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Pick Lists with Ash Kreider
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Pick Lists with Ash Kreider

This week, Sam talks with Ash Kreider about character creation picklists, a common feature of most (all?) PBTA games, as well as many others. Some topics discussed include:

  • Character creation speed runs

  • Gender lists

  • Are pick lists mechanics?

  • How Wanderhome doubles the length of its pick lists with This One Cool Trick

  • Are pick lists poetry?

Games mentioned

You can find Ash at peachpantspress on itch and @wundergeek on Twitter. Their website is peachpantspress.com, or here’s direct links to There Is Only One Bed and Queer Sir.

You can find Sam @sdunnewold on Bluesky, Twitter, dice.camp, and itch.io

The Dice Exploder logo is by sporgory, and the theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey

Join the Dice Exploder Discord to talk about the show!

Transcript

Sam: Hello and welcome to the season one finale of Dice Exploder. Each week we take a tabletop RPG mechanic and pour over it like a time lapse coming into full bloom. My name is Sam Dunnewold and before I introduced my co-host today, yeah it's the end of season one. Let's talk about that for a second.

So season two is coming probably mid late August. Before then, I'll probably have some bonus content, including a design commentary on one of my own games. I'll also be blogging on the Dice Exploder substack so if that's something you're interested in, sign up.

If there's anything else you want to hear from me or see from me in the meantime, just drop me a line too. I'm on all the socials and if I get enough Qs maybe I'll do like a Q&A episode or something. I don't know.

If you want more Dice Exploder before then, come down and hang out on the discord. It's felt small and manageable for a discord and pretty purely for just talking about design theory. Someone on there called it "the discord I'm in that most feels like the old days of forums," which I think is just a huge compliment.

Finally, thank you so much for listening and supporting the show, and thanks to all my co-hosts this season for being here and helping make this season what it was. It really was just so much fun to make.

Thanks especially to my co-host today, Ash Kreider. Ash. Ash, my bestie. Such a pleasure to have them. Ash is an excellent game designer behind games like the classic PBTA game The Watch, which we did a whole episode on earlier this season, and just a couple of weeks ago, There Is Only One Bed and Queer Sir, a pair of tropey romance games for two players that I think are really fun. If you wanna read me writing fic at the most romantic I am capable of being, i.e. stilted, but trying my best, the example text of Queer Sir is the place to look.

Anyway, today Ash brings us character creation pick lists from like every PBTA game. We get into just how revolutionary the original Apocalypse World gender pick list was, and how pick lists at large are used really differently in a variety of different games. And how there's something just so effective about these things that even with so much variation in implementation, they never really get cut from PBTA games.

So let's dive in. Here is Ash Kreider with character creation pick lists.

Ash, thanks so much for being here. What have you brought for us today?

Ash: So I'm kind of cheating. You said that I should pick a mechanic from a game and I am picking a mechanic from a genre of game. But what I wanted to talk about is character creation lists from PBTA games.

Sam: Heck yeah. So do you have like a specific one of these that you can like, kinda walk us through as just an example to get us started?

Ash: Yeah, sure. So like Apocalypse World is the, you know, kind of game that invented this whole thing. There would be choices for names. You would have several pre-written choices for like, look, demeanor, eyes, options for face, and there would also be like options for gender. And like more than two options for gender. Surprise, surprise. I know what a concept.

But uh, yeah it really like introduced me to the power of when you present players with a lot of options, character creation runs a lot differently.

Sam: Yeah, it runs so fast. Like pick lists, make character creation so quick and easy. It's so lovely.

Ash: Yeah, and especially like so I've, I've GMed so much PBTA especially of my game, The Watch at conventions and like, especially once I started at the beginning of a session just saying like, "Hey friends, character creation is kind of complex for this game. We got a lot to get through. So like, don't agonize over your choices. Just make the choice that seems obvious so we have as much time for story as possible."

And like I got set up for my games down from like 90 minutes to I think my record was 35.

Sam: It's pretty good for a complicated convention game.

