This week I’m joined by Jason Morningstar of Bully Pulpit Games, known for Fiasco, Night Witches, and many other excellent games.
Jason brought on transparency, a concept originating in the Nordic larp community, which describes the separation of player knowledge from character knowledge (similar to dramatic irony. We go through a whole library of example games in this one as we talk through genre, safety tools, playing to lose, and the deployment of secrets. Jason’s enthusiasm for this topic is infectious - there’s so much to think about here! If you’re listening and a designer, I’m pumped to hear what shenanigans you find to get up to with transparency in your own games.
Further reading:
The Golden Cobra Challenge, live now!
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Jason on Bluesky and dice.camp.
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Transcript:
Sam: Hello and welcome to another episode of Dice Exploder. Each week, we take a tabletop RPG mechanic and squint real hard until it comes into focus. My name is Sam Dunnewold, and you can still go and follow the Dice Exploder Season 3 Kickstarter launch page right now to get notified when that thing goes live in October.
I've got a rockstar lineup set for Season 3. Alex Roberts of Star Crossed, Mikey Hamm of Slugblaster, Strega Wolf of Lichoma. Don't miss it.
But this week, my co host is Jason Morningstar. Lead designer at Bully Pulpit Games, has been out here making weird and provocative little games for, like, decades. He's probably most famous as the designer of Fiasco, the game that tells a story like a Coen Brothers movie in about as much time as it takes to watch one, and which was my gateway into RPGs other than Dungeons Dragons. And Jason's well known for Night Witches and many other [00:01:00] games based in real history.
But like, have you heard of The Skeletons? A game in which you play the skeletal guardians of a dungeon and the primary mechanic is sitting silent in the dark for long stretches of time to simulate the passage of millennia? Have you checked out all the fascinating stuff Bully Pulpit Games puts out on their Patreon every month? Jason is a workhorse. He's super talented. He helps run the Golden Cobra Challenge, a wonderful game jam for LARPs that's going on right now. And he's also just incredibly kind and lovely to play with.
Today, Jason was excited to talk about Transparency, a concept originating in the Nordic LARP community which describes the separation of player knowledge from character knowledge. It's similar to dramatic irony, though we get into some other ways it can function too. Jason and I go through a whole library of example games in this one as we talk about genre, and safety tools, and playing to lose, and the deployment of secrets for maximum effect.
This is simultaneously such a specific concept and such a broad topic and Jason's enthusiasm for it is just infectious. There's so much to think about here.
With that, here is Jason Morningstar with Transparency.
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Jason, thank you so much for being here.
Jason: Thank you Sam, for inviting me. I'm excited to be here.
Sam: So what are we talking about today? What have you brought us?
Jason: Well I decided that the thing that I am most interested and that I wanna talk about is transparency.
Sam: Yeah, so what is transparency sort of at large? And then let's get into The Fool's Journey, the specific example you brought.
Jason: Yeah. So I think the easiest way to think about transparency in tabletop and live action game design is there's a slider and on one end there is opacity. There's secrecy, there's complete control of information. And on the other end, there is complete transparency and a full sort of sharing of information both on the player [00:03:00] level and the character level.
And in between there, there's all kind, it's a spectrum, right? So you can attenuate your game design to accommodate anything along that. And I think that things on the transparent end of that dial are really interesting and offer a lot of really fun opportunities for play that if you're controlling information you just can't get.
So I'm excited to talk about that.
Sam: Sweet. So yeah, I think we can definitely go for an example. So let's talk about The Fool's Journey. This is only a one page game, so you want to just like explain this game to me, like we are sitting down to play it
Jason: Absolutely. So The Fool's Journey is a game by Anna Antropy. And it's two player game. And the idea, the, of the framing of the game is that one of you is a fortune telling witch and the other one is a wretch who is seeking their services.
That's the setup. You're going to actually sort of tell the wretch's fortune if you're the witch, and you're going to ask them some important [00:04:00] questions if you are the wretch. And the cool thing about this game is that you sit down and lay out all the details in advance. So the first example is if you're the wretch, maybe you say "I'm gonna ask about my husband but I secretly, I suspect he's carrying on an affair with his night commander." And so you as players both know what the deal is, what the wretch is asking about, and what the wretch is really asking about. And of course, the characters don't know that. The witch doesn't get that information. As a character the witch does not know the, deeper ask. All the witch knows is they're gonna ask about the husband.
Sam: Yeah.
