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PODCAST

Dice Exploder

A show about tabletop RPG design. Each episode we bring you a single mechanic and break it down as deep as we possibly can. Co-hosted by Sam Dunnewold and a rotating roster of designers. Part of the Many Sided Network. diceexploder.com

arts design

All Episodes

38:33

Clarity (Changeling: the Lost 1e) with MintRabbit

Dice Exploder ·

2025/05/20

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 as it’s trying to do something different, maybe a little more nuanced and less obviously offensive as

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00:41:58

Question Oracle (Stoneburner) and rolling the dice...

Dice Exploder ·

2025/05/13

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 episode to our first go around on rolling the dice in idie rpgs more broadly. When do you roll dice? Are

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00:57:00

10 Candles (10 Candles) with Jay Dragon

Dice Exploder ·

2025/05/06

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 bring in the 10 Candles from 10 Candles. This is a game best known for, what else, the 10 candles you

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00:57:36

Experience Design with Caro Murphy

Dice Exploder ·

2025/04/29

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 something for hundreds if not thousands of participants?And Caro delivered so much more: we get into bleed and

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00:58:18

Safety Tools, and Players Are More Important Than The...

Dice Exploder ·

2025/04/21

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—how they compliment each other—but also in the philosophy behind their existence in the first place,

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00:33:54

Beats (Heart: the City Beneath) with Aaron Voigt

Dice Exploder ·

2025/04/15

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’ve always found it strange I didn’t love beats in practice, and I today I wanted to break down how and

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00:37:18

Zenith Abilities (Heart: the City Beneath) with Aaron...

Dice Exploder ·

2025/04/08

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 fucking cool… before killing their character.I’m joined by ardent Heart-lover Aaron Voigt, aka the guy

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00:08:51

Elf Motors with Chris Duffy

Dice Exploder ·

2025/04/01

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 ReadingElf MotorsSocialsChris’s podcast How to Be a Better HumanSam on Bluesky and itchThe Dice Exploder blog is

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00:50:57

Fateplay Scenes (House of Craving) with Sharang Biswas

Dice Exploder ·

2025/03/25

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 up throughout this larp series: immersion, the separation or lack thereof between player and character, safer

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00:51:34

Spotlight Scenes with Moyra Turkington

Dice Exploder ·

2025/03/18

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 games, and today I want to talk about a mechanic that does so very firmly: spotlight scenes, a procedure

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00:37:41

Shadows with Elin Dalstål

Dice Exploder ·

2025/03/11

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 choices. They’re special effects, or ghosts, or whatever else you want them to be. Let's talk about

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00:48:09

Workshops with Marc Majcher

Dice Exploder ·

2025/03/04

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 gameplay itself, but I don't see much of that in ttrpgs. Meanwhile in larp, workshops to set up a

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00:04:57

Dice Exploder is on Patreon, plus Yazeba's Bed &...

Dice Exploder ·

2025/03/03

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://www.patreon.com/DiceExploder

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00:51:19

Embodiment with Kate Hill

Dice Exploder ·

2025/02/25

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 fictional character's actions, might be what many people understand as the core difference between larp

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00:42:37

Just Read the Card (Ghost Court) with Randy Lubin

Dice Exploder ·

2025/02/18

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 could learn from larp, so much that this is the start of a big series on larp.And where better to start than with

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00:47:09

Mule (Last Train to Bremen) and Pregenerated...

Dice Exploder ·

2025/02/11

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 charts.Aaron’s KickstarterIthaca in the Cards: Second Expedition and What Should We Have Tomorrow? Full CourseAd LinksA

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00:55:47

Coloring Book Character Sheet (Two Hand Path) with...

Dice Exploder ·

2025/02/04

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 with another episode on physicality in games and the act of creation. But because I’m joined by the

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00:50:44

Flauros the Demon (Wreck This Deck) with Audrey Stolze

Dice Exploder ·

2025/01/28

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. Today that's Wreck This Deck, and the transgressive feeling you get when the core mechanic of a game is to fuck up a

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01:35:10

2024 Year End Bonanza

Dice Exploder ·

2024/12/10

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 Bluesky Rowan on Bluesky MintRabbit on Tumblr Aaron’s picks Last Train to Bremen by Caro Asercion Fealty by Michael Elliot and Galen Pejeau Helvetia by Bully Pulpit Games/Jason

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00:32:53

The Challenge Deck (Wickedness) with Audrey Stolze...

Dice Exploder ·

2024/11/26

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 challenge deck from Wickedness by M. Veselak. In this game about a coven of three witches, the challenge deck

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