[SPEAKER_01]: Hello and welcome to Table Talk, a show where I chat with other creators in the TTRBG space about how they run their tables.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm DangerDanger's, the GM and host of D&DARC, and joining us at the table today is a player GM and TTRBG designer who has been featured on Game Master Monday and DiceFiends, Izzy, hello!
[SPEAKER_00]: Hello, thank you so much for having me.
[SPEAKER_01]: Thank you so much for being here.
[SPEAKER_01]: To get a started, can you tell us a little bit about yourself, your history and the TTRPG space, and about the different projects you're involved in?
[SPEAKER_00]: Sure, so I am Izzy, my pronouns are sheaker.
[SPEAKER_00]: Also sometimes known online as Lady Life, but mostly I just go by Izzy.
[SPEAKER_00]: I've been a player slash GM with TTRPG's in general TXC.
[SPEAKER_00]: years now, I've been in the actual play space for less than that.
[SPEAKER_00]: I want to say probably four years.
[SPEAKER_00]: I have been a player and a GM mostly on dicefins where I play a recurring character, core a carry, on the kind of center heroes.
[SPEAKER_00]: I was a GM for Game Master Monday, many series burned
[SPEAKER_00]: which at the time recording is critical work nominated.
[SPEAKER_00]: I've heard of work nominated for a very exciting.
[SPEAKER_00]: I am a TTRVG designer.
[SPEAKER_00]: I've been designing and making small one-page games for a few years now.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: Awesome.
[SPEAKER_01]: I want to unpack specifically your credit award nomination.
[SPEAKER_01]: Can you tell us a little bit about the Burt Creek mini series?
[SPEAKER_01]: your involvement in that the show is a whole and what that critter award means for you.
[SPEAKER_00]: Absolutely.
[SPEAKER_00]: I would love to so burnt.
[SPEAKER_00]: Creek originally started out for me as a short story that I had written in a creative writing class and then from there evolved into a game of Call of Cathedral that I knew I wanted to run in some way, shape, or form as an actual play.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I got a great opportunity to do so with Game Master Monday where they basically put out a casting call looking for guest GMs for a mini series, which was like the first time that they were doing that and so they actually didn't really take a gamble on having me on because I had not interacted with them before.
[SPEAKER_00]: but they were very nice and brought me on.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's called Kthulhu Southern Gothic Horror many series of body horror and violence and religion and it is one of my favorite things I have ever made.
[SPEAKER_00]: I am I'm so proud of it.
[SPEAKER_00]: I was nominated for Best GM in a Chaosian game, Chaosium who
[SPEAKER_00]: And it means so much to me to be recognized by my peers for my efforts and for what I put into this game and to know that it meant enough to other people in the space that they thought I should be recognized with the nomination.
[SPEAKER_01]: That is absolutely awesome.
[SPEAKER_01]: The little bit of experience I have with the Call of Catholic System has been a ton of fun and it really sounds like a good project that you've been able to sync your teeth into.
[SPEAKER_01]: Is it more of a mini series or has it expanded to more of a full campaign by this point?
[SPEAKER_00]: Uh, so it's just the mini series.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was three or four.
[SPEAKER_00]: episode many series that took place in small town of Birch Creek and I liked that it's going to stay as many series I feel like it is sort of done what I wanted it to do which is the absolutely terrifying and leave people with a lot of questions.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I'm very happy with it.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, Calvacatula really lends itself very, very well to small, self-contained stories.
[SPEAKER_01]: I haven't really delved a ton into longer campaigns with the Calvacatula system, but just in the way that I've interacted with it for one shots and many campaigns,
[SPEAKER_01]: wider reaching stories.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I absolutely understand what you mean about enjoying keeping it in a smaller package.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I think it's a bit harder than other games to have in a longer form just because like in my opinion one of the main hooks of Call of Catholic is that it is a very lethal.
