GM role split over six pieces, distributed among players, and passed around during play.

I wish there was a bit more white space, but everything else here is great. The Sources section is an excellent way of grounding the player in a collection of sources to draw on, ranging from novels to the Talmud. This is helpful when you pick up this setting element and aren’t sure what to do with it, but also safely and easily ignored in the way it’s kept to the right side of the sheet by the center line.

Meanwhile everything mechanical you actually need on the sheet is kept nice and tidy in the lower left. The layout once again leaves mood and setting to the language of the text rather than visuals, which are kept simple and well-organized for maximum clarity and useability. Bravo.

One last treat before I go: here’s a few super super old D&D sheets for OD&D and and AD&D 1e that Emanoel found while researching the episode:

What fun. I love the crease in that first one! RPG history is so cool.

Play Advice: Get to the Goods

Here’s some play advice: the instinct to hold on to your best ideas so you can “properly set them up” or do “big reveals” is a trap. Get to the goods.

The goods will beget more goods. If we spend three years leading up to meeting a player’s evil twin, that’s gonna be exciting. But you know what’s way more exciting? The fourth time that evil twin shows up. You can’t get to that fourth time and all the baggage, betrayals, double-crosses, and oaths of vengeance that come with it without going through the first three. So just get started.

If you don’t cut to the goods now, you might never. Holding onto good ideas is the best way to ensure that your group falls apart over the holidays before you’re able to make them happen.

Don’t be season 3 of Lost, spinning your wheels not knowing how long the network is going to make you drag this show out. Be a soap opera, kicking someone in the emotional nuts as hard as you can with every scene. Whatever sounds fun, just do that immediately. You’ll probably be right.

I think this advice holds true in design, too. Don’t edge your players with sick mechanics that don’t kick in until epic tier. If your game is an action adventure game about people being special and looking cool (D&D 5e), just let people do the cool shit.

Why can a Druid not wild shape an unlimited number of times until 20th level? Why make them do that extra bookkeeping? And did you know that level 20 paladins can just turn into angels? That’s sick, why can’t they do that at level 1? Why can’t I do something as cool as “Time Stop” before 9th level spells?

Do you even know anyone who’s ever gotten to 20th level? Why hide all this stuff up there?

Not every game is about looking cool and being epic, true. You don’t want to give protagonists the ability to fly and shoot lasers in a horror game about experiencing helplessness. But whatever it is that your game is about, cut to the quick. Don’t make me wait around to feel helpless unless the waiting is the point.

Get to the goods. That’s the good part.