Jason: So what you have there is transparency on the player level where you have complete knowledge of what's about to happen. So in the game, the witch's cards are magic, but the witch themself is a charlatan. So the cards absolutely are going to find the truth. That's what they do. They're magic cards. That's what they do.
Sam: I love this detail that you play them face down. Sorry to interrupt, but I...
Jason: [00:05:00] oh yeah, yeah. So, so you're actually like, you lay these cards down on the table and you lay 'em down face down, and you never look at them in real life. the players never like reveal the
cards,
Sam: information is opaque.
Jason: That information is opaque. It's irrelevant really, because you're making it up, right?
So the witch has her magic deck of cards and she's like, oh, well I see you've uh, and you have the past, present, and future. So I see that in the past. you've selected the serpent. Oh, well, we all know what that means. You know, the serpent is about deception and I'm wondering if there's something in your past where there's been an incident of infidelity or whether your husband who you're asking about has ever been less than forthcoming with you, right?
And so the cards of course are, true because they're magic. But as a character, you don't know what you're saying. And the wretch who's asking the question is just getting this information revealed to them and getting their mind blown. So the witch interprets the past, the present in the future. The wretch [00:06:00] responds how they want to they can add details because they see the image too. So they could be like, well, yeah, but if you notice the serpent is inverted and that probably means that my husband is being truthful to me or whatever.
So you, you have this situation where you're co-creating in an environment where the characters and the players have very different levels of information. And I just love that. I think it's a really fun game.
Sam: Yeah. What do you call it in the moment here where like, for a split second, like the witch and the wretch actually have more information than the players because in a way, like the characters see the cards before the players do, right?
Jason: Oh yeah.
Sam: Does that have its own word or is that also transparency in a way? Or like what, how do you think about that?
Jason: I mean, the way that I think about it is really there are dials for the player and dials for the character. So those dials can go up and down from secrecy to openness for both parties involved. And I just love that I'm so interested in character agency. And that's a whole nother topic, but the idea that [00:07:00] our characters know more than we do, I think that's a really fruitful design space. And in this case it just happens for a minute, but there, I think you can push that in other games where they know more for longer.
Sam: Yeah. Okay. Well, let's, come back to transparency. You have so much excitement for transparency, and I want you to start unpacking it here. Right? Like, what is so exciting to you about transparency as an idea?
Jason: Okay. I think at its core, it's a wonderful tool for people who are lazy because. and rest assured, Sam, I am lazy. I want help. I want people to help me. I want to rely on the people that are around me, who invariably I trust and I love, right? They're smart. They're clever, they've got cool ideas. So why the hell do I want to hoard my information?
You know, if I can tell them, Hey man, my teenage protagonist is really anxious about asking this girl out. And I'm really concerned that my friends are gonna tell me all kinds of horror stories about the experience of asking [00:08:00] her out. So please, no matter what, I really, I don't want this guy to have to encounter any of those horror stories. know, I'm giving them the opportunity to do something awesome with my character, to enrich that character's life by absolutely telling those horror stories.
And so like, by not doing that, like I can have this intense maybe it's even a personally immersive internal conversation, but it doesn't impact anybody else. Nobody else gets to contribute. We're not co-creating any moment, and I just, I find that less interesting.
Sam: Yeah.
Jason: That's where I'm at.
And there are a lot of games where the opposite is, is the standard, right? Where there's a lot of secrecy, the flow of information is rigidly controlled, there's a imbalance in power and authority you know, at the table in a way that removes all that genius from the equation.
Sam: Yeah. So the way you just described it was almost like a piece of advice for [00:09:00] playing any game rather than like a, a thing about game design itself. Although, I don't know, maybe there's no line between those two things actually, but I'm curious to hear you talk more and maybe you can throw out, we've got a bunch of examples lined up here, but throw out some other examples of like how you see that being used on the sort of game designer level as opposed to the, okay, I'm at the table and I'm telling you kind of a target I want us to aim towards.
Jason: Sure. Yeah. I don't know. Can we talk about Fiasco, I
guess
Sam: let, let's talk about Fiasco.
Jason: So Fiasco is a game where if you look at it from the point of view of the transparency dial, or the openness dial, as players, we have a very clear picture of who these characters are and where they're going. But the characters themselves do not. And it's not as fun if they do.
So like, they're dumb. They're gonna get in trouble. They're making bad choices. They're probably not great people, some of them. And as players, we get to roll around in that, right? We get to just enjoy [00:10:00] their foolishness and the bad decisions they're making, and the game doesn't really work if that transparency extends to the, the characters. Like if they're trying their best, and believe me, I've played this game. If they're trying their best to win, if they're trying really hard to do well in the circumstances that they're in, the game's boring. It routes around that kind of behavior on a player level.