[SPEAKER_00]: It is
[SPEAKER_00]: meaning to and that's really hard to sustain that kind of leaveality over a long campaign because you're either killing off characters, left and right, and people have to make new characters and new reasons for them to come into this hot podge group or they're surviving through everything that they are facing, in which case it's not delivering on the promise of leaveality.
[SPEAKER_00]: Smaller campaigns for shorter series, but I can imagine it gets quite difficult for long campaigns.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, it's a very good system for what it does best.
[SPEAKER_01]: So, is that more of your foundation or did you come from more of a traditional pipeline of 5E into branching out to other systems?
[SPEAKER_00]: I very much came from five E into branching out into other systems.
[SPEAKER_00]: It started out with my roommate and best friend in college who had had experience with a dungeon in dragons and was like, no, what?
[SPEAKER_00]: I feel like,
[SPEAKER_00]: Just having a bunch of our friends over in our dorm room doing a little campaign, what do you think?
[SPEAKER_00]: And I was like, yeah, I'd love to be a part of it.
[SPEAKER_00]: And from there, my friend group has tried a ton of different games we have gone through, blades in the dark.
[SPEAKER_00]: We've gone through a bunch of powered by the apocalypse games, including masks, what else we thought they're now suddenly, every game I've ever played is just falling right out.
[SPEAKER_00]: out of my head.
[SPEAKER_00]: We've done Kingdom, we've done Fellowship, we've done our own like home brew games, we've tried a lot of different games.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I've had a lot of experience with a bunch of different games and game designs and game philosophies.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I've branched out quite a bit.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's an absolute blast expanding on other systems and there's so much that you can learn that different systems do and emphasize particularly well that you can always take into other games.
[SPEAKER_01]: So one of the ones that you name dropped is the mask system, which your dicefiends show that you are a player on kinder-center heroes uses.
[SPEAKER_01]: For listeners who are less familiar with that system,
[SPEAKER_01]: how that system generally works and what that shows focuses.
[SPEAKER_00]: Sure, so Masks is powered by the apocalypse game, and all powered by the apocalypse games have the same sort of general format.
[SPEAKER_00]: We're like, you have a number of stats, you roll two D6, and then if you get a six or lower, that's a failure, seven to nine is a half success, a 10 plus is a full success.
[SPEAKER_00]: And there's different moves you can do, you can, you know, be people up as one move or come for your friends as another move.
[SPEAKER_00]: Two things that I really like about masks, there isn't a traditional like HP system.
[SPEAKER_00]: Any damage you take is narrative and in the form of like emotional conditions that you take.
[SPEAKER_00]: So angry or afraid or guilty and you heal those, you know, either through a certain.
[SPEAKER_00]: action or through some sort of narrative events.
[SPEAKER_00]: So if you're afraid, it says that you can clear the afraid condition by running away.
[SPEAKER_00]: So like that has very strong narrative implications.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the other thing that I really like is that you are
[SPEAKER_00]: teenage superheroes.
[SPEAKER_00]: You are teenagers dealing with teenage drama with the background of being super heroes.
[SPEAKER_00]: So it is, it's a lot of fun because on the one hand you are a person with incredible super powers able to reach through dimensions and pull through things that your world has never seen, but the hardest thing you had to deal with this week was asking out of girl you had a crush on.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's a very fun theme to go off of using the like teen titans and young justice genre template really give you a lot to sink your teeth into and I think it's so interesting the way that it uses emotional states of being as
[SPEAKER_01]: your penalties and obstacles to overcome.
[SPEAKER_01]: I like the, the lack of a helpful makes a lot of sense for playing a super powered character.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm sure that that really opens the door up for a lot of really good interpersonal team drama.
[SPEAKER_01]: Has any of that system or Call of Kathulu or any of the other systems that you've played around in?
[SPEAKER_01]: Have any of those sensibilities leaked into your work
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, absolutely.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think the biggest thing from both of those games that has really helped me is like having a strong hook for your game having like one or two sentences that you can use to like
[SPEAKER_00]: sound people on why they should play your game because masks has the hook of your teenage superheroes dealing with not just the pressures of superhero life and saving people but also the stress of just being a teenager.