Ash: Yeah. Yeah.

Sam: So where, where did you want to start? Like why did you want to pick this to begin with as a mechanic?

Ash: So at first, like, there's like a lot of things I really like about this as a mechanic. The first thing was really like especially with you know, being a non-binary person, having like a list of options for gender and having like more than two options on that list. I noticed from, you know, all the jamming that I did that it really like reduced a lot of the defaultism that happened in convention games where like people would just sit down and, you know, it would be mostly dudes and then the dudes would just be like, oh, of course I'm gonna play, dude.

But when you have like a list of like a bunch of different genders and some of them are weird or cool or evocative, you know, or, or even, you know, just like a lot of those guys who before would've, you know, yeah, I'm gonna play. A dude would be like, oh, no, actually I'm gonna, I'm gonna play a woman, or I'm gonna play, you know, this person with a different gender for mine.

Sam: What does concealed mean? What can I, that sounds cool. Can I try that out? Like,

Ash: Yeah, yeah, exactly. You know, and like God, one of the best con games of Apocalypse World I ever played was there was this kid, this teenage boy that was the kid of a friend of mine. And like he was playing this faceless and he was just super into like the idea of transgressing as a gender.

Like not transgender, but just transgressing. Just played the most terrifying and compelling, faceless I've ever seen. It was very cool.

Sam: Yeah. Yeah. I think there's, I mean, we're talking about gender specifically here, but I think the, the results that you're talking about really spill over into everything that you're picking, right? That even just picking some eyes for your character. It's something that can happen really quick and is something that can just make a decision about who your character is, like give you some thing to lean into.

Like in Apocalypse World, I'm looking at the the Angel Playbook here. We've got like quick eyes, hard eyes, caring eyes, bright eyes, laughing eyes or clear eyes. And this is like a medic playbook. And each one of those things, like the Quick Eyes angel, I like know who that person is. Like that person is really into getting the job done quickly and precisely and doing a good and like probably dehumanizing people in the process. And hard eyes is like, I've seen some shit. And Caring Eyes is all about bedside manner. And like you're getting all of those things just from picking the eyes of the character. And, and it's so effective, I think to be able to pick one thing that quickly, that just gives you something to latch onto as you're making your, your person.

Ash: Yeah. You know, PBTA was really like a shift in my thinking about how I create RPG characters and like, because of, you know, this approach, There's, there's just so much like evocative detail in like those small amounts of verbiage that it's like, oh, I don't need to do the lonely, fun thing of writing 3000 words about my character's backstory that no one is ever going to see but me.

Right. Like I can just roll up to a session with and, and Sam, you, you have played with me so you know that I'm especially prone I don't read games before I play them with people. I just roll

Sam: Why would you? That's not the fun part.

Ash: no, I just roll up to the session and I'm like, whatever, I'll take whatever's left.

And yeah, you know, because when you play PBTA, like that is totally a valid way to play. And it's it's just really nice and like stress free knowing that like, oh, yay, we're playing something PBTA. So like I don't have to do any prep to play this game.

Sam: Yeah. The other thing that we've kind of gotten out here a little bit that I really love about pick lists is how much world building and just kind of like setting stuff you can get out of them, even out of the options that you don't pick.

And I think that the most effective way to do that is for these pick lists to be as specific as possible. Like Blades in the Dark most people listening to this are probably familiar with it, like has pick lists sort of in its character creation, right? You're picking a heritage, which is just like, which of the continents are you from or cultures are you from? And you pick a background, which is like academic or labor or military or noble.

And those things are useful. Like those things are doing the kind of thing that we're talking about. But when you go over to a game, like Dream Askew, you're picking two psychic gifts and you're choosing shared dreams or absolution or brain whispers, or you're deciding what the world's psychic maelstrom told you. Like that love is the only salvation. Or just incredibly weird specific stuff that is really gonna define not just your whole character, but like the entire campaign or game that you're playing.