So like, if you're playing it competitively, you're definitely gonna win. You're gonna have a great outcome. Your character's going to be safe and secure, and you're gonna have a boring Fiasco game.
fiasco game.
Sam: Yeah, and, and hopefully we can wrap this up in 45 minutes so I can go play something else. Yeah,
Jason: Exactly right. And I've been there, I had a guy, actually a really well known game designer who said "now your game is broken and I can prove it to you." And I was like, well that, hello. It's nice to meet you too. And we played a game of Fiasco and me and the other two people at the table were having the greatest time and he was making optimal choices throughout the game. Which is just boring. It's just a [00:11:00] bad way to play.
And by doing that, his character did very well. You know, at the end of the game, his character was successful and never got hurt, never got into trouble. And the rest of us, you know, got our legs sawed off or you know, or stealing cars or doing the stuff that you do and a Fiasco game.
Sam: The stuff that makes it fun.
Jason: Yeah. And we just routed around him. Right? We just didn't engage with him. And we had fun. And then he was like, see, I told you. So I'm like, okay, you win. Congratulations.
Sam: I feel like you are really getting at there what I see as the most obvious big use of transparency which is to set a target for everyone. And like, you know, you can do that as you were saying, on the kind of player to player level, but like on the game level too. Even just like knowing that we are playing a horror game, like, or right, like sets up without any rules. Like suddenly the mood at the table shifts. We all know we are pushing in a different direction and like our characters aren't gonna know that they're about to walk into [00:12:00] this scary basement and die. But like we do know that and we have completely reframed
Jason: And you want to walk into that basement, right? like in real life, why would you do it? You wouldn't. But if you're playing a horror game, absolutely. that's the move. I think that's dramatic irony.
Sam: Yeah, totally. And like I, you, you put this example in here too, like Paranoia is another example I love here of the complete opposite. Like, we know we are aiming for slapstick. A different brand of it than we are with Fiasco, right? Like painting such a clear picture of this is the kind of story, the kind of like end game we are sitting at the table to shoot for.
Jason: Paranoia is an interesting example because it's a game that's all about secrecy as well. There are secret societies, there's opacity about what you're even doing or why the computer's asking you to do it. but that's, diegetic. It's just part of the fiction.
And as players you're like, haha, secrecy. Haha, you're a member of death leopard or whatever. But, [00:13:00] that is not information that you're taking seriously on the player level. You're not hoarding that information.
Sam: Yeah. Well, and secrecy feels like it is a big part of transparency, sort of the table's relationship to, I mean, it's literally the table's relationship to information in a lot of ways, right? But like secrets and when they come out and how they come out feel inexorably tied to transparency. Can you talk about like the revelation of secrets and like how best to use transparency to kind of set that up.
Jason: Sure. Well, first of all, like a dungeon is a secret, right? It's the unknown and that's super fun. so my enthusiasm for like radical transparency doesn't necessarily map to every possible game, or it doesn't work in every mode. I think there's a really fun there dungeon crawling game around the dungeon that we, we know what to expect, where the map is on the table and we know where the owlbear is. You can still play that game, and I think it's [00:14:00] Different and interesting.
But the standard model where there's a GM who retains all the information and you discover it through hard effort and pain works and has worked for 40 years for a reason, right? Because that's fun. So I'm not necessarily in opposition to that, you just need to tune it for the game and recognize that it's a tool that you can actually use.
I think that it's easy to fall into the deeply worn rut of a model of credibility where there's a game master who hoards information and players who try to discover it. And that can be fun, but it's not the only way to go.
So, you know, I just, I think I want people to question why they're controlling information the way they are. And I want the default to be we're all smart people. We know how to play, pretend, let's get it out there so that we can work with it. All this information should be available to us as toys on the table to make each other have a delightful experience.
And, if there [00:15:00] are places where you wanna pull that back, then very consciously pull it back and restrict that. They're really fun and excellent reasons to restrict that either on the player level or the character level. And I, you know, we can talk about that, but
Sam: let's talk about it now. Go for it.
Jason: Alright. So I have a LRP called Welcome Guests. it's l for about six people and two or three hours. So it's a, you know, it's a fairly intimate small game. And the idea behind Welcome Guests is that in a six player games. Four of the people are a, family of cannibals. They kill and eat people. That's just what they've always done. It's what grandpa did. It's what we do. It's what our kids are probably gonna do. So that's the setup for the family.
