Many Questions on Dream Askew // Dream Apart

I’ve had the pleasure of interviewing Avery Alder and Benjamin Rosenbaum about their Kickstarter project, Dream Askew // Dream Apart, two games about community and belonging as marginalized people. I hope you enjoy the interview and that you’ll check out the Kickstarter!

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A dark haired woman in a black shirt smiling at the camera.
Avery Alder


Tell me about the project of Dream Askew // Dream Apart. Why does this joint project matter to you as a creator?

Avery: While these two games tell stories of very different communities—Dream Askew is about a queer enclave amid the collapse of civilization, while Dream Apart is a fantastical-historical game of the shtetl—they’re also united in being games about marginalized people building a community for themselves against the odds, what we call games of belonging outside belonging.

For me, this project matters because telling stories about finding our collective power and learning how to live together in community matters. And I feel really proud about how we’ve merged those themes with the mechanics: power is distributed around the table, and rather than relying on chance, everything is driven by the choices that we make together.

A dark haired man in a light colored shirt smiling at the camera, in black and white.
Benjamin Rosenbaum

Benjamin: I love the games we’ve made, I’m excited about people playing them. I think this kind of in-person game can be a great space for learning and exploring, and I think it’s cool that these games celebrate the agency and struggle of communities with complicated relationships to the outside world, in settings that I think matter a lot.

What was your collaborative experience like on the project, and how did you handle complications or struggles of any kind?

A: Our collaboration gained momentum really slowly! Benjamin first wrote me about using the Dream Askew framework to create a game about Jewish shtetl life in 2014, and it wasn’t until 2017 that we committed to an active collaboration and co-development process. I’ve been really delighted by the ways that Benjamin’s innovations in Dream Apart have looped back to transform Dream Askew; key relationships are instrumental in defining the relationship web of the community, and they weren’t even in my original design!

B: It’s been amazing! Avery is brilliant, super nice, amazingly supportive, and has oodles of artistic integrity. She knows a tremendous amount about game design, community, and the technical praxis of creating and publishing games, and it’s been an enormous privilege to work with her. We’ve handled complications and struggles by talking through them, listening carefully to one another, and making decisions together — a process that has been strikingly full of fun and ease. I think our visions were very closely aligned from the beginning, and we also have very distinctive areas of expertise in the project. Each of us is the expert in our own game’s subject matter, so we tend to naturally defer to that expertise; and while I have a deep background as a writer and gamer, it’s my first professional game project, and Avery is one of my favorite game designers, so it’s been very easy to trust her judgement on game design and publication issues.

A yellow and green toned image with a collection of people gathered in a fallen city.
The Dream Askew cover.

Dream Askew

Tell me the core purpose of Dream Askew. What about it fuels your passion?

A: For me, the passion comes from building something that can be run at the drop of a hat, that tells meaningful stories, that’s legit fun to play, and that brings us closer to imagining possiblities for queer community.

I think the game is challenging in some ways! It requires players to take on a big creative load, and to jump into co-developing an apocalyptic world together. But for players who are up to the challenge, it’s a delight! The game uses lists and prompts to point players toward interesting dilemmas, and then gives them space to actually figure out how to handle them. That’s exciting! That’s what fuels my passion.

A sheet of paper labeled "Introducing the Hawker" with various lists of options for players to choose from, some already circled.
The Hawker playbook.

When you work on the project, what design elements do you keep as key priority?

A: I started work on Dream Askew in early 2013, when I was helping run a weekly, drop-in meetup group. It was queer-centering, but welcome to all who wanted to drop in and play something neat. I tried running Apocalypse World a couple times at those meetups, and it never quite worked: the sheets intimidated new players, the mechanics were slightly too dense to teach to new players in the short span of time we had each night, and the game always felt like it was cut too short. I designed Dream Askew to fit perfectly into that space: inviting, quick-paced, and perfect for weirdos. And that remains a priority. I want this to be a game that I can run at the drop of a hat for a gaggle of queers who’ve never played a roleplaying game before, and I want it to rock under those conditions.

An orange and brown toned image with angels - multi-winged creatures with eyes peeking through the wings and flaming halos - watching over people in a small neighborhood with tents and buildings.
The Dream Apart cover.

Dream Apart

Tell me the core purpose of Dream Apart. What about it fuels your passion?

B: What I really wanted was to capture the distinctive tone, setting, and underlying philosophy of Jewish fantasy and folklore, which differs from both the traditional high fantasy ethos of a titanic final battle between Good and Evil, and from the aimless-violent-vagabond ethos of sword & sorcery. I wanted to see characters who are rooted in community, in a deeply spiritual but also morally ambiguous world, a world in which evil is written with a small “e”: our own human failures of courage and compassion, rather than something alien and essentialized and external; characters who don’t wield triumphant violence to achieve their ends, but use wit, grit, and moxie to thrive in a world where they are likely to be always on the receiving end of violence; and just all the rich strangeness, cleverness, yearning, whimsy, irony, self-criticism, soul, and mystery of talmud, midrash, Yiddish folktales, and the literatures of the shtetl.

A sheet of paper labeled "Introducing the Klezmer" with various lists of options for players to choose from, some already circled.
The playbook for the Klezmer.

When you work on the project, what design elements do you keep as key priority?

B: I think the main priority is capturing that spirit described above; other priorities include making it an accessible game with elegantly simple mechanics, concise design, and very rich fiction, keeping players supported in story creation so they always have something to fall back upon and aren’t left hanging if the flow of creativity stutters, and supporting a social contract that centers everyone feeling safe and curious and excited and connected.

A black and white image of a sigil - the bottom half has three lines arranged like an A, with a half circle posed on top and multiple curved and straight lines emerging from it.
The sigil for Dream Askew.

Dream Askew

What have been some of the most vital elements of growth in Dream Askew over the past five years, mechanically and thematically?

A: Mechanically, there are two ways that the game has changed that I think are the most vital: the introduction of the community worksheet, and the introduction of key relationships for every character role. These two changes shift the story of Dream Askew in the direction of community, relationships under pressure, and questions of belonging. The game feels like it contains a deeper treatment of its themes, rather than a more aesthetic, surface-level treatment of what it means to belong to a queer enclave. Key relationships were a piece of the design that Benjamin first introduced into Dream Apart, which I was so excited to borrow back for the apocalypse.

Thematically, I think the biggest difference isn’t actually with the game, but with the real world that I’m going to be releasing the game into. The idea that apocalypse was a contemporary force which operated in waves at the margins of civilization, that the digital realm would factor into not only the collapse but also what came next… in 2013 this was closer to science fiction. In 2018 it feels startlingly timely to be talking about. I talk about this more in the design notes I’m releasing alongside the game, but I think it’s chilly how much more real the world of Dream Askew now feels for me and my friends.

The "The Outliers" book, black and white with a black and white illustration of queer, edgy characters, imposed over the faded cover of Dream Apart.
The Outliers zine, which is a stretch goal reached on the Kickstarter, includes additional game materials.

What elements of queerness speak the most to you personally, and to your experience in games, that you have brought forth in Dream Askew?

A: I think there’s a bit of misdirection at play in how Dream Askew portrays queerness. Character creation opens with a prompt to choose from a list of strange and unprecedented genders, and to think visually through physical descriptions and wardrobe combinations. Queerness feels like a flashy aesthetic project. And that’s definitely a real part of the game, one that it’s fun to play around with! But queerness is also the relationships you attempt to hold in balance, and it’s the fact that everyone has a different kind of lopsided power that both contributes to the community and also puts them at odds with it. The Iris is a potential healer, but also an unsettling psychic weirdo. The Hawker is a resourceful provider, but also a territorial profiteer. The Stitcher is an engineering genius, but also a strange recluse. The drama of the game comes from watching how these people who hold sway in the community tug its ideals and character back and forth.

