a conversation with matt colville

hello everybody welcome to the stream this this is becoming a habit I did I did this once we had a thing where I was like hey I want to interview somebody about a game let's make them come on my twitch channel and it just keeps happening and I would like to thank Matt Colville for continuing to make this happen look it's I'm happy to be here yes so Matt for for people who are not already familiar with your mighty bodies of work would you like to tell us a little bit about who you are and why you might be here I'm a writer a designer I started in the tabletop industry in 1997 at a tiny little company called Last Unicorn games I worked on the Dune collectible card game I was a writer and designer on the dune the short live - dune role-playing game we did two different systems for start official Star Trek the RPG books I was a designer on the second one I did the starship combat system for that I designed I wrote a whole the in the the introductory box for the Lord of the Rings RPG called the Lord of the Rings adventure game then I jumped ship went into video games worked on mercenaries won mercenaries to a game called evolve that I am still incredibly proud of I was a designer on the first two of those games and I was a lead writer on the last to evolve was the first game I ever worked on you know depending the way my career has gone it may be the last actually where I was the lead writer and we got to create an entire science fiction universe from scratch I don't know if we'll ever get that opportunity again that was pretty special and then we started a YouTube channel III say we I started YouTube channel the Royal we it's you I like saying we just because it makes it feel like this is collective effort the wrong no I do I do precisely the same thing and I don't know where I picked it up and I don't know when it start happening but I'm like today we'll be doing this or today we're playing this game I'm like no I'm playing it you know it's literally you it early just to me yeah but I mean if it was literally you there'd be no audience there'd be no reason to do rest so we'd you do feel like the audience is part of the process so I always say that so we started a YouTube channel about hey largely predicated on the fact that many of many all the people I was running D&D for that I had met in the last 10 or 15 years would not then even did matter how much fun they were having playing the game it would never occur to them to run and when I would confront people that I thought would be good Dungeon Master's they'd go oh I could never do what you what you do that's crazy and I was like it's really not that hard and it's a lot of fun so I said I need to make more Dungeon Master's that was literally what I thought I need to make more DMS how can I do that I'm gonna just start a YouTube channel saying look it's not only is it fun it's actually pretty easy it just looks it does the job the Doge mask just make it look all like it's esoteric and ineffable to make it seem like we are always speaking ex cathedra and so that did really well the YouTube channel did really well then we did Kickstarter and to make a supplement to Dungeons & Dragons about strongholds building strongholds and the rewards you might get for building a stronghold which harkens back to a style of play I have a lot of affection for from the 1970s and that's something we can talk about is the difference in styles of play on the idea of fashion in its I feel like you're you're you're filling a niche that a lot of people have never had any access to like when I play D&D I don't know how I hit it big because at ninth level I don't get to roll for my followers and stuff anymore so I'm like well what do I do now like I just yeah I I mean the the core different editions of the game have handled this better than others but it's definitely right now I believe you're just the thing you're doing a first level fighting monsters it's basically the same thing you're doing in fifteenth level uh-huh right and and I think fourth edition because it had different literally like scales of play you add like eventually you were there was epic level play there's there was heroic something an epic level play had better guidelines for okay now now you should be dealing with cosmic powers right start off trying to save the village then maybe you're trying to save the country then later on you're trying to save the world right and so yeah there was a in the original version of the game you built a stronghold when you picked about seventh or ninth level and the reason you did that explicitly was because now it was time for you to worry about politics now it's time for you to stop worrying about killing orcs you can still adventure you know richard the lionheart managed to run a country while he was adventuring that wasn't a problem for him and and but the idea is that you start caring about more important things than just dungeon delving so that's the thing i'm trying to bring back and the kickstarter did you know it did pretty well and so you know there's a whole lot of people who that's how they know me like why not or the YouTube channels how they knew I mean they didn't have any idea who I was as a designer or writer before that and I don't know why they should and so that's how we are here now that's that's the that's the life story well I was trying to think it was good you did an excellent job summarizing your entire career good good job curriculum vitae in 30 seconds yeah I was thinking about this because I was like alright when when was the actual first time that I interacted with with Matt Koval like what is the origin story there and my first thought was like as often happens on the internet people who are fans of one thing become fans of the people who are connected to that thing and so I have overlap with lots of other didi people and I think somebody tweeted I mean like hey you should check out Matt Koval stuff I think you guys would would be you'd have some interesting things to say to each other and you know I know like to YouTube but the more I thought about it I think the first time that I interacted with you indirectly was you were making games when I worked at a game store yeah so you certainly stocked some of the games my interactions would definitely have been with with your your works ye mighty before we got to the point where the internet was the thing that made people who play dungeons the Dragons famous enough to have fan base yes famous I mean it's it's a word that has lost all meaning so yeah I think of so for what from what you were you were laying out there I want to jump right on on something right away that that idea of like your design of your new book of circles and followers solving what you perceived to be a gap in the in the design space in D&D because for me being familiar with older editions and older versions of D&D in that style of play it yeah it feels like there was something that was there and then like a like losing a tooth you're like wait wasn't there something something used to be in that space and so it's cool seeing that return what I mean what about that that's why do you think that that has that has changed like why are we where we're at I think that Wizards of the coast specifically I don't this is a very kind of inside baseball stuff and I used to work at Wizards of coast like they bought the company I worked at and although we were never in their office so I say I worked it was the coast I didn't work in their office so I didn't really work there but I had access to the knowledge of what was happening and this would been about 2001 I think 2002 the right literally right when the third edition came out I think they have internally starting in around 2000 when they bought D&D they have identified what is the brand of dandy and the brand of D&D is basically fighting monsters yes and so things that fall far outside that they're like well if you want to do that that's fine we are gonna focus on fighting monsters and that has impact on me in a couple of ways because it's the reason warfare has never been core and never will be core to Dungeons and Dragons yeah there will never be a core system in those three books for how to resolve large combat there may be a paragraph or two where it's like okay well roll a die and make it a skill check or something but it'll never be a system and that's not because they're dumb it's not because they couldn't do it it's because they have identified that as being outside the core brand yeah they're very they're very very different narratives right like the idea of King Arthur and the knights of the round table wandering angle and like fighting the Saxons and what-have-you is one type of story and then the King on his throne commanding his armies is a whole other type of story completely yeah it is it is and it's a fantasy furthermore this is something that is a hard-fought lesson on my part I definitely have that fantasy of commanding armies and being being a Duke I think that's I think that's super cool I as a player love to do that but in the 20 years that I would feast upon my players this kind of stuff what I learned was only about one or two players at the table in any given campaign actually want to do that stuff and the rest of them and this was it took a lot of me trying put myself in other people's shoes and me trying to empathy for these players that are happy it eventually has learned that if you showed up to the table to fight monsters and everything that comes from that all the amazing storytelling I don't mean to in any way to mean fighting off you know I don't think we need to I don't think we need to expend time and breath on excusing Dean Dee's core play values like people know that they're good we don't know it's okay okie-dokie Wizards has enough self-esteem we don't really need to be like you know we're not trying to hurt your feelings Wizards of the coast I don't want people watching to think when I say the game is by killing monsters that I'm somehow saying that there's as a result it's not also that story I think the to go very closely Ganon and although I highly developed ideas about what it means to call a game a storytelling game aware that D&D is one of them the players who apart from the one or two players who want to do like that fantasy yeah the other ones often find it distasteful uh-huh they they they're like what is this peanut butter doing my chocolate I'm allergic to peanut butter alright oh oh I thought everybody liked this no I'm wrong not only do they not like it they're like get that out get that out and so eventually were fourth edition I finally I think cracked that nut and made it so that my warfare system is simultaneous with an encounter it happens while you're fighting the armies of the gates while you're fighting the leaders of the army and if you don't want to command an army you're literally just playing D&D and your writing becomes opt-in my warfare system is opt-in unlike actual war you get to decide whether you go or correct yes yeah well that's what makes a fantasy and what I discovered as many players who historically would not have been interested that helped kind of onboard them because they're like well my turns over and there's a couple of we have a couple of units that haven't done anything yet screw it I'll be stupid for me too and then they start commanding the units and then they start engaging with the combat so when it wasn't this style of play I wasn't forcing on them and it was just a thing you can do if you want if you don't want don't worry about it then they there were a lot more ok with it and it became a lot more it instantly became much more successful system so warfare and having a stronghold and influencing the world politically are two things that I don't think any any stewards of D&D since TSR have really thought was that important and even back in the event original game they did think it was important they just assumed that you would have your own rules for that and they would say yeah it makes sense because you're you're seeing a game that in in its own way like evolved from war being the default right like this this is a game that came from chainmail which is a tabletop wargame and so why would you want to go back to that we already did that we came from that place yeah a lot of those guys had that stuff right they had it it was like and so if they wanted to do it they had these other systems and so when I was coming up in the 80s it was typical for every DM have their own system for when it says here in the book at seventh level a fighter gets a key every DM had their own system for what that meant hmm and that was you know part and parcel of being a dungeon master back then and one of the things I love about fifth edition hats off from my point of view to mike Merle's is it he has made they have developed a system he and Jeremy Crawford have developed a system that is incredibly easy to house rule and so and the result is people house rule it people do now makeup so it's my hope that if people get this stupid book I'm working on if they get this book and they're like oh this isn't really what I wanted that they do feel empowered to them at least now that they've got one it one answer they can come up with where you have no answers when you don't when you have no idea this can't even be done you don't I don't think you worked or once you realized oh I could house rule something like this then you will yeah well and I think that's the difference between leaving this massive design void and just saying like make it up yourself versus saying this is a way to do this because every I think every player and every group of people that play Dungeons the Dragons or any role playing in really if you played it long enough you start finding the stuff that that rubs you the wrong way and well that's where that's where fantasy Heartbreakers comes right yeah I'm gonna publish my I'm gonna self publish my own game take it to Gen Con and it's it's super important that my game is different from D&D because my elves don't have 20 years yeah or like I don't use fancy and magic everything else is exactly the same but say no points though yeah yeah actually you said something on Twitter that I thought we could talk about which is how much you hate the using is it even rule zero we're talking about using rule zero to excuse bad design yeah and say like hey man if you don't like it you can just change it which sort of what I was just talking about you're like my book well so gleep yeah there's there's two two things that get conflated I think when I talk about rule 0 or the golden rule right it's this I associate it with with the like white wolf IRRI game advice versus the Gygax ian like you can make up your own rules cuz you're the G I could do whatever you want your god those two things get conflated a lot but the thing that the thing that I tend to refer to is this like unguided empty space where the rulebook says either very early on or or as secret advice to the game master like guess what none of the rules actually matter like the story is all the matters and if the rules get in the way just throw them in the trash and say whatever the coolest thing that comes to mind is and like that to me is really really lazy design and it tries well for the game being bad and I think your point is correct me if I'm wrong that you feel like it is a it's a cover for bad design that it is a thing that people say to excuse the fact that they're not actually designers they're really just writers I think intentionally or otherwise I think some people think that it's a good game design principle I think some people think that like giving the GM this this thing is empowering them in some way instead of just like taking their parachute away and throwing them out of the plane yeah I think I don't think anyone like I'm not I'm not gonna go out there and say like Justin Achille made up the golden rule to cover for vampire being bad I'm sure that the team thought they were doing some really good game design and some bits of it are and certainly it has a place in the in the design space but I also did it it's often used to say well if you don't like this rule that we wrote for whatever reason go ahead and just make up your own I mean that gives us a question of what is the purpose of rules in a role-playing game right what is the purpose of rules in a role-playing game and I think I know I think I haven't let have an answer but I'm I don't know if there is like that it's that it's the shared language that we need in order to communicate and make the game move forward and if you really did feel like if you really did feel like you didn't need the rules it didn't matter what the rules so you