This week’s cohost is Ray Chou, who brings Rolling The Dice from John Harper’s iconic one page RPG Lasers & Feelings.
Topics discussed include:
Minimalism
Underlining genre through mechanics
Episodic vs serialized stories
When you should roll dice
Randomness and fate in real life
Beer & pretzels gaming
Games mentioned:
Sam’s designer commentary on his own Lasers & Feelings hack, Couriers, can be found here.
You can find Ray's publishing company at myth.works.
You can find Sam @sdunnewold on Twitter, dice.camp, and itch.io.
The Dice Exploder logo is by sporgory, and the theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey.
Transcript
Sam: Hello and welcome to another episode of Dice Exploder! Each week we take a tabletop RPG mechanic and break it down as far as it can possible go. My name is Sam Dunnewold, my pronouns are he/him, and my co-host today is Ray Chou.
Ray is best known as the co-founder of Mythworks, a comics and games publisher, formerly Mythopoeia which they rebranded because, as Ray explained to me, no one can say Mythopoeia. It’s the publishing company behind The Wildsea and CBR-PNK and soon the second printing of Slugblaster - a power-trio of forged in the dark adjacent games.
But I knew Ray first as a guy at a Los Angeles indie games meetup and from hanging around the Blades in the Dark discord. He’s a designer, not just a publisher - he’s got this lovely one shot time travel romp of a game called Time Force he co-designed with his Mythworks partner Vincenzo Ferriero. I’ve always loved talking and playing with him.
On this episode, Ray brings us “Rolling The Dice,” the core mechanic from John Harper’s Lasers & Feelings, a game that’s pretty self-evidently a Star Trek pastiche. It’s probably the most iconic one-page RPG (besides maybe Honey Heist, which we also get into).
This is a conversation that goes, uhhh, deep. We start by breaking down the elegance of this mechanic’s simplicity, but we end up talking about genre and fate and free will... and whether you need mechanics to play RPGs at all. And that’s why I wanted to start this whole Dice Exploder project with this episode, because just how far afield we get here is exactly what I this show to be about: how a pretty simple mechanic can echo out in ridiculously wide ways.
So let’s get into it. Here is Ray Chou with “Rolling The Dice."
Sam: Ray Chou. Hey.
Ray: Hey everyone.
Sam: What have you got for us today?
Ray: Today I am bringing in the core resolution mechanics from John Harper's Lasers and Feelings, his famous one page hack and. It reads as follows, rolling the dice when you do something risky, roll 1d6 to find out how it goes.
Roll plus one dice if you're prepared and plus one dice. If you're an expert, the GM tells you how many dice to roll based on your character and the situation.
Roll your dice and compare each die result to your number.
Sam: Do we wanna pause here and talk about your number in this game?
Ray: Absolutely.
Sam: Because in the character creation for lasers and feelings, basically your entire character creation process is you pick a number between two and five, can you do one and six? That feels like could be excessive. And that's your character's number.
Rya: So the important thing to note is that, well, we'll, we'll, we'll get back to the text and hopefully it'll make sense. Uh, do you only read the second part of the text Sam?
Sam: Yeah. Great. All right. So. You've got all these dice in your hand.
If you're using lasers, science and reason, whatever, you want to roll under your number. If you're using feelings, rapport, passion, you want to roll over your number.
So just to clarify, your number is if you have a low number, then you're good at feeling stuff. And if you have a high number, then you're good at laser stuff. And whichever one you're not good at, you are good at the other one. So either you're a feelings person or you're a lasers person. And like as you become better at lasers, you become worse at feelings.
Ray: Right, and that's really the core mechanic that I wanted to explore. Basically, Lasers and Feelings, for those who are unfamiliar, it's a Star Trek hack with the serial numbers filed off.
It primarily models the original series, Star Trek, the seventies version with Captain Kirk, that type of idea. So Lasers and Feelings. But the core resolution mechanic has two stats, lasers and feelings, and they are opposite of each other. So if you good at one, you're bad at the other. And that's determined by that number we were mentioning earlier.