A black and white image of a shape almost like a bell with two concentric circles in the top center, then a straight line on top of a triangle that has a Hebrew symbol "alef" in the center.
The Dream Apart sigil.

Dream Apart

What were some of the elements of Jewish fantasy and folklore that you personally felt deeply about including in Dream Apart, and how did you include them?

B: Most people are familiar with a kind of Sunday School version of the Hebrew Bible, in which the Divine is a kind of mathematically omniscient and omnipotent Santa Claus whose job it is to make everyone be good. A cursory glance at the world around you should make it clear that this doesn’t make much sense. In fact the story (or rather stories) that the texts suggest are much weirder. The God of the Tanakh is volatile, mysterious, numinous, and alien; the midrashim and the Kabbalah make this weirder still, with a fractured Divinity in exile from Itself, and a universe-altering magic inherent in the smallest human actions (it’s not that much of a stretch to say that in the Lurianic Kabbalah, when mom lights the candles Friday night she is literally healing a tiny bit of the sundered Godhead). The psychic maelstrom of Apocalypse World (and thus of Dream Askew) is the closest thing to this theology that I’ve found in any game; it feels a lot like what Moses encountered at that bush in Midian. Magic in games tends to feel like engineering at best, and more commonly like ordering from a menu at Denny’s. Gods are either absent, or they’re statted-up dispensers of plot tokens and buffs. I wanted a kind of magic that would be terrifying, wondrous, unsafe, inchoate. I also wanted it to be tied deeply into the story’s drama of moral agency, because so much of Jewish tradition is about wrestling with complex moral questions that have no easy answers. Temptation, solace, power at a price, rebuke, reconciliation, grudges, forgiveness, these things are not just part of the social drama, they’re also central to the meaning of the Unseen World. A demon that just wants to try and kill you is not nearly as interesting as a demon that wants you to betray yourself. A golem isn’t just a monster, it’s an allegory of freedom and servitude, the limits and risks of violent self-defense and of human knowledge. A dybbuk isn’t just a possessing spirit, it’s one with an agenda and unfinished business.

A sheet of paper labeled "Welcome to the Shtetl" with various lists of options for players to choose from, some already circled, and a map of the Shtetl..
The sheet for the Shtetl for Dream Apart.

Were there any unique challenges for approaching the subjects of Jewish culture and beliefs that are not addressed often enough or respectfully enough in popular media?

B: To the extent that shtetl culture is addressed in popular media at all — think the musical-theater and cinematic versions of Fiddler on the Roof and Yentl — it tends to be in a sentimental, rose-and-sepia-tinted, elegiac frame, ignoring a lot of the complexities and real-world grittiness. Non-Jews are usually offscreen menaces (though to be fair, one of Tevye’s daughters does marry one); economics is flattened into a virtuous poverty; and in general, the viewer is encouraged to see the events as a kind of hagiographic ancestral origin story. (The original texts are grittier and sometimes queerer than their tamed stage & cinematic versions, too — there’s a good argument that Singer saw his Yentl, who keeps the name Anshel at the end of the story as opposed to putting a dress on and running off to America, as a trans man.) At one point Avery asked if we should find a more Yiddish-looking font for the Dream Apart playtest kit; I responded that I really liked using the same one we use for Askew, to get away from that coy sentimentality and ram home the point that this, too, was a gradual apocalypse, with — for its characters– the same apocalyptic immediacy.

A dark haired woman in a black shirt writing in a notebook while sitting at a table in a restaurant.
Avery writing notes.

One last…

Beyond basic structural elements, what are some pieces of Dream Askew // Dream Apart that are similar or contrasting – mechanically and thematically?

A: I think one of the most interesting contrasts—and one I haven’t talked about anywhere yet—is in how the two games approach supplemental reference materials. Since Dream Apart is historical, its reference materials need to offer up specific, tangible answers: here’s what that word means; here’s a plausible Russian surname from the era; here’s the river you’d walk alongside. Benjamin is working hard to make resources that feel thorough while remaining compact. On the other hand, Dream Askew is speculative and built upon a queer epistemology. Its reference materials need to do much the opposite, to reject a single definition in favour of pitching the question back to players in an encouraging way: that’s a great question, what do those words mean? My challenge is being exploratory and playful without coming across as hostile or opaque.

The book of Dream Askew // Dream Apart with the cover illustrations and white text over black cover, imposed over a faded image of the Dream Apart cover.
The Dream Askew // Dream Apart book and illustration.

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Thank you so much to Avery and Benjamin for the interview! I hope you all enjoyed the interview and will share it with others! Please check out the Kickstarter for Dream Askew // Dream Apart today!

This post was supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs. Tell your friends!

To leave some cash in the tip jar, go to http://paypal.me/thoughty.

If you’d like to be interviewed for Thoughty, or have a project featured, email contactbriecs@gmail.com.

#IAmQueerGames

Hi! I’m Brie Sheldon, and I am queer games.

June is Pride month, which is when we recognize the adversity queer people face and overcome, marked especially by remembering the Stonewall riots. When police raided a bar where queer people were gathered – trans people, gay and lesbian people, bisexuals, and all – the patience of queer New Yorkers ran out. Martha P. Johnson, a black transgender sex worker, is credited with initiating the riot as response to police aggression**. A number of other black people and people of color headed up the rejection of prejudice in power, alongside many queer resistors. Pride matters. When we talk about resistance and the pursuit of freedom, we should look to the best parts and most important parts of Pride.

Those parts are the people. So, as a gamer, I’m a people. I wanted to offer a way to connect with other queer people, and to have an easier way to frame who I am as a queer person – while showing how it matters to things I love.

This video includes a series of questions that I’ve responded to below. If you’re a queer gamer or queer person-who-plays-games, please consider answering these questions in your preferred format – video, social media, blog – and use the hashtag #IAmQueerGames.

This is supported by my Patreon at Patreon.com/briecs, as part of my community outreach and efforts in recognizing diverse creators. Thank you for watching! Here we go!

1) Who are you?
I’m Brie Sheldon, formal game designer, journalist, and editor. I run a site called Thoughty were I talk game design and do interviews, supported by my Patreon. I’m a graduate of leadership studies and creator of Leading with Class, using games to teach leadership, which is supported by Patreon.com/leadingwithclass.

2) What are your pronouns?


I use either they/them or he/him, whichever is easier and makes more sense.

3) What’s your queer, in a few words?


I’m genderfluid nonbinary-masculine, queer in orientation.

4) What are your intersections and chosen labels?
On the marginalized side, I’m disabled and have mental health stuff. For privileges, I’m white, well educated, and married to a cisgender man with a decent paying job and live in a safe neighborhood. On the fun end, I’m polyamorous, a gamer, and an artist.

5) What’s your gender (or lack thereof) and what does it mean to you?
I describe my gender as genderfluid nonbinary-masculine because my gender identity – the inside part of me – fluctuates between nonbinary androgynous and nonbinary masculine, where I am never a man but I have some masculinity. I call myself a boy a lot because the soft masculinity that I associate with boyness is basically where I am then.

My gender is very important to me. I struggled with it for 24 years before coming out on a small scale and 26 before I told my family. It’s who I am and I love to live it freely.

6) What’s your orientation and what does it mean to you?
I am queer, and I call myself queer because it makes the most sense to me. Being a fluid person and being non-cisgender, I fluctuate a lot on how I define my relationships, but basically I’m attracted to people of pretty much every gender. My attraction is different with different people – sometimes romantic, sometimes sexual, sometimes both, or sometimes aesthetic or none at all, and I also have a lot of platonic attraction. It’s all important to me! I feel a lot of feelings, and they find homes in many different places.