And then the other two players are people that are showing up for dinner. And by for dinner, I mean that by the end of the night, they're probably gonna be killed and eaten. And everybody knows this. That's the setup for the game. And when you come to play Welcome Guests, you absolutely know that it's completely transparent. If you play a [00:16:00] member of the family, completely transparent, the characters know exactly what's up.
If you play a guest, your character does not know it. They don't know it at all. And your, your entire job is to make the family uncomfortable, So as a, as a guest, you can be like, wow, this food is really delicious. What is this meat we're eating tonight? And just like pushing on what's happening or pushing on the characters who maybe are thinking about changing their lifestyle, because inevitably there are a couple who are like this is messed up.
Sam: Yeah, I can imagine coming in and really leaning into like, ah, my mother needs someone to care for her and she only has me, and like, it, wouldn't it be sad if something happened to me and and so forth.
Jason: Oh, absolutely, absolutely. And as a player you can really push that. And it's very fun because of dramatic irony, right? We all know what's happening, but the characters don't. Some of the characters don't. And that's a cool dynamic too, because there are people who have a lot of power and people who have no power.
And it's, it's a wonderful dynamic. And [00:17:00] it's super interesting because the family are given reasons not to kill these people. Right? It's not a cut and dry situation. It's not an assembly line to the slaughterhouse. or to the kitchen.
In the case of Welcome Guests. But that's an example of a game that, it's pulling it back because there is secrecy on a character level, but not on a player level. And even that is asymmetrical.
Sam: Yeah. Cool. So I wanted to ask you about how transparency kind of relates to like the social contract of the table, because I, put in our outline here this note about how I got this great advice from previous guest, Ash Kreider, of like if you have a secret and you want something to happen at the table, To do exactly the thing you, Jason, were describing earlier of like, boy, I sure hope my friends don't find out about my crush. Like, to really lay it out there so that people can respond to you.
And you responded in our outline with like, but this is a social contract issue. Like if the rest of the table doesn't [00:18:00] agree to your level of transparency than telling your secrets as being a dick. And I was, I was wondering if you could just expand on that a little bit.
Like the game design level of transparency is a good way of sort of setting those expectations around the social contract and secrets. But I was wondering if you could talk a little bit more about what you mean there.
Jason: Yeah. So I'm being a little contrary because Ash is very smart and is absolutely right. The conventional wisdom, this is particularly true in lrp where there's a whole genre of LARPs that are about having secrets and using your secrets to get what you want. And in those games, hoarding your secret is the most boring choice you can make.
You know, if you're given a secret, your objective typically should be to find a way to reveal it. And you want to do it in a, thoughtful and dramatically appropriate way, but like, get it out there. So that is very normal. And in a tabletop game, my dark and tortured Half-Elf who wants to get revenge on the evil wizard king really [00:19:00] needs to tell you that he's got the tragic backstory and wants to get revenge on the wizard king because you're not gonna be able to help me if, if I don't. Right. So that's the conventional wisdom.
But it's conceivable and there are lots of people who love to keep secrets to play games where information is compartmentalized, and if that's their jam and that's the way they want to play, telling them your thing is not helpful. Telling 'em your thing is playing wrong. And it's no fun, and as an added bonus, they're not gonna help you anyway. They're not gonna make your game better because that's not the game they're playing.
So that exists. It's a valid way to play. There are lots of people who do. If you find yourself in that situation, one, you need to assess whether you're at the right table. And two, you need to respect the social contract. That's all.
I think that's an unusual situation, I think by and large, most people, and certainly the people listening to this podcast, are going to welcome your your request, right? And that's really what it is. It's an, [00:20:00] it's an offer. you want to enrich the table and to be given a gift and they wanna give you gifts because that's fun too.
Sam: Yeah. Yeah. I feel like there's a spectrum between like playing werewolf where would be extremely impolite to just be like, I'm the werewolf, and reveal your werewolf card. Like, why would you do that? Like, you would just fundamentally break the game and the kind of default role playing we're talking about where doing that is, as we're saying, probably a cool thing to do.
I have this memory of playing in a, fourth edition Dungeons and Dragons game like 15 years ago and showing up to a session at one point and So a, you know, player like fell in a pit trap or something, and another player like grabbed their hand and the two of them looked at each other and were like, we should do it now.
And then revealed that like, oh, we actually had this secret background connection and in this moment we remember it. And like the rest of the table was like, oh, that's cool. Like, that's neat. And like it really didn't impact the larger story much. And it was this [00:21:00] nice little thing to happen on sort of small edge of the story.