And I love, even if you don't pick, like the psychic maelstrom told you that love is the only salvation, like you've learned so much about what the game is trying to set up as the world just from that existing on your character sheet.

Ash: I mean, speaking of, of gender pick lists, Dream Askew has some bang in gender choices. Raven. Warrior?

Sam: Gargoyle, yeah. Oh yeah.

Ash: I remember playing an Iris one time even though that is totally not my kind of playbook because I was like I. I need to know what Warrior gender is. I need to play a session to like figure this out.

Sam: Yeah, it, it is cool how like a single option on a pick list can really inspire a whole character or inspire you to play the playbook at all.

Ash: yeah.

Sam: yeah.

Ash: Yeah. And like as a game designer, I've definitely, like, So, you know, Dream Askew was one of the games that really like got me thinking about like, you can have lists of things that aren't like how your character looks or their personality or stuff like that, right?

You can, you can have lists of weird things to pick from. And using that as like a way to inform like, this is what the world is, right? So even if the player isn't gonna choose most of those choices, but like you're still informing so much about what the world is by saying, well, these are what your choices are in this world.

Sam: Yeah. The other thing that I love about the Dream Askew pick lists especially is that it's basically the entirety of character creation is just these pick lists. I say basically, but you don't need, basically it's just the

Ash: Yeah. No, it's just that.

Sam: character creation is a pick list. That's so cool. Like it just goes so quickly and it's so not mechanical. Or is it mechanical?

Like on the one hand, you're just making some flavor choices. Like was there a mechanic here at all? But also like, yeah, of course. There was like, like the fact that you had to go through and like make a few choices, that's a game action. And you're learning all this stuff as we've been saying about the game world as you are going through that.

Like it's, It's just so fucking cool. I don't know.

Ash: Yeah,

I I definitely feel you there, there, it feels kind of weird to call, like lists a mechanic, but at the same time, like out of the, you know, 90 a billion or so PBTA games out there, like almost every single one of them has those pick lists for your characters.

And they have different lists, but you know, so the fact that almost every game has kept that is like, okay, that clearly says something about the effectiveness of, you know, presenting characters that way.

Sam: Yeah, totally. There's a thought I had while prepping for this too, that like what is a list of playbook specific moves or like Blades in the Dark special abilities for a specific playbook. Except another pick list that you like gradually pick options off of throughout the course of play as you level up.

Like it is in a lot of ways, like a lot of special ability playbook lists are working the same way as these flavorful character creation pick lists that we're talking about where here's a bunch of interesting things that are like genre beats your character could hit. And even if you don't pick this particular one, this particular move, you still like, absorb it into your brain as setting information when you read it and and that like comes out as you're playing the game.

Ash: Yeah, so the funny thing that, that reminds me of is like like when I first got into indie games there was a time in my life where I poo-pooed like lists as an approach to like games. And I, I remember one of the first years that I went to Gen Con, 3000 years ago or whatever Andy Kowski was there and he had a translation of this Japanese RPG called Maid RPG, in which... it's very trophy.

So the GM was like the master and everyone else was like maids working for the master. And you know, you could have these weird, like you could have cat girl maids and like robot maids and alien maids and

Sam: I'm making the grimace emoji, but go on

Ash: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, look, it is what it is. But like 80% of the book, like, like an absurd quantity of the book was literally just random lists for like rolling results on.

And so I remember another game designer friend of mine, we had looked through the book and we were like, we don't, we don't get it. And so we were talking about it and then we trekked like all the way across the dealer's room to like, yeah. Hi Andy. Great. Glad you're selling this, this game really well. Can you, can you please explain the appeal of, of this thing is just lists. And, and we left that conversation not really feeling anymore enlightened.

But, but looking back on it, it's like, oh man. I have come to really appreciate the power of a good list. Now, do I want 200 pages of random lists? No. Editing is definitely a virtue, but like, yeah, I definitely am thinking about that like very differently than when I was first getting started in indie games, that's for sure.

