Transcript 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. All the games we talk about are pretty short, so it should be easy to follow along at home. Check out all the jam submissions here. Thanks to Audrey Stolze (aka Lady Tabletop), Chris...

Transcript What if your D&D adventuring party settled down and opened a tavern, and the vibes went from dragon murderers to Bob’s Burgers? That's my pitch for Stewpot: Tales from a Fantasy Tavern, one of my favorite RPGs. It's currently on Backerkit, and you should check it out. 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...

Transcript 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. Further Reading: ⁠Ribbon Drive⁠ ⁠Spindlewheel⁠ Everything Is Illuminated, the book and film ⁠Ten Candles⁠ ⁠Dread⁠ ⁠Star Crossed⁠ ⁠Our Radios Are Dying⁠ ⁠Void 1680 AM⁠ Sam’s...

Transcripts are available at diceexploder.com 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...

Transcript What's the deal with Playbooks? That's a question that's way too big for one episode. But Moe Poplar, of the RPG Academy podcast Show & Tell, had a very particular effect of playbooks that he wanted to talk about on the show today: how playbook choice can be a line of communication between players, GM, and designer. This is one of those episodes that's as much play advice as it is about design. I should do more of those. Further Reading: Monster of the Week Blades in the...

Transcript This week, now that the part of season 3 that was funded by Kickstarter is over, I’ve got a treat for you: the backers-only bonus episode with Mikey Hamm, designer of Slugblaster. You didn’t think I was gonna just hold on to an episode this good forever, did you? It’s the show’s namesake mechanic! Mikey is currently Kickstarting Two-Hand Path, a solo game roll-and-write dungeon crawler. Check it out. While I thought this episode would be a big of a goof about a goofy mechanic...

Transcript This week's cohost is James Wallis, cohost of the Ludonarrative Dissidents podcast, a show a lot like this one that's Kickstarting their third season now, and designer of one of the first story games: The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen. Today we're breaking format: instead of talking about one game mechanic, James brought in the concept of innovation in game design. What does it look like, is it important, and how can we do more of it? The show notes for this one...

This week I'm bringing you an episode from the new podcast Lyrical Ludology with host Logan Timmins, a show all about lyric games. I'm very excited for it. There's already at least one more episode of Lyrical Ludology published, so if you like this one, go subscribe and take a listen!

Transcript It’s the solo games episode! Hopefully the first of many. I’m joined by Seb Pines, designer of The Awards winning game Dwelling and haver of MFA in basically solo games, to talk about prompts in solo games. This is a broad survey of solo games. We talk about a bunch of games (listed below) that all behave differently. If you’re curious about this side of the hobby, this is the primer for you. Further Reading: Dwelling by Seb Pines Thousand Year Old Vampire by Tim...

Transcript This is an intensely visual episode. If you'd like to follow along with the sheets we mention and get some extra commentary from me, you can do so at https://www.diceexploder.com/blog/2024/2/22/dice-exploder-aftershow-character-sheets I’m fascinated by character sheets, mostly because there are so so so precious few that I think do a 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. They just have so...

Transcript Alex Roberts, designer of Star Crossed and For the Queen, joins me to talk about pity points from Kagematsu, a mechanic that doesn't actually do anything itself beyond evoke a particular feeling when put in opposition to love points. This episode is what I always dreamed Dice Exploder could be. We start from a simple game mechanic, but we get into power dynamics at the table in the past and the future, how people treat you when you’re disabled, cultural appropriation, my personal...

Transcript This week I've got designer and illustrator Strega Wolf van den Berg on to talk about money and the Mork Borg third party license. What, if anything, is the difference between making RPGs for fun, to pay rent, and to be paid fairly? And what is the cost (aha) of bringing money into making art? On the flip side, this is also an episode about community, and how the shape of Mork Borg’s license fostered a community around it that allowed Strega Wolf to find a space in this hobby....

Transcript This week I've got Nova, aka Idle Cartulary, of the excellent Playful Void blog among other places linked below. Nova's one of my favorite writers in the, as she puts it, DIY elf game scene, and I knew that was a world I wanted to cover more this season. Nova brought on the rumor table from Zedeck Siew's Lorn Song of the Bachelor, an excellent elf game adventure. We got to talk about what makes a good random table at large, our taste in how adventures are written, and how point...