But I feel like if you'd, done that to fundamentally change the direction of a campaign we would've gotten pretty mad, right?
Jason: absolutely. And also, you know, I would question the utility of keeping that a secret at all. Like, I wanna know that about your guys so that I can like hint at it, you know, or, or sort of poke you and let, you have these moments where you're like, no, I can't talk about that, because that's clearly what you want.
So yeah, that's a case where I would, I would err on the side of being discursive, you know, and sharing that, like, Hey guys, we've got this secret backstory, but it's a style
thing, right? And they weren't, they weren't wrong to do it their way, and that was a delightful surprise for the table. So that's cool too.
Sam: Yeah. Yeah, so I wanna talk about transparency as like safety tool too, because as we were talking about this to begin with and I was just thinking about transparency on my own, I feel like there's a ton of overlap between the conversation around transparency and like [00:22:00] game content to make the best story possible and transparency and just talking about like, what targets do we want to avoid? Like what content do we want to include and not include in the game at all? It feels just sort of like a natural overlap in a way that is really exciting to me. Like, it feels like a natural, easy way to bring content discussions into play.
Jason: I agree with that. I think that If you're acculturated to and are in a setting where there's a lot of trust and people feel comfortable with sort of a writer's room approach to talking about things, that it's very easy without necessarily proceduralizing it. So like I know that you can do a lines and veils discussion, or you can have a content checklist.
But it's also in that high trusts environment to say, well, you mentioned that there are spiderwebs around this cave. I don't want to see any spiders. I just don't. And in the moment the GM or whoever can be like, oh, cool, [00:23:00] well it's gonna be scorpions then, or whatever. And there is no net effect, no impact on play, other than the person who's phobic about spiders doesn't get freaked out.
Because they felt comfortable mentioning it and they didn't have to think about it in advance, which is, I think, important.
Sam: so you have Fat Man Down written here, which is a game I didn't research beyond knowing it is very controversial and probably bad. as an example of what not to do in this conversation. Can you tell me about it?
it
Jason: Yeah it
Yeah, sure. So Fat Man Down is a kind of a polemic. It'LARP LRP that was written as a design response to conversations that were happening in the Nordic LARP community about safety and calibration at the time. That's a very old game. It's not really a playable game But as a, you know, as a manifesto, it made some points that were relevant in a conversation a dozen years ago. So frame it that way, you know, understand that this is not something that anybody [00:24:00] is actually excited about doing.
The key thing in Fat Man Down is that there's going to be a player who is the focus of other people's ridicule and hostility, and they agree to that as part of the game.
And they're given a safety tool for when they've reached their limit of ridicule and hurtful discussion as a player. And then the game text explicitly says everyone is supposed to ignore that.
Sam: Oh wow.
Jason: Right. and so like you can see like as a, as a game designer and a conversation about safety and calibration, where that's a really interesting point to make.
It's a really interesting position to take that is indefensible but is worth talking about. That's why I mentioned it. Um, I think it's super interesting.
My nibling recently approached me and said, Hey, can you hook me up with Fat Man Down? I'm really curious about it. And I was like, eh, I don't know, it's not a game you want to play. And they said I'm really interested in safety right now and I just want to [00:25:00] see examples and counter examples.
And it's definitely a counter example that's worth looking at. So that's the way to frame Fat Man Down.
Sam: Interesting.
Jason: Now, I think you can do that responsibly. I have a game that I'm working on right now called The Washouts where you can play it with complete transparency where everybody knows everything and that's fine, but you can also play it in the mode where one of the players does not know what's happening.
And in the fiction, their character doesn't know what's happening regardless of how you play it. They're clueless, their character's clueless. But you can also play it with the, the player being clueless. And I haven't tried it yet. I have people who are excited to try it that way. I think it's interesting, but it, raises some really complicated issues with consent and trust.
So with The Washouts, there's a character who is gonna be put into a bad situation by their friends. And basically what you have to say is, Hey, do you want to come play this LARP with me? Everyone's gonna be mean to you, and you'll probably die. I'm not gonna tell you anything else about it. Do you trust us enough to know that that's gonna be a pretty cool experience? [00:26:00] And the answer is yes or no. So think it can be done, but it, takes the right people in the right circumstances.
And when you do it wrong, there's a word for that in the LARP community which is " surprise you're Hitler." which is a game where you think you're playing one game and halfway through you find out you're playing a completely different game that you didn't sign up for. And usually it involves you being terrible people. Your characters are terrible people, and you, you weren't told that. And I don't like that.