Sam: Yeah. All right. So, uh, you wanna take up the next section, the actual results.
Ray: Sure. If none of your dies succeed, it goes wrong. The GM says how things get worse somehow. If one dies, succeeds, you barely manage it. The GM inflicts a complication, harm or cost. If two dies, succeed, you do it well, good job. If three dies succeed, you get a critical success. The GM tells you some extra effect you get. If you roll your number exactly, you have laser feelings, you get these special insight.
Sam: Pew, pew, pew!
Ray: Pew, pew pew! You get to ask the GM a question and they'll answer you. Honestly. Some good questions include, what are they feeling? Who's behind this? How could I get to them? What should I be on the lookout for? What's the best way to blank and what's really going on here?
So that's kind of a riff off of a PBTA type of mechanic where it kind of defines the questions that you should ask, which is pretty cool. And then of course, a roll of laser feelings counts as a success, and that is the entire mechanic.
Sam: So you, you got into this a little bit, but like, talk about why you wanted to bring this in.
Ray: Yeah. I think that lasers and feelings is a game that every aspiring RPG desire should play as well as hack at least once, and I think that a core part of that is the resolution mechanic. My main thing with Lasers and Feelings is that it distills the essence of what an RPG does so beautifully, minimalistically, elegantly, and I'm just saying synonyms now, but it's, it's an awesome, awesome system that teaches you so much about what an RPG is and what what it can be and what you need versus what you don't need, which I think is a very, very important lesson for everyone playing RPGs and designing RPGs.
Sam: Yeah. We're gonna come back on this show a lot of times, I think, to how much I frigging love minimalism and like, this is just an absolute triumph of it. Like you pack in. So like the idea of a character having a single number that is, you know, it's, it's a sliding scale is what it is. It's like, where are you on the spectrum, from black to white or from lasers to feelings or like whatever your game is about.
First of all, it like defines so much about your character, where you put yourself on that slider and it defines the entire genre of the game in a single slider. Like it's so efficient, it does so much, and then all you're doing is a single number. It is just all in a single character. Like it's incredible.
Ray: Yeah. So many thoughts from this. Um, number one, like the idea of minimalism is a very interesting one, I think with RPG specifically because, I've observed that as designers tend to get deeper down the rabbit hole, they begin to value minimalism a little bit more. Like they, they kind of become, they, they like minimalistic games.
They see the beauty and elegance of minimalistic games and a lot of people aspiring to design RPGs when they first start off, especially forging the dark desires. Certainly ones that hack d20 systems, they have the idea of the fantasy heartbreaker, right? Where they want to design this perfectly massive tome of a game that is gonna be their masterpiece right off the bat.
But it's really hard to design a large game, complicated game that is also elegant and wonderful and fits together really well. And I think that starting from the opposite end, from a smaller game, helps designers understand what's important about the game and what's not. And, yeah. I think I made this comment in one of the, one of the threads in the Forged in the Dark channel recently, where the more experience you get, the more you tend to as a desire want to go towards minimalism.
But that's kind of a double-edged sword too, because. Minimalistic games aren't necessarily the most popular games. I wish they were more popular. But yeah, people tend to latch onto more mechanics and think that more mechanics means more game when sometimes the opposite is true in, in a weird way.
Sam: Yeah. So, so yeah, that idea of like minimalism and design, especially RPG designs is fascinating to me. Yeah, first of all, I think there is a little bit of a movement right now, like a, just the vibes I've been getting around my corner of the design scene is people are kind of tired of long big ass frigging games and like are more thinking about how can they play smaller stuff.
Like I've seen a lot of people really latch onto the, like, six session campaign lately. And I hope we get to see more of that and I hope that brings us more games on the order of like Lasers & Feelings with bells and whistles as opposed to like full on forged in the dark hacks.
Another thing that you kind of covered here that I think is really compelling about Lasers & Feelings from a designer perspective is you, you really do see so many different knobs on this move of what can you change to make a different statement about your game. Right? You can change Lasers & Feelings like the labels and like-- by the end of this, I'm sure we will be sharing our favorite lasers and feelings hacks, right?