7) How do you present yourself, and how do you want to present yourself, including clothes, makeup, body mods, and anything else?
My ideal presentation is moving between soft masculine and edgy androgyny, but both with boobs. I like my boobs and hate that having them decreases my masculinity, and my androgyny. I wish that I could be those things and still have boobs, and still wear makeup – which I do enjoy. I like wearing masculine or more unisex clothes – I could live in simple jeans, ballcaps, and tee shirts – but I super dig getting to wear those alongside low cut tops and stuff. It suits me.

I’m not planning on getting any further body mods than my piercings and tattoos – except more tattoos. Gender affirmation and hormones aren’t what will make me whole, from what I know.

8) What’s this got to do with games – gender, queerness, Pride?
Games have a good dose of queerness in them already once you realize how easily you can put on another gender and orientation and have it be the identity you perform for a session, event, or campaign. If you think you’ve never touched queerness, think of how many times you’ve played a character of a different gender or who was attracted to a gender you aren’t. It doesn’t make you queer, but it shows how you can connect those things.

Gender and orientation are so tied to our experiences at the table because they’re tied to our real lives. Mechanics and settings in games can encourage queerness, and safe environments encourage engagement with identity questions – when we’re playing a game, it is a safety buffer. It’s a way to explore with training wheels. And when the wheels come off, we can tell stories we want to be told, since good media for us is so hard to find.

We must tell our own stories. We can make them rich and interactive for queer and not-queer people alike. It’s an amazing medium to dig into both queer reality and queer fantasy, and it gives us a unique power to frame the mechanics of the worlds we play in when we design queer games – how we handle violence, how we handle sex, how we handle stigma. The control it gives us to realize queerness is really important.

9) When do you remember being queer in game the earliest? What does it tell you about games and queerness?

Honestly, it started when I was playing Harry Potter text based roleplay when I was in my early teens. I started playing androgynous characters – very clumsily – and exploring who my characters could be attracted to. In my mid-teens I played some androgynous characters in D&D and flirted with the ideas of queer characters like lesbians and gay men, and even pansexuality.

But it was not well executed. We need games that support queerness and identity questioning, where it’s okay to explore these things and encouraged to explore them, and done with support in the text and community. Games can’t hold these spaces alone, they need support from those making them and playing them who know about queer culture and life.


10) What can cis straight people do to help?

Listen. Look at your life, look at your choices. If you’ve fucked up, apologize and don’t do it again. Remember that kink isn’t inherently queer. Donate money and time where you can. Honor our history. Hire queer creators. Support sex workers. Don’t write about us without doing research and consulting us. Use people’s proper pronouns. Be better than you ever have been.


Share a message with other queer gamers, both out and not, about the future.

Things are a hot damn mess right now, but we can make it through. Pride month is a big deal but it’s not the only month of the year we need to raise our voices, support each other, and keep moving forward. No queer person is alone in their queerness – we can find ways to work together. We need to recognize black queer people, queer people of color, trans and nonbinary people, bisexual and pansexual people, queer Jewish and Muslim people, and asexual and aromantic people.

Don’t forget that sex workers, disabled people, and people with mental illnesses are queer people sometimes, too. We need to remember we are in this together. Don’t let the pressure from privileged bigots crush you. And if you are still keeping private – it’s okay. We’ll be here when you’re ready.

Final Thoughts


I’m doing this because I want to see queer people in games be recognized and welcome them, as well as talk about why these things are important. I want to highlight the diversity in games that is so often brushed under the rug. I also want to open up the floor for queer voices. If I can do that for even one person, make just one person be heard? Yeah, I’ll like that.

This post is supported by Patreon.com/briecs patrons like you! Please feel free to support my work there or donate through the donation links in the description.

Note: In my video, I state that Marsha P. Johnson (a black trans woman) was the one who started the riot at Stonewall. According to this tweet: https://twitter.com/BlackFemmeinism/s…, the riot was started by Stormé DeLarverie, a Black Butch lesbian, and Marsha P Johnson & Sylvia Rivera (a Latinx trans woman) founded & organized PRIDE. I apologize for any errors – finding consistent information was pretty challenging.



This post was supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs. Tell your friends!

To leave some cash in the tip jar, go to http://paypal.me/thoughty.

If you’d like to be interviewed for Thoughty, or have a project featured, email contactbriecs@gmail.com.

Five or So Questions on Champions Now

Hi all!

I did an interview with Ron Edwards on his Kickstarter project, Champions Now! Ron prepared our audio recordings and edited everything into a video, so you get to hear the interview on the following video. I hope you enjoy it and that you’ll check out Champions Now on Kickstarter today!

https://youtu.be/Pkfg6uxu2EY

This post was supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs. Tell your friends!

To leave some cash in the tip jar, go to http://paypal.me/thoughty.

If you’d like to be interviewed for Thoughty, or have a project featured, email contactbriecs@gmail.com.

Turn Grows, So Do I

a gif of Chris Evans breaking a log in half
Chris Evans is a representation for me, the log is my fear of running games.

I recently updated the biggest games document I’ve ever worked on myself, the Turn playtest document. It’s like almost 80 pages now. Like, that’s a lot. The updates included:

  • minor changes to Human role abilities for clarity
  • minor changes to Beast archetype powers for clarity
  • adjustment to refresh for exposure
  • integrated essay content
  • more Storyteller content
    • how to on session 0
    • session checklist
    • explanation of rules
    • character creation
  • an entire player’s guide to all of the roles and archetypes
  • elaboration on some mechanics
  • rewritten elaboration on mechanics 
  • complete step-by-step on how to start a game of Turn

I don’t know if that sounds like a lot, but it was a lot of work!

I’m hoping to talk about a variety of these things over time, but the biggest one I wanted to talk about is the Storyteller’s Guide and how that came to be.

Storyteller Purposes Make everything personal (to the characters) Always put the characters at risk of exposure Keep the characters connected Love the characters and all of their flaws Give everyone a secret Use status as leverage Give every wrong a reason Don’t let deviance go unnoticed Keep in mind that everything takes time Offer every player and character moments of comfort and of success
The Storyteller Purposes were actually written by dictation to John while we were driving across the state last year.

I am not a particularly gifted facilitator, especially not in an actual “game master” type of role. I avoid it like the plague because it stresses me out, I don’t feel like I do a good job, and I don’t have experience in it. However, for Turn, I have very clear ideas on how the game should work. It’s the only game I’ve run 4 sessions of, ever. But I didn’t write any of these ideas down.

So, when John and I went to the lake cabin (my parents’), he asked me a ton of questions. I answered as best I could, and realized I kind of had to write all of it down. Since then I’ve been adding text to the Turn document like wild! I have a lot of ideas for how to solve the little issues people have come up with before I made the changes, but I have no idea if they’ll work for people other than me.

To some kind of credit, I did try out the first draft of the “how to set up Turn” the other night and it went awesomely. I even did the new Session 0! And it worked great. I’ve added some detail since then, so I hope it’ll work. Here’s some things I wrote about, which are in addition to the materials I’d already written:

Character Creation
This has guidance on helping the players answer questions about their characters, how to handle animal groups, a note on NPCs, and special rules for some of the roles. It’s stuff that I know will come up, but didn’t write down. Some of this is just hard to figure out how to word, or I hadn’t had time to put on paper. Some things I just didn’t know needed written guidance, but it did – like the special rules for the Late Bloomer or the NPCs. But, now it’s written down!

Two sheets of paper, one titled "The Beastborn" and the other "A Wolf," with various details of the characters on it
The Beastborn and Wolf character sheets for John’s character in my new game, created by John W. Sheldon.

