Episode notes
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…
Podcast
Dice Exploder
Sam Dunnewold · Arts & Books · English
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>
More from Dice Exploder All episodes →
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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…
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S5 · E8 · 51 min
Spotlight Scenes with Moyra Turkington
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…
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S5 · E10 · 37 min
Zenith Abilities (Heart: the City Beneath) with Aaron Voigt
Transcripts available at diceexploder.com Heart: the City Beneath. It’s a surreal and bloody dungeon crawler full of so much to love… plus some bits that drive me up the wall. This week and next I’m devoting TWO episodes to it. Today, it’s everything I love about Heart as seen through the lens of zenith abilities: epic things that let players take control of the game and do something gigantic and fucking cool… before killing their character. I’m joined by ardent Heart-lover Aaron Voigt, aka the guy who makes the indie rpg video essays on YouTube. We get into Heart’s spectacular setting, the…
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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…
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S6 · E3 · 49 min
Love, Sex, and Romance: Roll to Seduce with Alex & Sharang
Transcripts available at diceexploder.com Alex Roberts and Sharang Biswas are back for round two, this time with “roll to seduce,” that classic action so many people try and even succeed at taking across any number of games. If I roll high enough on my persuasion check, surely the dragon will fuck me instead of killing us, right? In some games, yes! Right indeed! This is such a weird dynamic, but clearly so appealing to so many people, and today Alex and Sharang get into the why and how of it all. That leads to all kinds of places, but in particular the seductive choice to quantify sex and…
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S5 · E11 · 33 min
Beats (Heart: the City Beneath) with Aaron Voigt
Transcripts available at diceexploder.com Last week, indie rpg YouTube essayist Aaron Voigt and I delved into Heart: the City Beneath, a surreal and maximalist dungeon crawler with lots to love. But when I ran the game, I had some trouble with it from a mechanic that by all accounts I should love: beats, little nuggets of story, little goals your character takes on that they advance by achieving. I’ve always found it strange I didn’t love beats in practice, and I today I wanted to break down how and why they left me overwhelmed and unsatisfied. I think there’s at least as much to learn from…
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S5 · E13 · 57 min
Experience Design with Caro Murphy
Transcripts available at diceexploder.com Here near the end of Dice Exploder's larp series, I wanted to have on Caro Murphy ( Galactic Starcruiser ) to talk about experience design, and specifically how to think about curating all those parts of an experience bigger and larger than most of us at home will ever have access to. How do you design the set a game is played on? How do you design something for hundreds if not thousands of participants? And Caro delivered so much more: we get into bleed and empathy and how Caro sees games as an inherently educational medium. Let's get into it! Ad…
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S6 · E2 · 44 min
Love, Sex, and Romance: Sex Moves (Apocalypse World) with Alex & Sharang
Transcripts available at diceexploder.com Love, sex, and romance: huge human topics, wildly under-discussed in roleplaying games. At least in my opinion. So today on Dice Exploder we’re kicking off a new miniseries on the subject hosted by NOT ME. Instead, for the next four episodes, Alex Roberts (Star Crossed, For the Queen) and Sharang Biswas (editor of Honey and Hot Wax) are taking over the show to bring you all things love and sex. And today they’re kicking off with an episode on sex moves from Apocalypse World and Monsterhearts, classic PBTA moves that trigger when two characters have…
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1 hr 3 min
Love, Sex, and Romance: Big Chunky Prompts with Tasha Robinson
Transcripts available at diceexploder.com I’m back! Alex and Sharang have done an amazing job talking love, sex, and romance over the past month but I have plenty to say on the subject myself. In particular, I wanted to approach the conversation Alex and Sharang started about the quantification of romance from the perspective of how I feel when I’m actually at the table playing these games. Because that quantification makes me feel kinda weird… but what do I want instead? Because freeform romance is tough for me. Romance is scary! I want some help, some guidelines, some dare-I-say rules and…
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S5 · 9 min
Elf Motors with Chris Duffy
Transcripts available at diceexploder.com Over on the Dice Exploder discord, we welcome new members by asking them what their favorite mechanic is. It’s a great tradition, kicks off a lot of great conversations, but I have largely avoided having it turned my way. So today I thought let’s just get it out there in an episode: what is my favorite mechanic and what do I think about it? Further Reading Elf Motors Socials Chris’s podcast How to Be a Better Human 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…
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