Podcast · Arts & Books

Dice Exploder

by Sam Dunnewold · English · Arts & Books

A show about tabletop RPG design. Each episode we bring you a single mechanic and break it down as deep as we possibly can. Co-hosted by Sam Dunnewold and a rotating roster of designers. <br /><br /><a href="diceexploder.com">diceexploder.com</a>

Typical length: 49 min
Language: English

Latest episode

42 min

Thri-Kreen (Dark Sun) with Zedeck Siew

Transcripts available at diceexploder.com Further Reading Dark Sun, New Class: Really Good Dog , Lorn Song of the Bachelor, Nine Space Games, A Perfect Wife Socials Zedeck on Bluesky and at his blog Sam on Bluesky and itch The Dice Exploder blog is at diceexploder.com Our logo was designed by sporgory , our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey, and our ad music is Lilypads by Travis Tessmer. Join the Dice Exploder Discord to talk about the show! Credits Our logo was designed by sporgory , our ad music is Lilypads by Travis Tessmer, and our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey.…

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Earlier episodes 29 most recent

S5 · E9 · 38 min
Fallout (Liminal Horror) with Craig Shipman
Transcripts available at diceexploder.com Further Reading Liminal Horror, Heart, Blades in the Dark, Cairn Socials Craig on Bluesky and Linktree Sam on Bluesky and itch The Dice Exploder blog is at diceexploder.com Our logo was designed by sporgory , our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey, and our ad music is Lilypads by Travis Tessmer. Join the Dice Exploder Discord to talk about the show! Credits Our logo was designed by sporgory , our ad music is Lilypads by Travis Tessmer, and our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey. This episode was edited by Em Acosta.
S3 · E9 · 54 min
De-Roling with Caro Murphy
Transcripts available at diceexploder.com Further reading Back Tower Runners on Kickstarter ! DrachenFest Incantrix Productions Imagi-Ne'er-Do-Wells Socials Caro’s website 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 Credits Our logo was designed by sporgory , our ad music is Lilypads by Travis Tessmer, and our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey. This…
59 min
Our Lives in the Wood with Kendo Smith
Transcripts available at diceexploder.com Further reading Our Lives in the Wood episode 5 This Game Takes Place in Your Home Town Socials Kendo on Bluesky and the web 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 Credits Our logo was designed by sporgory , our ad music is Lilypads by Travis Tessmer, and our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey. This…
S9 · E2 · 56 min
What Is There to Eat in Duskwall (Blades in the Dark) with Jeeyon Shim
Transcripts available at diceexploder.com Note: the "What Is There to Eat in Duskwall" pages of Blades in the Dark were written by Andrew Shields. Further Reading Blades in the Dark by John Harper Socials Jeeyon on Patreon , Bluesky , and itch Sam on Bluesky and itch The Dice Exploder blog is at diceexploder.com Join the Dice Exploder Discord to talk about the show! Credits Our logo was designed by sporgory , our ad music is Lilypads by Travis Tessmer, and our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey. This episode was edited by Em Acosta.
S1 · E9 · 39 min
Duty Stations (Night Witches) with Ash Kreider
Transcripts available at diceexploder.com Further Reading The Watch 2e is on Kickstarter now Night Witches by Jason Morningstar Socials Ash on Bluesky Ash's website , including listings for their games and books Sam on Bluesky and itch The Dice Exploder blog is at diceexploder.com Our logo was designed by sporgory , our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey, and our ad music is Lilypads by Travis Tessmer. Join the Dice Exploder Discord to talk about the show! Credits Our logo was designed by sporgory , our ad music is Lilypads by Travis Tessmer, and our theme song is Sunset Bridge by…
3 min
New Episodes Next Week + An Announcement
Transcripts available at diceexploder.com
S8 · E14 · 41 min
Deckbuilding (Signs of the Sojourner) with Lady Tabletop
Transcripts available at diceexploder.com Further Reading Signs of the Sojourner by Echo Dog Games Band-Aids & Bullet Holes by Sam, on Kickstarter now Slay the Spire 2 by Mega Crit Socials Lady Tabletop on itch Sam on Bluesky and itch The Dice Exploder blog is at diceexploder.com Our logo was designed by sporgory , our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey, and our ad music is Lilypads by Travis Tessmer. Join the Dice Exploder Discord to talk about the show! Credits Our logo was designed by sporgory , our ad music is Lilypads by Travis Tessmer, and our theme song is Sunset Bridge by…
S8 · E13 · 52 min
Minigames (Firebrands) with Viditya Voleti