could just make stuff up what's going to happen is if you follow that really followed it you would end up with a really a bunch of unhappy players because they would never really know what the hell cannot what what how is the DM going to rule on this because he's constantly just making it up and having any any rule set gives us an objective because it's written down somewhere an objective language that we can use and depend on to make decisions in the game yeah yeah that it's so I like that I do like that Gygax e inversion I actually tend to tend to be a Gary Gygax apologist which is God it's okay I never thought I would be doing but that notion of like when what he meant was design your own stuff design your don't just throw it out and replace it with nothing the thing is I think I think the gay Gary Gary Gygax is a he was a better game designer than he was a person capable of communicating what he actually meant because I think that if you read if you read the Dungeon Master's guide and yes and that first Dungeon Master's guide is incredible you know one there's a Gygax ian is a term in the dictionary now yeah right the way that dude wrote because they needed to invent a word for the way this one guy wrote yeah the Dunn's of the first edition a D&D Dungeon Master's guide is I think the earth text of Gygax Ian literature right like if you read it there is this way that he is trying to impart things that we've found better ways to say since then but there's the the thing that gets caught up in in the whirlpool of Gygax is it's about authority right he's a very like the GM has 99 percent of the authority in the game and the other 1 percent is split between the rules and the players yeah and so what I think we end up with is this mythologizing it goes back to what you were saying about what makes being the GM seem so scary is that guy gets sent the GM the GM up is this godhead figure right that like you will have infinite ultimate power as the game master and for most people I think looking at that as outsiders it's like I do I'm not ready for that I do not want that I don't that sounds terrifying I don't want to have to be responsible for everything let someone else be a god I just want to fight monsters and so we all try to like defer this responsibility because it's so pumped up by this this Gygax ian super myth of the of the game master to the point where i think that he had a bit of an identity crisis where he was like well i wrote these rules and i'm perfect and amazing so the rules have to be perfect except the game master is also perfect he gets caught in this circular logic thing where it's like the GM is god because i say they are because i'm the ultimate authority but then the GM is and we can get caught I also think that we we suffer because we are reading stuff that that dude wrote over a course of 20 years yes and that when he was the head of TSR and trying to get people to buy his products and not other people's products he said very different things that he did when Dean Dee was the only game in town it was just this thing heinous but he's made up and they were selling it you know well yeah you compare it you compare the way dandy gets talked about in interviews in the sort of early 80 is the the kind of high TSR era where Gary's talking about dandy versus like the early and alarms and excursions right where it's just like hey here's this game me and my friend Dave made go ahead and make up your own stuff for it that would be cool and it really mimics the the way that's sort of the indie tabletop space like small press tabletop stuff feels now oh sure you look back at that the alarms and experience stuff you look back at those old articles and it's like oh yeah this is just like small press game designers talking about a game like hack young each other's work and stuff and then at some point it became a business and like you said it shifted and Gary was like no everything else is substandard product yeah yeah it's not really playing unless you're playing with our product that's where a lot of the language he gets criticized comes from it's when he was shifting away from being a game developer and into being a business man and trying to it's I'm always super impressed that's always this blew my mind when I got a chance to read the three little brown booklets Jeffy brought to game night one night where like one of the first things Gygax says is he's like listen man sooner or later your player is gonna be like hey I play a dragon crate and he's like he's like yeah if they asked that same shirt yes and that that notion which I mean is is it I think every dungeon master goes through that fate every game master goes to that phase of being like well it's not the rules then no because the rules are what they know and the rules the existence of the rules gives them safety and gives them this feeling of I can if I follow these instructions than I am being a dungeon master or a Game Master and what Gary was saying was what's really important is like empowering your players to have fun that that's what we're here for and so if they ask this question just say yeah so tell me yeah but then try to make it so that it's it's you know like a you know your baby dragon or something great advice yeah advice and that's well that's where you run into the problem that I think game design needs to solve right because if you get into a situation where one of your players says I want to play dragon and you're like okay cool we can work that out I can make that happen but when your other player's is if he plays a dragon this will not be fun for me anymore right and you're like dude yeah and so suddenly suddenly and this is why you know when when I whenever I hear game designers talk about design whether it's video games or tabletop or whatever designing for fun I'm like stop just stop trying to throw fun out the window because everybody's fun is different and my fun might be slogging through the muck and and suffering as a character but your fun might be being a fantasy superhero and the rules need to fit either both of those things or one of us needs to change according to the game that we're playing we all need to buy in and agree with that because there's no one rule set that can be designed to be fun for everyone like it's just I feel bad I fight it's a strange position for me to be in because I definitely haven't gone through the 90s and having played you know dozens of different role-playing games and really gone down the story is all that matters rabbit hole I have since spent the last 15 maybe longer being like you know what game these basically it's the only game I need I can run everything I can everything I want to do I can do in this framework I now find myself in the position especially on Twitter seeing these people who they watch I think critical role is the is the patient zero for this they watch critical role and they want to do what those guys are doing but Matt Mercer is this is not obvious I think I don't think this is August you watch patrol Matt Mercer is a war gamer Matt Mercer plays by the way he plays a war machine which I think of as being a very complex game I don't know if you're familiar with war machine but it's supposed to be awesome cheaper and easier than or amber because you need fewer units unit there or however however each unit has like three Magic the Gathering cards of text with all its different special abilities and as a result war machine ends up being quite a complex game and so that's where he's coming from he's inculcating that kind of war gaming a light right they don't when they do a dungeon crawl there's maybe three rooms it's not six levels and hundreds of rooms but he's inculcating that D&D which of course I love D&D is is a negotiation role-playing investigation pack you know to boot fight and there's always gonna be a fight and there are people online I'm watching people online who are like but with though does it have to be right and you're like you're like you know what you know what you probably don't know this but there's a shitload of games out there that have wildly different solutions if any for that fight part and I should I should do something with Matt Matt and I should do something like this where we talk about like all the different games that are out there for people because there's definitely some there's a dial and you can that dial is incredibly fine control over it and you can dial in whatever kind of narrative experience you're looking that's and that's the thing that I think for me is a really big pet peeve in in role-playing games and I think that Wizards of the coast in critical role by extension have encouraged this mindset that dandy is the only game anyone will ever need for anything and that you can do everything every kind of story can be told by slightly adjusting Dungeons & Dragons in some direction rather which is patently false like you can do a lot with dandy certainly but you can't I think okay I think it might be true except that you're still yeah I think you could tell any story you wanted inside D&D but some of those stories would not have a whole lot to do with the rules right so I guess that's what I mean like this and this is this is sort of like I think that this is something that the OS are kind of latches on to this idea that if it's not in the rules the players are expected to just bring it themselves narrative lis and work it out outside of the rule set which I don't think you can I go I don't want to give D and E credit for that like if I play a game and if I play a game of Dungeons & Dragons and it's a space faring intrigue game in which no one ever draws a sword or cast a fireball spell we're not playing Dungeons & Dragons right sure no I don't you don't engage with the rules you're not actually playing the game and so I don't think that wizard should get to sell copies of their game based on that when there are other games that can support I get that and and I think there's a difference between like the setting and genre right I think you can do a swashbuckling science fiction story in D&D it just wouldn't be rocket ships you know you can do a Wild West game in D&D she just wouldn't six guns but it's when you get down to so definitely obviously the indie doesn't an elated that stuff it's when you get down to well I really want to run more like a soap opera style game and but yet my dungeon master a couple of times the session expects me to want to care about armor class right what does armor class have to do with General Hospital's General Hospital obscure reference now I know I mean I'm a bet I know I know what that is but you get it right I understand yeah here are still these game mechanics here are still these assumptions fighting monsters one-third of the core rulebook is about monsters not about like plot points now or you know NPC development and so if the dungeon master often feels empowered to tell lots of different stories against the players who end up shafted because they're like I don't want to fight monsters when and there are games out there like ten candles and stuff and that don't really have anything to do with fighting monsters or combat and people when they play it and the light goes on they really like and so that's what that's what I hope that people understand is it well I'm sitting here as a somebody who could who will can play D&D literally for the next thirty years and not feel like they're missing out on anything it's other people I feel bad for it's other people who don't come from that is fine it's the children that are wrong they're not that's my point now I understand it these folks deserve their own game they deserve to be able to enjoy their watching for instance critical role which I watch which I love they're watching the show they love this show and they want that experience they don't realize how closely interwoven those monster fighting rules are to that and and they they don't maybe they don't know that it can be unfuck yeah and I know that bugs Matt I know the he talks about it he's like I keep really when he does other streams he loves doing other streams where he's a player in someone else's game it's not deep right when that and that's the trick right I think that like there's there's this halfway point and I think the dm's guild is is a space where this is either happening already or is going to happen more and more where people will try to be like this is the soap opera supplement for fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons and here's some new soap opera focused class and like here is my very and it's like your your you're halfway to a point where you should just throw out what you're doing I make another game that's just making the games I find in the game or go make into the game because there are lots of games out there and and you can and that's so that's that's something that I think about as somebody who is like I said steeped in this culture and perfectly happy here in my warm hot tub of D&D that I don't want other people to feel like they've got to jump in this this hot tub because this is the only one it's not the only one there's lots of games out there and there's there's a you can custom tailor the experience for yourself yeah well I think it sort of speaks to like understanding the difference between like you said sort of setting and genre or setting in theme like you can and I've seen lots of people do this even published like you look at the difference between polished campaign settings right dark Sun and ever on and spell jammer are all still very much Dungeons and Dragons settings they tell Dungeons & Dragons stories they are about the same things D&D is about and that's why I think they fit but you start to get into things like birthright and Ravenloft and you need to start bending the rules to the point where you're at that tension point where the rules are there they're white-hot and they're ready to snap because you're pushing them so hard to try to make the story work yeah like when I I remember when I I loved birthright by the way and I it was my favorite setting it was actually it was my favorite of course it was look at look at the book you're making like yes no yeah thank you ever that in like one piece of back when I was back when I was playing it and other people back because like you especially when you came up cuz you're about ten years after me D&D in the 90s was seen as a kids game like grown-ups grown-ups didn't play D&D what's wrong with you right people would say well if that's what you want why don't you just play Pendragon right like that was what I would get I would get what I would say oh I'm running birthright there'd be like why would you use D&D for that why not use this other and they would they would argue much better system but the 90s was definitely a time of storytelling being primacy over over in ping service to story not actually like engineering it rightly cuz I this is this is the thing when it comes down to like I hate this divide this is a divide that I I'm it's very much something that came up as part of my like game design learning space like as a result of things like the Forge and like this this idea of like Ron Edwards story game right as being an independent thing from like I don't know I guess a role-playing game which i think is a horseshit distinction because I think is absolutely a story game in the sense that all role-playing games are about fundamentally ending up at that point where you're like we can tell the story about the game that we played like this is a correct thing okay so this you just said something I think is super important by the way because I this is something I think Craig Robinson one of the folks that follows me on Twitter I think was him who said that he when I said I don't I don't think D&D as a storytelling game because I'm a game designer that's where I'm coming at it from I'm coming from a know if I wanted to sit down and design a story for telling a game for telling stories yeah it would have act 1 act 2 act 3 okay why their role to see how the protagonist is this a reversal what's the inciting incident right what was this it would head that would be what it would be about and there's none of that in D&D no he said to me D&D is a game and then as soon as you're done with that session yes that's when the story begins it's not a storytelling game at the table no one's telling stories at the table they're rolling 20-sided dice to see if they can beat the armor class correct yeah storytelling starts as soon as we're in the parking lot five minutes later graves in the next three hours was like I thought we were I thought we stopped because we were tired and we just spent three hours in the parking lot at one o'clock in the morning telling ourselves