Dice Exploder Season 3 Premieres Today!
Hello and welcome to another season of Dice Exploder!
The podcast is back, baby, and this newsletter and blog have a new home away from Substack at diceexploder.com - this is the last email I’ll be sending via Substack. If you’re excited to stay subscribed, awesome. There’s nothing you have to do, and you’ll get more emails like this one soon. If you’d prefer not to follow me off the platform, I recommend unsubscribing soon.
You can read about why the change here (it was the Nazi stuff).
What’s up today:
New newsletter format and schedule
Season 3 of the podcast premiers, featuring John Harper
What I’m thinking about: short sessions and playtesting
Dice Exploder is running a game jam: remake or de-make your favorite game
Band-Aids & Bullet Holes: my new John Wick inspired game
Let’s get into it.
#1 - This newsletter is gonna become more newsletter-y and less bloggy
As a part of moving off Substack, I’m gonna stop sending a newsletter every time I have a new blog post. Instead, you’ll get one of these in your inbox every month or three with a general roundup of what I’ve been writing, reading, podcasting, and working on. If you want to follow the blog directly by RSS, heck yeah, you can find that feed at the bottom of the new website.
#2 - John Harper is cool and on the Dice Exploder season premiere. Out now!
You may be aware of this if you’ve listened to a single episode of Dice Exploder, but I’m a fan of John Harper’s games. We’ve covered Blades in the Dark (arguably thrice), Lasers & Feelings, and Agon 2e (co-designed with Sean Nittner). And these are not niche games - Blades has a freakin TV show in development.
Needless to say, it’s nice to have John on the show.
John brought in the Psi*Run risk sheet, a fairly complex dice resolution mechanic, known generically as Otherkind Dice. Here’s what it looks like:
It’s such an elegant piece of design. Just look at that beauty - you’re only missing, like, two rules to immediately hit the table with this. We go into everything there is to love about it on the show today.
Also be sure to check out Vincent Baker’s Otherkind SRD - I reread this post annually at least. It’s an excellent breakdown of all kinds of crap you might get up to if you want to hack up an Otherkind game of your own (maybe for the game jam mentioned later in this email…?)
Thanks so much to everyone who helped fund this new season! I’ll be bringing you at least one extra episode beyond what the crowdfunding campaign originally promised. Shoutout to Chris Greenbriar of the Blaseball episode who picked up a few edits in this season of the show, including this episode. Chris did a great job.
Podcasting is fun. It’s good to be back.
#3 - What I’m thinking about: short sessions are great, especially for playtesting
Since my game Couriers, I’ve been enamored with games where the play loop is pretty quick, maybe 45-90 minutes, but you’re rewarded for playing a couple loops a session and maybe 4-6 sessions total. I think this started with Space Post, where the familiarity and repetition of revisiting the same locations over and over is the primary fun and charm of the game.
Then a couple months ago I dusted off a sketch of a game about a community of John Wick style assassins, where you’d start by making a big network of light weight characters and then one by one zoom in on their quests for vengeance. See more later in this newsletter.
What I’ve been struck by in development is how effective it’s been to notice I have 90 minutes free, show up in the Dice Exploder discord and announce “anyone want to playtest a game right now,” and actually pull a group together. I keep the sessions light, I look to accomplish one clear thing with each, and we genuinely get done quick. Not every game I've worked on could get away with this, but many could. It’s easy to imagine just running 45 minutes of downtime or a quick score in a system with that sort of play loop. And beyond good playtesting feedback, I’ve gotten some real nice little stories out of my efforts. Who will ever forget The Lightbulb Man and his iconic, ominous and threatening jar of mayonnaise?
Anyway the immediate pickup game is fun and effective if you’ve got a community that’s up for it, even if they’re a little taken aback by the idea. Give it a shot.
#4 - Dice Exploder game jam
Yeah that’s right, for season 3, Dice Exploder is running a game jam. Explode a game you love (or want to love) with a remix, remake, or reinterpretation. This is your chance to make something like my Doskvol Breathes or John Harper’s World of Dungeons: a love letter and celebration of a game you can’t get out of your head by way of how you’d tear it apart and do it differently.
When the jam is over, I’ll do a bonus episode going over some of my favorite entries. If you want to get talked about on the show, this is probably your best way to do so in the foreseeable future.
Personally, I think I’ll be submitting yet another hack of Blades in the Dark. A while back in a private designery group chat, we somehow decided to all make our own micro versions of Blades. Mine ended up centering a mechanic I called Shivers, after the ability from Disco Elysium, which functions as a representation of your relationship to the city of Doskvol (or really whatever city you live in - it’d be easy to repurpose to another city / game / genre). How much does the city like you? The more you act in kind with the city’s moods and desires, the more you assimilate to it, the more you’re able to get away with stuff. But also, the more it asks of you. I love the vibes of it, and maybe I’ll finally polish it off for this.
I should also say: I’m not running this jam myself. I have plenty going on with the whole “making the show” thing. But Lady Tabletop, Chris Greenbriar, and Sam Roberts stepped up to make it happen. Thanks to all of them - the Discord is hoppin as people are getting to work.
Can’t wait to see what y’all explode.
#5 - Band-Aids & Bullet Holes
As mentioned above, I’ve got a new game in the works: Band-Aids & Bullet Holes. It’s a deck-builder tabletop role-playing game about a tight-knit community of professional assassins and the debts and vendettas between them. In each session, you take a single protagonist's quest for bloody revenge on someone who wronged them and see it through to its inevitable conclusion. 2+ players, 1-3 hour sessions, only thing you need is a regular deck of playing cards.
Yes, the name came from me free associating on revenge until I got to Bad Blood -> Taylor Swift lyrics. It’s that kind of game.
Here’s the temp / ashcan cover art:
I’m planning to itchfund this puppy for Zine Month starting in February. I think the core engine beneath it has potential for all kinds of games and stories. It does “two people headed towards one-on-one climactic conflict” extremely well. I can see reskins for a pantheon of Gods, professional wrestlers, immortal vampires, superheroes and villains, sci-fi bounty hunters, a high school debate team, fool-hardy wizards, amateur golfers, and I’m sure plenty more.
I’m kind of shocked I haven’t seen more TTRPG deck builders. “Your deck is your character” is such a strong concept to me, it does away with messy character sheets, and it has all the lovely feeling of a traditional deckbuilder. Maybe we’ll see more of it as the trend of RPGs becoming more board game esque accelerates.
But making your character a deck does mean you have to use the deck at some point, and that can end up feeling very mechanical. But just as with the ur-father deck building game Magic: the Gathering itself, I’ve found the act of building the deck to be where 75% of the fun lies, and there can be a ton of emotion and self-expression in that as each card takes on a weight and memorable fictional meaning.
In B&B, you spend a lot of time going around asking people for favors, and when they agree to help you, you get to borrow their good cards for your ultimate climactic fight. Essentially you’re trading with characters in the fiction. I don’t know how else to say this: it fucking rules. It basically takes all the fun stuff about Magic or any other trading card game and ports it into the fiction of an RPG while jettisoning all the toxic gambling parts of Magic. Instead of paying hundreds of American dollars to make your cards valuable, you tell a story about them and add value that way.
Anyhoo, I’m super proud of it. Be on the lookout. You’ll get more updates here about it, or you can follow me on itch. If you’re interested in playtesting, find me on Discord or Bluesky.