Transcripts available at diceexploder.com Further Reading Band-Aids & Bullet Holes on Kickstarter Mobile Frame Zero: Firebrands by Meguey & Vincent Baker The King Is Dead by Meguey & Vincent Baker Stewpot: Tales from a Fantasy Tavern by Takuma Okada Socials Viditya on Bluesky and itch Sam on Bluesky and itch The Dice Exploder blog is at diceexploder.com Our logo was designed by sporgory , our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey, and our ad music is Lilypads by Travis Tessmer. Join the Dice Exploder Discord to talk about the show! Credits Our logo was designed by sporgory , our ad…
S12 · E8 · 1 hr 5 min
John Wick (2014) and Genre Emulation with Sam Roberts
Transcripts available at diceexploder.com My new game Band-Aids & Bullet Holes is still on Kickstarter! Check it out today. In honor of BABH, this month on Dice Exploder I'm covering mechanics from other games that inspired it. In keeping with this show's increasingly loose definition of "mechanic," today I'm joined by Sam Roberts (Escape from Dino Island) to tackle one of this game's greatest influences: the 2014 Keanu Reeves movie John Wick. The first half of this ep is basically a movie podcast. We go deep on what makes John Wick tick (in brief: the first 30 minutes). But the back half we…
S12 · E8 · 1 hr 5 min
Character Nonmonogamy (Space Post) with Sidney Icarus
Transcripts available at diceexploder.com Today is the launch of Band-Aids & Bullet Holes, my melodramatic action game of bloody revenge. It's a one shot, capsule game, box set, deckbuilder rpg. Check it out. In honor of BABH, this month on Dice Exploder I'm covering mechanics from other games that inspired it, starting today with the idea of character nonmonogamy. Traditionally in rpgs each player gets one main character. This is often true regardless of whether or not there's a GM: certain characters "belong" to each player. Not so in Band-Aids & Bullet Holes. But what does that look like?…
S10 · E8 · 33 min
Calling Cards (Band-Aids & Bullet Holes) with Lady Tabletop and Seraphina
Transcripts available at diceexploder.com My first stand-alone print game, Band-Aids & Bullet Holes, goes live on Kickstarter next week on May 5th. I have a lot to say about it, and I'm gonna say a lot of it: May's going to be all episodes about mechanics from other people's games that inspired me in this design. Today I wanted to talk about Band-Aids & Bullet Holes straight up, but I didn't want you to just take it from me all the stuff I love about it, so I'm handing the show over once again to Lady Tabletop and Seraphina Garcia Ramirez. They're gonna tell you about Band-Aids & Bullet…
S8 · E9 · 30 min
Keys (Lady Blackbird) with Whitney Delaglio
Transcripts available at diceexploder.com I love pregens! But why do I love pregens? I dug into this a bunch on an episode last year with Aaron Lim about the characters in Last Train to Bremen: I love being given a clear goal and baseline temperament when I sit down to play so I can get into drama as fast as possible. But the game Lady Blackbird goes a step further. Each character has "Keys" which lay out not just character traits and goals, but the central dramatic questions and stakes each character's arc is likely to concern itself with. And that, more than anything else, is probably what…
S8 · E8 · 58 min
Weak, Strong, and Regular Moves (Dream Askew / Dream Apart) with Austin Walker
Transcripts available at diceexploder.com Austin Walker's new game Realis is on Kickstarter now, and it's been making splashes in the indie rpg scene since last year when the ashcan came out. The game's core mechanic, Sentences, feels like the exact kind of mechanic I love covering on this show. But where did it come from? I asked Austin to come talk to me about it and bring one of his influences, and he came back with another diceless, GM-less resolution mechanic: the token economy of weak, strong, and regular moves from Dream Askew / Dream Apart. So today we're completing Dice Exploder's…
S8 · E7 · 32 min
The Awards 2024 with Nico MacDougall
Transcripts available at diceexploder.com Follow Band-Aids & Bullet Holes on Kickstarter ! The Awards are back! The rpg awards show with a bent towards indie games and the guaranteed worst SEO of all time is back for another around, and the current steward of The Awards - Nico MacDougall - is back on the show this week to talk through some of our favorite mechanics from the last batch of winners. If you want to get involved in The Awards, you can apply to be a judge through the end of April and you can submit your games during the month of May! This year's Awards will cover games published…
S6 · E8 · 28 min
Lures (Heaven in the Dust) with Barclay Travis and Bee Alexander
Transcripts are available at diceexploder.com Bee and Barclay are the hosts of Tabletop Book Club, a podcast that is exactly what it sounds like. It’s a show with such fun energy, and of course good design talk. Because Barclay has a new belonging outside belonging game that's just come out - Begin Again, check the link below - today I'm talking with them about lures, maybe my favorite part of the belonging outside belonging engine, and specifically how they're implemented in Heave in the Dust... Further Reading Heaven in the Dust by Luke Jordan Begin Again by Barclay Travis Dream Askew /…