Sam: Do you have thoughts on like rollable lists in, in this context? Because some, you know, I hear 200 pages of lists and I think, well, that the, the way that becomes usable is if they're all like set up in d66 tables or whatever, and, and you're kind of running through them like that. And I've, I've seen games that essentially have pick lists of character creation, but they're set up in tables where you can just randomly generate a character even more quickly than picking from all the options.

Is that something that's interesting to you at all? Do you have, do you have thoughts on that?

Ash: So I think that's really kind of getting into osr territory. I, OSR is not my jam. I know some very lovely people who enjoy it very much and I am very happy for them. So not, this is not me saying that OSR is bad game design, it's just, it's not for me.

Yeah, I, I very much. There are characters I want to play and there are characters I don't want to play. So I don't enjoy the here's a bunch of lists and roll randomly to see what happens. Like, I, I don't enjoy that.

Sam: Yeah, absolutely.

Ash: So you know, Dream Askew was kind of the second generation approach to like, wait, we can make lists that aren't just like physical appearance or like personality traits. But then kind of the games that came after that got even weirder. And I, I love it.

Like Wanderhome has. Such weird lists, and I love them so much. You know in our campaign, I, I played the veteran. And you know, like there's just things like I. I'm looking at my old character sheet here. Sometimes I'm exhausted and curt. Those were, there was like a list of like, sometimes I am, you know. Or I refuse to be, and then I chose terrified or heartless, but, you know. And then there was, there was like a whole list of like, you know, cuz like the veteran's deal is like, oh, I fought in a war a long time ago and now I'm just like wandering the

Sam: now I want cry about it. Yeah.

Ash: yeah, I'm just trying to like, I don't know.

Sam: like, dunno.

Ash: Very, very, like, sad ronan samurai kind of vibe.

But like you know, there was like a whole list of like lessons and I had to choose that were basically like memories. And I had to choose one that I learned and then two that I'd forgotten. And it was, it was like little snippets of things from my past and I was just like, what? Like,

Sam: Yeah.

Ash: that's, that's just so cool.

Sam: Yeah.

the other thing I love about what Wanderhome is doing on that particular choice, but on a lot of the playbooks they're saying like, choose one that's like X and choose one that's like Y like one that you remember and two that you've forgotten. Or I pulled the example from the dancer. It's like, pick a bunch of dances that you know and choose one that you will teach anyone who wants to learn, and one that you'll only ever dance alone.

And framing things like that, kind of like doubles the length of your list because every option now could go in one direction or the other direction. It could be the thing that you are really open about and want to teach everyone, or it could be the thing that is very private to you and you only ever want to do for yourself. And that like bringing that duality to those pick lists is super cool.

Ash: Oh, yeah, yeah, it's, it's great because like, for the veteran, like these, these memories, like the one that I chose, that I remembered was, you know, a grieving mentor basically taught me to Uh, never draw my sword in anger. But like that hits very differently if that's the lesson that I remember versus the lesson that I've forgotten. Right. Like that,

those are two very different things.

Sam: Yeah.

Another thing I love about these Wanderhome lists that sort of give every option on the list, a double meaning, is that sometimes it doesn't even matter what the objects on the list are.

Like with the Vagabond playbook there, you're choosing two crimes you've been falsely accused of and two that you're actually guilty of. And yeah, sure, like whether you're lying about having killed a God or whether you're actually guilty of having killed a God, like that matters, that is going to be different for your playbook. But like just the vibe of you have been falsely accused of some crimes and you have actually committed some crimes, that is such a vibe even before you make the selections.

It also like just, I mean this goes back to Dream Askew too, but especially in Wanderhome, it's just like these pick lists are just a great excuse for the author to write some poetry.

Ash: Yeah, I,

that's interesting. I, I never thought of it as poetry exactly when I was doing it, but mine were a little bit more concise. But yeah, it's, I don't know. Weirdly, this is the part, like one of the parts of, of designing PBTA games that I hate the most. I Oh,

Sam: the, like actually writing the

Ash: writing? Yeah, writing all the lists. I find, I just find it, it's, it's just a slog doing because it does end up being like a lot of lists.

