This week, Sam talks with Morgan Nuncio about cramped quarters, a move from Uncharted Worlds. Some topics discussed include:
Travel in story games
Making this move at the beginning, middle, or end of a scene
Moves as training wheels
Stonetop’s “keep company”
Wanderhome
For the Queen
You can find Mo on Twitter @SirenaBesos.
You can find Sam on Bluesky, Twitter, dice.camp, and itch @sdunnewold.
Our logo was designed by sporgory, and our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey.
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Transcript
Sam: Hello and welcome to another episode of Dice Exploder. Each week we take a tabletop RPG mechanic and wander off into the wilderness with it for a nice hike. I'm Sam Dunnewold, and my co-host today is Morgan Nuncio.
I know Mo from pickup one shots in a private discord server. And then after a few of those, I got my head outta my ass and realized they're one of the main people helping organize Big Bad Con, the best con in the whole damn world. I've been to like two cons, so I totally know what I'm talking about here.
Anyway, Mo is an organizer, a great actual play performer, an enthusiastic fan, and just a delight. And they brought in cramped quarters, a move from Uncharted Worlds, an early sci-fi on a spaceship powered by the apocalypse game. This is a move about how emotions can boil over when you're stuck in a metal box with someone for a long journey.
While yesterday-- yeah, that's right. I released an episode yesterday. Keep up-- Clayton and I were talking about how logistics can make travel interesting in games this week. It's all about how feelings can make travel interesting. And we immediately got off topic from cram quarters to a whole slew of other story game travel mechanics.
I said this during last week's episode, but I think these two make a great pair. If you're a logistics person, take a listen here for what else travel might mean. And if you like this episode, go back and check out the one with Clayton to get another perspective.
But for now, here's Mo with Cramps Quarters. Mo, thanks so much for being here.
Mo: Oh my God. Thank you for having
Sam: Yeah, what a delight. So we are talking about Uncharted Worlds today and a move from it, but first, what is Uncharted Worlds?
Mo: So Uncharted Worlds per the book, it calls itself a space offer of discovery and adventure which explores of a universe full of deadly beautiful hostile frontiers, rapacious organizations, and crippling debt. For me, from what I played of it, cuz I actually ran it on my old podcast, that it is a sci-fi game that covers the range of hard sci-fi. From like small ship to intergalactic planets and colonies and all that. So it's wild.
Sam: Yeah. The way you described it to me was Firefly to Star Trek. your poison.
Mo: Pretty much cuz you, the way you can like build your ships is that you can either have like a small, tiny ship of a crew or you can have this company that you're playing with running around on like a colony of sorts or like a massive, like mega cruiser. And it's, it's a lot.
Sam: It's very early PBTA vibes to me where it's this big chonker of a book. It's probably trying to do too much. It's just sort of understanding that Apocalypse World is super cool and that someone should be hacking that to like make a space traveling sci-fi game and has decided that there's one of those. And it's going to be the only one of those, and so it better include everything in the genre.
Mo: That's pretty much it because it has, like I said, spaceships that are small, like for a Firefly like group to like go off and do rogue stuff, to like orbiting colonies that you can like have like these factions and all this debt and like all this like nitty gritty stuff and it's like, okay, I, I get where you're coming from, but like, can you like cut in half and like do like maybe like Uncharted Worlds:
Traders Edition or Uncharted Worlds: factions. Like it, it's from 2015, so it definitely needs a second edition, that's for sure.
Sam: Totally. But we are going to only talk about one tiny little move, one corner of this game. So tell us about cramped quarters. Why, why don't you just read us off the move cramped quarters verbatim.
Mo: Cramped quarters: when you're trapped in cramped quarters with the same people for a significant amount of time, like with an interstellar journey, et cetera. Choose a character trapped here with you and roll 2d6.
On a 10 plus, describe how the two of you bonded over the past few days.
On a 7 to 9, reveal slash discover the answer to their questions about an aspect of yourself or your past.
