Moira 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 about how we made The Die Guys. We start with a bunch of background - how shows get made for YouTube at large, how the Try Guys specifically make shows, and how this show came about - but we get granular to, all the way down to how I made choices in the edit about whether to leave in or cut individual jokes.
For 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 partial successes good? And how does all of this change for solo and GM-less play? We didn’t ask all these questions last time, and we didn’t have great answers to the ones we did. So let’s check in on the state of rolling the dice!