Ray: Yeah.
Sam: But you can also just change, like how do you get dice? Like if you're prepared and you're an expert right now, you get bonus dice, right?
But like, if you're making a game that doesn't care whether you're prepared or if you're an expert, if you wanna make a game that's about like family drama. So maybe, maybe you like get plus one die if you are trying to screw over a family member because the whole game is about that. Like, that's just such an easy change and it like makes the whole game about that thing.
Now, in the same way that changing lasers to whatever the heck else, you're gonna change lasers to. I don't know why I can't think of a one of the thousand of Lasers & Feelings hacks off the top of my head right now, but like, just changing those words, it changes that genre in the same way. Right?
Ray: I think of it as like if, if you were to picture the mechanic of lasers and feelings, it's kind of like an elegant. I don't know. A seesaw system, right? Where depending on, yeah, what you put on one side, the other side kind of raises or lowers, and that's, that's generally the two words, right? The poetic layer, the lasers and feelings.
The best hacks, I think have some sort of relationship between those ideas. Lasers representing science, feelings, representing emotions, kind of opposite ends of the spectrum. Yeah. You alluded it to earlier, like black and white or, you know, perhaps like individualism versus duty, something like that.
Sam: Yeah. But, uh, just to give my, my favorite, one of these hacks is Cows and Boys, which first of all is a hilarious joke of a title. But second of all, like, you just immediately know you're playing Brokeback Mountain and you know that cows stuff is the same as lasers, it's doing cowboy shit and boys stuff is feelings. It's like interacting with the boys, it's talking to people. It's having crushes.
And like the best of these games I think do exactly what you're saying of like having a relationship between the two stats and having that relationship be so clear that the two stats are the name of the game and that tells you everything you need to know about the game.
Ray: Yep, yep. That, that certainly, um, is my experience as well with these type of hacks. And to your point earlier, how you add on the different weights to the seesaw, that's almost like your dice pool, right? So in this case, it's pretty straightforward. It's like, okay, you know, if you're, you get one base and if you have an advantage or a great advantage, then boom, you get extra dice to it for a maximum of three.
But you can certainly tweak that into more thematic elements like in your family betrayal game as an example. So how to build a dice pool, that's something you could certainly tweak. And certainly the actual big poetic names of what the two big stats are will definitely affect what type of game you're playing that can seesawing.
Sam: Also brings us to what I think of as the game's only obvious problem, which was how do you differentiate characters that have the same number when you're sitting down at a table to play. If you're playing a GM and four people, then everyone can have a different number. You know, you have 2, 3, 4, and five.
Those are the four numbers that you can have. Maybe everyone has a different one, but like, How do you differentiate the person who picked four from the person who picked five? And there's ways to do it, obviously, right? And in some ways the game is nice because it sort of invites you to think about that distinction.
But also I... It's not giving you a lot of handholds for like where to take that. Maybe that's a problem. Maybe that's not, it's just something I always notice when I do sit down with a Lasers & Feelings hack.
Ray: Yeah. But I think that strikes to a thing in RPGs as a whole, where you don't necessarily want characters that are too similar.
If you're playing D&D, you don't want two Bard like characters who just want to talk through it because it'll be hard to share the spotlight with them. You don't want in-- sometimes in Blades or I find in Blades, you don't want to necessarily take the same action points, right?
Because you don't want to like, you know, step on another person's toes. And even with the minimum system, Like Lasers & Feelings. What I would suggest is the character creation, right? Where you choose a different style, alien, android, dangerous, heroic, et cetera, and choose a role for your character. Those two things you would probably need to scaffold a lot onto those two aspects to try and differentiate the characters.
Sam: Yeah. And I don't even know that it's always like a problem straight up. Like it can be fun to play the D&D game where everyone's a bard because like that brings a certain character to the game.
Or if you are playing Lasers & Feelings and you're all just like weird lasers people, then suddenly your campaign like takes on this... it becomes about how you're all bad at interacting with people. And maybe we're gonna lean into that, but I think you have to do that intentionally. Like the default feels like what you are saying, we want some differentiation. We want to make sure it's obvious how every character is going to shine in their own way and we're not gonna just have a gaggle of people that are roughly indistinguishable from each other, cuz that's not what stories are about.
