Dice Exploder is a podcast about tabletop RPG design. Each episode focuses on a single game mechanic and examines it as deeply as possible. The show is co-hosted by Sam Dunnewold with a rotating roster of designers. More information is available at diceexploder.com.
Episodes
Sam's Exit Interview with Em and Sera
Transcripts available at diceexploder.comSocialsSam's short film Toothless, live todayEm on Bluesky and LinktreeSam on Bluesky and itchSera on Bluesky and itchThe Dice Exploder blog is at diceexploder.comJoin the Dice Exploder Discord to talk about the show!CreditsOur logo was designed by sporgory, our ad music is Lilypads by Travis Tessmer, and our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey.
Traits (Pendragon) with Caleb Zane Huett
Transcripts available at diceexploder.com Further ReadingPendragon 6e, The House EdgeSocialsCaleb on Bluesky and Haunted TableSeraphina on Bluesky and itchThe Dice Exploder blog is at diceexploder.comJoin the Dice Exploder Discord to talk about the show!CreditsOur logo was designed by sporgory, our ad music is Lilypads by Travis Tessmer, and our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey. This epi
Rights (Dark Ages) with John Harper
Transcripts available at diceexploder.comFurther ReadingDark Ages, Apocalypse World, Blades in the Dark, Under Hollow Hills, 3:16 Carnage Amongst the StarsSocialsJohn on Bluesky and itchSam on Bluesky and itchThe Dice Exploder blog is at diceexploder.comOur logo was designed by sporgory, our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey, and our ad music is Lilypads by Travis Tessmer.Join the Dice Ex
NPCs with Amanda P.
Transcripts available at diceexploder.comFurther ReadingBeyond the Pale, Tannic, Landmark, Hidden, SecretSocialsAmanda P. on Bluesky and at Weird WonderSam on Bluesky and itchThe Dice Exploder blog is at diceexploder.comOur logo was designed by sporgory, our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey, and our ad music is Lilypads by Travis Tessmer.Join the Dice Exploder Discord to talk about the s
Thri-Kreen (Dark Sun) with Zedeck Siew
Transcripts available at diceexploder.comFurther ReadingDark Sun, New Class: Really Good Dog, Lorn Song of the Bachelor, Nine Space Games, A Perfect WifeSocialsZedeck on Bluesky and at his blogSam on Bluesky and itchThe Dice Exploder blog is at diceexploder.comOur logo was designed by sporgory, our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey, and our ad music is Lilypads by Travis Tessmer.Join the
Fallout (Liminal Horror) with Craig Shipman
Transcripts available at diceexploder.comFurther ReadingLiminal Horror, Heart, Blades in the Dark, CairnSocialsCraig on Bluesky and LinktreeSam on Bluesky and itchThe Dice Exploder blog is at diceexploder.comOur logo was designed by sporgory, our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey, and our ad music is Lilypads by Travis Tessmer.Join the Dice Exploder Discord to talk about the show!CreditsO
De-Roling with Caro Murphy
Transcripts available at diceexploder.comFurther readingBack Tower Runners on Kickstarter!DrachenFestIncantrix ProductionsImagi-Ne'er-Do-WellsSocialsCaro’s websiteSam on Bluesky and itchThe Dice Exploder blog is at diceexploder.comOur logo was designed by sporgory, our ad music is Lilypads by Travis Tessmer, and our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey.Join the Dice Exploder Discord to t
Our Lives in the Wood with Kendo Smith
Transcripts available at diceexploder.comFurther readingOur Lives in the Wood episode 5This Game Takes Place in Your Home TownSocialsKendo on Bluesky and the webSam on Bluesky and itchThe Dice Exploder blog is at diceexploder.comOur logo was designed by sporgory, our ad music is Lilypads by Travis Tessmer, and our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey.Join the Dice Exploder Discord to talk ab
What Is There to Eat in Duskwall (Blades in the Dark) with Jeeyon Shim
Transcripts available at diceexploder.comNote: the "What Is There to Eat in Duskwall" pages of Blades in the Dark were written by Andrew Shields.Further ReadingBlades in the Dark by John HarperSocialsJeeyon on Patreon, Bluesky, and itchSam on Bluesky and itchThe Dice Exploder blog is at diceexploder.comJoin the Dice Exploder Discord to talk about the show!CreditsOur logo was designed by sp