Session 0
This is how to actually get the game going. It directs the Storyteller to the Beginning Your Game section and then walks them through a structured first couple scenes. I’m really pleased with it and when I tested it out it went amazingly well, for someone like me to run, so I’m glad it’s on paper. I had to really separate out what was important in a first session, and I think that this meets it – connecting the characters, placing them within the town, and establishing the personality of the characters.

Running an Average Session
This covers the typical things a Storyteller will encounter in a session of Turn. Some people had expressed they weren’t sure how to engage stress or how to run beast scenes, so I wrote up some details on that to get people really on the same page. This involved writing up how you should pepper each session with mundanity – everyday tasks that will stress out shifters – and beast issues like territory and habitat struggles.

I also included a Storyteller Session Checklist that makes sure that there are NPC to PC connections, PC to PC connections, gossip, mundane vignettes, and beast scenes alongside the human scenes everyone leans to. I’m pleased with it!

Tracking Goals
This section was to make more concrete guidance on how to handle players trying to achieve goals. It includes guidance on using progress bars based on difficulty, and how that comes across for each goal. I needed to give a more solid way to mark and record this so that there wouldn’t be unfair imbalance in how quickly some goals were achieved. Plus, this way the Storyteller can have visual representation of the progress.

The top of two pieces of paper titled "The Beastborn" and "A Wolf," with text describing the character following.
A closeup of the character sheets – wolves have packs in the game, did you know? by John W. Sheldon.

Reintegrating into Animal Groups After Exposure
After I’d made a small change to the refresh rate for exposure, I realized I’d never noted that animal group stress doesn’t refresh. I fixed that, and then wrote up some rules on how Storytellers will use a progress bar to help shifters reintegrate with their own group or find a new group, based on difficulty. I think that this, the explanation of exposure, and my new guidance on beast scenes will help Storytellers more actively engage that material.

–
Overall this has been a heck of a lot of work. This is only the ONE section, out of all of the ones in my bulleted list up top. The thing is, I’m not really changing rules for 90% of this – I’m just explaining stuff. More of this whole project is explaining things than I ever thought it’d be, and I’ll tell you, I’m hoping that this makes a difference when people get into the text!

One of the hardest things I’ve had to do is make guidance for Storytellers. It’s not something I do a lot, and honestly, a lot of people in that role are people I don’t actually enjoy working with (just a personality thing, maybe?). I don’t necessarily want Storytellers in Turn to work the same way a D&D GM would, or even a Fate GM. I want them to care a lot more. It’s a heavy workload to run the game, by many people’s counts, especially for a “story game” sort of game – but I wouldn’t have it any other way.

I started a game on Friday as Storyteller, and we have a fantastic group of a Late Bloomer otter, a Showoff raven, and a Beastborn wolf in a town full of intrigue because the shifters know who each other are and there’s formal shifter culture, and it’s incredibly exciting to think of the places it could go. I know I’m gonna have a lot of little progress bars and it’s gonna be exciting to mark each one off. I can’t wait!

A map with circles and lines showing a town, three cards showing a fast forward, a pause, and a rewind, and the Human Form struggles sheet.
Our town, Script Change, and the Human Form struggles – just the stuff I was reviewing while I was taking a break.

And that’s the thing, right? I’m excited about running a game. Me! I have literally pretended to be sick to avoid doing it, and here I am, enthusiastically planning NPCs and secrets, anxiously bugging my friends about playing the next session. I actually did an okay job, and it’s me saying that!

There’s so many things I love about game design, and as hard as it can be to do it on spare dollars, I can’t ever stop being amazed by how much it teaches me. It is a constant learning experience, and I’m very glad that my time spent digging into Turn’s mechanics and text has encouraged me to do something I find terrifying – and made it exhilarating instead!

It’s awesome, and so is Turn. Check it out if you want to see the hard work I’ve been putting in! Thanks for reading <3

This post was supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs. Tell your friends!

To leave some cash in the tip jar, go to http://paypal.me/thoughty.

If you’d like to be interviewed for Thoughty, or have a project featured, email contactbriecs@gmail.com.

approachable theory: Types of Fun

The approachable theory logo, with the text "approachable theory" and an image of two six-sided dice with one pip showing, with a curved line below it to make a smile. The dice are black with cyan for the pip and yellow with black for the pip.
The approachable theory logo.

Hi all! Today I have a post by Selene Tan on Types of Fun! Selene is a game designer who is always up for a design competition, and writes about games and GMing. This post is about types of fun – the ways we enjoy games – using a variety of existing theory and talking about how we can understand those things in our own experiences. Selene said she loves “interacting with dynamic systems that produce unexpected and inspiring outcomes, and it’s even better with friends!” So let’s see what she has to say!

I ask that you remember the requests I put forth about treating my writers with respect and understand that a lot of game design theory is still growing, so definitions can be a little fluid. 

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A table with assorted playing components, dice and playing cards, and play sheets and mats.
A collection of materials for a game of Roar of Alliance (Game and photo by John Sheldon.) during play. 

Whether you call it “fun,” “enjoyment,” or “involvement”: when you’re playing the right game, there’s something that makes you want to play it, and keep playing. But not all games are fun in the same way.

The fun of tactical miniatures combat in D&D 4th edition is different than the fun of a collaborative story/map-making game like The Quiet Year. There are many types of fun, and while people have preferences, none is intrinsically better than any other.
We can sort these different types of fun into categories. Sorting and labeling experiences is a good way to analyze them, and analyzing game experiences is a key skill for game design. There are schemes that classify games or players, and schemes that classify fun directly. I find schemes that classify players reductive. As a player, I enjoy many kinds of games, depending on my mood and situation. Classifying games is more useful, but again, most games combine different types of fun. I prefer to classify fun because as a designer, those are my building blocks. The types of fun I want to focus on are a key part of my design vision.
It’s worth comparing several schemes to learn what works for you. The main factors that I consider when deciding on a scheme to use are:
  1. how applicable it is to the kinds of games I want to classify. If there are a lot of experiences not covered by the scheme, some of the types are unused, or most experiences go under one type, the scheme is a bad fit.
  2. how easy it is to remember. If there are too many categories, or the names are confusing, it’s hard to remember the scheme.
  3. how easy it is to apply. The categories should clearly describe what experiences belong to them, and most experiences should clearly belong to one or two categories, without confusion.
I’m including links to several others, but here are three schemes with different approaches that I find
useful for analyzing RPGs.

Schemes of Fun

8 Kinds of Fun

My personal favorite scheme, and the one that started me on categorizing fun, is 8 Kinds of Fun, originally described by Marc LeBlanc as part of the Mechanics/Dynamics/Aesthetics framework (overview).
Chris Sniezak at Gnome Stew has written in more detail about the 8 Kinds of Fun for RPGs. Here’s a quick summary of the types:
  • Sensation: Game as sense-pleasure. e.g. playing with miniatures and detailed terrain, background music, or props; drawing; manipulating dice.
  • Fantasy: Game as make-believe. e.g. exploring a world from the point of view of a character. This is the most “RPG-y” kind of fun.
  • Narrative: Game as unfolding story. e.g. playing through a story with cool set-piece encounters, crafting a story together with other players.
  • Challenge: Game as obstacle course. e.g. dungeon crawls or combat-focused games, any encounter where the point is for players to overcome it with skill.
  • Fellowship: Game as social framework. Playing as an excuse to hang out with friends. e.g. Kaleidoscope, where you “remember” (invent) a movie with friends and discuss it.
  • Discovery: Game as uncharted territory. e.g. sandbox games, hex crawls, and dungeon crawls.
  • Expression: Game as soap box or self-discovery. e.g. drawing your character or other game elements, creating detailed characters.
  • Submission: Game as mindless pastime. In RPGs, this is usually combined with Fellowship. e.g. Kick-in-the-door play where the goal is to defeat baddies without thinking too hard.
Pros

Classifies types of fun, not games or players
Flexible enough to apply to RPGs, board games, and video games
The eight categories cover a wide range while being easy to remember
Cons

The categories have a video game bias
Some of the word choices seem awkward (submission, soap box)
A table with assorted playing components, dice and playing cards, and play sheets and mats.
I used Roar of Alliance because it has a variety of materials and two parts of play, with strategic combat and “downtime” roleplaying making up the game – both could be very different kinds of fun. (Photo by John Sheldon.)