Ray: Yeah, definitely agree.
Sam: The other thing that I immediately noted when I was rereading this game, preparing for this episode, I'd forgotten that you actually roll more than one die. I just did a hack of this actually, where you just have a number and you only roll one die ever, and realizing that you roll more than one dice it made me realize how good characters are at just doing stuff in this game.
Like even if you are trying to roll, you know, over five, if that's your number. Like if you get two or three dice and like, that's not hard to do when you start with one. And you can be prepared, and this isn't included in rolling in the the dice, but you can get another die if someone helps you. Three dice trying to roll a five or higher, like you're more than 50% to do that.
And that's if your number is the worst possible number for the job. I think it makes a lot of sense that like characters are good at stuff in this particular genre and especially, you know, like I'd also forgotten the part where one die is a partial success basically. And so, you know, you're, you're doing that classic PBTA kind of thing of like constantly hitting that partial success by rolling one success, but still like characters are competent in this game.
Ray: Right. And I think that's a very important thing to think about when you're designing games. Certainly forged in the dark games. There's always a lot of discussion in the hack channels about, you know, what, what the action rolls are and what you can rename them to.
But I think from a meta perspective, it's the idea of, okay, well, do you want your players to be rolling mostly 2-3 dice, 3-4 dice, or you know, 4-5 dice, or 5-6 dice, because each one of those zones has a very, very different feeling in terms of how competent your characters are.
And certainly Lasers & Feelings, it's not exactly a one-to-one match because it's a slightly different resolution mechanic where it's, you know, multiple successes rather than you do it with a complication on a four five. But it is important to think about what the genre what the tone of your game is and find a dice pool system and a resolution system that kind of matches.
And, you know, I'm not a very mathematically oriented person, so for me it's more of like a mouth feel or a roll feel kind of, kind of feeling, right? Like, all right. Yeah, that's, so I kind of just simplify or abstract it into like one, two, dice. Three, four. Five, six. zdo on and so forth. But I'm sure if you look at the numbers, you know, you can map it out into like a curve or whatever the case may be and see that as well.
Sam: Yeah.
Ray: Yeah. I wanted to talk a little bit about the lineage of this game because I think when I discussed this with you, Sam, very briefly on the Discord, I mentioned Lasers & Feelings and I also mentioned Honey Heist and you kind of brought up, you're like, oh, I didn't know Honey Heist was a hack of it.
So I actually kind of looked into it and what I found was that Lasers & Feelings and Honey Heist descend from the same lineage of game, which is 3:16 Carnage Amongst the Stars by the UK designer, Gregor Hudson. And that was released in 2008, I believe. So in that game, all skills were defined as fighting action or non fighting action.
And the game, I've never played it, but from what I've read, is it's basically a space marines versus bug aliens game. But it is certainly one that was influential in that both John Harper mentions it in a couple of his interviews as a big influence and grant, how it attributes it directly as well. So as far as I know in, in my amateur RPG historian knowledge, that was the first time where this kind of B camera resolution mechanic -- I like to call it B camera cuz it sounds cool. So basically like the 2 2 2 staff pool system.
Sam: Gotta make it sound like you wanna to a liberal arts college, you know?
Ray: That's right. That's right. No, I watched Westworld one time and you know the bi-cameral man, that's stole it from there. I think it is interesting.
Sam: So Honey Heist is a game in which you are trying to steal honey from Honey Con 2016 or whenever the game came out. And also you're a goddamn bear is part of the text of the game, and your stats in that game are bear and criminal, which clearly this is a very iconic and famous game. I think bear and criminal do a good job of inventing a genre of their very own in two stats.
But that game, you don't have a single number in the same way, like you're criminal and your bear stats are distinct from each other, and often you are told to subtract one from bear and add it to criminal under certain circumstances or the other way around. And so they kind of have this push pull in the same way, but they are technically different numbers and I think that it still feels like a very minimal mechanic.