Duty Stations (Night Witches) with Ash Kreider
Transcripts available at diceexploder.comFurther ReadingThe Watch 2e is on Kickstarter nowNight Witches by Jason MorningstarSocialsAsh on BlueskyAsh's website, including listings for their games and booksSam on Bluesky and itchThe Dice Exploder blog is at diceexploder.comOur logo was designed by sporgory, our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey, and our ad music is Lilypads by Travis Te
New Episodes Next Week + An Announcement
Transcripts available at diceexploder.com
Deckbuilding (Signs of the Sojourner) with Lady Tabletop
Transcripts available at diceexploder.comFurther ReadingSigns of the Sojourner by Echo Dog GamesBand-Aids & Bullet Holes by Sam, on Kickstarter nowSlay the Spire 2 by Mega CritSocialsLady Tabletop on itchSam on Bluesky and itchThe Dice Exploder blog is at diceexploder.comOur logo was designed by sporgory, our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey, and our ad music is Lilypads by Travis Te
Minigames (Firebrands) with Viditya Voleti
Transcripts available at diceexploder.comFurther ReadingBand-Aids & Bullet Holes on KickstarterMobile Frame Zero: Firebrands by Meguey & Vincent BakerThe King Is Dead by Meguey & Vincent BakerStewpot: Tales from a Fantasy Tavern by Takuma OkadaSocialsViditya on Bluesky and itchSam on Bluesky and itchThe Dice Exploder blog is at diceexploder.comOur logo was designed by sporgory, our the
John Wick (2014) and Genre Emulation with Sam Roberts
Transcripts available at diceexploder.comMy new game Band-Aids & Bullet Holes is still on Kickstarter! Check it out today.In honor of BABH, this month on Dice Exploder I'm covering mechanics from other games that inspired it. In keeping with this show's increasingly loose definition of "mechanic," today I'm joined by Sam Roberts (Escape from Dino Island) to tackle one of th
Character Nonmonogamy (Space Post) with Sidney Icarus
Transcripts available at diceexploder.comToday is the launch of Band-Aids & Bullet Holes, my melodramatic action game of bloody revenge. It's a one shot, capsule game, box set, deckbuilder rpg. Check it out.In honor of BABH, this month on Dice Exploder I'm covering mechanics from other games that inspired it, starting today with the idea of character nonmonogamy. Traditionally in rpgs
Calling Cards (Band-Aids & Bullet Holes) with Lady Tabletop and Seraphina
Transcripts available at diceexploder.comMy first stand-alone print game, Band-Aids & Bullet Holes, goes live on Kickstarter next week on May 5th. I have a lot to say about it, and I'm gonna say a lot of it: May's going to be all episodes about mechanics from other people's games that inspired me in this design.Today I wanted to talk about Band-Aids & Bullet Holes straight up,
Keys (Lady Blackbird) with Whitney Delaglio
Transcripts available at diceexploder.comI love pregens! But why do I love pregens? I dug into this a bunch on an episode last year with Aaron Lim about the characters in Last Train to Bremen: I love being given a clear goal and baseline temperament when I sit down to play so I can get into drama as fast as possible. But the game Lady Blackbird goes a step further. Each character has "Keys"
Weak, Strong, and Regular Moves (Dream Askew / Dream Apart) with Austin Walker
Transcripts available at diceexploder.comAustin Walker's new game Realis is on Kickstarter now, and it's been making splashes in the indie rpg scene since last year when the ashcan came out. The game's core mechanic, Sentences, feels like the exact kind of mechanic I love covering on this show. But where did it come from? I asked Austin to come talk to me about it and bring one of his
The Awards 2024 with Nico MacDougall
Transcripts available at diceexploder.comFollow Band-Aids & Bullet Holes on Kickstarter!The Awards are back! The rpg awards show with a bent towards indie games and the guaranteed worst SEO of all time is back for another around, and the current steward of The Awards - Nico MacDougall - is back on the show this week to talk through some of our favorite mechanics from the last batch of winners.