And like, you know, because you don't have that many options, there's like pressure to make, you can't have any filler options, right? It's not

like So it takes a lot of work, you know, like, you know that something is done when you play tested and everyone is like, oh shit, everything on this list is so good. Right? That's, that's, that's the reaction you wanna get.

But yeah Wanderhome is definitely like a game that I'm, I'm, I'm just like, I, oh man. I read the list. I'm just like, these are so delightful. They're just, I, I love them so much.

Sam: Yeah. It really is, each option is so specific and... they feel handcrafted. Like they, they feel like they've got someone's fingerprints on them. You know?

The, the other God thinking about how hard it is to write good lists. Like I, I made this game, Space Train Space Heist that was just like, I want to do the dumbest fucking, like forged in the dark heist that I can. I just want like my game to have a playbook called Space Wizard in it. And like, we'll go from there.

And I like stole from Dream Askew the idea of picking a relationship with the person sitting to your left on your playbook. And I'm writing this list of potential relationships and, you know, I, I got like exes. Great. Yeah, great. And ex-business partners, also great. And then ex-bandmates, which was just an absolute banger for like, what I was trying to do. Like every time I sat down to play this game, people would pick this playbook and look at that and be like, I love ex-bandmates. That's so good. They would never pick anything else. So it basically wasn't a pick list at all.

And then accidentally, 75% of the time that I ran this game, there would be a battle of a band's theme in it. And this is not a game that's supposed to be about a battle of the bands, right? So like, if you make the one option on the list too good, suddenly your whole game becomes about that. And like you, you can't even hit it out of the ball park once, because if you only do it once, then you're fucked. Like it's it's hard to write these lists.

Ash: Yeah. you know, and that's, that's something that I struggled a bit with in Mars Watch, which is like...

So, you know, I did The Watch, which was like a game about people who aren't men fighting against a, a very thinly veiled allegory for patriarchy. But you know, like I, I wrote that game like before I was out to myself as non-binary. So like not to say that like non-binary people hadn't been invented yet, but like a lot of the language that I needed to be clear about my intentions wasn't like in popular circulation yet. So there's been some like common misconceptions of how people tend to approach the game.

And plus I've just like run a ton of it and there's been some things that I wanted to clean up over the years, so it was like, you know my husband he wrote like a micro setting of like, actually it's The Watch on Mars. And I was like, oh, that's like super interesting. So I took that and I ran with that and I'm, you know, polishing up a bunch of stuff. But yeah, I mean, coming back to the issue of gender that was like, that was like a whole problem of you know,

man, I given that the language that I used in The Watch about gender was completely obsolete like seven years later, I was like, I, I do not wanna do that to myself again. Like trying to predict future gender language is a fool's errand and I don't wanna do that.

So I turned to Facebook actually and I was like, Hey, Facebook friends, help me crowdsource some like future Martian genders. And a lot of them came from Marshall Bradshaw, who turns out super into Mars. But yeah, like. That ended up being a very strategic, because it is a game about gender, but it is a game about gender in a future world that could exist. So it was very important to like have something that could feel like plausible and get people to ask questions about, okay, what does this mean? So like there are genders like explorer and scientist and uh, hearth keeper you know, along with the more like, traditional genders.

But yeah, that was, that was definitely something where, because I was inventing a bunch of future genders, like it was really important to me to make sure that they were equally appealing with all

Sam: yeah.

Ash: you know, the other ones as well, right.

Sam: Yeah. Yeah. I wanted to call out a couple of things in there. First of all, if, if you're listening to this and you're a designer lists great thing to crowdsource in your game design. Like it really, it, yeah,

it's fabulous to do so. And like collaborating is always fun. Filling out a list is a great way to do it.

But also, you're talking in there about the other side of pick lists. Like we've talked about how even if you don't pick an option from a list, it's still kind of informing the vibe of the game and like saying something about a setting.