But it also feels really different to not have them sort of both entwined in that same number at the core of your character in the way that Lasers & Feelings does.
Ray: Yeah, definitely. And in that system, Honey Heist, when you reach six in one stat, you. Have a endgame scenario. Where you're, you're taken off the board basically, so you become fully feral as a bear or you betray one of your, uh, allies as a criminal, which kind of alludes to Rowan Rook and Deckard, the other stuff that they do in their systems where they very much have like endgame scenarios built into their character progression.
Sam: We'll have to get someone to bring on the mechanic in Heart where you just like, bring a train through the scene to like run over one of your enemies and then, right.
You like, get on the train and go away, or, What, I can't remember how it works, but they, they, they certainly have some big end game moves. Honey Heist is also a nice demonstration with just little things like that and the idea of changing your number of kind of other places you can go with a mechanic this small, even though this feels so minimal. Again, there's just a lot of knobs on it, a surprising number of knobs on it that you can turn one way or another, add to. Especially when your game is so small to begin with, right? Like, of course each knob makes a huge difference.
Ray: So in thinking about this, I was kind of thinking of other like, craft forms and, and what the equivalent would be. I thought about like sculpting right sculptures and how you can have like one single elegant mobious script sculpture, right? Versus like making something that's likea huge samurai suit with a a million different parts and that, that kind of is like a good analogy for complicated RPGs versus simple ones.
It's like there's one shape. All of the things kind of intertwine together and they all interact with each other in interesting ways, whereas a complicated one, that may be the case, but each individual piece is a little bit separate.
Or in cooking is the other example that I was thinking of. If you're making like a, a very delicious, simple, elegant Italian dish with only five ingredients. Everything is going to matter, like how well prepared every ingredient is, how fresh every ingredient is going to be noticed in the dish as a whole. And that's certainly one way to do it. And another way is by making a dish with 40 components. And each one, you know, has its own thing.
Sam: You're making that Guy Fierri trashcan nachos version of the game instead, right?
Ray: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. But when you have just five ingredients, when you just have a, a couple of mechanics like lasers and feelings does, um, besides the core resolution mechanic, there's basically just a, uh, a bunch of D six tables and man, I wanna come back on the show and talk about those, those tables too sometime.
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Yeah. But that's pretty much the entire game, right? And everything has to work every. Bit is important in a small game because you have so much less to work with. So all of it has to fit together really, really well. Yeah, there's something really interesting to, like I've heard of people running lasers and feelings campaigns too, like this is not something I've done myself, but like I can imagine doing with a similarly sized game of you just don't need that much infrastructure to run a long-term campaign.
I know people really like. Advancement and light complication. You know, there's something satisfying about, you know, the experience of playing Blades in the Dark and gaining system mastery. Sort of like understanding how to use all of the tools in that game to help tell your story. But like fundamentally, all you need to tell a good story is like good characters and like in an RPG setting, like, A, a way to inject some randomness, or not even that in a game.
Just some ways to help structure your story, move forward, and lasers and feelings like this. Core resolution mechanic just has it all. It has like a way to define your character in the number. It has a way to resolve. Risky situations and move the fiction forward in that way. And like elsewhere in the game, it has, like you were saying, just like a few little tables that can like, set you off on adventures and that's just all you need for a game.
Yeah. Um, and this is a bit of a tangent, but what I found for longer term campaigns is what, what kind of manners, at least in, in the games I run, is I, I. Have a tendency to, to jump the shark when it comes to like a campaign or a game in the sense that once you've achieved really large beats, if the genre doesn't support more than that, happening a couple of times, then you're, you're kind of running out of track, right?
Yeah. So for lasers and feelings, It's good because it already has this kind of campy campaign where you're, you're going against space aliens and cosmic beings, so you, you can theoretically keep on doing that, right? Yeah. I mean, it's based on network television, right? That episodic, like what's the cool space adventure of the week kind of thing, and like got what, 50 seasons of Star Trek, a hundred seasons of Star Trek off of just like, What's the weird space thing that happens next week?