Quantic Foundry Gamer Motivations

Another scheme is Quantic Foundry’s Gamer Motivations. It classifies reasons that people play games, where each reason is a type of fun. There are two schemes, one for video games and one for board games. The video games scheme has 12 motivations in 6 groups, while the board games scheme has 11 motivations in 4 groups.

These are the video game groupings:
  • Action, containing excitement and destruction, e.g. fast-paced combat like Savage Worlds, or causing mayhem in towns.
  • Social, containing competition and community, e.g. combat in Agon, where whoever deals the killing blow gets more Glory; most D&D play where the party works together; or D&D Adventurer’s League play, where you’re part of a larger community.
  • Mastery, containing challenge and strategy, e.g. dungeons, combat, and character build optimization.
  • Achievement, containing completion and power, e.g leveling up, stomping enemies, and completing quests.
  • Creativity, containing discovery and design, e.g. hexcrawls and sandboxes, creating characters, or coming up with unusual uses for items and spells.
  • Immersion, containing fantasy and story, e.g. speaking and playing in character, following elaborate pre-planned plots, or playing dynamic characters that create emergent plots.
Pros

Data-driven. Quantic Foundry used a combination of survey questions about preferences and favorite games to create clusters of users, then labeled those clusters to get the 11-12 motivations.
Comprehensive. It’s hard to think of anything not covered.
Cons

Since the schemes are for video and board games, some categories are barely used while others are heavily used for RPGs.
It’s hard to remember all 11-12 motivations.
The category “Immersion” has a different meaning than its usual meaning in RPGs

Threefold Model and GNS

The third scheme is the Threefold Model (Drama, Simulation, and Game), including its descendant, Gamism/Narrativism/Simulationism (GNS). The Threefold Model and related models classify play styles or modes by what aspect of RPGs is their highest priority.
Gamism is a play style where the highest priorities are challenge and competition. One example is the Dungeon Crawl Classics “character funnel,” where each player starts with multiple Level 0 characters and tries to keep at least one of them alive to Level 1.
Narrativism/Drama is a play style where the highest priority is exploring theme through character. Different characters address the theme in different ways, and highlight it through decisions. For example, every playbook (character class) in Apocalypse World has a unique take on surviving in the wilderness, from solving everything with guns to building a community.
Simulationism/Explorative is a play style where the highest priority is to experience a world or characters that have deep, consistent internal logic. Investigating crimes in Mutant City Blues, where the Quade Diagram describes how mutant powers relate to each other and therefore what kind of mutant criminal you’re looking for, is an example of simulationism/explorative play.
Pros
Created for RPGs
Only three categories to remember
Cons
Lots of arguments and confusion about the definitions of each category
Ignores some common types of fun, e.g. Sensation or Creativity: Design

Other Schemes

Using Schemes

One way to use a classification scheme is to analyze play. I’ve adapted Nathan Paoletta’s Two List Method for this.

Make a list of all the things you like and dislike when playing RPGs.

Then play an RPG session with that list in mind. Afterwards, write down a new list of things you liked and disliked from that session. If you won’t get to play for a while, make a list from your most recent session, but it’s best to do this while it’s fresh in your mind.

Pick a scheme and classify your list items. For each like, write down the type of fun. For each dislike, write down the type of fun it interferes with, and if applicable, the type of fun it promotes. Don’t worry about forcing things to fit: it’s okay to have some lone items. But if there are a lot, you might want to pick a different classification scheme!

For example:

I like to play characters that help people. (Fantasy, Expression)

I dislike games where everyone plays backstabbing schemers who are out to get each other. (Inteferes with: Fellowship, Submission. Promotes: Challenge, Expression.)

You’ll see trends arise from the lists. Some categories will have more items than others, and some reasons will keep showing up.

The categories that keep showing up in your likes are the types of fun you enjoy the most. You have the most experience playing and creating that type of fun, and the strongest intuition for them. You’ll also find complements: groups of types that keep showing up together, or types that show up occasionally on your list of likes but not in your dislikes. The types that show up on your dislikes list interfere with or detract from the types you enjoy.

When you’re designing a game or wrestling with a mechanic, ask yourself what types of fun you’re aiming for. If the mechanic doesn’t seem to be working, is it encouraging a different type of fun than the one you’re aiming for? Is it related to a fun that interferes with your goal? If you have a design that feels like it’s missing something, try adding one of the complementary fun types.

If you want to read more about classifying and analyzing fun, here are some resources:

A table with assorted playing components, dice and playing cards, and play sheets and mats.
Roar of Alliance is a fun game to play, and now after reading Selene’s article, I can’t stop wondering how someone would evaluate the game in regards to the type of fun – what type of fun is your favorite game?

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Thank you so much to Selene for the excellent article and for making the theories of fun a little more approachable! I learned from reading this article, so I hope you did, too! Please share and keep checking back for more approachable theory!

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Five or So Questions on BFF!

Hi all, today I have an interview with Terri Cohlene and her son, Ross Cowman, designers of BFF! BFF! is currently on Kickstarter and is a game about girlhood, friendship, and adventure – it looks like such a fantastic time, and I hope you love hearing what Terri and Ross have to say about it! 

FYI: This game is nearing the end of its Kickstarter and could super use some support – please share and consider backing an interesting new project that has a diverse cast of characters to play!

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The Kickstarter video is so good! So much happy!


Tell me a little about BFF. What excites you about it?

Terri: Finally! After all this time, it’s getting out into the world! BFF! is a role playing game about friendship, girlhood, and adventure. Originally I wanted to create a game about friendship that girls would love. Turns out, lots of people (young, old and of different genders) are having fun getting into that mindset.

The art is fantastic and provides a backdrop for all kinds of great adventures, from school to sleepovers to summer camp to road trips to just hanging out at the mall.

Ross: Yes, all of those things. And it is really cool to be be working with my Mom, and all of the other folks on the team. BFF has so many people’s wonderful ideas in it!

As a design nerd: I’m excited to be using boardgame techniques to make a role playing game. I think this design space has a ton of potential to bring story gaming to a new audience that maybe didn’t feel like they had access before.

A board game box and board, along with stand up character tokens, "charm" tokens, some cards, and character cards.
BFF! really does look like a combination of a board game and a roleplaying game, and I think that’s awesome!

BFF! seems to be almost a board game + story game hybrid. How did this design come about?

T: Maybe that happened because I didn’t know what I was doing. I started the ball rolling and, because my expertise is “story,” that’s where I began. I was thinking about what was important to ‘tween girls, and, Bingo! Friendship, of course. Then I shared my idea with Ross and he fine-tuned the game design, plus we brainstormed A LOT to get the results we have now. The landscapes were kind of obvious, except the fabulous details we ended up with were totally inspired by the artists and everyone else on the team.

R: When my mom brought me her idea my first thought was to hack Fall of Magic somehow to make this work. We eventually added some unique mechanics like charm bracelets and friendship cards to specifically support the friendship theme.

