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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

36:46

Always Give Them The Clue (GUMSHOE) with Tristan...

Dice Exploder ·

2026/03/17

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 enough to progress,” it’s “once we have all these clues, how do we put them together and what do we do

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117:31

The Voice of the Text (Triangle Agency) with...

Dice Exploder ·

2026/03/10

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 much I struggled with, and I wanted to break it all down on the show.And I didn’t want to do that without

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48:07

Draw Maps, Leave Blanks (Dungeon World) with Tim Denee

Dice Exploder ·

2026/03/03

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 when you completely reinvent the setting, how do you think about what parts of the fiction are important

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46:50

Doskvol's Lightning Barriers (Blades in the Dark)...

Dice Exploder ·

2026/02/24

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 to take a crack at today: rules are important, they can radically shape play, but the fiction a game

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43:09

Setting Elements (Dream Askew / Dream Apart) with...

Dice Exploder ·

2026/02/17

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 & reputation" and "the wild forest" and give everyone a piece. That choice has become one of

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36:32

Afterimage: The Experimental Role-Playing Laboratory

Dice Exploder ·

2026/01/28

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 me. What might I still mean to them?Written, edited, and performed by Sam DunnewoldTristan Zimmerman at

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46:13

2025 Year End Bonanza

Dice Exploder ·

2025/12/22

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 my friends in the back of a moving truck by Seraphina Garcia RamirezTraffic Lights Are Communication

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59:06

Inventory Tetris (Mausritter) with Quinns

Dice Exploder ·

2025/11/18

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 level, not really! But instead of a bunch of paper bookkeeping, Mausritter turns items into little

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72:30

The Brainer VS The Brain-Picker (Apocalypse World...

Dice Exploder ·

2025/11/11

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 moves all the way down to a single name on a single picklist.Further ReadingApocalypse World: Burned

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49:18

Actual Play: Void 1680 AM Community Broadcasts (with...

Dice Exploder ·

2025/11/04

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 broadcast it out onto the real radio via the AM antenna in his garage (and on YouTube).Obviously it feels

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66:32

Actual Play: 4AM at a Diner (Last Train to Brooklyn)...

Dice Exploder ·

2025/10/28

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. It's excited at least as much about its nonfiction story as its fictional one.Today I've

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48:35

Actual Play: An Uncomfortable Offer (Maia's Game...

Dice Exploder ·

2025/10/21

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, in desperate straights, is pressured by an NPC to pay for his help with sex.It's an intense moment

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56:31

Actual Play: A Tree Shanty (My First Dungeon: The...

Dice Exploder ·

2025/10/14

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 Talk of the Table cohost and Wildsea GM Elliot Davis, break down one of those tree shanties: how it came

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48:57

Actual Play: The First 30 Minutes (My First Dungeon:...

Dice Exploder ·

2025/10/07

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 the current state of the scene, we dig deep into the fine line this medium walks between fiction and

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48:55

You Will Die In This Place with Merrilee Bufkin and...

Dice Exploder ·

2025/09/30

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 an emergency podcast about this?No. I did not. I was busy with a hundred other things. But past cohosts

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45:50

Love, Sex, and Romance: The War (Will That Be All?)...

Dice Exploder ·

2025/09/09

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 even as the world outside feel deeply uncertain - and that’s what Kim wanted to talk about: how setting,

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62:30

Love, Sex, and Romance: Big Chunky Prompts with Tasha...

Dice Exploder ·

2025/09/02

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 that quantification makes me feel kinda weird… but what do I want instead?Because freeform romance is

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44:27

Love, Sex, and Romance: Physical Touch with Alex &...

Dice Exploder ·

2025/08/26

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 than you might believe at first blush, and I think also very obviously under discussed in the way that

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34:34

Love, Sex, and Romance: The Phallus with Alex & Sharang

Dice Exploder ·

2025/08/19

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 Alex and Sharang go a step further, talking about how in a game you can use an object as almost a vessel

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49:26

Love, Sex, and Romance: Roll to Seduce with Alex &...

Dice Exploder ·

2025/08/12

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 clearly so appealing to so many people, and today Alex and Sharang get into the why and how of it all

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101 results

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