Lures (Heaven in the Dust) with Barclay Travis and Bee Alexander
Transcripts are available at diceexploder.comBee and Barclay are the hosts of Tabletop Book Club, a podcast that is exactly what it sounds like. It’s a show with such fun energy, and of course good design talk. Because Barclay has a new belonging outside belonging game that's just come out - Begin Again, check the link below - today I'm talking with them about lures, maybe my favorite part
Always Give Them The Clue (GUMSHOE) with Tristan Zimmerman
Transcripts available at diceexploder.comMy friend Tristan Zimmerman is currently crowdfunding Ballad Hunters, a GUMSHOE game, meaning it’s based on a core mechanic built for investigation games and gathering clues. That mechanic goes like this: “always give the players the clue.” Simple! And I think so astute as to what the actual fun part of investigation is in RPGs: it’s not “can we roll high e
The Voice of the Text (Triangle Agency) with Seraphina Garcia Ramirez
Transcripts available at diceexploder.comI bet you’ve heard of this game Triangle Agency. Big exciting Kickstarter, super flashy product design, a game with… spoilers in the back? It’s corporate horror, it’s packed gorgeous art, it’s a game I spent 20 sessions with in 2025. And I… had a pretty frustrating time with the game. There is so much I love and admire about Triangle Agency, but also so muc
Draw Maps, Leave Blanks (Dungeon World) with Tim Denee
Transcripts available at diceexploder.comIf the thesis of last week’s episode was “hey the fiction of your game matters a lot and can even have mechanical effects,” how do you know how deeply to define that fiction? Maybe no one in indie games has recently faced that question on quite the scale of Tim Denee with Blades ‘68, an expansion to Blades in the Dark. I wanted to have him on to talk about
Doskvol's Lightning Barriers (Blades in the Dark) with Nova
Transcripts available at diceexploder.comIn Blades in the Dark, you play as criminals in Doskvol a haunted city where the ghosts are such a problem that they built giant lightning barriers around the whole city to keep them out. That sentence alone already makes me want to get the game to the table, and we haven’t even gotten to the rules of Blades in the Dark yet.That’s the conversation I wanted
Setting Elements (Dream Askew / Dream Apart) with Kodi Gonzaga
Transcripts available at diceexploder.comThere's many ways to decide who has authority over what in an RPG. Traditional games have a bunch of players with one PC each and a GM responsible for everything else, while Dreams Askew / Dream Apart by Avery Alder and Ben Rosenbaum takes a very different approach: divide that "everything else" up into flavorful pieces, like "gossip & r
Afterimage: The Experimental Role-Playing Laboratory
Dice Exploder: Afterimage is alternative show format, a cross between play report and personal memoir.The Experimental Role-Playing Laboratory, or ERPL, was a thrice a year mini convention put on by students at my college back in the 00s and 10s and onward to this day. It's how I got into indie games. I still think about it, and the people I met there, to this day. They still mean something to
2025 Year End Bonanza
Transcripts available at diceexploder.comIt's the Dice Exploder 2025 year end bonanza! This year I'm joined by Lin Codega and Diogo Nogueira to go over a whole bunch of game mechanics that we think represent where rpgs were at in 2025 and where they might be going in the future.Further ReadingMythic Bastionland by Chris McDowallPraise the Hawkmoth King by Sage the AnagogueI want to fight m
Inventory Tetris (Mausritter) with Quinns
Transcripts available at diceexploder.comMausritter is an old school dungeon crawling game where instead of playing as elves fighting dragons, you play as mice fleeing from owls. It’s not unlike any number of other old school games like Cairn or Into the Odd, but its inventory system is the only inventory system I’ve ever actually liked. Does it work differently than other games? At a raw numbers
The Brainer VS The Brain-Picker (Apocalypse World 2e/3e) with the Bakers
Transcripts available at diceexploder.comApocalypse World 3rd edition is on Kickstarter right now. In many ways, it hasn’t changed much. In many ways, it's a whole new apocalypse. So I thought it'd be fun to have on the Bakers and go through a playbook - the Brainer in 2e vs its equivalent the Brain-Picker in 3e - and ask them about every single change on the sheet, from updating the basic
Actual Play: Void 1680 AM Community Broadcasts with Ken Lowery
Transcripts available at diceexploder.comTo close out this miniseries on actual play, I wanted to feature a game that I think uses actual play as a game mechanic. Hear me out. Void 1680 AM is a solo playlist-building game in which you create a fictional radio broadcast. Except when you're done, you can send it to the game's creator (this week's cohost Ken Lowery), and he'll broadca
Actual Play: 4AM at a Diner (Last Train to Brooklyn) with Linnie Schell
Transcripts available at diceexploder.comLast Train to Brooklyn is an actual play from Twice Rolled Tales where they play Last Train to Bremen on a New York City subway car. It's also probably my favorite actual play full stop. Why? I think because it leans into what I'm most excited about this medium: treating capturing the act of play more like a documentary than a means towards fiction.