the sport and and that's completely the thing that for me changed the way that I look at role-playing games is the there's there's a distinction between the narrative which is which is the way the term that I use to describe the the ongoing imaginary things they're having at the table the I swing my sword the orc take some damage and falls down I jump over the orc because now in my mind in the narrative he's lying on the ground we all agree on that yeah a story is later when you're like remember that time that I jumped over that orc but that's not the story and you don't you don't tell those yeah that has all the rules of story that thing that happens in the parking lot has all the rules of storytelling if you want to play actual storytelling game go get you know the Baron Munchhausen role-playing game right yeah there's board games and card games that help you they say like okay it's your turn you make up a character you're making up the protagonist now you make up the antagonist and you you you follow the rules of sitting down and writing a story but Dungeons & Dragons and and role-playing games there are places where you you butt up against those two things right where there's there's a little bit of that that kind of like liminal space between them but for the most part I would say that role-playing games are a distinct thing from a game that encourages you to take turns telling a story correct I remember seeing like in feng shui mmm which had luke rules which is sidekick the sidekicks the guys in the background the nameless faceless guys in the background and there was a rule that was if any of the players asked hey what's that guy's great they suddenly like gain levels and yeah they become where they become they go from being a one hit point dude to being and I was like that is a that is the beginning of treating the game by the rules of storyteller I ate narrative I anything yeah I love that stuff I absolutely love that stuff because I think that I think that the idea that we first and foremost the idea that we differentiate between like a story game at a role-playing game is it's not a helpful distinction it just alienates people I think you're probably right yeah as a storytelling game that's me being a very new lead designer nerd it's sure and it's not it's not me trying to that's the reason I get in trouble I say those because people feel like I'm disparaging this thing they love because it has so much to do a story no totally yeah I think false dichotomy it's a false dichotomy it's me it's the same it's the same as the dichotomy between like this game is yeah like a story focused or rules focus it's like the rules help you create the story you will tell later after you're done playing great yes but I think the other thing that you can do is that I think understanding what makes an interesting story not just as a GM but as a player engaging in this game makes you better at it and this can be at the design level like in Feng Shui or even in even in a game that's like incredibly crunchy like I remember reading gurps for the first time reading and reading the gurps one of the groups like GM books not the main book of the companions and it there is a set of rules that say if you would like your game to feel like an action movie here are six rules that will do that and one of them is called imperial imperial stormtrooper marksmanship Academy and it write the rule was the rule was that no NPC will ever hit a PC on the first shot they will always miss the first shot to warn the PCs that they're there then the guy in the gunfight can begin and I love that understanding of what makes something feel interesting and cinematic but not just applied all wishy-washy at the table but applied through the rules through real rules yeah real very quite crunchy rule set in groups yes I know bench we had one too and now we're gonna layer on top of it actual rules from narrative actual like screenwriters stuff right that you none of which is in D&D by the way that but that screenwriter nerd stuff okay at this point you're gonna have a reversal at this out of the frying pan into the fire plotting and all the things we take for granted depending on what genre we're in like you could very easily have rules like that for westerns now about how the characters are allowed to behave based on what we know mechanic mechanics for how the players and characters are I mean the NPC's are allowed to behave based on and that's what and that's what Pendragon did right that's the sort of Pendragon is big thing was that like you have to act like a knight because that's what the rules say you're not allowed to be a pirate or a samurai in Pendragon because you you have if you want it to be if you wanted to hack Pendragon to be about pirates you have to change all of your virtues right pirates don't care about it that's right exactly there's not they don't have the seven nightly virgins yes you could you could very easily done you know chivalry you very easily do Pendragon as a semi game by replacing chivalry go with Bushido it's not that you couldn't do a pirate game right it would be that would be but reading Pendragon you could design your own you go up right what are the virtues of being yeah so that's the kind of stuff that I hope people understand as I sit here perfectly happy I could talk about D&D in the design history up for weeks that there are nearly infinite I remember we were just at my new office we just got our new gaming table assembled so we inaugurated it last we play games and when we were leaving I've got stacks of RPG books sitting around waiting for shells my friend tom was just like transfixed he was having like a liminal moment at some random book and I walked about what is he looking at he was looking at the in nómine hmm he was look at the innominate infernal players guide on the art on it which was insane and I had to explain what in nómine was and that there was a time when there was an entire role-playing game and the moderately successful one I think where you played angels and demons and had a completely different rules set and the dice you rolled with three six sided dice 666 system and you know that stuff is out there and the combat wasn't that big a deal in that game and you know I wish I just hope that people understand it like you don't have to try to find your fun inside to this one edition of this one game that Matt Koval happens to love a bunch of other nonsense out there well yeah and I think that's the thing right is that when when I say burning wheel is my favorite role-playing game yeah sometimes people hear D&D sucks like I I formed different words with my mouth then sometimes end up in people's brains yeah and I think that's a product of this sort of very cyberpunk dystopian world that we live in where brand loyalty is personally reaffirming yeah I get the same thing when I say D&D is not a storytelling game that's ridiculous right get angry because they feel like I'm saying that the thing they love is bad yeah it's like and I wish I wish I wish people wouldn't think that because obviously that's not what you mean and that's not like you arts you are quite evidently steeped in the history and culture but you you were one of the writers and designers of dungeon world yeah which is crazy love letter to D&D late writes the opposite is true to where like if I say this other game that I like is good and you hear Dini sucks then what do you hear when I say dandy sucks like you're not hearing that part of my conversation either like I think that I think there's there's nuance to be gained from appreciating a bunch of different games or like knowing what's good and what's not good about any given thing yeah absolutely and also just knowing like what that it's okay to like the same game for different reasons yeah and it's like so yeah that's that's it's I think that just as we're seeing this explosion in interest in role-playing which I largely credits a critical role because of the way they show like any new anybody can now watch this show and go oh is that what it is that looks fun it's my hope that we see a lot more different and interesting games start to come out to cater to people who want to have that experience but don't necessarily want to fight monsters it's really it's really interesting if you look back at the history of of role-playing games and think about kind of what could have been there was a period in the mid nineties where TSR was going out of business because of mismanagement and and some bad decisions on their part they were they were at this point where they could have fallen apart forever White Wolf was was a big deal vamsee was vampire was huge and people people in the popular culture were saying things like Oh rock and roll is over techno is the new thing forever yeah we could live now in a world it is very possible there's an alternate reality not too far from our own where dungeons and dragons died and and games like vampire became a predominant paradigm and we're all listening to Moby and like being excited about being Clan ven drew yeah that's true I remember when I started in tabletop one of my co-workers and I he had been in the industry for a long time I was a complete newbie he described the I I'm about to jump two or three points ahead away just said sure yeah please right he described gamers as mouth-breathing morons okay sure and that and this is somebody who made games right and that's what I associate with the 90s the 90s were this era of we aren't designers we're writers and that these are these are works of art that we're making that are meant to be read who cares if they play the magma these are the the white wolf and I Scott this sentiment from not everybody obviously but at least a couple people from 1990s white wolf but like the worst thing about the game they were making is that there were people out there who were playing they wish they wished it could exist as really easy right that was changing the culture and was empowering Goths and empowering Outsiders by the way those are excellent things to do right but but the fact that people in the play you know because that was still a time when rolling dice and kicking down the door rolling dice and fighting a werewolf instead of rain dragon was considered de classe it was considered rain this it was the high art of what we were doing in the 90s was the storytelling stuff it's so schizophrenic it's that awful nested that nested shame thing that happens with nerds sometimes where it's like well I'm not a dork I like Star Trek not like this Star Wars nerds and the Star Wars nerds are like yeah well at least I don't like Battlestar Galactica okay and it you just there's this and that's that that is one of the things that has always upset me because the kind of thesis statement of my my channel my youtube channel is that everything that was ever popular is still fun for some people it's just not fashionable anymore yeah it's it's stupid to think of that way they played back then as being somehow degenerate and they weren't really having fun no they actually were having a lot of fun and there are still players out there like that and if they only knew that this kind of game existed they would be having a lot more fun and that goes in both directions by the way it goes both in the terms of focusing more on role playing a narrative character and plot it also goes and focusing more on combat I remember my friend George fossil aquas who runs even studios a big comic book store in Albany New York he went the first time he showed me because I'd never heard of it Warhammer Quest he said when this game came out my friends and I stopped playing D&D hmm because this is all we wanted right right and I was like oh my god I couldn't believe that I couldn't believe that there were people out there who were like but what about all the cool storytelling and although cool you know it's something I found myself being storytelling defender in the D&D group and but it was an eye-opening moment because I was like oh of course of course that the spectrum goes in both directions and it's all good and it's all fun and that there are games out there for everyone well in that needle of popularity moves around a lot - right like I remem watching people in the the sort of indie post Forge like space rediscover mold they try and be like oh this is an indie game like it does it really is like it does one thing it does that one thing really well and it gives you rules for doing the one thing it's a hyper focused small game without a ton of rules that just does dungeon crawling and does not literally doesn't care about anything else like if you look at mole day and you're like what happens if we leave the dungeon old tamil day is like nope I don't care go talk to cook I think he's figured and go out I feel like Tom Mulvey's like the Nick Drake of he is this unsung hero yeah influenced so many people that came after him and when you discover his his work you're like wait Pink Moon what where's this been all my life and you suddenly see all of these different antecedents that branched out from him but you know he wasn't he wasn't Gary Gygax he wasn't he wasn't any of those guys so if you're if you're a certain kind of D&D nerd or a certain kind historian of the game you absolutely know who Tom mauvais was yeah but when you go and you like a lot of people think that the rules cyclopædia is like the best edition of the game ever and that's all they need and yeah a compilation of all that stuff so I don't know yeah I think that I think that it's it this is a fantastic hobby and there really is something out there for everybody it's just a question of whether or not women I think get the chance to find it or whether or not they feel like there's only like well I spend 99% of my time talking about D&D so people are gonna think that's the game about there it's a tough it's a tough thing because I think that you know people people ask this a lot and we talk about it in terms of of like twitch so I'm running around for four games a week four campaigns a week I do burning how is far for Rhoda going yeah I do a burning wheel game we do far Verona and then I do two 2d indie games and people people like why do you play so much D&D and I was like well okay like it's a good game but mostly it's not because I love D&D in enough that I want to be playing it two times a week it's there's a bunch of other peripheral stuff that makes it the thing to play right sure it's gonna get you it's gonna get you the audience it's going to get familiar to people people can tune in having learned about games like RPGs from critical role and think oh hey this is a new thing you can build your audience this is why most people who stream role-playing games on Twitch just stream under a D&D it's it's contributing to the the clean exiting of the game well yeah which I don't mind of course I don't mind it but I'd like to know I learned a lot about when he ball came out I learned a lot about streaming and I learned a lot about how people follow up really personalities more than they follow games and so a lot of these streamers they're gonna they're gonna stream for tonight because for tonight's pocket not because it like for tonight maybe it's still a fun game right so it's not the end of the world but for tonight's was popular so they'll stream for tonight I remember I was a crazy in love with a old Oh a 1990s tabletop wargame called for made by FAFSA and my friend Jim who is a old school or gaming was like wow this is a really well-designed game I love this game and that for me that was a huge blessing from my friend Jim and but then every time he was playing anything anywhere it was always where I'm like but this is a terrible game why are you playing this he goes because this is why everybody plays right and in the comments so if I want to get in the game I can get in this game and in the context of that it's not it's not it's it's it's fine was his attitude to say I agree with you I agree with you but in the context of I get to play games and that's something that I hope that we can do away with eventually and and this this will be a thing that will negatively impact D&D I think not on a grand scale because I think wizards is going to be top dog for a very long time but this idea that we play whatever is around right like I definitely I definitely have played bad games because that's just what the people I knew wanted to play it's the books that the GM owned and I could not find another group to do something more interesting so I was like all right I can try to make this thing fun you know if you can't you can't be with one you love you gotta love the one you're with okay so sometimes I know it's the worst but sometimes like if you're an incredibly