The first ever Dice Exploder game jam came to a close about a month ago, and today I sit down with the three hooligans from the discord who put it together and go through some of our favorite entries. If Dice Exploder is a show about concrete examples, this episode is as Dice Exploder as it gets.
This week I'm talking about a super simple unnamed mechanic from Stewpot, and presumably other games before it, that's inspired much of my own work: everyone goes around and adds a detail about the scene at hand or whatever we're talking about. Simple but effective. I think of this mechanic, and Stewpot generally, as especially welcoming to people new to the hobby. And so I brought on my favorite new to the hobby person: Lee Conrads, acclaimed theater director (there's a lot of theater and audience theory in this one) and also my spouse. It's a very special episode.
Is sharing music with your friends an RPG? It sure is when you're playing Avery Alder's game Ribbon Drive. Takuma Okada, the designer of Stewpot: Tales from a Fantasy Tavern (on Backerkit right now), joins me this week to talk about music, contemplation, and unconventional ways to inspire players.
I have complicated feelings about ranking things. When you start ranking art, you start deciding what makes one art “better” than another, and that often leads to trouble. But also… it’s fun?
The thing about Google Slides that makes it my favorite virtual tabletop is that everyone knows how to use it. No setting up accounts, no learning a new service, you just get right to playing. It’s easy to navigate and remember where things are. And if all you’re doing is dropping in jpgs of character sheets and putting text on top of them, maybe with a few extra slides for session recaps and notes, Slides is fully functional. You’re killing it even.
I’m kind of obsessed with this article over on the excellent Indie Game Reading Club. It’s a guest post by Jason Morningstar in which he describes his process for throwing together a game in an hour. And I don’t mean prepping for a session, I mean soup to nuts all the mechanics and everything, done in 60 minutes.
This post is more or less a love letter to that article. Here’s how my playgroup did that and what we learned.
The first ever Dice Exploder game jam came to a close about a month ago, and today I sit down with the three hooligans from the discord who put it together and go through some of our favorite entries. If Dice Exploder is a show about concrete examples, this episode is as Dice Exploder as it gets.