Actual Play: An Uncomfortable Offer (Maia's Game Room: The Electric State) with Maia Wilson
Transcripts available at diceexploder.comOne of my favorite parts about these episodes where I'm highlighting a single moment from an actual play is how many practical lessons I can bring back to my own table by going beat by beat through a significant moment in play. And today, Maia Wilson has brought a particularly significant moment from her show Maia's Game Room in which one character,
Actual Play: A Tree Shanty (My First Dungeon: The Wildsea) with Brian Flaherty and Elliot Davis
Transcripts available at diceexploder.comIn The Wildsea, you play as sailors on a sea of trees in a climate post-apocalypse where the climate won. And in the My First Dungeon mini series of this game, today's co-cohost Brian Flaherty took it on himself - along with co-player J Strautman - to write an original song, a “tree shanty,” that played on each episode.Today Brian and I, along with his
Actual Play: The First 30 Minutes (My First Dungeon: Orbital Blues) with Rowan Zeoli
Transcripts available at diceexploder.comIt's a new series on Dice Exploder all about actual play. For five episodes, instead of breaking down one mechanic, we're going to break down one moment from one actual play show. And to kick things off, I'm joined by actual play critic and all-around-writer Rowan Zeoli of Rascal and Polygon. We cover an overview of actual play as a medium and t
You Will Die In This Place with Merrilee Bufkin and Jay Dragon
Transcripts available at diceexploder.comLast summer a hot new game hit the indie rpg scene: You Will Die In This Place, a surreal and experimental... dungeon crawler? Technically? ...that seems to have more in common with House of Leaves than it does many roleplaying games. And for a couple weeks I saw so many discussions about this game that I eventually broke down and was like, do I need to do
Love, Sex, and Romance: The War (Will That Be All?) with Kim Lam
Transcripts available at diceexploder.comToday we’re wrapping up the Dice Exploder series on love, sex, and romance with Will That Be All? by Graham Walmsley, a game about the social relationships between the downstairs staff at Melton Hall, a fictional British estate, over the course of about a decade between the first and second world wars.It’s a lovely game about finding solace and community ev
Love, Sex, and Romance: Big Chunky Prompts with Tasha Robinson
Transcripts available at diceexploder.comI’m back! Alex and Sharang have done an amazing job talking love, sex, and romance over the past month but I have plenty to say on the subject myself. In particular, I wanted to approach the conversation Alex and Sharang started about the quantification of romance from the perspective of how I feel when I’m actually at the table playing these games. Because
Love, Sex, and Romance: Physical Touch with Alex & Sharang
Transcripts available at diceexploder.comIn this final episode hosted by Sharang and Alex, perhaps their climactic episode, they are turning up the heat on sex mechanics all the way to physical contact, both as a way to simulate sex acts through other kinds of physical touch... and through actual sex acts being used as game mechanics.This stuff is fascinating, I think much more broadly applicable
Love, Sex, and Romance: The Phallus with Alex & Sharang