rich white dude and Crosby Stills Nash and young and you're just like why would I get married like when I could just sleep with all these girls can't have the thing you actually want well suck it up and just take whatever you can get I guess that was so like yeah but in terms of role-playing games like that's that's very much a thing where people are like I hate my group my GM's a I don't want to be playing this game but I live in a tiny town I don't I don't know anybody else that has so much yeah so many people I knew or I met in video games because it's incredibly easy to get into video games and never play any tabletop yeah like you came up through Nintendo like you did not ever play tabletop games so many people I've met probably hundreds of people at this point who they bought one or two cool-looking RPG books they weren't D&D books there were some other awesome looking thing and knew they knew nobody who played sure and that's kind of tragic but now we have the internet you know that makes it so that if you're in if you have a little bit of entrepreneurship you could you could make a game happen online with whatever game you want to play yeah we were gonna talk about authorial voice we were and I was actually just keep going forever this is actually a really good a good segue because I was gonna make a joke about nobilis which in a game in which the dungeon master is called the hollyhock god that is the but it's the best name for a gene ever the halogen I am 90% sure what that's not John Snead's game what quit whose game it's whose game was nobilis I'm 90% sure there were different developers for there were different developers for different different use but it was a Jenna Moran are Sean porks from thing for okay yeah yeah I always thought that was them deliberately taking the piss out of Dungeon Master I think so too what what can we do to make sure that no one ever mistakes this game for a game like that yeah nobilis was kind of a flag that people will wave at a certain era when they were trying it was if they were trying to make a hill that was not the bean when I yeah when I worked when I worked at the game server to the center box that was that was the game that everyone would like talk about but no one had ever played they'd be like oh I have that and I'd be like you know you played it no of course you don't no one has but I think I think that's a that's a thing that is going to go away I think that's gonna fade because you can now find at least three other people on the internet who will play it makes it possible the democratization of technology makes it possible for anybody if you want to play this so you can just go online and say I'm gonna run this game who wants to play yeah no definitely nobilis there's nothing but authorial voice and I'm a I'm a big believer in authorial because I've seen it work we talk about when we talk precipitate for folks who may not be familiar with the term when we talk about authorial voice in role-playing games what are we what are we talking about well we talk about the fact that when you read this RPG book you are aware of the author and you're aware of the authors not only their existence but but their point of view and their attitude and that is something that comes out in the text and this is traditionally an Emma - role-playing games for good reason and that is 99% of the time that's I do a number I just made up it's a good number it sounds like a big massive number yeah I'm quite often the purpose of a role-playing book is to be a reference manual where you are just trying to find the rule you need and and in that capacity it needs to be clear there can't be any authorial voice it needs to be well indexed you need to be able to quickly get to the rule you need if it says it's on page xx you go there and you're like ah I got it an authorial voice is a threat to that because it means I've got to wade through a bunch of the author talking in order to find the text I need but for me I think that is worth it I think it's worth that because the flip side of that is no one ever learns role-playing games by reading them no hits to learn role-playing games because they're their older sibling played they've thought on critical role now thank God thank God for critical role they can watch that show and go oh I get it I have a basic understanding of how this rule of how this game works now I can just look up the rule when I need it and they never actually sit down to read it from cover to cover good because you can't that's not how they're meant to they're written as reference manuals I have not written as books you read I've definitely been in positions where I have for the purposes of a review or whatever sat down with a role-playing game and read it like front to back word by word and and there it's very difficult to do it's it's a challenging thing it's it's it's designed to those role-playing games typically especially D&D I've got most of the games the way they differentiate themselves is by making themselves not feel like a reference manual but most role-playing the traveler I don't you I don't know if stars without numbers this I have it but I haven't read it where the goal is the player knows what the player is using the book to get to the rule they need how do we make it as easy to do that but I was working on the first role playing game product I think I wrote from cover to cover which I still see by the way in game stores everyone said I was the Lord of the Rings adventure game it was the it was of all the stuff we were doing this was the one that was going to end up in Barnes & Noble so and I saw this one you walked out of the movie in the mall and you went to the bar Noble there was my game that I wrote as the introductory it's the red box it was the red box for the Lord of the Rings RPG and I wrote it with heavy heavy authorial voice I used meat I you I said your players are gonna want to do this that's a terrible idea but you there's nothing you can do about it and so you've not only did you and hopefully get the rules you also got my attitude my personality and my boss was like this is your project man we'll see what happens and then lay up the layout artist who was responsible for dumping the text into it it's actually my aforementioned friend George Ross Lucas said to me and this had a huge impact on me so thank you George he said Matt this is the first role-playing product I've read from cover to cover right because you could read it you could read it I think about that though is that depending I mean you have context that this is a person you know and you know what they mean but that could also be like I don't know that I would necessarily you uniformly accept that as a compliment because I think that to a degree because authorial voice right isn't it back on a reference man you well so yeah so I think harder to find the rules you need that's the reality we have several variations of how authorial voice kind of makes itself known in a role-playing game right like you can see throughout the history of RPGs authors or groups of authors struggling with this where there's the sort of Gygax authorial voice where he's like I'm writing the Dungeon Master's guide because I'm the god of Dungeon Master's and I'm imparting my specific godly advice to you you need to understand this because I'm smarter and better than you which is like fine okay you wrote the book Gary and that's great cool that's his authorial voice but it's it's throughout the book this kind of slightly patronize down voice and then moving towards this kind of like awkward and I would love to be able to cite the first book that ever this and I hate it in books but the in character like contextualizing of setting stuff you know I can Shadowrun does it well so I'm talking about this as differentiated from chapter beginnings right because white wolf had the common is that there's like is what's the what's is this an is this an r-rated stream can I use adult language please what's the RPG where they used a British euphemism for for as the term they used in the text to talk to players god I am you're talking about Burke its Burke oh it links game Planescape planes Burke is short for Berkshire hunt rhymes with times and so they're walking around in this game and the text would say listen upper blah and like it was written like like this is I mean what Tolkien did in The Hobbit is something that children's book authors do on purpose is they talk directly to you that way it feels like you know feels like your mom or dad reading you a story when you read The Hobbit and that's how they wrote that book so they're literally had a character telling you know now I think I think that's that's different from so what I'm what I'm doing cuz yeah that's definitely a thing and that's that's you see that in paranoia you see it in apocalypse with this is a great example by the way of how Matt Mercer loves promoting other games yes kind of paranoid game you play to the paranoia game I think and paranoia is very very different from D&D by the way yeah i 100% associate matt and and that game but so what I'm what I'm thinking of is this thing where they'll be like plain kind of vanilla rules text and then a sidebar of like either direct commentary on that rule from an NPC in the game or side conversations with NPCs or this kind of in character like oh I'm a duel if I'm going to dwarf explain this rule to you like dwarves love fighting with axes and you're like okay but I just read the rule I don't need you to like flavor it up with this this it's kind of like I'm learning I'm reading from the root the author of the rules and then like three or four NPCs and I think the the for me the game that I got the privilege I couldn't I couldn't read Dresden Files the RPG it is it is just like drowning in that the whole book is like that I get that because it's getting in the way yeah and that's something I'm aware of because I strongholds and followers the book that I'm working on is full of me talking to the there is literally a point where the header because one of the four strongholds you can get a key keep tower temple and establishment and there's a footnote that's gonna be in the book under keep saying you know there is a great by which I mean deeply weird movie by Michael Mann called the key and so there's me my my point of view and my attitude makes it hardly I wanna I want a quote more likely that you're gonna read it I want to quote you this is I this is the thing you sent me some some some oh strongholds and follower stuff and I read this no so so this is a line that I jumped out to me when we were talking about authorial voice and I was just like I love this because I think that it is you can hear Matt's voice in this text it is pure editorial on top of the rule material so it's under the setting for power with an exclamation mark not merely power of a power excellent argh and it says strongholds unbalanced the game I mean it's not clear to me the game is balanced in the first place it's like that's perfect it's so good because you're not imparting first purse or first party like information about the setting or the material you're imparting something to give people context for your approach to the whole rest of the game it slightly bends your understanding of the the way you can trust or not trust the person telling you this information which in this case is Matt imparting the rules of that it also requires me to have a lot of trust in the reader yes right and that is something that I feel like I can get away with because of the YouTube channel I feel like there's a lot of people who are gonna get this book who know how I talk and I can get away with it I probably wouldn't do that otherwise but yeah that notion of it's that Trust goes both ways is that they have to trust me if you keep reading this is gonna make sense which is not something you have to worry about in a normal role-playing game the rules are meant to be clear and explicit and I don't I don't think you don't think you get I don't think you get the right to write that way in your very first book ever when no one's heard of you like I do not think that if this was the first time that anyone was ever accessing your material I would say this would be a bad move right I completely i completely agree and it's like I mentioned how I wrote I wrote the lordlings adventure game with authorial voice by one make it clear nothing like this sure that was much more me just who-who who you was and the fact that I was talking directly to the dungeon master which tend not to do they tend to say the DM player or when they or when they do when the rules do directly address the dungeon master it's with this obsequious bowing and scraping tone where it's like well well milord milord might like to use this rule if milord would like like that that's a that's a tonal shift that when I feel it in a book I hate when you get to the GM chapter and suddenly it's either like all right now those players are gone let's do the real or the inverse that like oh well I have a private audience with you my TJ master let's let's do this thing now I'll give you the secret rule like it's it's I think authorial voice strong authorial voice is a it's a dangerous implement but when it's used well it's really good but again it goes back to that thing like using it well well it's yours here's the the virtue of just writing a reference manual is that you don't have to worry about losing your audience I mean you have to be a clear writer you have to you can lose your audience because you you couldn't write things clearly enough for the players to understand it but once once you bring off the real voice in the mix now people are gonna judge the author yes now people are gonna judge your attitude toward the players toward the game and I think that's one of the reasons people deploy authorial voice is because they want you to know their opinions on things yeah that kind of 90s design where they had you know it's it's just an extension of that 90s game store where the owner of the game store bought the store because he wanted to preach and you know I tell people and this is just the RPG version of that you know exactly I really think what I'm talking about I've read I've been - I've been to Gen Con enough times and I've gone to the like buy one get get six free booth I have read games who are entirely written in the I know better than you so I wrote a game voice yeah yeah that was tomate in my limited experience and my limited a heavily biased experience that was very much the nineties the author was the I know better than you or actually we are better than me uh-huh we read you who are enlightened cuz you about this book are we're all about we're automatically better than all those people who don't know about this book or playing something dumb like Dungeons & Dragons and that kind of fact factionalism I mean I don't I had that I hate that I hate I hate people who try to make themselves popular at the expense of putting something else down it's hard because it sells books like it can yeah it can like if you do it if you can catch a zeitgeist and you can you can understand like people who are vulnerable to that particular kind of marketing which is save like most people and leverage it in the right way you can you can really sell a lot of copies like it's 100 percent of thing yeah yeah but it's it's I think it's toxic because it creates this us-versus-them attitude that's and that's why I really that really made it really made me sad it really made me it's weird because in the nineties it made me feel like this is this isn't for me and then the crazy thing was it was D&D that saved that baby's like kicking down doors and killing orcs is fun don't overthink it and I was like yes I agree I agree I all of these things are fun do we have to say that one thing is fun of the other things when I'm so I'm so so curious to see the new edition of vampire because all of the all of the interviews that I've read with the people developing it that's the attitude that I feel dripping off of it like there was an early interview by the the director whoever was responsible for the new vampire game and the whole thing was just like everyone who used to play vampires an idiot everyone who plays D and E is an idiot we're cool and tough we're making a game about being an edgy vampire and I was like well oh my god this is gonna be a train wreck so I'm really hoping that they've they've moved away from that but that very very much feels like it's gonna be the way that they move into it the way that that that's marketed and I'm really well that was my impression of the game back in the 90s was that like except obviously they didn't have the people who used to play bad power part it