On a six below, describe what caused the newest hurt feelings or bad blood between you.
And I love that like it's just like it gives you something to do while you're traveling and like adds that little bit of like a slice of life scene. It's gonna be like, okay, you left and now you're there. Like,
Sam: Yeah. I feel like travel mechanics are. I've been looking for good travel mechanics since I was in the fifth grade. I just love the idea of travel. I mean, it's going back to Lord of the Rings even. So much of the, the genres that role playing games like, like this space fairing, sci-fi or fantasy, just walking around places, it has always felt like you really want something to cover all of the interesting character stuff that can happen as you go from point A to point B.
And one way to do that is to just like throw in a bunch of adventures. Like the first campaign I ever played in, we were trying to walk 500 miles and every 50 miles or so, the Gm, my dad would be like here's a weird thing that you encounter on the road. And great. That, that was like a totally fine way to do travel. Just have a new travel adventure episodically every week basically.
But having actual rules for the travel time is hard. Like it took forever for me to find a game that I thought did that well. And looking at this like, I think this does that really well. Like, this
Mo: Yeah. And it could easily be plucked out of a sci-fi game and moved into a fantasy game because like,
Sam: There's nothing genre specific about this really.
Mo: instead of like throwing in a random encounter, like you can have just a quiet day on the road for once and like have role play.
Sam: Yeah.
Mo: And I'd rather have role play to combat. I thought that's just me in my games.
Sam: yeah. In some ways you could even plug this move into a random encounter table.
Mo: Mm-hmm.
Sam: Because this movie is kind of interesting in that it doesn't have any stats assigned to it. There are a number of moves like this in Uncharted Worlds where they're just like, well, we want to have mechanics for like X, Y, Z things, but it wouldn't make sense to tie them to your character's abilities, so I just roll some dice to see how it goes.
And I think like a lot of modern PBTA games would look at that and take the dice out of it entirely, but it'd be really easy to imagine this as being like 10 plus, describe how you bonded over the past couple of days. Seven to nine, describe what the newest hurt feelings are and six or less, roll on the monster table and see shows up.
Mo: Like if there's like an account or instead of like you like working together. Yeah, I can see that.
Sam: Yeah.
Mo: Yeah. and when I ever ran up for my podcast, I actually was able to like flesh this out and see, and you know, of course you do the role play first and then you know, you kind of like throw the mechanic in there and then like try to like see where, because of the results kind of tilt how the scene ends. Cuz that's how I did it. And and then some bad blood. I felt bad, but they had fun. So like, you know,
Sam: Yeah. So were you making this move at the end of scenes?
Mo: I was kinda like doing it like halfway cuz I was like, they started role-playing and I was like, you know what that, that's... And how you use Ppta is like, they start the scene and it feels like it's going in a direction. I'm like, hey, let's just roll the dice and see out of the three ways. Like which way you'll go.
Sam: It sounds like you've triggered a move. Yeah.
Mo: Yeah. Like,
Sam: it's here for.
Mo: mm-hmm. Yeah. So you set the scene, see the scene's going, it triggers the move. We rolled for the move cramped quarters, and then like we follow the descriptions of like what the outcome of that dice roll was.
Sam: Yeah, I played a long campaign of The Watch where we handled things really similarly. There's a move in that game that's just like, oh, you were trying to like bond with someone, like how did it go? And we had the bad habit of always doing the whole role play scene and then getting to the end of being like, well, let's roll to see how that went when it's very clear from the fiction how it went
Mo: Yeah. That's why I always kinda like stop in the middle. I'm like, hey, by the way, I see that you're triggering the scene. Let's, before we get to anywhere in particular,
Sam: But a thing that I like about this move is that I think you could also do this move at the very top of a scene. You could say like, I know we wanna have a cramped quarter scene here. That's just what makes sense in the fiction right now. So let's roll and see what kind of scene that ends up looking like.
