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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

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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01:00:55

AMA with Merrilee Bufkin

Dice Exploder ·

2024/11/12

Transcripts available at diceexploder.com I 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. And there’s no one I like yapping with more than my friend Merrilee Bufkin. So this week, it’s casual

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00:49:30

Deep Cuts with John Harper

Dice Exploder ·

2024/11/04

Transcripts available at diceexploder.com It’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 fuckery,” and I’ve never seen such a good and extended example of it all in one place. Further

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00:35:02

Dice Forager: a Dice Exploder zine

Dice Exploder ·

2024/10/22

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 your friends can be just as if not more rewarding than for any other reason. Preorder Dice Forager now

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01:01:23

The Sooth Deck (Invisible Sun) and Custom Oracles...

Dice Exploder ·

2024/09/18

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 get into that, we dig deep into a mysterious black cube to get to our specific custom oracle deck: the

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00:49:53

Keys (Keymaster) with Caro Asercion

Dice Exploder ·

2024/09/12

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 Reading Keymaster by J Li The Golden Cobra Challenge i’m sorry did you say street magic by Caro

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01:01:07

Love Letters (Apocalypse World) with Aaron King

Dice Exploder ·

2024/09/04

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, and today we go deep on why that is and how and when to write your own. Further Reading Apocalypse World

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00:34:13

Speak Your Truth (Desperation) with Jeff Stormer

Dice Exploder ·

2024/08/21

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 slick mechanic. Meanwhile over on Party of One, you can listen to Jeff and I actually play the

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00:43:21

THAC0 (AD&D 2e) with my dad

Dice Exploder ·

2024/08/13

Transcript For 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 complicated version of an attack bonus. I made him do this because I think of THAC0 as so

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00:46:07

Rule Zero (D&D) with Em Acosta

Dice Exploder ·

2024/08/06

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 the game, how it's actually played at the table, and how many of its rules people actually

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00:42:19

Prestige Classes (D&D 3e/3.5e) with Sam Roberts

Dice Exploder ·

2024/07/30

Back ⁠⁠Dice Exploder season 4 on Backerkit⁠⁠ now!⁠Transcript This 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 corpse? We get into that, along with a boots-on-the-ground discussion of what our experiences were like

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00:53:55

The Adventuring Day (D&D) with Tristan Zimmerman

Dice Exploder ·

2024/07/23

Back ⁠Dice Exploder season 4 on Backerkit⁠ now!Transcript Welcome 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, a hack of D&D set in the American Revolutionary War. Tristan brought on a mechanized design

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00:20:20

D&D Miniseries Intro (Homage to the Player's Handbook)

Dice Exploder ·

2024/07/18

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 hoping to answer with this series. If you listen to this show, you probably come from a community

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