was that I remember I think I found I posted a video well I believe I have a first printing of that vampire there Matthew and when that game came out they did not know what kind of game they were making they didn't know that they were they didn't know what success they were gonna have so it was until the second printing of that first edition that they went back and put in like ranking yeah you were really really slow changes from like there were quotes in that first vampire the masquerade books from like foreigner yeah right because that's the stuff those guys were listening to and then it caught on with goth culture they're like oh let's make sure let's and so I mean that stuff was there that cost up was there that original book but it was a much wider they were casting much wider net back well that's and that's a thing like I I talk I talk to you about white wolfs design a lot and I stand behind I think that it's not it doesn't achieve what the game sets out to achieve but you can't argue with their ability to market a product to understand a demographic to bend the product to fit that demographic and then to make Bank right off of yeah there were a lot of look there was certainly when I was in college and the years thereafter there was certainly a lot of people they definitely succeeded in getting people who didn't weren't interested in D&D to play role-playing games and that makes me happy so that's that's that's you know it's I think it's all fun I just don't like the idea that we have to promote ourselves at someone else's expense yeah that's all I agree I agree and and certainly that wasn't like there's no there was a lot of people that that worked and have worked at at way wolfen they certainly don't all have that opinion as people but the game the game did have that that going on for it and it was it was certainly an aspect in the authorial voice was a part of that that kind of like welcome to the cool kids club like come on in you go yeah so look you've joined the Camarillo you can leave your plus well and Baldrick behind wasn't just that wasn't just um by the way like a tactic that was really how those guys felt and thought they were the guys that held the first and then became annual rave at Gen Con the white party was handing out ecstasy at Gen Con in the 1990 that was real they really were like we were they hip kids we're not war gamers and I'm one of those people who was like I love the hip kids I also love the war gamers yeah so that factionalism is the thing that kills me but yeah that was white white wolf really were those guys so anyway yeah it's a whole thing so it's I mean this is this is the thing like culture culture of games and the games themselves are interlinked and you cannot separate them right there's there's the people that play it and make the games and the games themselves and I think that that that way that that voice comes out is a way to impart the culture of of games and impart the the stuff you're trying to say about a game I think for me the the the biggest interaction that I've had with authorial voice in sort of a design space is up with apocalypse world and with dungeon world so dungeon world I think because sage and I both wrote it but because a lot of the sort of flavor stuff a lot of the description of monsters a lot of the kind of more voiced stuff comes from me like I can I can look at it I'm like oh this this book is written like I was describing something to a person or I was I was just like explaining something or or whatever like this you can I can feel my own voice in that and I think that that's something that other people can pick up but the game was intentionally written to be relatively accessible because our audience was people who are familiar with the indie and we we did want to do a little bit of that like this is a slightly not edgier but a slightly more like voiced version of D&D yeah yeah but it's good because I think that's what engages a reader I think that engages the reader and it makes it a book that people will in my opinion if you're not D&D where you can sort of get by by assuming there's some osmosis it's gonna happen you you need I think you need authorial voice to get the get the reader to the point where they're a player to try to to transform somebody from being a reader into a player you can't just assume they already know the apocalypse world rules and therefore here's my skin to it you're like no no we're gonna we're gonna walk you through this and we're gonna write it in such a way that it's engaging with the hope that you read it because then there's a better chance that you play it well and I think that that some of that is what contributes to the success that I've had with that we have a dungeon world is that it was voiced to be more accessible because apocalypse world is very strongly like Vincent Baker's apocalypse voice like it's it's written in a way where to some folk that might it might make it harder to read or may make it unclear certainly it polarizes the audience in one way or another it either says like you like this which I did I love the police in Apocalypse yeah as soon as you were as soon as you are in your game that you're writing yeah you just lost some people rank they don't like the way you talk yes they don't really like the way you talk they don't like the point of the point of view they don't like you or in some cases it's because they actually just want to know the rule man don't give me the personality or the attitude I feel like how how is Favre already feel about me switching is more of a segue how is far Verona going because the stuff you're doing with it really excites I am having so much fun and it's I can tell it's weird because when I think about far Verona so far Verona is the the stars of the number campaign you know that we are running we're running on on role play it's our current role play campaign and it is paired up with a multi-user excuse me multi-user role play thing on discord so in stars without number there is there's a faction turn that the GM uses to negotiate all of the big movers and shakers in the world the the church and the government and the noble house and everything and how they conflict with each other and I took all of the factions and I turned them over to our fans and everyone could join a faction and we played this big game and what's funny about it is that it's been running for like eight eight weeks maybe now the time of our recording this and I feel like the faction stuff is the game for me this and the and the the tabletop is like the show based on the game yeah right like it's it's not the other way around it's it's not to me I don't feel like the discord stuff is supplemental to what's actually on screen I feel like the on screen is an opportunity for me to show off the cool stuff from the discord and from the the multi-user game on like I can highlight it for four hours once a week right and so it's it's really yeah it's really been it's really been well I mean it makes perfect sense so here is the here is what's happening here is the way the world wags and what wags it and then now we're gonna play the people who have to live in that world and deal with the reality of what the faction term is doing so of course the faction term is gonna start looking like the game the fax returns the same is happening the the tabletop game is people dealing with that reality you you did something that I so you did something that you in franchise the players and I'm sorry you in franchise the viewers because now people can join factions correct yeah and that the and the things that they do in influence the faction turn and I thought that was super cool and if I can find a way to rip that off I'm going yes yeah I mean all all I'm doing really is large-scale diplomacy well that's the thing I will meet with a multi-user dungeon sort of I have actually literally going to be I believe my next Dungeons & Dragons campaign which we're going to stream is also going to be actually a game of real diplomacy yeah where there's going to be seven people that I've chosen to run the movers and shakers of the world and they're gonna have a map of diplomacy and they're gonna be playing Houma C and the people watching the stream aren't going to see that they were just gonna see these characters in the city trying to deal with their nonsense but then every you know a month or whatever the whatever the turn ends up being for the diplomacy game and so I was not surprised I was a little delighted and happy to see that you were basically doing the same thing yeah right I don't know how explicitly you're using the diplomacy rules I don't think you are no I'm not I'm basically just giving the so each each faction is made up of several hundred people and I'm letting them I'm letting them decide how they want to govern themselves but once a month basically I say to their representatives I'm doing the like the group has a caller just like an older than the caller gives me the orders so each of them's I'm only really interacting directly with we're like 13 people and those people are giving me the orders for their faction and then I once a month on stream carry them out and we all get to watch a it's not a I think most of the people in chat are fans of yours there may be fans of mine in chat who I'm gonna act on their behalf and ask question yeah please so it's not like a democracy it's not like you Adam just put up a straw poll and say all right you all use 700 people who are in this one faction what do you want to do how do how collars selected and how do collars poll the electorate so I went in with the intention of like I do not care like all I require from you each faction all I require is that you give me an order if you cannot get your together in time to give me an order by the deadline you lose your turn yeah you pass get your together as fast as you can so I think that there's there's a little bit of like in character stuff going on and this has been fascinating is watching the types of people in the kinds of conversations that form in the faction based on the character of the faction like if you go into the channel if you go into the channel four house Lyra and house Lyra is the the sort of culture there they're part death cult part like a musician art like the goth artists essentially and if you go to their channel their channel is just full of like aesthetics posts it's like here's a song I love and here's a bunch of like fashion that we think is really cool and like it's very much like that it's that's what they're off their channel looks like and then if you look at like house reticulum and they're the sort of weapon Smith's of the Empire you go to there and it's all just like gun porn and talking about swords like right like why do you think that is do you think it's I imagine the answers both but do you think that's because people who were into that stuff pick this faction so that now they're doing that or do you think we're all just nerds that faction sounded cool to me but because it's the weapon manufacturer faction now I'm gonna talk about the weapons and games that I like and stuff like that which comes first I think I think it's it's it's self selection and reinforcement right where you're like I'm gonna pick the house that sounds the coolest to me based on my predilections in story and then once I'm there we all have that thing in common we're all members of the Aker corporation or all members of the UPC River and we're going to have these conversations about the things we're all interested in we can start there and yeah and so that's that's been really interesting and they've all organized themselves in different ways I know some of them have like councils of members some of them have like rotating speaker the the houses miner is a election of smaller factions that I'm treating as one faction so it's it's the biggest faction because it's made up of several smaller factions and so those smaller factions have their own governing body and then they put someone up for the houses Minor Council and then houses minor Council have somebody that comes to me as their representative they listen they have they have their own houses minor Senate live stream that they do where they follow they follow like senatorial like in character and out of character senatorial like behaviors to like figure it to come to decisions there's all kinds of except lament er II material around this and I get to watch and I just watch them populate the world and answer is I suppose and it's fast I just smiled and III feel like you're doing what you're doing mm-hmm with your campaign and I'm going hopefully going to do it's already kind of started doing what I want to do with my game where there are different factions and there's diplomacy happening because I wondered I wonder if it's because both you and I are trying to get back to 1979 how long he'll do right I think if we're both trying to get back to that that that ideal that we have that you and I perhaps uniquely have of the Dune structure the different factions yes pillars of the Imperium and the politics and backbiting and the personality of House Atreides versus house are conan versus 100% yeah the the tone of the game is interesting because the faction turn stuff is all it's all doon it's very doon and dress for me but then the the at the table game is very bleak Bladerunner right there down artificial yeah and so so I get I get both of these things that I love in different regards and I don't think Blade Runner would work on the large scale just like I think dune struggles on the small scale right like I think that it's hard to tell the dude story you know I tend to agree I think there is some swashbuckling adventure in here to actually do novel there's guys like Duncan Idaho or gurney Halleck but you rarely get to see them do their thing yeah the books about all right so it's yeah and and and politics and family and stuff like that so yeah I definitely think that's a that's a great match that's a great schism and when you've got that dune structure the politics and the factional and Tamiya this is something I've told every game company I've worked at I felt like there was a missed opportunity because if you can make a game that has between five and seven distinct factions that different iconography and heraldry and personality then you're gonna have a hit game because people want that you know that sport team precising baked into our it's baked at least in America it's baked into our culture it's Harry Potter right like everybody wants yes they belong to you yeah and they want to talk about which house they belong the alignment the alignment meme over and I column factional I think yeah I think alignments are very poor implementation of yes but I think it's the same thing it is you're right it is you're right and it's funny because I don't know that a lot people know this but alignment was invented to stop players backstabbing each other right law and lawful was the players and chaos was those guys and when the first time a player backstabbed somebody else in one of Gary's games the other players were upset by that because they didn't think that was fair yeah and should be possible and they invented this us-versus-them rule sorry your this is the lawful team and you just act it into chaotic matter um but yeah if you can do that I call it faction identification you can do faster than your game you are gonna sell a lot of copies because people want to put their people want to put that patch on their shoulders well in for me yeah for me what what I think is giving people value for for their their their $1 or whatever for the patreon is that they can not only be a part of that thing you don't just get to be part of the deathless fan club you get to as to whatever degree feels comfortable for you you can engage with that tribe as a unit and say like you know wouldn't it be cool if this were a thing that we're true about us it has to do with this is how there's a company called riot they make a game called League of Legends you may have heard of it is because well I say that and it sounds like I'm being facetious but when you're talking about things wild like there are I guarantee you there are people playing D&D right now don't touch it and one of the reasons they have had the success they've had is because they allow the player to pick the character that represents them and customize that character we can talk about gameplay and all that's but customization and peacock yeah peacocking like being being able to show off that thing that you expense money on maybe or spent time grinding to unlock but it you feel like it's cool and it's personal expression the faction you join is personal expression it's the way I and it used to be