Or even if it's not a whole scene, just saying, ah, reveal / discover the answer to their question about an aspect of yourself or your past. Just saying, ah, we're sitting around one night and you tell me a story about your past. What is it? And that's the end. Then you like, tell me a little detail about your time in the war or whatever, and how it was bad, cool. Like That really flavors the travel time we just did.
Mo: Yeah. Yeah, I can see it like, sort of like setting up the scene too.
It also helps players who are probably new to the scene too, like the newer to PBTA who like are like, I don't really know how to like start a scene or like, I don't really know exactly like how to role play in a PBTA game cuz they're so used to like the narrative of like maybe D&D for example, where the like, everything's like procedural, mechanical.
Sam: Yeah. A thing I like about this mechanic mechanically is that it's essentially a whole downtime system in, you know, six lines of text or something. Where like going off the thing you just said about helping people role play, a problem of something like Blades in the Dark even is people looking at the like mechanical results of downtime actions and thinking that is the entire purpose of downtime is to just do the mechanical things. And a scene like this or you know, Blades if you're in the headspace that I played in, is about taking those mechanics and turning them into scenes. And this just gets to skip over that part. it's just here's a interesting character beat. Here's an interesting flavor thing you might do like a baton to take and run with on your own.
Mo: Oh, for sure. Yeah, and I can get that cuz sometimes it can be overwhelming if you don't have someone who's like a steady hand.
Sam: Yeah.
Mo: because. I will admit Blades does like a crunchier PBTA and I don't do crunch too well. So I'm just like, okay, what, what are we doing now? It's okay. It's end thing. We have all these steps I'm need to do. I thought the game was done. Okay. Alright, little bit more.
Sam: Yeah, But this skips you over all the mechanical crunch that you could use to fill out downtime and, and talk about like how do we reduce the level of harm that my character is currently experiencing and how do we make the heat, the number of GTA stars that our crew has accumulated? How do we mechanically do that?
It skips all of that and it gets to the actual interesting part of travel, which is what changes in our character relationships because of this.
Mo: Yeah. I just like telling stories of friends and having a way to like be able to tell more stories in like a simple thing of like travel. It's nice.
It let's you just sit in the moment, you know, instead of like combat, mystery, running away from something, et cetera. You're just sitting in the moment of the play, and I think that's nice. That's why I also like, you know, GM-less games, so.
Sam: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I appreciate that. Every result of this roll is good and interesting, and in some ways you don't even need to roll the dice to use this move and to make this move interesting. If you're traveling and you know you wanna pick a fight with one of your crew mates, you can just say what's caused the, this hurt feelings or bad blood between us? Like, you can just kind of go for it.
Mo: Mm-hmm.
Sam: You know, if you're in a group that is more interested in that kind of freeform play than on you know, a hundred percent respecting the mechanics on the dice all the time. I like this as like a palette of scenes that you, you might pick from and, build into something else for travel.
Mo: Mm-hmm. Yeah, it's, it's nice, but if you, if you don't know and like you're newer to pta, it definitely helps like Guide where the story can go.
Sam: A hundred percent.
Mo: or if you just wanna like see where the dice take you, you know?
Sam: Yeah, I think that's what I was trying to kind of say is that it feels like good training wheels to me. Where if I am an experienced role player coming into a long travel sequence, and I, it's like between sessions, I'm just thinking about what do I wanna do as a player next session, I'm gonna be thinking about exactly the kinds of little scenelettes that cramped quarters is inspiring you to do right? To think about what's an interesting thing about my past or myself that I might reveal with someone else. Or how might I pick a fight with someone or how might I bond with someone else? What's an interesting kind of scene around that that I might frame next time?
Whereas if, if I'm not experienced, I am going to enjoy doing all those things in the same way, but I'm not gonna know that that's what I should be thinking about. And this move comes in and is just like, roll the dice so you don't have to choose, and all of these things are gonna lead to a good scene.
Mo: Yeah. Role play.
Sam: Role
Mo: good stuff.
Sam: Yeah.
Mo: Yeah.
