Dice Exploder – Details, episodes & analysis

Today the folks over at Many Sided Media, the production house behind My First Dungeon and Talk of the Table, are launching a new podcast network... and Dice Exploder is a part of it!

Nothing on the show should change much, but today I wanted to sit down with Brian Flaherty, a co-founder of Many Sided Media, to talk about what this network is going to look like.

Transcripts available at diceexploder.com

In the unreliable urban fantasy world of Changeling, Clarity is a mechanic that measures... well, for now let’s go with a character's ability to trust their own reality. But finishing that sentence is kind of what this episode is all about, because Clarity has deep ties to various sanity mechanics from any number of Call of Cthulhu inspired games, even as it’s trying to do something different, maybe a little more nuanced and less obviously offensive as measuring a person’s sanity with a flat number.

There’s any number of metaphors you might find meaning in with Clarity. It’s not clear to me that that makes it much better than sanity. And yet, today's cohost MintRabbit loves this game and this mechanic dearly, sees so much of herself in it. And seeing yourself in a flawed game, still finding beauty in it, that's what makes today's episode interesting.

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Spectacula by Jeremy Melloul

Kiss Me If You Can by me, Sam Dunnewold

Further Reading

Changeling the Lost 1e by White Wolf Games

Changelings, Trauma & Gaming by Mint Rabbit

A second post from Mint about Changeling

Dice Exploder on safety tools

Socials

Mint on Tumblr, Bluesky, itch, dice.camp, and ko-fi

Sam on Bluesky and itch

The Dice Exploder blog is at diceexploder.com

Our logo was designed by sporgory, our ad music is Lilypads by Travis Tessmer, and our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey.

Join the Dice Exploder Discord to talk about the show!

Support Dice Exploder on Patreon!

Transcripts available at diceexploder.com

When you’re playing roleplay-heavy D&D, what does a scene look like? Since the game doesn’t give you much in the way of tools for doing so, are you framing scenes intentionally or just kind of letting them happen? And if the latter, is that serving you well?

You very well might be, but I’ve become obsessed lately with how we frame scenes in roleplaying games, and today I want to talk about a mechanic that does so very firmly: spotlight scenes, a procedure in which each player in the game gets a turn to say what they want the next scene to be.

To do that, I’m joined by Mo Turkington, designer of many great structured freeform larps including the well-lauded Rosenstrasse and her latest release Lumberjills. We get into the history of spotlight scenes, the pros and cons of including rules for framing and ending scenes in your game, and how even a mechanic like this one that feels so structural and procedural, when used int he right context, can have a beautiful, thematically resonant message in it about agency and self-actualization.

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Song of the Scryptwyrm by Almost Bedtime Theater

Further Reading

Lumberjills by Moyra Turkington

I Say A Little Prayer by Tor Kjetil Edland

Just a Little Lovin’ by Tor Kjetil Edland and Hanne Grasmo

Rosenstrasse by Moyra Turkington and Jessica Hammer

Montsegur 1244 by Frederik J. Jensen

Red Carnations on a Black Grave by Catherine Ramen and Juan Ochoa

Socials

Moyra’s games on itch

Sam on Bluesky and itch

The Dice Exploder blog is at diceexploder.com

Our logo was designed by sporgory, our ad music is Lilypads by Travis Tessmer, and our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey.

Join the Dice Exploder Discord to talk about the show!

Dice Exploder on Patreon

Transcripts available at diceexploder.com

Shadows are a metatechnique in larp where you have players in the role of something other than a traditional larp or rpg player character. Maybe they’re stagehands turning out the lights because there’s ghosts in this house. Maybe they’re the characters’ worst fears who wander around and whisper into players’ ears to egg them on into terrible actions and choices. They’re special effects, or ghosts, or whatever else you want them to be. Let's talk about them!

Ad Links

⁠⁠Extra Ordinary on Kickstarter now!⁠⁠

Socials

Elin on Bluesky

Sam on Bluesky and itch

The Dice Exploder blog is at diceexploder.com

Our logo was designed by sporgory, our ad music is Lilypads by Travis Tessmer, and our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey.

Join the Dice Exploder Discord to talk about the show!

Dice Exploder on Patreon

Transcripts available at diceexploder.com

There's this period of time between when we've all agreed we're going to play a game now and when we start "actually playing." We've got to learn the rules, learn the setting, maybe go over safety or characters. Maybe we order the pizza in here, too.

This part of a game is just as much something that can be intentionally designed as gameplay itself, but I don't see much of that in ttrpgs. Meanwhile in larp, workshops to set up a game are standard practice. What do they look like, and what can we learn from them?

Ad Links

Extra Ordinary launches on Kickstarter March 10th!

Further Reading

The Art of Gathering by Priya Parker

Bleed on the Nordic Larp wiki

Playing to Lift, Not Just to Lose by Susanne Vejdemo

The Battle of Primrose Park: Playing for Emancipatory Bleed in Fortune & Felicity by Jonaya Kemper

Space Train Space Heist by Sam Dunnewold

Veins of Corruption, Marc's itchfunding mega-zungeon

Socials

Marc on Bluesky and itch and actual plays on youtube

Sam on Bluesky and itch

The Dice Exploder blog is at diceexploder.com

Our logo was designed by sporgory, our ad music is Lilypads by Travis Tessmer, and our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey.

Join the Dice Exploder Discord to talk about the show

Support ⁠Dice Exploder on Patreon⁠!