as a player but what you're doing is you're now making it so the viewers it's the way the viewer customizes their experience they customize their experience of watching your game by choosing a faction and that allows them to personally express themselves and that is I think I don't know if I've seen that in I mean you can do that like Game of Thrones well it's hard to do it's hard to do in a role-playing game because everything's in your mind you can't sell imaginary skins for your fighter right like I get to describe my character however I want and it doesn't I didn't have to pay $9.99 to describe my plate mail as being studded with diamonds with yeah that's just a thing yeah that's the the thing that factions let you do is like I describe my character I've obviously have customized my barbarian hero but you're not looking at my barbarian hero every time you look at me I ready to do the peacocking thing of showing off the decisions I've made it's not about the things you've unlocked it's not about the money you've spent it's showing off your personal customization and what it says about you and that's what the faction turn'd does is it lets players its place lets the viewers show off well are their personality that they feel like is house my references yeah and it gives them it gives them investment in the universe because they have to some degree and other built it themselves it lets them play a character in that world and for me as a GM it gives me you know it's one thing because you know I think a lot of people were like oh that are you how are you gonna keep up with everybody making all this stuff I'm like well I only have to worry about four hours a week and like what's immediately on screen so yes if they go to the planet Hong Lou I'm gonna go to the 14 red dogs triad and be like this is your home world dogs yeah what did you come up with and I'm gonna pick and choose in and use that stuff on screen the rest of the value for me doesn't come from having a fully built fully fleshed out universe because I don't I don't arrived a lot of that like I'm not a big blur antha fan I don't need to know the average the average rainfall of every part of the world or you just go play hard right exactly but what I can do is it creates a very voracious very excited audience whose favorite thing to do is ask me questions about the world and nine times out of ten I don't know the answer to that question and so I can make it up on the fly but the fact that they've asked me is like oh I hadn't thought about that what yeah what is the answer to that what what could what could that be truly so that you can go to the faction like you said this your home planet guys you tell me about it yes and that's the it's the dungeon world apocalypse world like deference to the players thing where you're like I hadn't thought of that either I have an interesting answer for you or no please you tell me like I don't I don't know what the titles for your noble house would be I would love to hear what you think of it and that'll help you as a great flavor that that stuff I don't know what these guys this house motto is let me go ask the house yeah I will tell me so how how would you characterize the difference between a game like stars without number which is a game you're using for far perotta and a game like travel is it both sci-fi games yeah so so really like and and for people who want to know a better answer from the horse's mouth about this the last time I had a talk like this was with Kevin Crawford so Kevin gave some insights I asked him this this similar thing I think it's there there is Kevin has made a game that is a particular kind of sci-fi that is adjacent to but not the same as traveler um in traveler it's I think to a degree assumed that you will derive fun from trucking minerals from one planet to another and occasionally something bad might happen to your minerals and you have to save the mineral shipment yeah but it's a Johnson & Johnson Metzger refers to that style of play as debt runner okay you owe a lot of money on a thing and your job in the game is to explore some solo fantasy yeah it's it's you've got to pay off the you got to pay off the thing by shipping minerals around but in in the premise of stars the number is you are adventurers you are people outside of society's normal bounds in whatever way and you you are in this sandbox environment and it's up to you to be successful and to to be an adventurer so it's a little less directed in that way but I also think that we're traveler if you just read the core book is about randomly generating planets and commentaries the longer you go into the traveller universe the better defined it becomes there is like an actual traveller campaign something that is very very detailed v Imperium yeah yeah it's got it's got all kinds of adjacent humans like dog people and cat people and yeah fish PL yes which I always thought yeah I was interesting because I watched that chat yeah with you and the developer and then III think I'm related to that thinking about I've got this office now I would thanks for the Kickstarter be able to rent an office and we can stream whatever we want it was something we designed we needed to stream four hours of dandy a week but there's the other seven days and I can do whatever and I was like god it would be cool to play really what I was think it was really cool to play a science fiction game yeah and I do have that kind of I think I am guilty of something you guys talked about which is fetishizing that old traveler thing and when I went online to look hey can I get the original because they reprinted like far future enterprises reprinted those little black books as our traveler is maybe one of the most confusing games to get into because if you're like it's like again like Hero Quest this way where you're like I would like to play this game I've heard about there are seventeen versions by four different companies which one is the real traveler highly developed ideas about which ones are good and which ones are bad but while I the reason I bring it up is because while I was looking to see hey can I get those because they reprinted them and I'd like to get him collected and I think there are hard covers and to do I ended up on forums about traveler in which people were talking about how like I think stars without number is just better and they were like I think stars without number is just kind of a more modern version of traveler and it's gonna appeal to a broader category of people and I was like that was crazy because I was just listening to this chat with those guys and that's kind of I wonder if you basically can't get away with the strict interpretation of a han Solo game where there aren't Jedi's and there isn't men you know psyonix are meant Alex or whatever they call it and it is a small ship and this much cargo and I'm going to sell it and get a bigger ship second I'm more cargo which it's kind of car Wars yeah kind of that thing I wonder if you just can't get away with having through having to understand hexadecimal right no and that's yeah right character creation is is people always the the the classic joke is didn't travel you can die in character creation but they which I love Bible yeah which is great but ironically but go ahead but I think I think that's because there's a there's a thing about original traveler I don't know if they survive but you you were meant to be able to play traveler solo like alone oh yeah right there there is a one player variation of it and that's why you can die in character creation but the the thing about the thing about traveler that I think I bounced off of was yeah you you have to understand how to read hex to make it carry your stats go up to a point and then they become a1b1 whatever and then also the chapter about space travel is very much like you have to calculate your deceleration speed and like there's a lot of math which yeah well bat that was back in the 70s when RPG science-fiction RPGs were fighting with each other about whether or not they were full thrust yeah or whether they were like whether or not they're tracking vectors or whether they were Star Wars and it was just you know biplanes in space and that was back then that was a huge big deal I think we've largely thrown out the notion of using real physics in our science fiction RPG I would say that the the connection between stars oh number and and traveler if you're not familiar with either of them is nearly invisible they're both space games stars the number uses a 2d six modifier skill system and then a much swinging or d24 combat that's straight from Old Bay and I think that you would not be able to tell that there is a pedigree between the two if you were not already familiar with them yeah that's it I got that I I have definitely like I can't imagine a world where I would play traveler over stars a little number because I think everything I can do with traveler I can do with those stars though and not have to do the graphing calculator stuff with it because especially with a revised edition because it does say in the in the back there are a bunch of things where it's like if you want the game to be more heroic here's how to be like Star Wars characters and here's the rules changes like we're talking about at the beginning with curbs right it's like this is I don't make it feel like Star Wars this is how to cut psionics from it and make it feel more like hard sci-fi and then again kind of going back to that idea that the GM can take what a game is and modify it to make it fit what you want better you can change the tables right you you are given the setting is in the tables and you can go in and you can redesign those tables so if you want to bend the random generation of the world to fit something more in line with your ideas I go in and cut all the aliens out and replace them with different kinds of humans yeah go in and just modify the tables or when you roll something on a table that doesn't fit your version of the universe like recolor it scrape scrape off what John Harper calls the poetry layer and put on put on your own yeah yeah which is interesting because like it without those like most people don't know and nor should they that science fiction the science fiction they've grown up with is a result of these different people of the 50s arguing about different ways in which science fiction should be and if you're if you're if you're one of the descendents of the john w campbell frame 3 then you just don't have aliens in your science fiction yeah and people don't think about that they don't think about why aren't there aliens in BAU star Galactica or dune or Firefly you know it's because they're all descended from this this one guy who thought science fiction should be about people yeah and the things that people deal with and that has nothing to do with a completely different tradition than Star Wars and if you don't call that stuff out I think players are gonna get confused they're not gonna ya know those things so they're gonna like like have they really get why are there aliens on this do I like it I even know why I care almost because hang on it's because you like this that the other thing and you don't know this but there was a rule no aliens I took yeah I took my so when I start a game especially a game like that where I'm like it's going to be sci-fi and I know the immediate next question whether it's voiced or not is well what kind of sci-fi I always lay out there's a game called microscope at the beginning of microscope you you lay out all the stuff that's allowed in the story you're gonna tell it together right the game you're gonna play and what isn't isn't blood you create your palette right and so I did that with with far Verona I was like okay so based on because I'm the GM and I'm the most invested in this obviously you can give me feedback as players but this is kind of where I'm coming from there are no playable aliens you cannot be an alien because in my understanding of sci-fi it's more impactful when we look at what what being a human is like as compared to an alien I don't think that people can necessarily play the kinds of aliens that I want why is that why is one I want aliens to be extremely alien like I hate real I'm different I hate bumpy 4head aliens I want aliens that are like because we're elves and dwarves are alien aliens right there they're not just grumpy people they're like which is very which is very different alien points of view it's very different from even Tolkien's interpretation right because elves are like sad humans and dwarves are cranky humans and númenóreans are well because he was just trying to reinterpret deliberately trying to reinterpret existing human myths and recontextualize them and elves and dwarves or things that people told in fairies door fairy stories yeah yeah yeah so that but that III tend to agree but I also like I played a game called blue planet and I played I played an orca I played right if you and my friend mark was like that stupid I mean that stupid how is that any different than playing elf well so it's what I love about blue planet particularly and games like it so blue blue planet for folks who are not familiar with 1990s RPGs blue planet is a sci-fi RPG set on like a water world in which you can play you can play intelligent cetaceans it's like what was that dud Seaquest DSV you want to be talking dolphin we got you well it's um basically David Brin up lift water stuff we're human beings yes did a couple of species so they can talk it's a big pre big precursor to Eclipse phase I think yeah yeah and so I it's it's always interesting to me to see how players who are perfectly comfortable playing an elf or a dwarf completely rebelled if you're playing ask road rider from you know a fire upon the deep but it's like and the reason is because they see ask road rider as being alien yeah but they don't see an else is being able no that's why they have that's why it's what's so weird about that is like you if you do it if you go too hard you end up with The Witcher problem where you're like what is the Witcher problem where are you end up in a situation where you're like alright so there's humans and then you have dwarves which are black people and you have elves which are also black people and racism is a thing but there's only white people in the setting on screen and they're elves and dwarves that's how we explore racism is because of fantasy races I think that's that's a weird thing where you you end up like losing traction I can't even unpack what you just said that so yeah but that's I mean that's a thing and that's a thing in fantasy a lot of the time where we have this like the other and we replace it with I mean even Star Trek did a ton of that especially the original series well I mean yeah I think that we talked about the other ending gaming it's like I was it Shane Hensley his business card said everybody loves zombies and his his point was that was brilliant your business cards has your design thesis statement on it right aim your game whatever the game is it needs zombies as we discovered this working on mercenaries was we needed it doesn't matter how complex and all these different factions you could work for and you'd get in trouble if you joined one faction you suck shot a soldier that fact there was always one faction couldn't join that you're always free to shoot at and it was you were always free as player to just those guys I know I can shoot that and so I think there is some design use for having this Lezama zombies well yeah and that's and that's the that's the thing because and again you watch the evolution of design and this even happened like early in DD there's the the with the cobalt babies in in the caves of chaos right where on the one hand DMV is saying like kobolds are unequivocally unquestionably chaotic civilization human civilization of dwarven and elven civilization is lawful kobolds are chaotic they are opposed they are the enemy you have every moral right to murder them these license license these cobalt babies will grow to be bad there is no question about that and then it puts you in a room and it's like yeah but like you're humans in a civilization that is not D&D we're moral relativism like and and so instead you have this situation where you're like cool well our characters would definitely just like stomp all these eggs and murder all these babies because they're gonna grow up to be kobolds but as players we're like uh but they're small and we should love them and yeah I think every group goes through that period well not maybe not every group now maybe we're more enlightened now but every group back then went through that period of being like but they're worth XP and they would be