I think that's shitty.
Sam: Yeah. That is definitely shitty. That conversation makes me think of... recently I was playing your game Desperation, and it was just me and one friend playing it together. And he is a man who likes dark stories. He likes darkness. I think Desperation was a game for him which is why we were playing it.
But I got to a section of the book that was like, here are the content warnings for the game. And you know, the cards you can remove if you don't want to deal with any of these particular subjects. [00:27:00] And I started reading it and he was like, hold on, can you skip this part? Because I'm on board for anything and I would rather not know what content to expect even.
And that is a really interesting setting of your own transparency dial. Right? Of I I know what my limits are, very high, and I know that I really like surprise, you know, he was very excited to share secrets and plans with me, the other player, but he really wanted to be surprised by the text of the game.
And I found that just to be a really interesting social moment.
Jason: That's great. I, I'm glad that your friend had the self-awareness to, put some boundaries around their own experience that were gonna make them happy. don't really have a problem with that, although I think the content, warnings in Desperation are pretty high level, so I don't think it would've ruined his time. But he didn't know that.
So. And that's also a really high trust environment, right? Because, if something came up that really [00:28:00] was outside of his comfort, he probably could have just told you
Sam: Yes. Yeah, he certainly would've been able to, and you know, with only two people especially, it's really easy to do that.
But I, I do think there is something really interesting in the like player advice version of transparency about Knowing your own preferences and being able to dial them in, in a, a high trust environment like that.
I think.
Jason: I agree. I think that as a designer, you kind of have the responsibility to let people know the contours of the experience they're gonna engage with, right? So saying this game is going to be about authoritarian shittery and bad things are gonna happen related to power differentials and you know, whatever the things in the game that are non-negotiable. It's gonna happen. And let people know what those things are so they can make a considered choice whether to play or not.
I feel like that's important.
Sam: Yeah.
Jason: And ideally, like as in Desperation, you can kind of tune the game. You know, what those, in broad strokes, what the things that are [00:29:00] definitely gonna turn up are. And then since it's the card-based game, I can say if you don't want infanticide to take out card 26.
Sam: Yeah.
I love safety tools that are really like bespoke to whatever game and the, the like format of the game they exist in too. I, I think those are the most effective safety tools.
Jason: I agree if for no other reason than it means the designer's thinking about it, you know? That it's not just use an X card.
Sam: Yeah.
Jason: Which is not a solution for every problem. It's a, it's a good tool, but it's a hammer. And if you don't need a nail, then it's the wrong tool.
Sam: So I wanna ask you about transparency and surprise too because we've talked about this a little bit, but I do, think of games, you know, maybe not role-playing games that I have played, but like in a movie or in like a board game, like a game of werewolf, like the surprise of who was it is exciting to have revealed like much later on a pretty opaque [00:30:00] environment
Jason: Sure, yeah. Or any game with a traitor mechanic. You're delighted to find out who the traitor was.
Sam: Yeah. and I feel like I'm curious if in the context of all the conversation we have had here, like where do you see surprise fitting into role playing games at large? Like, is there a place for it at all, and what does that place kind of look like?
Jason: Yeah, for sure. I mean again, going back to the idea that a dungeon is a secret, right? You're gonna be surprised by what's behind every door, more or less.
Sam: True.
Jason: And I think that's fine. the thing that I think is more interesting to me is that like surprise is good and I love to be surprised, but I'm always surprised. I'm always surprised by the people at the table and the choices that they make. So you can play a game where you know the ending and you're still gonna be surprised because people are gonna get there in a beautiful and weird way. The journey to that place is going to be delightful just because of the people around you.
Sam: Yeah. Well, and, the whole point of like adding randomness, like a [00:31:00] dice roll or whatever to a game too, is to introduce some of that outside the realm of players contributing kind of surprise and excitement too, right?
Jason: Yeah, I mean, that's. I mean that's, that is a form of uncertainty. And uncertainty can be cool. Right. And it can be used to make people surprised and change the trajectory of, of the fiction
Sam: Yeah. That it sounds like there's a whole other episode there.
Jason: Definitely.
Sam: yeah. So are there any other examples you wanted to make sure to get to or anything else you wanted to make sure we hit here?
Jason: We should talk about playing to lose, I think because it's come up a couple of times and the idea of buying play to lose is that you're not playing the game in an optimal way, you're playing a game in a fictionally optimal way. That you either know or you want your characters to come to a particular kind of end, and you're not fighting against that.