S8 · E5 · 37 min
Always Give Them The Clue (GUMSHOE) with Tristan Zimmerman
Transcripts available at diceexploder.com My friend Tristan Zimmerman is currently crowdfunding Ballad Hunters, a GUMSHOE game, meaning it’s based on a core mechanic built for investigation games and gathering clues. That mechanic goes like this: “always give the players the clue.” Simple! And I think so astute as to what the actual fun part of investigation is in RPGs: it’s not “can we roll high enough to progress,” it’s “once we have all these clues, how do we put them together and what do we do with them?” Further Reading Ballad Hunters by Tristan Zimmerman, now on Kickstarter GUMSHOE by…
S4 · E8 · 1 hr 58 min
The Voice of the Text (Triangle Agency) with Seraphina Garcia Ramirez
Transcripts available at diceexploder.com I bet you’ve heard of this game Triangle Agency. Big exciting Kickstarter, super flashy product design, a game with… spoilers in the back? It’s corporate horror, it’s packed gorgeous art, it’s a game I spent 20 sessions with in 2025. And I… had a pretty frustrating time with the game. There is so much I love and admire about Triangle Agency, but also so much I struggled with, and I wanted to break it all down on the show. And I didn’t want to do that without bringing on someone who could unabashedly sing this game’s praises, because I think the game…
S8 · E3 · 48 min
Draw Maps, Leave Blanks (Dungeon World) with Tim Denee
Transcripts available at diceexploder.com If the thesis of last week’s episode was “hey the fiction of your game matters a lot and can even have mechanical effects,” how do you know how deeply to define that fiction? Maybe no one in indie games has recently faced that question on quite the scale of Tim Denee with Blades ‘68, an expansion to Blades in the Dark. I wanted to have him on to talk about when you completely reinvent the setting, how do you think about what parts of the fiction are important and need to be kept vs what parts should evolve and change? And to do that, we picked an old…
S8 · E2 · 47 min
Doskvol's Lightning Barriers (Blades in the Dark) with Nova
Transcripts available at diceexploder.com In Blades in the Dark, you play as criminals in Doskvol a haunted city where the ghosts are such a problem that they built giant lightning barriers around the whole city to keep them out. That sentence alone already makes me want to get the game to the table, and we haven’t even gotten to the rules of Blades in the Dark yet. That’s the conversation I wanted to take a crack at today: rules are important, they can radically shape play, but the fiction a game brings is just as important. Doskvol’s lightning barriers mean you can’t just run away into the…
S8 · E1 · 43 min
Setting Elements (Dream Askew / Dream Apart) with Kodi Gonzaga
Transcripts available at diceexploder.com There's many ways to decide who has authority over what in an RPG. Traditional games have a bunch of players with one PC each and a GM responsible for everything else, while Dreams Askew / Dream Apart by Avery Alder and Ben Rosenbaum takes a very different approach: divide that "everything else" up into flavorful pieces, like "gossip & reputation" and "the wild forest" and give everyone a piece. That choice has become one of the backbones of Belonging Outside Belonging games (hacks of Dream Askew / Dream Apart), and today I'm joined by my good friend…
37 min
Afterimage: The Experimental Role-Playing Laboratory
Dice Exploder: Afterimage is alternative show format, a cross between play report and personal memoir. The Experimental Role-Playing Laboratory, or ERPL, was a thrice a year mini convention put on by students at my college back in the 00s and 10s and onward to this day. It's how I got into indie games. I still think about it, and the people I met there, to this day. They still mean something to me. What might I still mean to them? Written, edited, and performed by Sam Dunnewold Tristan Zimmerman at the Molten Sulfur blog Steven’s newsletter and novels . Try Black Velvet to start. Transcript…
S99 · E7 · 46 min
2025 Year End Bonanza
Transcripts available at diceexploder.com It's the Dice Exploder 2025 year end bonanza! This year I'm joined by Lin Codega and Diogo Nogueira to go over a whole bunch of game mechanics that we think represent where rpgs were at in 2025 and where they might be going in the future. Further Reading Mythic Bastionland by Chris McDowall Praise the Hawkmoth King by Sage the Anagogue I want to fight my friends in the back of a moving truck by Seraphina Garcia Ramirez Traffic Lights Are Communication Tools by Meguey Baker Daggerheart Draw Steel The One Ring starter set Sam Sorensen’s overview of…
S7 · E7 · 59 min
Inventory Tetris (Mausritter) with Quinns