Transcripts available at diceexploder.com

The show is on Patreon! There's not going to be a lot behind the paywall, but there is right now a pilot episode for a new podcast that's part play report, part games criticism, and part personal memoir. This pilot is about the excellent game Yazeba's Bed & Breakfast, and you can listen to it now on the brand new Dice Exploder patreon.

https://www.patreon.com/DiceExploder

Transcripts available at diceexploder.com

In a lot of tabletop rpgs, to do something in the fictional world, we engage with abstraction: to pick someone’s pocket, we describe picking their pocket, or we roll a die to see how well we pick it. But in larp, sometimes the action is the action. I pick your pocket... by picking your pocket.

This embodiment of play, where my real life actions equal my fictional character's actions, might be what many people understand as the core difference between larp and tabletop games. Today, Kate Hill and I get into the good, the bad, the ugly, and the beautiful of embodied play.

Further Reading

Playing to Lift, Not Just to Lose by Susanne Vejdemo

Bluebeard’s Bride

New World Magischola

Chasing Bleed – An American Fantasy Larper at Wizard School by Tara M. Clapper

Golden Cobra Challenge

Find Larp Shack on Facebook!

Two Hand Path and the Dice Exploder episode about it

Ad Links

We Three Shall Meet Again by Sam Dunnewold

Socials

Kate on Bluesky.

Kate’s actual play Path of Glory on twitch.

Sam on Bluesky and itch.

The Dice Exploder blog is at diceexploder.com

Our logo was designed by sporgory, our ad music is Lilypads by Travis Tessmer, and our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey.

Join the Dice Exploder Discord to talk about the show!

Transcripts are available at diceexploder.com

Larp! It’s that thing where you dress up like wizards, go into the woods, and hit each other with sticks. Right? Well.. yeah! Except no, because it’s a million other things, too.

Today I'm gonna introduce you to the world of larp. If you've ever been intimidated by it, this is a place to start. Because I think tabletop designers have so much we could learn from larp, so much that this is the start of a big series on larp.

And where better to start than with a mechanic that makes getting into larp easier than ever: just pick up a card and read what it says.

Further Reading

Ghost Court by Jason Morningstar

We Are Roommates Now by Wendy Gorman

Space Larps by Jason Morningstar

Welcome Guests by Jason Morningstar

The Climb by Jason Morningstar

So Mom I Made This Sex Tape by Susanne Vejdemo

Behind the Magic by Randy Lubin

The Hench Union Larp by Sam Dunnewold

Socials

Randy onBluesky

Randy’s foresight games are at leveragedplay.com

Randy’s consumer games are at diegeticgames.com

Randy’s online games platformStorySynth

Sam onBluesky anditch

The Dice Exploder blog is atdiceexploder.com

Our logo was designed bysporgory, our ad music is Lilypads by Travis Tessmer, and our theme song isSunset Bridge by Purely Grey.

Join theDice Exploder Discord to talk about the show!

Transcripts available at diceexploder.com

Pregens! They're not just a tool to get started playing quicker, they're also a way for a designer to take you by the hand and guide you to a very specific place, and they're a shared language across every table that picks up your game. Today, Aaron Lim and I break down all the joys and beauty of pregens, up to and including Aaron's meme charts.

Aaron’s Kickstarter

Ithaca in the Cards: Second Expedition and What Should We Have Tomorrow? Full Course

Ad Links

A Perfect Rock 

Growing Thylacine: A Pamphlet Zine TTRPG

Further Reading

Last Train to Bremen by Caro Asercion

Caro Asercion on Dice Exploder

Yazeba’s Bed & Breakfast by Possum Creek Games

Lady Blackbird by John Harper

Larp Design and the chapter BASICS OF CHARACTER DESIGN by Juhana Pettersson

Socials

Aaron onBluesky anditch.

Sam onBluesky anditch.

The Dice Exploder blog is atdiceexploder.com

Our logo was designed bysporgory, our ad music is Lilypads by Travis Tessmer, and our theme song isSunset Bridge by Purely Grey.

This episode was edited by Chris Greenbriar and Sam Dunnewold.

Join theDice Exploder Discord to talk about the show!

Transcripts available at diceexploder.com

What’s the best way to convey the emotional experience of being a post-apocalyptic demon-fighting wizard action hero? Did you say “a coloring book with some Yahtzee on the side?” Because that’s what Two Hand Path designer Mikey Hamm landed on.

Last week was an episode all about the joy of destruction and transgression, and I wanted to balance that out today with another episode on physicality in games and the act of creation. But because I’m joined by the wonderful and prolific Jeeyon Shim, this spilled out into so much more: Jeeyon's background in child education, solo games that ask you to do a verb other than journal, how important it is for our humanity to take breaks and touch grass sometimes, and just how much fun art can be.

Further Reading

Two Hand Path by Mikey Hamm

Making Comics by Linda Barry

Field Guide to Memory by Shing Yin Khor and Jeeyon Shim

A Mending by Shing Yin Khor

Ad Links

Sock Puppets

Mission ImPAWsible

Socials

Jeeyon on Patreon, Bluesky, and itch.

Sam on Bluesky and itch.

The Dice Exploder blog is at diceexploder.com

Our logo was designed by sporgory, our ad music is Lilypads by Travis Tessmer, and our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey.

Join the Dice Exploder Discord to talk about the show!