like yeah but couldn't we like adopt these guys and raise them and give them names and would they be our buddies right and and and I think that is that every group goes through that development phase of treating taking things on the world's basis rather than the games basis that makes any sense yeah anacs are saying that this is true but then think with it but the world is presenting me is it weak infants that need protection yeah and that's I mean that's a thing that that you know we we see in games this idea of like the internal moral structures of the universe versus the external I mean honestly in the first the first episode of within the first episode of far Varona a universe in which we determined synthetic people were illegal and immoral and bad and we saw this they're not they're not okay to exist and we need to we need to get rid of them in fact the premise of the game is you are playing a group of people who are devoted to the house whose job it is to keep the law and the law says this is an auto there's not a legal person but I presented them as like they look like a person and they're acting like a person and your character may or may not believe this but culturally that's not a person it's just just pretending to be one which is in a way more disgusting than it actually being one and what I thought was really interesting about that is that the the player who struggled with it the most max his character instead of backpedaling instead of being like I hesitate like I don't know if I want to kill this guy like I'll do it and I'll like I'll as a player I feel weird about this he changed his character like in the second in the second session he revealed that one of his goals was like the system is hypocritical and like if I'm as a player feeling or weird about this thing maybe I can just explore that through my character and so let's make the character about that so that I don't have to play someone who has a very differing moral approach than myself so he sort of eased himself into that into that position I mean that's a level of enlightenment I think like back like that I I told I don't think I'm gonna enforce this rule because it's more important that you just play somebody that's cool but the suggestion I gave my players for my next game is to make sure that you're playing a character you can play great yeah right make sure that you have not you you haven't developed a character idea that you think this character is cool but can I actually play them and that's something I worry more about now that were gonna be live-streaming our game then I would have worried about before but when you're live scream the game I think there needs to be more more not as FBI represent more of an overlap between the person I remember one of my players in my last game was he had made this really cool character he liked and I liked and both of us felt like we understand what his character would do in any given moment but it wasn't what the player would do right and he struggled with that yeah you can you can derive fun and tension from that like there is a moment where the GM is like so what do you do in the player cringing and strugglings like I stab him in the face I guess you feel a little pulled along by your by your character I remember talking to my good friend Chris Ashton who was one of the guys that runs actual Rock Studios and we had both played and loved a video game called Last of Us and we would as we were playing we would get together and we would talk about what had happened in the game and there was a point where you have to you know if you want to get from point A to point B it seems like you have to mow down a bunch of innocent people yeah there is a way to get through that without doing that but it's not obvious and he's like what did you do and I'm like oh I killed all those right and he was like he was horrified and you and I realized the reason I was able to do that was because I was role-playing Joel yes thank you so Joel that's how I played with you that's how I play video games too yeah yeah I knew what they did such a good job in last of us of making it crystal clear what she would do and I was like this is what this baby do and that's well that's the of the whole game right like when you get to the end of the game there is a moment at the end where the game is like oh you think your your Joel no no Joel is Joel you're just along for the ride like you do not get to make that last moral decision this last decision Craig you are going to reasons I'm very glad they're doing a sequel or a Fargo has already come and I missed it well because I was like you can't you can't you can't plunge the world into the wasteland we need you you can have Joel but then we need Percival we need Percival to go find the Grail after this yeah because he dams the land in that last moment in Last of Us and he took ten thousand years of darkness because ryone nonsense but I do love that that notion that for some players the character is them and they have a really hard time and then for other players is like no I have no problem role-playing this grades and doing what this one and I think that in in a role-playing game it's different because you create the character you embody the character and there are no like you don't have a choice you always get that choice and we've been with an audience and I know this is something in our burning wheel game all of the players but bluej especially struggles with where they're all playing kind of self-interested villains it's a medieval intrigue game and they're all kind of bad people with their own agenda and it can be really hard playing a character like that yourself but also having an audience be like how how dare you like how dare you make this decision how do you make me watch you do this which i think is i think is fascinating but you can also go too far in the other direction into the the sort of Nuremberg defense of gaming thing where you're like well I'm just I'm not an my character I can do whatever I have that's one the classic classic first things Dungeon Master's deal with his players using character license just to be yeah my characters evil so I stole all your stuff and I ruined your father what my character would do and it's like man now now now we have a whole thing we go yeah we got to do this whole thing again yeah so yeah that but that's one of the things that RPGs let us do that is so that's cool that like you have that since the way the the the difference between the way it synths are treated which is I mean that's you as a storyteller because you as Adam Coble as a person would be little since the people I love robots I love women be my friend as a storyteller no I need drama I need tension yes I'm gonna create a world where these people are being treated like property and see and force the players to you well in that for me that that moment was as much for the players as it was for the audience right like I've GM --d on Twitch and and make making GM stuff as a show so much that now I can't help but think about the audience and for me that moment of presenting them being like here's the thing here's the synth who which one of you is gonna retire it who's gonna pull the trigger and knowing they were gonna respond that way that was for the audience because I had spent weeks firing them up about how evil the synths are and how they almost ruin the empire and like the Kruk saved us from what they could have done and then it was like okay here's a moment let's see in practice what an actual person would do when presented with a human looking individual begging for their life right like can you do it are you willing to and if not what does that mean and what was really fun was watching the players bend their own behavior around that to be like oh you know what I'm gonna like and double down and was like nope you know what now I understand where we're at I'm gonna I'm gonna play to that that's my thing and Max was like you know what the nobility is a bunch of hypocrites and I need to like find a way to exist in this thing while also like working out how to change it right that's really cool in order to that moment even though you could not have predicted it is why you created that central today you created that central tension because you want players to have to start making those decisions and it's a great central tension by the way it's a great axis along which all the NPC's they meet are gonna have opinions about this all the factions they join are gonna have opinions about this right and players are forced to have an opinion about this and that's sort of that sort of something that I try to do like with far Verona specifically but with with games in general I try to develop le climatic arcs of like what is this game kind of about and how do the characters and the situations reflect that right like in right in fair Verona it's like what what does it mean to be human and not in the like David cage sense but in the like who is a person who is not a person right I think Blade Runner explores this a little bit there's a tiny bit of in in in dune where it's like other women people or not dude Blade Runner is all about the fact that like the point of Blade Runner is that the main characters and machine and machines are people yeah and we're gonna watch you're gonna watch Deckard go through this arc of just being just doing what he's told unthinkingly doing what he's told the way a robot would whereas the robots are the ones that are living life right and and alive trying to sir trying to experience the world and exploring and tasting and and and then that that he eventually Deckard gets to the point where he's a person that's the point of that yeah so yeah doing stuff like that in the role-playing game was super excited watching chat and as you talked about since people are exposing the different philosophies exactly there's there is a huge success to me that your game is a huge success because of that faction identification people are some people heard like it's it's awesome it's awesome watching people engage with content like yeah something that you know this is a you know it's we're getting to a point now where for some people out there if you're RPG game is something that only exists for you and your six players you're wasting an opportunity right because there's an audience of people out there who would engage with it and they're missing it and so I think this is you know critical role they weren't the first but they're it's gonna be this huge sea change and how we perceive what is a role-playing game and how can it what can it do is that the existence of that audience and then watching these decisions being made and how they identify what things is gonna be huge and the fact that the stuff you come up with all this work and effort you're putting into this game to create this world this universe to create the central tension and put in front of the players is engaging a huge audience of people yeah that's you know how why would you not do that if you could do that braid right align that and that's the thing we're gonna we're gonna see more people playing more variety of games people are gonna get exposed to those and they're gonna play games we're gonna get an audience of people are gonna get a hobby that is better educated and better understands the hobby participating in yeah as time goes on and it's all gonna be because and because it's led by people like members or it's gonna be more inclusive it's gonna be more empathetic it's gonna be more positive than anything we had deal with in the 70s 80s or 90s yes that's the thing I love about Matt is he's just so like friendly and gentle well I mean I am lucky to know him life and that dude actually is what everyone hopes he is yeah he's not a cynical waste case like the rest of us no no no no by no means no in fact I think one of the reasons he likes me is because I often I'm with one saying the cynical you know it's nice to be it's nice to be that thing for people to save its to say these things and then let them watch it you deal with the with the blowback yeah yeah well this was a lot of fun Adam I felt like we could talk for a lot longer yes I feel like that is definitely a thing that we could do again if you felt like it well I absolutely but I'm also looking forward to seeing who your next guest is because I watched I watched the interview you did with the Stars lever developer and I just thought it was fantastic yeah it turns out a lot of people I can turn in some of my social currency to get people to come and hang out with me on my stream so yeah so I'm gonna find I'm gonna find some more people when we're gonna chat about some others I'm curious while I have chat here I'd like to know what people thought about this and whether or not they thought this was I guess if you're still here after two hours you are by definition yeah you should have mark on YouTube yeah I'm uh mark so mark and I have been talking about he wants III offered to go on his his podcast so I think we'll start yeah so he he asked me to be on his world-building yeah is it the same thing his world-building podcast stream I don't know it was after forever aronia started he was like I do a podcast thing and I was like cool let me be on that I love being on podcasts yeah so I don't know if that's gonna happen mark me being on marks thing because I think one of us or both of us forgot about it yeah so he's been very he's been very busy with his LA stuff so oh that's right he was out here for that's right yeah yeah well good for him that's cool yeah yeah so like I mean this is this is the thing like I think that there's there's already lots of people talking about like interviewing game designers about their games but I kind of want to do more of like this kind of thing where we just like sit well I predict the next time this literally this happens you're gonna be in Orange County and we're gonna play the Dune role play the board game we didn't even get to that but that yes no but we are we I have the power you're willing we can fly you down put you up in a hotel and you can come out to the off make like a day or two of it we could do lots of stuff we'll fly up to come off like a schedule of stuff so you don't get bored but we're definitely going to film and stream our collective favorite board game I think is it accurate to call your favorite board game yeah absolutely one idea is the Avalon Hill it's so weird that there's been so many interesting advances in board game development and production but still for me it's hard to tell the best oh there's no there's never going to be a game that has better ludo narratives harmony than this is why Matt Koval such a smart guy like that you taking the words out of my mouth it's it's yeah it's perfect we'll do a whole thing we'll talk about the dune board game at a later date but just know that is something we basically that is got a great deal yep cool well let me know when that happens everybody thank you thank you so much for coming and hanging out and chatting with each other while we chatted about role-playing games and other things that's why he's smart he's like me exactly yeah what come on he's smart like me yeah listen I only have people on who will just ape my own opinions but think that's not at all true I mean I think the first like the first time not to digress too hard while we're trying to end the stream here but the first thing we did the round table afterwards everybody was like oh Adam and Matt hate each other oh my god because we disagreed on some points I guess which means yeah that's the fun that's the fun of doing a round table like that yeah yeah yeah because then when someone is wrong you can talk to them about why they well because it's like it's it's fun to find stuff like I don't know I thought I thought there was gonna be more stuff that we would disagree with on this stream we'll have to think about stuff that we don't that we don't agree with and and argue about it next time okay all right I'll come up with some more some more so here you tweet about things you like and I'll find reasons to hate them and then we'll talk them okay that's fine that's fine all right cool well thanks for coming everybody this has been a conversation with Adam : Matt Koval Matt thank you so much thank you very much for having me on Adam it was a privilege the privilege was all mine I will see all of you again if you're watching this live in like an hour on twitch.tv slash DD for the continuation of our tomb of annihilation game if you haven't watched it it's great it's fun we're gonna go ahead and continue that and and thanks for coming everybody make sure you you give them out a follow if you haven't already and we'll see you next time everybody see you