Like, I didn't make this explicit earlier, but a trick I often use as a GM is if I need an npc and I don't have a name for them, I just like pick a name off the pick list from someone's playbook that they didn't use. But the same is true for like gear and character concepts. Like if someone didn't pick that flame thrower that's on their sheet, then that seems like a pretty good idea for a, an npc, why don't I say this nPC as a flame thrower, or whatever the equivalent is.

But the reverse is also true where when you're having that conversation about like what genders are we gonna have in Mars Watch, you may end up in a situation where you're like, oh, I see that these things are on the list, but I think that's not what we should do.

Like I get the vibe of that that is informing like the game and like what we're doing here. But the pick list is like the starter for the conversation of the bounds of what your table is gonna be doing, and some things on the list might end up on the outside of that bounds. And that's really valuable too, to know what kinds of content you do want in your game or not.

Ash: Yeah. And you know, something I added to character creation in Mars Watch that, I don't know, maybe someone else has done this but I'm not aware of it, is, is like providing a list of, of these, you know genders that include future genders, and, and then like literally right after that saying, what does that mean in your colony?

And, and that was something that came out of I started redesigning the game. I um, hired Jabari Weathers to do some consultation with me on how to kind of fix some of the trickier stuff. Not mechanical stuff, just more fictional positioning. But yeah, that came out of conversations with Jabari of, of just saying like, great, so here's your very evocative list of items. Now, now think about what that actually means before we start.

Sam: Yeah. Pick lists as conversation starter is, is what all these pick lists should be really.

Ash: Yeah, for sure.

Sam: Or what all the best ones are anyway.

Ash: Yeah. And it's honestly, like I think it's really interesting, you know, reading through different PBTA games and like seeing their approach to... Because even within you know, like that, like more standard of, I'm just describing like appearance and personality, like designers have like really different approaches to like what they think defines someone's look or what they think defines someone's personality. So it's, it's always like reading through new PBTA games, you know, and even loosely based on PBTA, like I always find really like instructive.

Oh, oh, I can't, okay. I can't, I can't, I can't finish without, without mentioning this.

So I recently I backed Under Hollow Hills, which is Meg and Vincent Baker's PBTA game about a fairy circus. You're in a fairy circus and it spends some time in the human realm and some time in the fairy realm and like, oh God, but one of the things that's like so cool is you know, it's, it's a game about like the changing of the seasons. And you're a fairy character, like how you physically look to the world changes as the seasons change.

So you, yeah, so you have like, you have like a summer list and a winter list, and then like when it, you know, when it starts, it'll be like, okay so you have features associated with this season. So you'll say, here are my features that are summer features and here are my features that are winter features.

And then like each session, like one of them will shift in one direction. So like, ah, I love it so much because it's, it's, it broke me a bit like the idea of having like paired lists and that you're like always shifting in one direction or another. But like, it was so good.

Sam: Well, it, it plants such a strong flag that the game is about time and cool fairy shit, and like duality that there you have sort of like a, a, you know, this duality of personhood inside of you in this interesting way.

Ash: Yeah, for sure.

Sam: Well Ash, thanks for being here.

Ash: Thanks for having me.

Sam: Thanks to Ash for being here. So, such a joy to have them. You can find all their work at peachpantspress.com, especially Queer Sir, a letter writing romance game that I loved playtesting. There Is Only One Bed. Also new. Check it out.

And that is the first season of Dice Exploder.

Thanks again to you for listening and everyone else who made it possible. The people on the Blades in the Dark Discord especially. I'll be back soon with another eight episode season. Until then, you can find me @sdunnewold on fucking Bluesky, I guess. dice.camp, Twitter, and itch.io. And of course at diceexploder.substack.com.

Our logo was designed by SPO Gory, and our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Gray. Dice exploder is a production of the Fiction First Network, an actual play and podcast production co-op based outta the Blades in the Dark Discord. Come on by and join us.

We'd love to see you there. See you in a few months.

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Dice Exploder
Dice Exploder
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.