Transcripts available at diceexploder.comOur series on game mechanics centered around sex and romance continues with returning champions Alex Roberts and Sharang Biswas, and today they are talking about dicks. “The phallus.” Or more generally, physical objects. I did some episodes on physicality earlier this year and how the physicality of a game undeniably affects how it feels to play it. But Ale
Love, Sex, and Romance: Roll to Seduce with Alex & Sharang
Transcripts available at diceexploder.comAlex Roberts and Sharang Biswas are back for round two, this time with “roll to seduce,” that classic action so many people try and even succeed at taking across any number of games. If I roll high enough on my persuasion check, surely the dragon will fuck me instead of killing us, right? In some games, yes! Right indeed!This is such a weird dynamic, but cl
Love, Sex, and Romance: Sex Moves (Apocalypse World) with Alex & Sharang
Transcripts available at diceexploder.comLove, sex, and romance: huge human topics, wildly under-discussed in roleplaying games. At least in my opinion. So today on Dice Exploder we’re kicking off a new miniseries on the subject hosted by NOT ME. Instead, for the next four episodes, Alex Roberts (Star Crossed, For the Queen) and Sharang Biswas (editor of Honey and Hot Wax) are taking over the show
Rolling the Dice... On Camera! (The Die Guys) with Moira Joy Smith
Transcripts available at diceexploder.comMoira Joy "MJ" Smith is the Dungeon Master for the Try Guys D&D actual play show "The Die Guys". She created the show in 2024 along with the Try Guys, and I was her right-hand dude during production and the show's video editor.Today, ahead of a whole series I have planned later this fall on actual play, MJ and I sit down to talk abou
Afterimage: City of Winter
Dice Exploder: Afterimage is a new show format I'm trying, a mashup of This American Life with a play report.I have a box full of memories that lives in my closet, a pair of drumsticks, a half smoked cigar, a thimble full of sand from a beach I've never been to. If I passed away and you were cleaning out my closet, you would look at this box and you would know it was important, but you wou
Afterimage: Yazeba's Bed & Breakfast
Dice Exploder: Afterimage is a new show format I'm trying, a mashup of This American Life with a play report.When I was in the third grade, there was this cartoon that aired while I was coming home from school, so I could only ever watch the second half of episodes. The name of that show was Yazeba's Bed & Breakfast... or was that the name of a tabletop roleplaying game?Written, edited
Party by the Apocalypse preview: an Apocalypse World sex scene
Hello and welcome to Party by the Apocalypse, an actual play miniseries where we play Apocalypse World while breaking down how it works and the choices we're making as players so you can learn how to better play it.Party by the Apocalypse is Dice Exploder’s first foray into actual play, and the whole thing is out right now wherever you get your podcasts.In the full show, we over any number of
Announcement: Dice Exploder joins the Many Sided Network
Today the folks over at Many Sided Media, the production house behind My First Dungeon and Talk of the Table, are launching a new podcast network... and Dice Exploder is a part of it!Nothing on the show should change much, but today I wanted to sit down with Brian Flaherty, a co-founder of Many Sided Media, to talk about what this network is going to look like.