A series of character tokens representing girls of all backgrounds and types, including disabled characters, girls of color, athletes, musicians, and more! Very colorful!
Speaking of friends, look at all these awesome friends!
Where are the character concepts and fictional structure being drawn from? Have have you come up with mechanics that connect those characters? 
T: The brains of Cowman/Cohlene! Then we added the creativity of the rest of Team Deernicorn. Welcome to our world!!
R: Terri and I came up with initial ideas, then bounced them off everyone else in the team who added their own stuff to the mix. We wanted to have a balance of urban and rural, of indoor and outdoor, of crowded and spacious…
The characters are connected explicitly at the start of the game through the charm mechanics. Everyone trades charms which represent things our characters like about eachother.

A person with dark hair bent over paintng.
The art for BFF! is really adorable, done by artist Veta Bahktina.

The charms sound so cool! What is their function mechanically, and what makes them important narratively?
T: The charms sound cool because they are cool! I initially had the idea of actual charm bracelets that best friend players could even wear between play sessions. While a nifty idea, it wasn’t practical. At all. (Ross wisely pointed this out!) Then we briefly considered having charm necklaces that the friend tokens could wear. Again, not practical. So we ended up with bracelet templates and custom charms brilliantly designed by Taylor Dow. They represent traits or memories that the friends like about themselves or each other. Throughout the game, there are opportunities to add charms, gift them or get rid of them, each time explaining why you are taking this action. They add to the depth of understanding, growth, and bonding (& fun!) that happens during play.

R: The charms are the biggest mechanical deviation from Fall of Magic and really crucial to getting players into the friendship mentality at the start of the game. At the start of the game we each take turns selecting a charm for ourselves and talking about how that charm represents something we like about our character. Then we go around a second time and each give a charm to another character and say something we like about them. Between each hangout each do another charm scene which functions as a kind of mini-debrief in the middle of the game.

The box for BFF! and the heart of the deernicorn logo. The box is colored orange, green, yellow, and blue and has a cast of diverse characters on the cover.
The BFF! box art is so pretty and colorful. I love seeing all of the characters on the cover!
You’ve had some awesome sounding playtests. Were there any unique challenges in playtest with the broad age demographics or with keeping tone? What was some of your favorite feedback?
T: Not really. It’s been pretty easy to get into the middle grade mindset, whether that means imagining an older or younger (or same age) alternate self. Once that’s set, the playing field seems to be pretty equal. Favorite feedback? “I love it! It’s my new favorite game!” Or maybe, “You want to be an eggplant? Be an eggplant!”
R: We’ve had consistently awesome playtests, people grinning, laughing, and just having a really fun relaxing time roleplaying these friendships together. Some of the kids from the YWCA playtest group told us after they were really inspired to make their own characters and hangouts for the game. For me, inspiring some of these young women and gender-queer youth to become future game designers, is the best possible feedback I could ask for.

A visual map of a town, including a local mountain, various buildings, a river, a seaside, and a lighthouse.
The gorgeous map/game board in BFF! is colorful and compelling!

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Wow! Thank you so much to Terri and Ross for the interview! I hope you all enjoyed reading and that you’ll skip on over to the BFF! Kickstarter page to check it out, and share this article with your friends! There’s a few days left to make BFF a reality, and I think it’s totally worth it.

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If you’d like to be interviewed for Thoughty, or have a project featured, email contactbriecs@gmail.com.

Five or So Questions on Yarnia

Hi all! Today I have an interview with Tania Richter about Yarnia – A Yarn Quest Knitting RPG, Tania’s roleplaying game using knitting that’s currently on Kickstarter!

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a person facing a snow covered scene, spreading their arms out to show a green and black shawl patterned like a dragonfly.
A lovely dragonfly patterned shawl.
Tell me a little about Yarnia. What excites you about it?

Yarnia is a quiet little land that has a habit of being invaded by monsters. Eons ago the rulers of Yarnia set up a summoning system to bring in heroes from different worlds to aid them in their constant quest to repel the wool-thieving monsters. Part of what makes this so fun is that it’s a system that allows players to bring their RPG characters into Yarnia or roll an entirely new character for the quest.
A person with dark hair and glasses facing the camera wearing a black shirt and an orange and pink patterned black shawl.
A lovely cowl & a creative designer!
How did you come up with the idea for Welcome to Yarnia and start integrating the knitting aspect into play?

Yarn Quest – Heroes to Yarnia is an RPG knitting pattern that I designed to make a randomly generated pattern. We’ve done quite a few Yarn Quests now, and I wanted a pattern that would allow me to teach people how to double knit, along with introduce new gamers to RPG-style gaming. Welcome to Yarnia is designed as a sort of Introduction to the world of Yarnia. It also offers a gateway between the knitting and gaming communities, allowing members to cross over and bring new ideas to both communities.


What are some of the types of patterns players will encounter during their Yarn Quest?


There is a combination of geometric patterns and pixel monsters. I try and model my art after a lot of the classic RPGs like Pokemon, Final Fantasy, and Dragon Warrior while putting my own spin on it.
A fabric piece with a detailed black and white wing pattern.
Gorgeous wings pattern.
How do the roleplaying and storytelling mechanics function in the game?

The game is heavily based on storytelling as there’s no way to shift the full story on the fly like a traditional RPG. Your role as the player character is to make choices as you progress through the story, and the dice are the main tool you’ll use to determine what charts you’ll knit. As the quests are designed to be played solo or in a group they are often set up as almost a choose your own adventure. At the base of it I believe that RPG’s are a very extensive form of a choose your own adventure.
What makes knitting work with the roleplaying so well, and provide a rich framework for storytelling?

There is a large community of geeks who are also knitters, and knitterly folks love to try out new things. There are so many different stories to tell through the RPG format, and each person’s adventure is going to be different. Overall, it’s fun to experience new things, and Yarn Quest is different from any knitting pattern. The ability to record your character’s journey through a project that is almost a tapestry is a fun and unique method of knitting a pattern.
a person facing trees and grass, spreading their arms out to show a white and black shawl patterned like a bird with outspread wings
This black and white shawl with the bird pattern is so beautiful.
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Thank you so much Tania for the interview! I hope you all enjoyed reading and that you’ll check out the Yarnia Kickstarter today! Make sure to share the post with all of your friends, knitters and gamers alike!


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approachable theory: Tabletop RPG Dice Math

The approachable theory logo, with the text "approachable theory" and an image of two six-sided dice with one pip showing, with a curved line below it to make a smile. The dice are black with cyan for the pip and yellow with black for the pip.
approachable theory logo. (By Brie Sheldon)
Hi all! I have a post today from Michael “Karrius” Mazur (email) about tabletop RPG dice math. Michael is a tabletop RPG player, more often a GM than not, and in his own words, he’s “always had an interest in tinkering with and designing game systems.” I asked him his favorite part about roleplaying games and he said it was that roleplaying games are a creative hobby with a low barrier to entry – and I like that too! 
This post is definitely a lot of information, but I think Michael explains it simply and approachably. Please enjoy!
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Mathematical balancing can be an intimidating subject for RPG designers, but crucial for making a game that works like the designer intends is the solid foundation of having the correct dice rolling method. While familiarity with some methods of rolling are usually understood by designers, what questions to ask when deciding on a dice rolling system, the differences between said systems, and how to pick what’s most suited to the game can be a tough subject. The first question to tackle is often one of how many dice are appropriate.