Transcripts available at diceexploder.com Mausritter is an old school dungeon crawling game where instead of playing as elves fighting dragons, you play as mice fleeing from owls. It’s not unlike any number of other old school games like Cairn or Into the Odd, but its inventory system is the only inventory system I’ve ever actually liked. Does it work differently than other games? At a raw numbers level, not really! But instead of a bunch of paper bookkeeping, Mausritter turns items into little cardboard squares like board game pieces that you put in a grid on your character sheet. That…
S7 · E6 · 1 hr 13 min
The Brainer VS The Brain-Picker (Apocalypse World 2e/3e) with the Bakers
Transcripts available at diceexploder.com Apocalypse World 3rd edition is on Kickstarter right now. In many ways, it hasn’t changed much. In many ways, it's a whole new apocalypse. So I thought it'd be fun to have on the Bakers and go through a playbook - the Brainer in 2e vs its equivalent the Brain-Picker in 3e - and ask them about every single change on the sheet, from updating the basic moves all the way down to a single name on a single picklist. Further Reading Apocalypse World: Burned Over 3e on Kickstarter and a preview of The Brain-Picker Apocalypse World 2e handouts , including the…
S7 · E5 · 49 min
Actual Play: Void 1680 AM Community Broadcasts with Ken Lowery
Transcripts available at diceexploder.com To close out this miniseries on actual play, I wanted to feature a game that I think uses actual play as a game mechanic. Hear me out. Void 1680 AM is a solo playlist-building game in which you create a fictional radio broadcast. Except when you're done, you can send it to the game's creator (this week's cohost Ken Lowery), and he'll broadcast it out onto the real radio via the AM antenna in his garage (and on YouTube). Obviously it feels different to play the game knowing it's going to go out on air. But I think it feels different even just knowing…
S4 · E7 · 1 hr 7 min
Actual Play: 4AM at a Diner (Last Train to Brooklyn) with Linnie Schell
Transcripts available at diceexploder.com Last Train to Brooklyn is an actual play from Twice Rolled Tales where they play Last Train to Bremen on a New York City subway car. It's also probably my favorite actual play full stop. Why? I think because it leans into what I'm most excited about this medium: treating capturing the act of play more like a documentary than a means towards fiction. It's excited at least as much about its nonfiction story as its fictional one. Today I've invited Linnie Schell, one of the main creatives behind Last Train to Bremen, to come give me a beat by beat…
S3 · E7 · 49 min
Actual Play: An Uncomfortable Offer (Maia's Game Room: The Electric State) with Maia Wilson
Transcripts available at diceexploder.com One of my favorite parts about these episodes where I'm highlighting a single moment from an actual play is how many practical lessons I can bring back to my own table by going beat by beat through a significant moment in play. And today, Maia Wilson has brought a particularly significant moment from her show Maia's Game Room in which one character, in desperate straights, is pressured by an NPC to pay for his help with sex. It's an intense moment. It may not be for you (and this episode may not be, either). But I think there's no better way to learn…
S7 · E2 · 57 min
Actual Play: A Tree Shanty (My First Dungeon: The Wildsea) with Brian Flaherty and Elliot Davis
Transcripts available at diceexploder.com In The Wildsea, you play as sailors on a sea of trees in a climate post-apocalypse where the climate won. And in the My First Dungeon mini series of this game, today's co-cohost Brian Flaherty took it on himself - along with co-player J Strautman - to write an original song, a “tree shanty,” that played on each episode. Today Brian and I, along with his Talk of the Table cohost and Wildsea GM Elliot Davis, break down one of those tree shanties: how it came to be, and how this moment blends together preproduction, production at the table, and post…
S1 · E7 · 49 min
Actual Play: The First 30 Minutes (My First Dungeon: Orbital Blues) with Rowan Zeoli
Transcripts available at diceexploder.com It's a new series on Dice Exploder all about actual play. For five episodes, instead of breaking down one mechanic, we're going to break down one moment from one actual play show. And to kick things off, I'm joined by actual play critic and all-around-writer Rowan Zeoli of Rascal and Polygon. We cover an overview of actual play as a medium and the current state of the scene, we dig deep into the fine line this medium walks between fiction and nonfiction, and then we get to our moment: the very beginning of My First Dungeon's six episode miniseries on…

About Dice Exploder

Dice Exploder is a English arts & books podcast from Sam Dunnewold. Melo plays each episode straight from the publisher's own feed — no ads added, no account needed — and remembers where you stopped, in this browser only.

Publisher: Sam Dunnewold
Language: English
Category: Arts & Books
Typical length: 49 min
Feed: RSS — paste into any podcast app
Apple Podcasts: podcasts.apple.com/podcast/id1684883107
Rights: Sam Dunnewold

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