[SPEAKER_00]: All of Kathulu has the hook of like you are a regular person dealing with cosmic horrors beyond your comprehension you are going to die.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like these are
[SPEAKER_00]: very short descriptions that you hear them and you're like, okay, that's that's interesting.
[SPEAKER_00]: Let me see what else there is to this.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, what dice does it use?
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, you get interested in it.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I definitely learned from both of those that like you need a strong
[SPEAKER_00]: hook, especially in one page where you are trying to hook people to play, probably just a single session of your game, you're trying to get people to be willing to commit one, night, two to three hours to play your game as opposed to a whole campaign.
[SPEAKER_00]: So like making it snappy, making it hook people is very important.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I can absolutely see how having a really strong anchor to immediately ground the players in what the general premise of that game is.
[SPEAKER_01]: I can see how valuable that would be for something smaller and self-contained.
[SPEAKER_01]: Similarly, I want to pick your brain about how
[SPEAKER_01]: in kind of both directions with you participating in the actual play scene and participating in the design scene, how has each role kind of influenced the other?
[SPEAKER_01]: Is there anything that you've learned from making your one-page TTRPGs that's influenced how you approach the table in actual play or
[SPEAKER_01]: either on or off Mike and vice versa has being a player in those times of shows taught you anything that you've brought into your one-page RPGs.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I think he player goes on and off my cause really told me a lot as a designer, particularly in like,
[SPEAKER_00]: just how the game is played versus how a game is designed because how it is written on the page versus how the players roll the dice and make choices does not necessarily line up.
[SPEAKER_00]: When you're designing a game, you don't have control over how people are going to play it.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so I think something that I have learned is like, what are mechanics that are interesting to people that people want to engage with?
[SPEAKER_00]: What are things that people are like, all right, we can sort of brush this part of the book under the rug and like, how do we turn the fat essentially?
[SPEAKER_00]: How do we take the parts that people don't
[SPEAKER_00]: are going to ignore in their home games and just not even bother with them because if people aren't going to play it like why even write it and that's, you know, trying to get to the core of what he is to find about your game, what is interesting about your game, what sets it up hearts, you know, and making mechanics that people are going to want to engage with.
[SPEAKER_01]: Absolutely.
[SPEAKER_01]: There are quite a lot of, especially in older legacy systems, like D&D-5 or Call of Cthulhu, that have multiple additions and have been around for decades.
[SPEAKER_01]: There's a lot of legacy mechanics that served a purpose in the day, and that have still stuck around an or kind of vestigial.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's interesting to be able to point out and see what stuff applies in what situations.
[SPEAKER_01]: Are there any mechanics either as a good or bad example of mechanics that immediately jump to mind to you that are leftovers and relics of different versions of the game?
[SPEAKER_01]: And in the other direction, are there any mechanics that you
[SPEAKER_01]: absolutely love and adore about specific systems, like you brought up with masks, having the emotional conditions take the place of HP and damage.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I'll tell you, I've been playing Dungeons & Dragons for the edition consistently for six years at this point.
[SPEAKER_00]: I could not even begin to tell you what the rules for income brands are.
[SPEAKER_00]: How much weight a strength 17 character can carry before they're over and comfort and what over and comfort me.
[SPEAKER_00]: I couldn't tell you a single word of that because
[SPEAKER_00]: never use it.
[SPEAKER_00]: I can see a very early version of D&D, where it's very heavy into survival and your gear really mattering and packing, being very essential.
[SPEAKER_00]: That is just not how D&D5E is played and I don't think I know a single player who has ever had in
[SPEAKER_00]: reason to be there in a game like D&D where, you know, at level one, it doesn't matter how much your rations weigh because the true it can cast good berry and your bed forever.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, it's just a holdover mechanic that I think would be much better if it wasn't in the game.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, on the flip side of that, a mechanic that I absolutely love, there's two that really stick out to me so much so that they have become means in my friend group because of how much we interacted with them and how much we loved them.