So Fiasco is play the lose, right? [00:32:00] you're dumb people getting in trouble. Doesn't have to be, but for the most part, that's what's going on.
A game like uh, Star Crossed, right? It's not really play to lose, but there's this real tension there where do you want these characters to hook up? You kind of do and you kind of don't, but there's a, a extreme dynamic tension around that that's very close to playing to lose. And if you knock over the tower, you're playing to lose. A lot of my games are like that.
Losing is fun. I appreciate dramatic irony. So Bluebeard's Bride, right? You, you understand kind of what's going on, and that is not gonna end well. Although you can go into that game without really knowing that, or you can go in with complete transparency, and either way it's not gonna end well.
So those are some examples. I could list others, Montsegur 1244, right?
Montsegur is a really beautiful game. And at the end of the game, everybody's gonna make a choice whether they want to be burned alive or they want to convert to Catholicism. [00:33:00] That's it. Those are your options. That's how the game's gonna end. And the way you get there is what's interesting about it?
Sam: yeah, I think playing to a choice, like a hard choice, like For The Queen is another one that does that, right? Like, are you gonna protect the queen you've probably sworn to protect or not is a similar hard choice. And that playing towards making that choice as hard as possible for you and the other players at the table, I think is an exciting variation on playing to lose.
Jason: Yep. Yeah, very much so. The Shadow of Yesterday is an old game, but a really good one that introduced the concept of keys that you find the repercussions of that in Blades in the Dark, for example. But in Shadow of Yesterday, you, you know, you've got like the key of unrequited love and you're gonna be rewarded every time you just fail to connect with that person you love. And in a way so you're, you don't want that to turn into the key of love. You want to keep it unrequited,[00:34:00] but there's a reward mechanism there for fighting what your character really wants. Which I think is great.
Sam: Yeah. That's kinda like the engine of your story is playing towards not getting the thing.
Jason: Yep.
Sam: Yeah.
Jason: And it, it includes mechanics for transforming, right? So it can become the key of love at some point,
Sam: yeah,
Jason: when you want it to.
Sam: yeah. Only when you want a new engine.
Jason: Exactly.
Sam: I wanted to, I mean, Star Crossed is probably just its own episode, but I just wanted to like, run some, I, I just feel like in relationship to transparency, the way you interact with the tower is really interesting to me, where you have this player level where like we are here playing Jenga, and also you have the fictional level of we have two people falling in love or trying not to fall in love.
And it feel like if transparency is like this window of some level of cloudiness between you and the fiction, the manner in which you are putting your [00:35:00] hand on the tower in that game feels like pressing your hand to that window of transparency to me in this way that just puts a fine point on it that I don't think many games can because not many games are tactile in that way.
Jason: it's right. No, you're absolutely right Sam. And it's essential for that. And you should have Alex on to talk about it.
Sam: had plan to, yeah.
Jason: I think that would be great because she's very thoughtful about how the tower is interacted with how it's positioned, how it forms a tactile presence in the game, how it sort of is... it's not a diegetic element, but it kind of is. It's just, it's really, it's super good. And I'm really happy that we were involved in getting that out in the world. But you should talk to Alex, her, her, her depth of thought on that is staggering and would be a really interesting episode.
Sam: Can't wait. I just played a couple of weeks ago, a full campaign of Fall of [00:36:00] Magic in a single 12 hour sitting which was a
Jason: Nice. Oh, that's so great.
Sam: A wonderful experience. We're doing a whole episode about it. Later I'm gonna talk with Tasha Robinson, who played a, like three and a half year long campaign of Fall of Magic, which
Jason: Yeah, it's legendary.
Sam: unimaginable to, it's so cool. I cannot wait to talk about it.
But so I, I played this game of Fall of Magic, and I was so struck by how few rules there are in that game. Like truly the mechanic in that game is look at my cool map. You know, like, it that's maybe reductive, but there's so, so little to actual play. And I feel like one of the ways that game is able to get away with that is because the physical object of the scroll makes you feel so much like you are connected to your character. It like brings you into that [00:37:00] world. It brings you into the feeling of it. Like, it feels like it, lowers the divide between you and your character.
And I think transparency in a lot of ways, like just getting on the same page about where we're going, like setting a target feels like it can do a similar thing where you maybe need fewer rules because we all kind of know where we're steering the ship. And I, I'm wondering if that feels right to you.
Jason: It doesn't. I disagree
Sam: Alright.