Clarity (Changeling: the Lost 1e) with MintRabbit
Transcripts available at diceexploder.comIn the unreliable urban fantasy world of Changeling, Clarity is a mechanic that measures... well, for now let’s go with a character's ability to trust their own reality. But finishing that sentence is kind of what this episode is all about, because Clarity has deep ties to various sanity mechanics from any number of Call of Cthulhu inspired games, even
Question Oracle (Stoneburner) and rolling the dice again with Ray Chou
Transcripts available at diceexploder.comFor the two year anniversary of Dice Exploder, my first ever cohost Ray Chou returns for what starts off as a brand new episode about Stoneburner by Fari RPGs and that game’s oracle mechanic: a way to use dice, random tables, and the careful framing of stakes to adapt the game for solo play.But at some point the conversation morphs into a deserving sequel e
10 Candles (10 Candles) with Jay Dragon
Transcripts available at diceexploder.comThis is, at long last, the end of this Dice Exploder miniseries on larp. And I wanted to send it off by returning to the question I kicked it off with: what can tabletop designers learn from larp? To get into that, there’s few people I’d rather have on than Jay Dragon (Wanderhome, Yazeba’s Bed & Breakfast).When I pitched Jay this topic, Jay wanted to br
Experience Design with Caro Murphy
Transcripts available at diceexploder.comHere near the end of Dice Exploder's larp series, I wanted to have on Caro Murphy (Galactic Starcruiser) to talk about experience design, and specifically how to think about curating all those parts of an experience bigger and larger than most of us at home will ever have access to. How do you design the set a game is played on? How do you design someth
Safety Tools, and Players Are More Important Than The Game, with Sarah Lynne Bowman
Transcripts available at diceexploder.comSafety in RPGs and larp is a huge topic, one I’ve wanted to cover on Dice Exploder for a long time, but one I’ve avoided it because it feels hard to approach inside the “pick one mechanic” format of this show. Even more than most mechanics I cover on Dice Exploder, I feel like most safety mechanics are in conversation with each other in both logistical ways
Beats (Heart: the City Beneath) with Aaron Voigt
Transcripts available at diceexploder.comLast week, indie rpg YouTube essayist Aaron Voigt and I delved into Heart: the City Beneath, a surreal and maximalist dungeon crawler with lots to love. But when I ran the game, I had some trouble with it from a mechanic that by all accounts I should love: beats, little nuggets of story, little goals your character takes on that they advance by achieving. I
Zenith Abilities (Heart: the City Beneath) with Aaron Voigt
Transcripts available at diceexploder.comHeart: the City Beneath. It’s a surreal and bloody dungeon crawler full of so much to love… plus some bits that drive me up the wall. This week and next I’m devoting TWO episodes to it. Today, it’s everything I love about Heart as seen through the lens of zenith abilities: epic things that let players take control of the game and do something gigantic and f
Elf Motors with Chris Duffy
Transcripts available at diceexploder.comOver on the Dice Exploder discord, we welcome new members by asking them what their favorite mechanic is. It’s a great tradition, kicks off a lot of great conversations, but I have largely avoided having it turned my way. So today I thought let’s just get it out there in an episode: what is my favorite mechanic and what do I think about it?Further ReadingEl
Fateplay Scenes (House of Craving) with Sharang Biswas
Transcripts available at diceexploder.comLast week was a show about how it might work to frame a scene when you get to decide whatever you want that scene to look like. But this week, we're looking at the reverse: what happens when you're given a very detailed scene and must figure out how to incorporate it into your story?This episode brings together a bunch of threads I’ve been building
Spotlight Scenes with Moyra Turkington
Transcripts available at diceexploder.comWhen you’re playing roleplay-heavy D&D, what does a scene look like? Since the game doesn’t give you much in the way of tools for doing so, are you framing scenes intentionally or just kind of letting them happen? And if the latter, is that serving you well?You very well might be, but I’ve become obsessed lately with how we frame scenes in roleplaying g
Shadows with Elin Dalstål
Transcripts available at diceexploder.comShadows are a metatechnique in larp where you have players in the role of something other than a traditional larp or rpg player character. Maybe they’re stagehands turning out the lights because there’s ghosts in this house. Maybe they’re the characters’ worst fears who wander around and whisper into players’ ears to egg them on into terrible actions and ch
Workshops with Marc Majcher