The most familiar method of rolling dice in RPGs is the simple “roll a 1d20, add a number to it, and compare to a target number,” due to its use in Dungeons and Dragons and related spin-offs. One common modifier to that is instead of rolling 1d20, use the sum of 3d6. These two methods make for useful comparisons of the difference between rolling a single die vs rolling multiple dice and adding them. Both average out to the same result (10.5), and have similar maximums (20 vs 18) and minimums (1 vs 3). The following graph shows the probability curve of rolling each result on a 1d20 and 3d6, comparatively.


A graph showing the probability of rolling an individual result on 1d20 or 3d6. The 1d20 odds are a flat line, with 5% chance of rolling any number. The 3d6 results are a bell curve, as high as 12.5% for 10 and 11, and as low as 0.5% for 3 and 18.
This chart shows the probability of rolling a specific result, visual by Michael. Full details in alt text.

The probability of getting any specific result on a 1d20 is equal – each number is equally represented by once face of the die, giving a 5% chance of rolling any number in its range. The flat nature makes it easy to do calculations with – if you have something that activates on certain numbers being rolled (like critical hits on 20, or special moves on even rolls), it’s easy to just add up those 5%s, even in your head at the table. On the graph “Probability of Rolling a Specific Result,” the line for the 3d6 is a “bell curve” shape – the most common results are in the middle of the dice range, due to an “averaging out” effect, where there’s multiple different sums that can achieve them.

Rolling the maximum or minimum are far less likely due to having fewer combinations of dice that can achieve them. While a 1d20 can be expected to roll within a half point of the average result (10-11) one time in ten, and roll the maximum result one time in twenty, a 3d6 rolls within a half point of the average an expected one time in four, and roll the maximum result one roll out of every 216. Rolling multiple dice causes the “typical” results to be far more likely, and the extremes to be far less so.
click through for more!

The next step on the analysis is to understand that when you’re playing the game, for most rolls you’re not looking to roll an exact result – you’re looking to roll that number or higher – to succeed on the difficulty of a task. The following graph shows what the probability is of succeeding on a task for at various results needed, comparing 1d20 to 3d6.

A graph showing the probability of rolling a specific number or greater on a 1d20 or 3d6. The 1d20 odds are a diagonal line, with a 5% step each increment. The 3d6 results are a curve, with greater odds of success compared to 1d20 for results below 11, and lower odds of success for results above 11.
This chart displays the probability of rolling a specific result or greater, visual by Michael. Full details in the alt text.

What does it mean for the 3d6 that the extreme results are less likely, and average results more common? The biggest take away is simple: that if you’re already favored – and so the average result is a success for you – using 3d6 instead of 1d20 means you become even more so. But if you’re relying on an extreme result to have a chance of success, moving from 1d20 to 3d6 lowers your chance of success even more. Using a 3d6 allows a character to perform “lesser” tasks reliably, but struggle at performing tasks above their skill level. It promises easy success to the specialized, and warns away those not well suited to a task from even attempting it.

Situations where a skilled character repeatedly fails at a given task over and over become far less likely, which can ease frustration or keep a challenging monster fight from becoming trivial due to a few bad rolls from the monster. Systems that roll 1d20 allow a wider variety of task difficulties, which become possible for characters to attempt sooner, but continue to have a noticeable failure rate as a character grows. Rolling 1d20 gives a character less reliability, but also more leeway if they’re being forced into attempting more difficult tasks.

Deciding which tasks – reliable or risky – you want your dice system to encourage isn’t the only change in player behavior you’ll see from it either. An important consideration is how valuable a +1 bonus is to the success at any given task. This won’t be obvious to all players, but some will understand how this works, and others will pick up a sense of it as you play. The following graph shows the probability of a +1 bonus changing a failure to a success for each roll needed.

A graph showing the probability of a +1 bonus to a roll causing a success depending on what number is needed to be rolled for 1d20 or 3d6. The graph is the same shape as the odds of an individual result on 1d20 or 3d6. The 1d20 odds are a flat line, with 5% chance of rolling any number. The 3d6 results are a bell curve, as high as 12.5% for 10 and 11, and as low as 0.5% for 3 and 18.
This chart shows the probability of a +1 helping, visual done by Michael. Full details in the alt text.

The probability of a +1 bonus having changed a failure to a success is the exact same as the probability of rolling the number one fewer than whatever you’re trying to roll. As such, the graph of the +1 bonus helping is the same as the graph of individual roll results, except shifted one number higher. If you’re rolling a 1d20, no matter what task you’re performing, a +1 bonus is giving a 5% greater chance of success. If you’re rolling 3d6, that instead varies.

For tasks which are near impossible or very easy to perform, the +1 might not be worth sacrificing much for. But for tasks that you already have a near-even chance at, the value is very high – over twice as much as you would be getting on a d20! Players are more incentivized to spend resources or time in order to get any small bonus they can when they expect they’re close to the average of an attack or defense.

All of the above shows the difference between 1d20 and 3d6 – but what about other dice, or rolling even more? The following graph shows a comparison between six types of dice rolling methods, all with roughly even averages of 10-11.


A graph showing the probability of rolling an individual result comparing between 1d20, 2d10, 3d6, 4d4, 5d3, and 7d2. The more dice are rolled, the higher the likelihood of rolling the average results are, and the steeper the “bell curve” shape becomes.
This chart shows the probability of rolling a specific result, visual done by Michael. Full details in the alt text.

The more dice are rolled, the steeper the bell curve becomes. Anything that could be said about 3d6 in comparison to 1d20 is even more so for 4d4, and the trend continues to strengthen the more dice are rolled. If you want it so the average result comes up very often, and people with even small advantages are heavily favored, you want a system that rolls many dice at once. Another design consideration that emerges is the range of values possibly – when rolling 1d20, there are 20 possible results. When rolling 3d6, there are only 16 results – and four numbers (9-12) come up almost half of the time. When rolling 7d2, there are only 8 possible results, and two numbers (10-11) come up 55% of the time.

When so few numbers are likely to be rolled, this means that characters gaining small bonuses or penalties can very quickly put them in the realm of instant success or failure. It only takes a +4 to go from the average value to an instant success on a 7d2, as opposed to a +10 on a d20, meaning there’s not a lot of room for individual bonuses to make a difference and still have a chance of failure. This however also allows a stratification in difficulty – it doesn’t require very large bonuses for an expert character to be able to complete tasks a non-trained character cannot, keeping numbers reasonable if you want multiple tiers of difficulty.

In summary, there are multiple considerations that go into choosing the dice rolling method for your game. A single large die, or fewer dice in general, is more appropriate if you want a game to have multiple conditional sources of bonuses such as gear, positioning, and teamwork, to keep tasks from ever seeming too reliable, and to encourage risky maneuvers. Multiple dice, or smaller dice, are more appropriate if you want to make small bonuses matter a great deal, allow characters to treat lower-difficulty tasks as trivial, or to have hard tiers in difficulty. Neither method is inherently superior; instead, both are proper tools for their tasks.

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Thanks so much to Michael for the excellent article! Please share around and I hope you all gained something from reading this post on approachable theory!

If you would like to write an approachable theory post, send an email to Brie with your name, pronouns, and pitch. Responses may be delayed over the next two weeks as Brie is recovering from grad school, but they’ll get back as they can.


Updated 5/9/18 12:55pm Eastern to change “odds” to “probability.” Failure on Brie’s part to not catch that mathematical terminology difference. Sorry!

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Leading with Class

Hello all,

For the past several months I’ve been gearing up to start a new project called Leading with Class. Leading with Class is a web series I’m doing to teach leadership theory and practice using roleplaying games! It’s so exciting to have it together!

There’s a Patreon for the project and I have a Twitter set up that I’ll be trying to use for the project as well. It’s a dream of mine to teach important skills and make knowledge more approachable using games, and this is a great opportunity to use my experience and my education to put some good into the world. I hope you’ll join me!