Sam: Do you have other things about this that you're interested in?
Mo: Not this move in particular. I was trying to think. I do love the move. Like I said, it can be taken out from sci-fi into anything that has any remote sort of travel because everybody's got a past. Everybody's gonna get along. Some people may get along, you know um, So I think, I think it's good and like if I ran something that was a little more like fantasy or anything like that, I would definitely add it in.
Sam: Yeah. You know, our friend Victor when you first brought this up mentioned Stonetop's keep company move, and I wasn't able to get a copy of the Stonetop pdf, so I don't know if this is accurate, but version of the move that he sent along to me is basically a version of this.
It's basically when you spend a stretch of time together, ask the others if they want to keep company, and if they do take turns asking a PC or NPC or one of the following questions. And then it's a bunch of questions that are really similar to the kinds of scene that cramped quarters is gonna produce, right? It's what do you do that's annoying or endearing? Who or what seems to be on your mind? How do we pass the time? Stuff like that.
And I think that's an interesting way to make this diceless, to just sort of explicitly say here's a menu of options that you might pick from for what to do with the scene.
But I also think it's, interesting how that games move really lowers the stakes on it.
Mo: Mm-hmm.
Sam: Cramped quarters is really trying to push you into a, a whole scene. I, it feels like with "describe what caused the newest hurt feelings or bad blood between you." that's just higher stakes than like, what did I do that was annoying.
You know? And that that smallness of a travel move also kind of feels right where a lot of travel to me feels like the building up of bad blood that is eventually gonna explode into a moment that is not about travel after the travel or whatever else is causing you to spend a bunch of time together.
Mo: Yeah. Yeah. This is like more of a just keeping your ideas and minds, at least the Stonetop one is like more of a, like, like you mentioned, a subtle approach to, to things instead of like being in a scene. It's just more of like, getting a, bead on how your character feels in this moment.
Sam: Yeah. I mean, that's something about travel in RPGs at large that I really like is the way that it... it feels like it should focus you more onto smaller moments and details than onto big plot points. Like big plot points are things that happen at places whereas travel is this more ephemeral time that is still really interesting to me, but is, it feels about like building up to the the destination more.
Mo: Yeah, I can see that. And, which is nice. It's nice just to have these moments of just like chill quietness, like, and just be present.
Sam: Yeah. Are there other things about travel in RPGs at large that you like or that you're particularly interested in, or other games that you think do it well?
Mo: I mean, Wanderhome has traveling in it, but I don't think it has as a mechanic, if I'm thinking correctly. Oh, I don't have to book. I was gonna look, but
Sam: I mean, it has, one of the ways that you get a token in Wanderhome is by, I'm gonna get the exact wording wrong, but like stopping to marvel at the world and its beauty.
Mo: Yeah. Yeah, that sounds about right.
Sam: And you can do that at a location obviously. You can look at the, like, I think grandeur is one of the words in the move trigger.
So, it's really asking you to admire like a landscape. And it's a lot easier to say, oh, we're gonna pass this landscape and I'm gonna admire it, and then that landscape and I'm gonna admire it than to do that kind of repeatedly at a destination. But yeah, there's a lot of implicit travel even in Wanderhome. And then you, you get to a location and you do stuff there.
that whole game. Has that feeling of traveling though, where like even when you're at a location, it's because this is where you're camping out for the night most of the time.
Mo: Yep. Because it's, it's about the journey and it's about the travel and it's about the stories that you have on your adventures.
Sam: Yeah. The other, I wanna do a whole episode about this at, at some point, but the other game that I think really revolutionized how I think about travel and RPGs is For The Queen,
Mo: Oh my gosh, yes.
Sam: where
Mo: It just asks you questions about the travel and like
Sam: Yeah. it's like you've got this deck of cards and like towards the bottom of the deck is shuffled this "the queen is under attack card," so you know your journey's gonna be interrupted. Like the, you have this level of irony as players where you know that the journey's gonna be interrupted and the queen that you're traveling with is gonna be attacked. But in the meantime, every turn is just answering one provocative question about your relationship to the queen and like maybe what's going on while you're traveling, but probably not even.