Transcripts available at diceexploder.comThere's this period of time between when we've all agreed we're going to play a game now and when we start "actually playing." We've got to learn the rules, learn the setting, maybe go over safety or characters. Maybe we order the pizza in here, too.This part of a game is just as much something that can be intentionally designed as g
Dice Exploder is on Patreon, plus Yazeba's Bed & Breakfast
Transcripts available at diceexploder.comThe show is on Patreon! There's not going to be a lot behind the paywall, but there is right now a pilot episode for a new podcast that's part play report, part games criticism, and part personal memoir. This pilot is about the excellent game Yazeba's Bed & Breakfast, and you can listen to it now on the brand new Dice Exploder patreon.https:
Embodiment with Kate Hill
Transcripts available at diceexploder.comIn a lot of tabletop rpgs, to do something in the fictional world, we engage with abstraction: to pick someone’s pocket, we describe picking their pocket, or we roll a die to see how well we pick it. But in larp, sometimes the action is the action. I pick your pocket... by picking your pocket.This embodiment of play, where my real life actions equal my fict
Just Read the Card (Ghost Court) with Randy Lubin
Transcripts are available at diceexploder.comLarp! It’s that thing where you dress up like wizards, go into the woods, and hit each other with sticks. Right? Well.. yeah! Except no, because it’s a million other things, too.Today I'm gonna introduce you to the world of larp. If you've ever been intimidated by it, this is a place to start. Because I think tabletop designers have so much we c
Mule (Last Train to Bremen) and Pregenerated Characters with Aaron Lim
Transcripts available at diceexploder.comPregens! They're not just a tool to get started playing quicker, they're also a way for a designer to take you by the hand and guide you to a very specific place, and they're a shared language across every table that picks up your game. Today, Aaron Lim and I break down all the joys and beauty of pregens, up to and including Aaron's meme cha
Coloring Book Character Sheet (Two Hand Path) with Jeeyon Shim
Transcripts available at diceexploder.comWhat’s the best way to convey the emotional experience of being a post-apocalyptic demon-fighting wizard action hero? Did you say “a coloring book with some Yahtzee on the side?” Because that’s what Two Hand Path designer Mikey Hamm landed on.Last week was an episode all about the joy of destruction and transgression, and I wanted to balance that out today
Flauros the Demon (Wreck This Deck) with Audrey Stolze
Transcripts available at diceexploder.comDon't you hate it when one card in a deck gets a little bent? You ever have someone spill their coffee on your cards while you're playing and wish death upon them? What if I told you there was a game that told you to do these things and worse... on purpose?We're kicking off season 5 of Dice Exploder with two episodes on physicality in games. Tod
2024 Year End Bonanza
Transcripts can be found at diceexploder.comIt's the Dice Exploder 2024 year end bonanza! This year I'm joined by Aaron Voigt, Rowan Zeoli, and MintRabbit plus a cavalcade of friends of the show to go over games and adjacent things we loved from 2024. Come reminisce about the year with us!Aaron on Youtube and BlueskyRowan on BlueskyMintRabbit on TumblrAaron’s picksLast Train to Bremen by C
The Challenge Deck (Wickedness) with Audrey Stolze and Seraphina Garcia Ramirez
Transcripts available at diceexploder.comA few weeks back, a conversation on the Dice Exploder discord lead to a new game jam: the Femininomenon Jam, a jam about femininity and whatever that means to you, happening now on itch.io through February 11th. To help kick off your thinking on what a game in this theme might look like, today two of the hosts of that jam sit down to talk about the challeng
AMA with Merrilee Bufkin
Transcripts available at diceexploder.comI usually like to think of Dice Exploder as a pretty focused show with a pretty tight format. Yeah we may sprawl sometimes, but we’re not here shooting the shit, we’re here to talk game mechanics. But sometimes, a guy wants to stretch out like a dog in the sun, hang out for a while, and just yap the day away while answering a bunch of listener questions. An
Deep Cuts with John Harper
Transcripts available at diceexploder.comIt’s a Dice Exploder EMERGENCY POD! Less than 24 hours ago as of recording, John Harper, designer of Blades in the Dark, released a brand new official supplement for the game: Blades in the Dark: Deep Cuts. It’s 110 pages packed full of new setting and new mechanic ideas, and I really wanted to talk about it! I love Apocalypse World’s concept of “advanced f
Dice Forager: a Dice Exploder zine
Transcripts available at diceexploder.comHello from the between-season malaise! Today I'm joined by Aaron King, back again, who interviews me about my new zine Dice Forager: a 50 page collection of games, manifestos, and mini written-out episodes of Dice Exploder. We talk about how setting goals is great and people should do it for, what counts as a manifesto, and how making art meant just for
