Episode notes
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…
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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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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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