Of course, you can go forever, right? So that's a genre that, that supports it. The rules are the rules, right? And sometimes they have rules where, you know, they support campaign play or progression, but that's really just sort of a, a track type of thing to make sure that you're not mm-hmm. Jumping the shark too much.
Right? Like for Blades in the Dark, if you go and try and kill the emperor at your first mission, you're probably gonna die because the mechanics, uh, Enforce that. But if you were to do that, you probably don't have much place to go in the rest of the campaign if your GM allows for that. Yeah, and that's sort of where campaigns run outta steam, is that they don't necessarily have the push pull of like the story beats, cuz you gotta like fail a little bit to succeed.
Right. And kind of. That idea. Um, but anyway, that's, that's totally neither here nor there. Yeah. Yeah. I wanna come back to another sort of detail of this mechanic, and that's the very first sentence fragment of when you do something risky. Cause I think in a lot of, especially small games like these minimalistic games where, you know, you only have one page or you're, you're trying to keep it short so you don't have a ton of space to extrapolate, unlike.
When you should pick up the dice, you're not gonna write that advice in your book. Or maybe you're just new to the RPG scene at large and don't quite have that instinct worked out yet of like when you should roll dice or when the GM should call for dice to be rolled. And I think when you do something risky is a fine sort of trigger.
It's certainly very efficient for describing when you should roll dice, but I have found that like. It's not actually good enough for me. Like sometimes you want the risky thing to just succeed, and sometimes you want the risky thing to just fail, and sometimes you want a role even when it's not risky because there is something else going on here that, like failure would be interesting even if it's not risky.
And I, I just think that like when you do something risky is, A little bit vague enough that it sort of lets the playgroup decide when to roll dice and then it, it's kind of relying on this like culture of play and like oral tradition almost within the RPG scene of like when you pick up the dice in a way that like works.
But like I wish, I wish there was something better there. Like I just wish I could describe intuitively in my own heart of hearts to someone else when they're supposed to freaking pick up the dust. Totally. It's, it's such a tricky thing and I think there is no one consensus as to when you are or you aren't supposed to.
Um, It, my short kind of vague, non-helpful answer is, well, it depends, basically. Yeah. Yeah. It depends, right? Um, sometimes I like to, to roll when the stinks aren't so high or maybe the game just needs it, right? Maybe things are stalling a little bit, or it's like, well, let's inject some randomness into this situation and see what happens, happens from here.
And I think a lot of it depends on the genre that you're playing, right? Yeah. Like, The, the, the table culture that, that you mentioned for laser in feelings, for instance, it's leans towards a more goofy game. So I would expect there to be some goofy roles. Yeah. Uh, for players, right? They wanna do some goofy things and they wanna see if that happens or not.
And I think a lot of it also depends on what the consequences of said game could be. Now for lasers and feelings, there's not a lot of guidance on that aspect of it. But for a game like Blades in the Dark, there are a lot of aspects where, There's a whole big GM guy, but there's also mechanics like resistance.
Yeah. Which completely change how hard the GM can punch. And in that game explicitly, you're supposed to try and kill your players, right? Or you're supposed to kill your players every once in a while. Yeah. Like if they, if they do things and you're supposed to let them resist that as, as a means of tugging on those mechanics.
So it is, it is a really tricky thing, and I don't know if there's one. Universal guide that can be written by saying like, okay, this is when you roll dice versus this is when you don't. Cuz I, I think it will depend a lot on the table that you're playing with and, and what they want to do, right? Like, yeah, it, it's based off of what you find interesting.
Like if my player wants to arm wrestle the. Big guy, Burley guy in the brawl and see if he, he wins that. Right. And like, it's not really up to me as a gm. Like I can't really decide, well that's not interesting, and just say you succeed because the player, by asking if they can roll is indicating that they would find that interesting.
So there's, there's kind of like a give and take going on at the table as well. Yeah. I think sometimes when you pick up the dice, you like, Go back and you're just rolling for something trivial, that doesn't matter, right? You're rolling for like, can I walk down the stairs after I got up in the morning and like, That's not particularly interesting and I think an easy trap for new players to fall into.