Channel: Adam Koebel

Views: 110,988

Rating: 4.9042935 out of 5

Keywords: adam koebel, skinnyghost, twitch, live, interview, discussion, debate, talk show, matt colville, strongholds & followers, D&D, white wolf, vampire, planescape, l5r, gaming, tabletop, rpg, roleplaying

Id: jn5U6pNQ-bA

Length: 108min 37sec (6517 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 15 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/mctrev]

Really appreciated this conversation. My favorite part was probably the discussion surrounding narrative versus story. The distinction, I think, being that narrative is the back and forth between GM and players describing actions during play, and story is verbally retelling those actions later after play has ended.

It's nice to get more perspective from Adam and Matt on game design too. Any other parts that stood out?

[u/hauk119]

I enjoyed the callout of the first roundtable comment section — people went way overboard. Great discussion overall

[u/Jallorn]

The part of this that I found resonated with me the most was about alien non-humans, and not letting dwarves be grumpy humans, etc. It's something I realized I've been doing in my setting, except the players never get that, and I'm not sure how to help them get that. Anyone got any tips?

[u/JosefTheFritzl]

I loved the part denouncing the universality/misuse of 'Rule Zero'. So much of the meaningful conversation of rules in online dialogue these days is shut down immediately with "Fun is #1, if a rule doesn't suit you throw it out".

Probably one of the few times I've strongly agreed with Adam about something. Relying heavily on "these rules are optional so long as you're having fun" is very lazy at the design level.

[u/ricefrisbeetreats]

I always enjoy the little stories of the "olden days" like when Matt mentioned that alignments came up to stop people from killing each other.

That said, it was super long. I had a hard time getting through it all. I think I was just hoping for more meat from the video.

[u/mephnick]

I'm glad Adam touched on the fact that DnD isn't a universal gaming system. It is in fact a very specific gaming system about exploration, resource attrition, and killing monsters. I always see people saying " How do I run a horror campaign in DnD?" or "How do I run a political intrigue campaign in DnD?" and I get a lot of shit when I say "You should find a system that does those things instead." It bugs me when people use the inability if DnD to satisfy these needs as a disparagement of the system. It does what it's designed to do very well. It isn't DnD's fault that you're trying to bend it into a shape it's not.

It's like the threads on reddit where people say "We played an 8 hour session with no combat..I'm so proud of my players :) :)". Why? Why do you think not having combat in a DnD session is some lofty goal and not a failure? Play something else. You'll enjoy it more.

[u/LordSadoth]

In regards to game manuals as reference guides: You guys should check out Degenesis: Rebirth, because it is so much not that. It's pretty much 'Authorial Voice: The RPG'. And it's so good.

[u/[deleted]]

Really enjoyed this podcast!

Of particular interest I found the idea of viewers joining discord to form factions and provide feedback to the DM on in-game events.

I would love this for my game but I am not a streamer ...yet the idea of interested third parties providing feedback would be really awesome. Any tips and ideas how to find and recruit people who might be interested in basically becoming NPCs that once a week provide feedback on events in-game from their point of view.

[u/badivan1]

Did anyone catch who they referenced at about 42:30? Something like Tom Molve? I was curious and tried to look it up, but I couldn't figure out the spelling.