Transcript On the season 3 premiere, I’m joined by John Harper, designer of many games featured on past episodes of Dice Exploder including Blades in the Dark, Lasers & Feelings, and Agon 2e. John brought in the Psi*Run risk sheet, a fairly complex dice resolution mechanic, known generically as Otherkind Dice. The risk sheet is such an elegant piece of design, packing essentially a whole game onto a single sheet of paper, and being so clear in both how it works and how you might tear it...

Thursday January 25th Dice Exploder is back with an all new crowdfunded-by-listeners season! The lineup includes John Harper, Alex Roberts, James Wallis, Idle Cartulary, Strega Wolf van den Berg, Emanoel Melo, Seb Pines and MORE - that's right, I'm over-delivering on the Kickstarter as a treat. Check back next week for the season premiere, and visit the blog's new home at diceexploder.com. Transcript

Hello and welcome to the Dice Exploder 2023 end of year bonanza! I love me a good ranked list of movies on an end of year movie podcast, but ranked lists are bad and this show’s about RPGs not movies, so you get this instead. It’s me, Aaron King of the RTFM podcast, Lady Tabletop of the Alone at the Table podcast, and Sharang Biswas of winning tons of Ennies this year and being a games academic, and the four of us (plus a half dozen other special guests) are here to tell you about a bunch of...

Hello hello! Today I’ve got for you another between-season bonus episode. This time we’re breaking format to talk about i know the end, a module I published earlier this year about going back home after a long time away and all the horrors that entails. Because if you can’t occasionally publish something self-indulgent in your podcast feed, what’s even the point of having one? My cohost for this is my friend Nico MacDougall, the current organizer of The Awards, who edited i know the end and...

It’s a bonus between-seasons Dice Exploder! Wowie! As promised back in my episode with Gem Room Games about Mork Borg, today I’m talking about accessibility in game design using Mork Borg’s graphic design as an example. My cohost is Marc Muszynski, a friend and screenwriter with low vision, and we talk in detail about his experience with Mork Borg. Is this game, with all its important and loud art, accessible to people who can’t see? Like with most accessibility questions, It’s...

On this episode I’m joined by Nychelle Schneider, also known as Mistletoe Kiss, a moderator from the Blades in the Dark discord and contributor to The Wildsea, the upcoming Dagger Isles supplement for Blades, and Underground Maps & Passkeys among others. Nychelle brought on the idea of customizing existing games, homebrewing mechanics for your table (or even publication). This is... a big conversation, chock full of cool ideas that I hope people take and run with. There are so many games...

Thomas Manuel of the Indie RPG Newsletter and the Yes Indie’d podcast joins me to talk about Secondary Missions, a mechanic from Band of Blades by Off Guard Games. In Band of Blades, a grim military fantasy forged in the dark game, you and your party go off and do missions. Meanwhile, there’s a whole other squad out there doing a whole other mission! What’s up with them? This mechanic tells us. It’s such a change in the mouthfeel of Band of Blades compare to other forged in the dark games. We...

It’s your last chance to back Dice Exploder season 3 on Kickstarter! The campaign ends Friday, October 6th. Here’s the link: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/sdunnewold/dice-exploder-a-tabletop-rpg-design-podcast This week I’m joined by Tasha Robinson, film editor at Polygon, Games on Demand aficionado, Golden Cobra honorable mentionee, and author of this excellent piece about today’s game and mechanic: Fall of Magic and the five and a half foot long handprinted scroll at its...

In the year of our lord two thousand and twenty, many things occurred. But one of those things was the cultural event known as Blaseball. Blaseball was, more or less, a simulated baseball league that ran one game an hour, one season a week, that players could bet on and then use their winnings to vote for global rules changes. It got... weirder from there. And bigger. And memeier. It became nothing less than a lifestyle. And then, this past summer of 2023, it ended. What made it such a...

DICE EXPLODER IS KICKSTARTING NOW Ignore the lies of previous weeks, the Kickstarter has come early, and you can back it right the heck now. Here’s the link: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/sdunnewold/dice-exploder-a-tabletop-rpg-design-podcast Today on this beautiful Tuesday I have for you a preview of the Kickstarter’s backers-exclusive episode featuring Mikey Hamm (Slugblaster) talking about exploding dice. Of course, what else could it be? And while I thought this episode would be a...

Plain text transcripts are available at diceexploder.substack.com This week Sam is joined by Jason Morningstar of Bully Pulpit Games, known for Fiasco, Night Witches, and many other excellent games. Jason brought on transparency, a concept originating in the Nordic larp community, which describes the separation of player knowledge from character knowledge (similar to dramatic irony. We go through a whole library of example games in this one as we talk through genre, safety tools, playing to...