Our 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 for player emotions. Take a listen.
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Love, Sex, and Romance: Roll to Seduce with Alex & Sharang
TranscriptCommentAlex 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. That leads to all kinds of places, but in particular the seductive choice to quantify sex and romance, but put a number to all these ephemeral and scary ideas about sex and romance, presumably so we might better understand them or be able to avoid dealing with how potentially embarrassing and messy they can be.
Love, Sex, and Romance: Sex Moves (Apocalypse World) with Alex & Sharang
TranscriptCommentLove, 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 to bring you all things love and sex.
And today they’re kicking off with an episode on sex moves from Apocalypse World and Monsterhearts, classic PBTA moves that trigger when two characters have sex. Let’s get into it!
Rolling the Dice... On Camera! (The Die Guys) with Moira Joy Smith
TranscriptCommentMoira 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.
Afterimage #2: City of Winter
TranscriptCommentI 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 wouldn't know why. You wouldn't know whose funeral I played at with those drumsticks, or on which rooftop in my hometown, I smoked that half a cigar. But you would feel their weight all the same...
Afterimage #1: Yazeba's Bed and Breakfast & The Kite
TranscriptCommentHello, and welcome to a brand new episode format here on Dice Exploder: Afterimage. It's equal parts This American Life style personal memoir and play report.
When I was in 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…
Clarity (Changeling: the Lost 1e) with MintRabbit
TranscriptCommentIn 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 measuring a person’s sanity with a flat number.
There’s any number of metaphors you might find meaning in with Clarity. It’s not clear to me that that makes it much better than sanity. And yet, today's cohost MintRabbit loves this game and this mechanic dearly, sees so much of herself in it. And seeing yourself in a flawed game, still finding beauty in it, that's what makes today's episode interesting.
Question Oracle (Stoneburner) and rolling the dice again with Ray Chou
TranscriptCommentFor 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!
10 Candles (10 Candles) with Jay Dragon
TranscriptCommentThis 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 light at the beginning of play. And the act of doing so, and then turning out the lights, sets a mood that feels like a ritual, something deeper and more visceral than most tabletop games, something not exactly larp-like, but that feels of a piece with the emphasis on environment and embodiment that larp often brings…
Experience Design with Caro Murphy
TranscriptCommentHere 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 empathy and how Caro sees games as an inherently educational medium. Let's get into it!
Safety Tools, and Players Are More Important Than The Game, with Sarah Lynne Bowman
TranscriptCommentSafety 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, how including these mechanics at the table is ideally a statement about how we’d like to treat each other both at the table and away from it. So today we’re gonna name that underlying philosophy and call that our mechanic: “players are more important than the game” is something I hear in conversations around safety all the time, and that’s this episode.
To break it down, I’m joined by Sarah Lynne Bowman. She studies all this professionally, and she has so much to say and to share about how safety tools work in theory and in practice, how no tool can ever guarantee your safety (even if we should still definitely use them), and how building good communities around our games is at least as important to safer play as any individual tool.
Zenith Abilities (Heart: the City Beneath) with Aaron Voigt
Transcript1 CommentHeart: 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 who makes the indie rpg video essays on YouTube. We get into Heart’s spectacular setting, the act of handing story agency over to players, and the joys of playing to lose. Then come back next week for part two with more Heart and more Aaron!
Elf Motors with Chris Duffy
Transcript1 CommentOver 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?
Fateplay Scenes (House of Craving) with Sharang Biswas
TranscriptCommentLast 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 play, and more. I couldn't ask for a better cohost for that than Sharang Biswas.
Spotlight Scenes with Moyra Turkington
TranscriptCommentShadows with Elin Dalstål
TranscriptCommentShadows 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 them!
Workshops with Marc Majcher
Transcript1 CommentThere's this period of time between when we've all agreed we're going to play a game now that’s 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 game are standard practice. What do they look like, and what can we learn from them?
Dice Exploder is on Patreon, plus Yazeba's Bed & Breakfast
TranscriptCommentDice Exploder is now 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.
Embodiment with Kate Hill
TranscriptCommentIn 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 and tabletop games. Today, Kate Hill and I get into the good, the bad, the ugly, and the beautiful of embodied play.
Just Read the Card (Ghost Court) with Randy Lubin
Transcript3 CommentsToday 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 a mechanic that makes getting into larp easier than ever: just pick up a card and read what it says…