Transcripts available at diceexploder.com 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...
Jul 01, 2025•1 hr 51 min•Season 3Ep. 6
Dice Exploder: Afterimage is a new show format I'm trying, a mashup of This American Life with a play report. I 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 m...
Jun 24, 2025•32 min•Season 6Ep. 2
Dice Exploder: Afterimage is a new show format I'm trying, a mashup of This American Life with a play report. When I was in the 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. The name of that show was Yazeba's Bed & Breakfast... or was that the name of a tabletop roleplaying game? Written, edited, and performed by Sam Dunnewold Transcript available at www.diceexploder.com Music by Blue Dot Sessions: ...
Jun 17, 2025•21 min•Season 6Ep. 1
Hello and welcome to Party by the Apocalypse, an actual play miniseries where we play Apocalypse World while breaking down how it works and the choices we're making as players so you can learn how to better play it. Party by the Apocalypse is Dice Exploder’s first foray into actual play, and the whole thing is out right now wherever you get your podcasts. In the full show, we over any number of mechanics and how they play out at the table: character creation, violence and combat, player vs playe...
Jun 03, 2025•22 min•Season 5Ep. 17
Today the folks over at Many Sided Media, the production house behind My First Dungeon and Talk of the Table, are launching a new podcast network... and Dice Exploder is a part of it! Nothing on the show should change much, but today I wanted to sit down with Brian Flaherty, a co-founder of Many Sided Media, to talk about what this network is going to look like.
Jun 02, 2025•5 min
Transcripts available at diceexploder.com In 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 m...
May 20, 2025•38 min•Season 5Ep. 16
Transcripts available at diceexploder.com 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...
May 13, 2025•41 min•Season 5Ep. 15
Transcripts available at diceexploder.com This 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 candle...
May 06, 2025•56 min•Season 5Ep. 14
Transcripts available at diceexploder.com Here 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...
Apr 29, 2025•57 min•Season 5Ep. 13
Transcripts available at diceexploder.com Safety 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 plac...
Apr 21, 2025•58 min•Season 5Ep. 12
Transcripts available at diceexploder.com Last 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...
Apr 15, 2025•33 min•Season 5Ep. 11
Transcripts available at diceexploder.com Heart: 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 ...
Apr 08, 2025•37 min•Season 5Ep. 10
Transcripts available at diceexploder.com Over 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 Reading Elf Motors Socials Chris’s podcast How to Be a Better Human Sam on Bluesky and itch The Dice Explod...
Apr 01, 2025•9 min
Transcripts available at diceexploder.com Last 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, sa...
Mar 25, 2025•50 min•Season 5Ep. 9
Transcripts available at diceexploder.com When 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 proc...
Mar 18, 2025•51 min•Season 5Ep. 8
Transcripts available at diceexploder.com Shadows 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 t...
Mar 11, 2025•37 min•Season 5Ep. 7
Transcripts available at diceexploder.com There'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 game are standard practic...
Mar 04, 2025•47 min•Season 5Ep. 6
Transcripts available at diceexploder.com The 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
Mar 03, 2025•5 min•Season 5Ep. 99
Transcripts available at diceexploder.com In 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 la...
Feb 25, 2025•51 min•Season 5Ep. 5
Transcripts are available at diceexploder.com Larp! 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 th...
Feb 18, 2025•42 min•Season 5Ep. 4
Transcripts available at diceexploder.com Pregens! 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 Kickstarter Ithaca in the Cards: Second Expedition and What Should We Have Tomorrow? Full Course Ad Li...
Feb 11, 2025•46 min•Season 5Ep. 3
Transcripts available at diceexploder.com What’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 th...
Feb 04, 2025•55 min•Season 5Ep. 2
Transcripts available at diceexploder.com Don'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 u...
Jan 28, 2025•50 min•Season 5Ep. 1
Transcripts can be found at diceexploder.com It'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 Mornings...
Dec 10, 2024•1 hr 35 min•Season 4Ep. 96
Transcripts available at diceexploder.com A 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 de...
Nov 26, 2024•33 min•Season 4Ep. 95
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...
Nov 12, 2024•1 hr 1 min•Season 4Ep. 94
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 Readi...
Nov 04, 2024•50 min•Season 4Ep. 93
Transcripts available at diceexploder.com Hello 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...
Oct 22, 2024•35 min•Season 4Ep. 92
Transcript This 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: t...
Sep 18, 2024•1 hr 1 min•Season 4Ep. 10
Transcript Today, 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 Asercion So...
Sep 12, 2024•49 min•Season 4Ep. 9