[SPEAKER_00]: The first is blades in the dark's position versus effect.
[SPEAKER_00]: In blades in the dark, there is what is known as the position and effect whenever you make a role, position is how much risk there is and what you're doing and effect is how effective whatever you're going to be doing is so something that has high position.
[SPEAKER_00]: Low effect is something that won't be very effective if you accomplish it, and if you fail, the consequences are going to be massive.
[SPEAKER_00]: I love this mechanic, the idea that you can trade risk for reward, and there's a mechanic for going down a level in position to also go down a level in effect.
[SPEAKER_00]: what you're doing is safer, but it'll be less effective.
[SPEAKER_00]: And vice versa is making your position worse, but also increasing the effect you can have, which is led to my friend group,
[SPEAKER_00]: We do not care about consequences don't exist to us.
[SPEAKER_00]: We always assume we're going to roll a full success and consequences are consequences.
[SPEAKER_00]: You don't encounter them.
[SPEAKER_00]: So always go all out with the fact who cares if you're risking getting your arm chopped off.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's not going to happen.
[SPEAKER_00]: You're just going to roll well.
[SPEAKER_00]: So that is one and then the other.
[SPEAKER_00]: is in Fellowship, which is a game I love, I could talk about it forever, but the basic just of it is that Fellowship is a game split up into four books, each one that adds different playbooks and different rules and things like that.
[SPEAKER_00]: And book one, as you probably guess from the name Fellowship is very much time to be Lord of the Rings,
[SPEAKER_00]: and then from there it goes completely off the rails because in books two, three and four, you can play as like a devil or an android by book four, you have like the mascot.
[SPEAKER_00]: If this was a TV show, this would be the character on all the branding.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then there's like the outsider who is literally from a different universe, like they're from a separate IP that just get launched into this game.
[SPEAKER_00]: So it's very crazy and I could talk about it forever,
[SPEAKER_00]: The mechanic that I really like is all the price.
[SPEAKER_00]: It is when something goes wrong when you fail a move or when an enemy makes a move against you, very often it'll ask you to pay the price.
[SPEAKER_00]: the price is a list of negative things.
[SPEAKER_00]: It is, you know, like take damage, lose a gear, split up from your team, something like that.
[SPEAKER_00]: The interesting thing is that whenever you have to pay the price, you get to choose which one you do, you check it off the list, and the next time somebody has to pay the price, they can't choose that option.
[SPEAKER_00]: You have to go through every option on that pay the price list
[SPEAKER_00]: And I love that because it really makes you think about like, okay, I have to pay the price in this social situation.
[SPEAKER_00]: So if I take a damage here, it's not going to really matter.
[SPEAKER_00]: Unless do I think the work and again in a battle, in which case maybe I should do this.
[SPEAKER_00]: And there's some prices that are worse than others.
[SPEAKER_00]: So you're like, do I take them early on when I can mitigate that damage as much as possible?
[SPEAKER_00]: mission without even reaching that.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's again, it's very like risk versus reward type mindset and it's decision-making that isn't, you know, it's very narrow in the decisions that you make, but they are so meaningful and so important and it is so much fun.
[SPEAKER_00]: I absolutely love it.
[SPEAKER_01]: that sounds amazing.
[SPEAKER_01]: It seems like you and I have very similar sensibilities when it comes to gameplay mechanics.
[SPEAKER_01]: I also really love high-risk, high-reward gameplay trade-offs and really impactful decision-making to me is where a lot of the most interesting developments in gameplay come from.
[SPEAKER_01]: The position versus effect trade-off,
[SPEAKER_01]: Kind of reminds me of a couple of homebrew rules that we brought into our campaign in D&D and Dark.
[SPEAKER_01]: One of them, for example, the way that I approach magic and a homebrew rule that I usually have, at least in five E games that I run that I take kind of everywhere with me.
[SPEAKER_01]: is for spellcasters using your spell slots, your spell slots are not how many spells you can cast.