This post was supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs. Tell your friends!

To leave some cash in the tip jar, go to http://paypal.me/thoughty.

If you’d like to be interviewed for Thoughty, or have a project featured, email contactbriecs@gmail.com.

Five or So Questions on Archives of the Sky

Hi all! Today I have an interview with Aaron Reed on Archives of the Sky, which is currently on Kickstarter! Archives of the Sky is a GMless game with collaborative story telling, set in the broader reaches of the universe where characters seek purpose in the epic galaxy. It seems pretty nifty, so please check out the interview below! You can also peek at at a play example here.

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Kickstarter video for Archives of the Sky.

Tell me a little about Archives of the Sky. What excites you about it?

Archives of the Sky is a tabletop storytelling game that uses epic science fiction as a stage for stories about very human conflicts and values. I love sci-fi and roleplaying, but most of the existing games I know of in the genre focus more on its external trappings: spaceships, laser guns, and so on. There are a few rare exceptions that focus on the more human, philosophical side of sci-fi– “Shock” by Joshua A.C. Newman is one of my favorites– but I wanted a system that also took inspiration from GM-less improvisational games like Microscope, Fiasco, and Downfall. After a lot of iteration and playtesting, Archives is the result.

What excites me about it is that it really evolved into a great vehicle for supporting a group of people to collaboratively create an amazing story together. The mechanics of the game really work to provide a structure for a plot, and to ensure that plot is based around a conflict between beliefs. The characters are then forced to resolve this dilemma somehow, which means they need to get down to the heart of why the believe the things they do and why they’re worth defending– and that tends to lead to some great roleplaying.


four people in a semi-circle around a table filled with index cards, paper, and writing instruments.
A group of people playing Archives of the Sky. Index card tents! yay!
How do you set up a game of Archives of the Sky – who has input into the story, the characters? – and how do plot hooks happen?


Everyone’s involved with setting up the world and telling the story– there’s a role called the Archivist to help facilitate, but everyone has equal creative authority. The first thing you do when you sit down to play is create a House together, a group of near-immortal wanderers who have been exploring the galaxy for thousands and thousands of years. You start by coming up with their core purpose, which becomes the game’s first value. This might be something like “We preserve life,” or “We learn truths,” or even something simpler like “We hunt” or “We sing.” It’s something this House has sworn to pursue as their highest calling.

The rules walk you through fleshing out the House a bit more, giving them a few more Values and figuring out their place in the galaxy, and then each player makes their own character, someone within the House. Characters each have their own personal Values, which may or may not line up with the House’s Values, or with each others’. These are the seeds of stories– think of Captain Kirk in the early Star Trek movies, who has sworn to uphold the Federation’s mission of peace, but will also “never forgive” the Klingons for the death of his son. Clearly, he’s going to have to face this conflict sooner or later. (Sentences starting “I always” or “I never” make great Values, by the way.)

Once the game begins, players take turns staging Scenes that advance the plot. Each scene is based around a Question which that player has about where the story is going. So if a mysterious transmission was detected in the previous scene, the next player might ask “Who sent the transmission?” as their Question– or might introduce a new complication by asking something like “Why can’t we find the source of the transmission?” Everyone then collaboratively plays a scene around answering the Question, both playing their character as well as making things happen in the story world (like a GM).



Some "trove" cards, created by the players to support storytelling - the words are machines, magnitude, nightfall, prisoners, absorbtion, decaying, and disturbance.
Some “trove” cards, created by the players to support storytelling.

What are the basic mechanics like for social and other conflicts, and how do they engage players emotionally?


Players have the option of resolving conflicts through roleplay, but there’s a mechanic that provides a bit of randomness and an uncertain outcome that can be used by any player who wants it. Another thing you do at the start of play is create a deck of index cards called the Trove, each one with a single word on it. (The rules encourage you to pull these words from your favorite sci-fi novels.) When you want to resolve an uncertain outcome, you can draw from the Trove and let the word inspire the outcome. What’s great about this is the interpretation can be anything you want: literal, metaphorical, even tangential. So the word “fire” might inspire one person to narrate a catastrophic explosion, while another might read it as the fire in someone’s eyes as they pull off a wild maneuver.

Where emotions come in is when the story gets to a Dilemma, a conflict between two Values. This is a situation where the characters need to decide on a course of action, but either decision would threaten one of the Values in play. Say the players have created a House with a core Value of staying hidden; but one of the characters has a personal value to protect the helpless, and the House has a chance to save a lot of lives by coming out of the shadows. Can that character convince the others to change their minds and go against their House’s highest value? Or will she find a way to live with betraying what she believes for a greater good? It’s not an easy decision, because any character who acts against a Value they believe in might have to Adapt at the end of the session, making a permanent change to their character.

An example of a Value, "We Always Show the Truth" with one in the background reading "We Record Tragedies."
An example of a Value, “We Always Show the Truth.”

What was your playtesting process like? Tell me about any realizations you had, and how you dealt with necessary changes.

I’ve been making digital games for a long time, but this is my first fully finished and released tabletop roleplaying game, and one of the things that surprised me was how much more playtesting and iteration tabletop takes. With digital games, you spend some amount of time thinking of ideas, a hellishly long amount of time programming them, and then some amount of time playtesting: ideally throughout the process, but often closer to the end. With tabletop, almost all of your iteration time is spent actually playing the game and seeing how it works, with a few hours here and there to think through problems people are having and revise the rules.

Archives morphed a lot as it went through close to twenty fairly significant revisions (i.e. not just tweaking wording) over about two years. It accumulated more and more rules as I tried to get all the parts to work the way I wanted them to. The downside was this is as you went through a game, you kept bumping into new rules, and needing to stop to explain them. Finally I sat down and counted up the number of individual rules and mechanics in the game, and there were something like 27 of them. I challenged myself to try to make a version of the game that had only 10 concepts that needed to be explained. I think the simpler version that came out of that was when I really cracked the code of how the game worked, and from then on everything was just refinement.

The biggest two realizations I had were A) the game was really about Values, not the plot events (in the original version, you did a lot of writing down plot points on cards, moving them around the table, taking special moves to revise them, etc.– in the final version, all that focus is placed on the Values in play instead). And B) A bunch of separate mechanics in older versions could be combined into the simple rule “Ask a question to begin a scene.” So at certain times of the game that’s a fixed question; at some times there are some questions that make more sense than others; but it’s only one rule to explain, and everything else follows naturally from that framing, which simplified things a lot.

How do you put the “epic” into the game, with mechanics, narrative, and structure?


I wanted all players to get involved in telling the story: contributing details to scenes, helping build the world, and so on, but in practice people were often afraid to contribute when it wasn’t their “turn” to stage a scene. So I added the concept of two meta-roles, called the Epic and the Intimate, that people take turns playing. Your job when you’re the Epic is to look for opportunities to make the story huge and awe-inspiring in scope… so if someone mentions a spaceship, you might jump in with “It’s three miles long and made from some incredibly black material that totally swallows up the starlight.” By contrast, the Intimate looks for moments to keep the focus on emotions and small human details: they can ask a player what their character is feeling at any time during a scene, or add small touches of detail, like a texture or a significant glance between two characters. This system works really well to give players “permission” to tweak the story, and having those two things to focus on help make the stories feel like the kind of sci-fi I want to emulate.
The Archives of the Sky cover, reading "Archives of the Sky, a tabletop storygame of galactic scope and human ideals, by Aaron A. Reed."
The Archives of the Sky cover.
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Thanks so much to Aaron for the interview! This was a real cool game to learn about. I hope you all enjoyed the interview and will check out the Archives of the Sky Kickstarter today!

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