And it's basically all flashback to this one moment that you know is coming. So you know you're all on this journey, maybe you're narrating like what's going on on that journey, but it's so much more about what happened and like where you were even before the journey started. And I think it really captures that feeling of almost nostalgia that I think travel can bring on. Like the, the quietness that allows for self-reflection.
Mo: Oh yes, for sure. Because, you know, what else are you gonna do?
Sam: Yeah, and I think that's something that the middle result of cramped quarters especially does really well too, of, you know, "reveal slash discover the answer to someone's question about an aspect of yourself or your past," that is the exact sort of self-reflection and then sharing or interrogating that self-reflection with others that I, I think is the most beautiful that travel can be.
Mo: Yeah. And then like also questions during the travel too, or like, I just pulled up my deck to like flip through it while we're talking.
" What did you bring with you that endangers the queen?"
Sam: Yeah.
Mo: Or like, how does the queen remind you of her status while on the journey?
Sam: Yeah.
Mo: So it's, it's a beautiful game of just like questions and thoughts and reflection of like this character you never really thought you'd ever develop, and then you just... just throw questions alone you develop a character. All you do, you develop a character by not only questions alone, it's also by a single photo of what the queen looks like.
Sam: yeah, yeah.
Mo: That's it. That's the, all the backstory that you have. Really,
Sam: I honestly, this is just a For the Queen podcast now. I.
Mo: Yeah. Sorry. This, this is, this is and Mo taking over a For the Queen podcast.
Sam: I even like playing For the Queen without the, the art of the queen because as much as each one of those pieces of art is so evocative and beautiful,
Mo: And they're so like different and like they just all give different energies.
Sam: They're so unique. Like they're all by different artists, so they all, they all have such a different feel. So, I, I like playing without them because I think people come up with the wildest like settings and world buildings for that game if you just let them run absolutely free. And really it's all just from these like kind of provocative questions and that's, that's just it. Then, then you get all this backstory and you get the whole vision of this journey and all the, places you're going on it and everything. It's, it's really just, that's how you do travel right there.
Mo: Yeah, it's, it's very nice cuz it's, yeah, the reflection of self and then like having the conversations with each other by answering these questions openly with the group and other people can like chime in or like have like small interactions with your own character, but it's mainly about you and your character and how their direct relation is with the queen.
Sam: Yeah. Yeah, and there's a thing that happens in that game too that I want to tie back to cramped quarters where every time it's someone new's turn and you draw a card, you just intuitively feel that you've gone another day on your journey or another six hours or something, but you, you're like another step forward. Time has passed on the trip.
And in the same way with cramped quarters, the game advice around this move includes text that's like when you're on a journey roll two or three times and or however many times you think is appropriate based on the length of the journey. And you can feel in that that if you're using this to set scenes up in the first place, like, every one of these is going to be the encapsulation of a unit of time on journey.
But that's so implicit. It's such a rhythm of play thing acts as metaphor for the time of travel in your character's lives in this very strange and I think intuitive way.
Mo: And for me, like I love just rolls like this or like scene setting like this because I love character connections. I love how they can be developed, how they can fall apart, how they can, you know, the bond can be tighter. Like I love how they can dive deeper. And it's just by rolling dice and like having explicit mechanics that's set up for this sort of play.
Cuz if you didn't have these mechanics, you probably wouldn't be doing it, you know?
Sam: Yeah, yeah. And it, it's easy to imagine too, how you could tie the like numbery kinds of mechanics, like the stats of your character to this move or a move like it in another game. Like it's easy to imagine a move that's like:
When you spend time with another person in order to reduce your stress or to recover from an exhausting circumstance or whatever, like do one of these things and on a success. Clear three stress and on a partial success clear one. Stress and on a failure. Ooh, you, you got one more stress. Sorry.