Jason: With you. So first of all, I think Fall of Magic is a very subtle game that has a lot of rules, but they're, they're not explicit, they're implicit. And also you're going to create a culture of play around the game that has its own rules, right?
So I, I, I don't think that it's, I think you were being a little reductive, but that, that's cool. We, we can disagree.
And yeah, I think that transparency allows you to set additional boundaries [00:38:00] and guidelines and build scaffolding and make rules. So, for example, and this is my, I use this example all the time, but you can play Fiasco and say let's play melancholy Fiasco. Let's make a really sad game. And it works great, but only if everybody commits to
Sam: Mm-hmm.
Jason: that. and if everybody at the table is like, yes, I agree, let's be sad, you can play a really low key sort of downmarket Fiasco game that has a very different tone to it than monkeys on the moon and ice cream for breakfast which is how Fiasco often gets played.
and that's, that's an element of what I'm talking about here, right? You can be very intentional, not just about the things that the game is telling you to be intentional about. Like we're a bunch of dungeon people going in a dungeon, so get your stuff together. But you can also say, you know what? Wouldn't it be cool if we were doing this for a reason that we all care deeply about that we're gonna discover once we get in there [00:39:00] together. As players. We'll learn what it is. But it's a real serious thing for these guys. They're not doing it just to get money. They're doing it for something else. Let's find out.
That just colors the whole experience
Sam: Yeah,
Jason: If everyone agrees to it.
Sam: I like that framing of transparency as a way to reframe as opposed to something like I was saying, that maybe lets you get away with fewer rules. I think you're right that that feels like a better description of what it's doing
Jason: Yeah. Uh, Although I mean, I, I don't think you're wrong. I think a lot of high transparency games lean on that and are probably, you know, sort of procedurally more simple because they're kind of coming from a different place. You don't need to adjudicate the same kinds of things.
Sam: Yeah. Cool.
Jason: That's also a whole nother conversation, Sam.
Sam: Well, and part of it, I, I'm sure I'll end up having in this Fall of Magic episode that I have yet to record.
Jason: That's really cool. I, I envy you. Fall of Magic games around here go really fast. We have a really quick culture of play and can play pretty quickly. So 12 hours seems luxurious and fun.
Sam: [00:40:00] It was great and we still had to skip some locations too. Yeah, I, I wanna like, sit down and, and take more time with it too.
Jason, is there anything else that uh, you wanna make sure to mention before we call it here?
Jason: No this is great. I'm glad I got a chance to talk about this stuff. I guess the, the one thing that I would mention is the mixing desk of LARP uh, one of the dials on the mixing desk of LARP is openness. But all the dials are really interesting ways to look at the experience of design and play. So if you haven't checked it out, go look at the mixing desk.
Sam: Yeah. Truly like a syllabus for additional episodes of this show, I'm sure.
Jason: My goodness. Yeah. Yep.
Sam: Well thank you so much for being here.
Jason: This is great anytime. This is really fun.
===
Sam: Thanks again to Jason for being here! Before I close this out, I wanted to throw out one other oddball example of transparency in action that I thought of after the fact in this episode. In Factory Reset, a LARP from previous co host Ash Kreider, you're all robots who've gone into a facility to have your memories wiped back to their [00:41:00] defaults, and you all start out, players and characters, knowing this is what's about to happen. Then, one by one, your characters are taken into a back room and lose that knowledge as their memories are wiped.
In most of the games Jason and I talked about, player knowledge starts ahead of character knowledge, and either the characters gradually catch up or never learn what us as players know.
But in Factory Reset, that flow is reversed. Characters and players start on the same page, but character knowledge flips to be less than player knowledge as the game goes on. It's a super effective and odd use of transparency. Anyway, that game rocks, and if you can find the bodies, you should play it.
Once again, Dice Exploder Season 3 is coming to Kickstarter. Follow the launch page. Do it. Uh, do the thing.
You can find Jason on dice. camp and bluesky at jmstar, and bullypulpitgames on twitter and bluesky at bullypulpit_hq. Probably dice. camp too.[00:42:00] But for my money, the best place to find them both is the bullypulpit patreon, where they're putting out great weird little games at a regular clip.
As always, you can find me on BlueSky, Twitter, and Dice. Camp at sdunnewold.
And there's a Dice Exploder Discord! Come and talk about the show if you want to.
Our logo is designed by Sporgory, and our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Gray. And thanks, as always, to you for listening. Sign up for my Kickstarter.
See you next time.
Transparency with Jason Morningstar