The Sooth Deck (Invisible Sun) and Custom Oracles with James D'Amato
TranscriptThis week I’ve got James D’Amato (Campaign: Skyjacks, the Ultimate RPG book line, and the upcoming Oh Captain, My Captain) here to talk about custom oracle decks. Yeah a Tarot deck is cool, and great for doing Tarot, but James makes the case that it’s the “custom” in “custom oracle deck” that will really bring the not-quite-but-feels-like magic of an oracle to your table. But before we g
Keys (Keymaster) with Caro Asercion
TranscriptToday, Caro Asercion (i'm sorry did you say street magic) brings us a game and mechanic all about instinct and physical embodiment: Keys from the larp Keymaster. This game isn't like most games. It’s so much about physical embodiment and exploring group identity rather than pesky shit like “storytelling”. Physicality! Larp! The Golden Cobra Challenge! We've got it all.Further
Love Letters (Apocalypse World) with Aaron King
TranscriptThrilled this week to have on one of my favorite movewrights, it’s Aaron King of the RTFM podcast. Aaron brought on Love Letters from Apocalypse World, a kind of custom move the GM can write when it’s been a while since we played and everyone might need a refresher on what was going on to get the ball rolling again. I think custom moves are a wildly overlooked part of Apocalypse World, a
Speak Your Truth (Desperation) with Jeff Stormer
TranscriptIt’s the crossover event of the season! This week I’m joined by Jeff Stormer of the Party of One podcast to talk about the core mechanic of Desperation by Jason Morningstar. In this game full of dread about a small Kansas town struggling through a never-ending winter, instead of deciding what happens, each turn you draw a card and decide who the thing on the card happens to. It’s a super
THAC0 (AD&D 2e) with my dad
TranscriptFor this final episode of the Dice Exploder D&D miniseries, I wanted to go back to the source, to my first experiences playing the game. And I figured who better to do that with than someone else who was there, my first DM, my very own father.We get plenty nostalgic for back when I was 8 years old, but I also made him talk to me about THAC0, early D&D's needlessly opaque and
Rule Zero (D&D) with Em Acosta
TranscriptI have a list of mechanics I’d like to cover on Dice Exploder, and I’d say about a third of them are jokes. One of those jokes is Rule Zero, a maxim that says "the DM (or GM) is always right." I think of Rule Zero as originating in D&D culture, and as part of this D&D miniseries, I thought it'd be interesting to use as a way into talking about the play culture around
Prestige Classes (D&D 3e/3.5e) with Sam Roberts
Back Dice Exploder season 4 on Backerkit now!TranscriptThis episode I'm joined by Sam Roberts (Escape from Dino Island) to talk about prestige classes, special classes from D&D 3e that you could only take by multiclassing into them. Sam thinks of these things as a noble failure: a very cool idea whose execution almost immediately dropped the ball. But what can we learn from their corp
The Adventuring Day (D&D) with Tristan Zimmerman
Back Dice Exploder season 4 on Backerkit now!TranscriptWelcome to the D&D miniseries! I wanted to kick this off with a look into the mechanical heart of D&D, but I didn't really know what that meant. So I asked my friend Tristan! Designer of the award winning game Shanty Hunters and author of the Molten Sulfur blog, Tristan now spends his time as a designer on Nations & Cannons,
D&D Miniseries Intro (Homage to the Player's Handbook)
Back Dice Exploder season 4 on Backerkit now!
Transcript
Today I'm kicking off a miniseries of Dice Exploder episodes all about the Tarrasque in the room: Dungeons & Dragons itself. But before we get into that, I wanted to lay out for context where I'm coming from, what my relationship is like to "the world's greatest roleplaying game™" is like, and what questions I was h
The Queen Is Under Attack (For The Queen) with Kimi Hughes
Back Dice Exploder season 4 on Backerkit now!TranscriptAmong my favorite RPGs is Alex Roberts' triumph of minimalistic, elegant design: For The Queen. Today I'm doing just with along with Kimi Hughes of Golden Lasso Games. For The Queen is a card drawing prompt game, and one prompt is always the game's last: "The Queen is under attack. Do you defend her?" That's today's
Designer Commentary: Northfield (with Jason Morningstar)
TranscriptIt is still designer commentary season on Dice Exploder, and today I'm talking with Jason Morningstar (Fiasco, Night Witches, a million other games) about Northfield: a game we co-designed about when Jesse James tried to rob the bank in my home town, we shot the hell out of him and his gang, and then we started an annual small town fair to celebrate our victory. You play as both a me
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