Mo: You tried, but it did not work out.
Sam: Yeah, and you don't need that, that all feels like extra juice on top of like, the core thing of like, let's do some scenes and some character bonding.
Mo: mm-hmm.
Sam: but there's that space to tie that together if that's a thing that your game has.
Mo: Yeah, as like mass for example, has comfort and support where, like you, you're trying to comfort and support each other. Or, I'm sorry, it's comfort or support, but it should be comfort and support. But like, anyways
Sam: I'm only comforting, but I, I'm secretly judging you. And or I support you, but it's harsh love only.
Mo: Yeah. It's like, it's tough luck buddy. Like I am.
Sam: Yeah.
Mo: It's, it's funny cuz actually I have, I'm playing a character in like a game right now that is, actually has this thing that involves care and support where playing the Scion, basically it's like the child of like a super villain. And it's called White Lies. Or it's called something. And like anytime you comfort or support somebody by, by telling 'em white lies, you roll with something else instead of like, with mundane.
Sam: Interesting.
Mo: Because like you don't really know how exactly like show care and support because like you never had it yourself.
Sam: Yeah. Yeah. The only thing you know how to do is like lie to people to make 'em feel better. Interesting. Well then that gives me the idea of making a custom version of cramped quarters, like a custom travel move for every given playbook in a game. That feels like something you could certainly come up with.
Mo: Like almost, I don't wanna say like the sex moves in Monster Hearts but that's like kind of, because they're all sort of like, you do this thing and this affects your character in a customized way.
Sam: Yeah, exactly. No, I think that's a good comparison really, where if we're just doing Dungeons and Dragons fantasy, a move where the Wizard on the travel time has to do the spell preparation and you find some way to like bring other people into that process
Mo: Like, taking a break and going out of the woods to find like ingredients.
Sam: Yeah. Yeah. Or you know you can easily imagine a priest who has to like pray to their God and do the travel move, like on the travel move like, how are you praying to your God and doing that thing. I'm sure there's a way to like genericize that too and say like what's a habit or a routine that you get into while you're traveling.
But I bet you could write some like interesting playbook specific, archetype specific moves, even in like a sci-fi setting like Uncharted Worlds about what is travel like for you specifically.
Mo: Well if you know, Uncharted Worlds had a thing called a playbook, that would be great. But they don't, so, uh,
Sam: Do you have final thoughts on travel in RPGs or cramp quarters in particular?
Mo: I think instead of just having violence and fighting all the time, there should be moments of self reflection and bonding. So
Sam: Yeah.
Mo: I think more people should look into it and do it, especially if they have games that travel.
Sam: Yeah. Yeah. Have travel in your games. It's cool and interesting.
Mo: If your game does traveling.
Sam: Yeah. Yeah.
Mo: Don't have it randomly. If it's not, if it's not a
Sam: Just cram it in there.
Mo: Don't, don't
Sam: Into your game about your, like one small community and never leaving it. You gotta make sure you have travel moves in that game.
Mo: Oh my gosh. Travel from grandma's house to your house and avoid the bad wolf.
Sam: God, I, that sounds like a lyric game that's gonna come out and be about assembling a playlist and, you know, all
Mo: Oh my God. One called road trip where you're actually making like a remix of songs.
Sam: That is a real game that I, that an Avery Alder game, that involves making a playlist for a road trip.
Mo: oh, maybe. Okay, so it's called Ribbon Drive. I found it.
Sam: Ribbon Drive creates stories about letting go on the open road, and we all work to both further and complicate this agenda during the game. Cool. Yeah.
Mo: I like that.
Sam: Thanks again to Mo for being here. You can find them on Twitter at Sirena Besos.
You can also join the Dice Exploder Discord. Come and talk about the show if you want to. As always, you can find me on Blue Sky, Twitter, dice.camp, and Itch at sdunnewold.
Our logo was designed by sporgory and our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Gray. Thanks as always again to you for listening. See you next time.
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