You know, no one's gonna roll for like walking down the stairs. I think most people understand that's not the thing, but like stuff that just doesn't really matter to the story. Like you can get bogged down in. But also, I think on the, the flip side of that, sometimes you end up in these moments where like, you know, you should be rolling.
But you don't know what the stakes should be like. I know the stakes aren't actually that interesting. If like the bad guy wins in this situation, no one wants the bad guy to win. Like I'm definitely gonna defeat the bad guy. So like what happens on a failure? I. And I, I think that there are a lot of interesting tricks for that kind of role.
Like you can do, like, oh, the thing that's at stake is like, what does it cost me? Like, you know, am I going to go down with the bad guy or is the bad guy going to like, take down my friend with him? Or like, whatever the deal is or, or is like the thing that's at stake here, not like the actual fight that we're having that he's definitely gonna lose, but it's like, can he like, Get the little information out of me.
That was his real plan the whole time. And like that's the actual thing that we're rolling about. And there's, there's moments like those that are really hard to sort of pull out of the ether and like identify that. That's really the interesting stakes here. That again, like you were saying, there's no.
Concise way to like teach people that kind of thing. I think, especially when it's hard to identify those moments in the heat of play. But I long for a way to convey all of that in when you do something risky and you just can't. And that's, that's always disappointing to me in basically every resolution system.
Yeah. So many thoughts here. Uh, I, I mean, part of it I think is that, For people who are so into RPGs where we think about them and we write them and like, it's, it's a major part of our lives in terms of how much time we spend like a, a big hobby. I, I've always thought that I. We kind of are chasing the dragon a little bit, right?
Yeah. Like, we're always looking for that perfect game. Like that, that experience at like, that just blows all other RPGs away, whether it's at the perfect system or you know, the perfect one shot, the perfect table, and it's just such a fleeting thing, right? And like, you know, play a bunch of games and like, you know, they're, they're great and you have a good time, but like maybe one in every 10 games is like, oh man, that, that just hits the spot.
Right? And I think, uh, we're always. Trying to look for that. And I feel like, uh, when you describe the consequence aspect of it, it kind of touches upon that. And I think one way of looking at the resolution mechanic or when to roll is. Thinking when? When do I want to disclaim fate? When do I want the gods, the universe?
Yeah. The dice to, to decide. Because there are a lot of games that have no resolution. Mechanic. No. No element of chance. But I think Chance is fundamentally kind of interesting because our lives are based off of chance, right? We don't know what's going to happen. Today or tomorrow. But we know, kind of fundamentally, scientifically, that maybe time is just a different dimension.
Right. And maybe if you are like a higher level being or, or whatever the case may be, like, we would see our lives written out as, as like a different dimension as we're the arrivals. Yeah. Right. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. So, um, so that gives us the idea of free will and, and that interplay of like, Free will and fate.
I, I like think about a lot when playing RPGs cuz it's like, yeah, you can do things and you can always just make it up and if you make it up, it's almost like you're leading into the fate aspect of it. Right? Like where the dms like, well I can just decide what happens. Yeah. Or I can just say what happens?
But that's not fun. That's not interesting. Sometimes you wanna roll some dice and see what kind of shenanigans you can get into. Right. And it's almost like that idea of. Giving up the free will by, by saying, I'm, I'm gonna let chance decide. That is the idea of free will in like a apotheosis kind of like strange way, right?
Like Well, it makes you feel like you have some control over fate when you get to decide when fate comes in. Right? Right. The other piece of it, I think, on the flip side is, Calling for a dice roll and deciding, oh, this is risky. Like now it's time to roll. Dice is a really easy way to sort of keep this story going when everyone's out of ideas.
Yes, yes. So, so much. Yes. Right? Like when, when you're going in and you're, you're jazzing a little bit and you're, you know, 30, 40 minutes in and you're like, you know, shooting the shit at the tavern or whatever, and it's like, well, I mean like, let's, let's roll some dice at a certain point, right? Let's, someone throws a beer bug at your head out a freaking no dude rolled the Dodge.
Let's fucking do this. Right. Exactly like that. That certainly is, is a huge aspect of it cuz like, especially with these fiction first. Type of systems, that's what it's for, right? Like the, the, the resolution mechanic isn't to determine whether you lose health points or whatever the case may be, or succeed or fail.
It's really to help push the story forward, right? Yeah. So you're kind of just deferring to it to be like, Hey, prompt me with something. Cause you do it. The consequence at the end of the day is just a, a story prompt, right? It's a, how do I move this word? Yeah. I wanna go back to something you were saying also in there about like, How we as hardcore tabletop people, like, if you're hardcore enough to be listening to this podcast right now, like God bless you, you know?
Um, we are chasing the dragon of that like perfect moment and that perfect resolution system, the perfect way to convey that long screed I had in there about trying to communicate to people when they should roll dice, and like also if you're just like, Four people sitting down. None. None of you have ever played RPGs before for game night.
And you like pull this out. Probably you'll like kick it around and be like, that was weird. But we had some fun. And there was that fun moment where I rolled some dice to see if I fell down the stairs and then I fell down the stairs and the aliens were right there and like that's how the game went. And there's nothing wrong with that either.
That's. I, I think, I think we overthink it. I just wanted to call out that part, uh, of the thing you were highlighted. Oh, a hundred percent. I mean, like, I think playing with RPG designers and people who are enthusiasts, it's, it's such a different experience from your home group. Yeah. And, uh, when, when you're with your home group, they're your, your longtime friends, you have this rapport built up from.
Bunch of hours spent together playing this game or just outside, and there's this comfort level that, that you can get. Right. So that's, that's why when I got into designing RPGs, it was really weird because my friends decided they wanted to play d and d. Right. And they asked me to run d and d and me being, you know, snobby Yeah.
In D and I was like, all right. Like fine. Um, but it was the best time ever, right? Yeah, it was, it was like such a beer and pretzels game and it was just hilarious and fun. And, That always struck me as, as like, wow, like, you know, I'm, I'm so into the theory crafting of all of all of this stuff, but do the rules even matter, right?
Yeah. Like, does it, does any of what I'm talking about or thinking about really matter? And it's like sort of in the sense that the rules are trying to capture this imperfect experience, experience that you're replicating and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But it matters a lot, but it also matters a lot less than we sometimes overthink it to be.
Well, that brings us back to. How much I like minimalism. You just don't need more rules than this in that kind of situation because the framework of the game that you're playing is really 10 years of hanging out and shooting the shit. And if you have a game that is as simple as lasers and feelings, The game is gonna stay out of the way of that dynamic that you already really like and you're already really getting a lot out of.
It's gonna do just enough to allow you to bring that dynamic into the fictional world of Star Trek or Broback Mountain, or like whatever the heck game you're playing tonight, but still give you the joy of just hanging out with your friends. Yep. That tracks with my experience too. I, I, I've had some of the most fun I've ever had playing lasers and feelings in honey highs where the entire group is just hurting because they're laughing so much.
Yeah. And that's, that's the type of game that. These little minimalist games can foster it, you know, given the, the genre and whatever they're trying to, trying to do. Yeah. All right. Well, on that note, you got anything else for us? Just, uh, I'm so happy that you're starting this series, Sam, I'm honored to be the, the pilot, the pilot guest here.
Thanks, Ray. Yeah, thank you man. Thanks so much to Ray for joining me. I mentioned in there that I've got my own lasers and feelings hack, a Blade Runner inspired game called Couriers that I think plays with everything we talked about in some. Pretty interesting ways and I've got a director's commentary blog post for couriers up@diceexploderdot.com that you can check out.
If you're interested, you can find everything Ray does@www.myth.works. Short and sweet site name Cyberpunk. Augmented is being fulfilled now and the second printing of Slug Blaster is coming this fall. Keep an eye out, as for myself as always. You can find me at S ALD on Twitter dice.camp Mastodon and itch io.
Our thumbnail is designed by a Spoor Gori. Our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Gray and 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 and thanks as see you for listening.
See you next time.
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