[SPEAKER_01]: They are how many spells you can cast safely.
[SPEAKER_01]: And as a homebrew rule, if you are out of spell slots and need to keep casting or want to upcast a spell higher than you are capable,
[SPEAKER_01]: And it's led to some really interesting gameplay moments and trade-offs that have led to some really dramatic and clutch plays that put my players in some very precarious situations as
[SPEAKER_01]: especially late in the campaign they got really deep into exhaustion debt and so it was a constant vicious cycle as that perpetuated and they could never really quite scratch and claw their way out of it but made for some fantastically interesting gameplay, similarly with um i what was the fellowship system called uh the price the price that's it the price.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think that's such a cool way to incentivize group strategy and am I understanding correctly that everyone pulls from the same pool of price consequences?
[SPEAKER_00]: Yep, everybody.
[SPEAKER_00]: So if I have to pay the price and I check off option one and then something happens where you have to pay the price, you can't choose option one because I've already crossed it off.
[SPEAKER_00]: So it is very much a group thing of like,
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, I have the highest HP out of all of us, so I can take the damage, where somebody else is like more socially adapt, so they can take a penalty to their next social role or something like that.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, the group strategy of trying to figure out who falls on the sword is so interesting to me.
[SPEAKER_01]: I absolutely love that.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's one of my favorite mechanics also because again, not all of the prices are equal.
[SPEAKER_00]: Some of them are worse than others.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so when the list starts to dwindle down to those really, really bad ones that nobody wants to pay.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's like this oncoming doom where you feel more and more pushed to try harder and harder and it really gets you into that mindset of like the walls are closing in at things are about to break.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, that is, that is so fun.
[SPEAKER_01]: And with you kind of having that high risk high reward sensibility, I know with one page TTRPGs, you're a lot more limited in what you can do mechanically, but are there any of the games that you've designed that
[SPEAKER_01]: lend themselves more highly to that high-risk, high-reward trade-off.
[SPEAKER_01]: Anyone that you want to put forward is having mechanics that particularly have a fond place in your heart or strike on a particularly resonant theme or genre.
[SPEAKER_01]: Are there any of your projects that stand out to you in those ways?
[SPEAKER_00]: As far as mechanics that I've really enjoyed my first I would say game that like got a fair amount of success is called tarotails and it's very much based on deck of tarot cards and how those can tell the story and things like that so I do like that and then.
[SPEAKER_00]: there's one that I made triple towers which is you start the game by rolling all the dice you will use and then you assemble them into three towers and as you know you're going through it and the GM asks you to make a roll or to use one of your dice you choose the topmost dice of
[SPEAKER_00]: very decision-making in how you set up the towers in which tower you pull from in the idea of like okay I have a bunch of low dice here but I know I've got some higher dice towards the bottom of this so if I can race through that tower that I can save that really good dice for the end and I really liked it.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a mechanic that I would actually like to explore more in depth.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's a super fun gameplay mechanic and I'm sure that there's a lot of practice that you've gotten from starting small and it's a very wise choice to focus early on on getting a bunch of ideas out there in smaller bite size chunks before expanding into bigger and bigger territory.
[SPEAKER_01]: What kind of lessons have you learned from doing your one-page RPGs, and are there any bits and pieces of advice that you would give to somebody trying to do the same thing?
[SPEAKER_01]: Or if, for example, you could tell your past self and you were first starting off to watch out and be aware of anything, what advice would you give to past you?
[SPEAKER_00]: So my advice to pass me would definitely be simpler is better when you are making these one page games you want it to be as quick and easy to understand as possible for people they're going to be playing this in very short bursts one session games.
[SPEAKER_00]: and you want the rules to be as short and digestible as possible.
[SPEAKER_00]: And any advice that I would have for other people looking to make games is to play more games, play a bunch of different games, get a group of friends together and just play whatever one page
[SPEAKER_00]: click on page 2 and keep going.
[SPEAKER_00]: Find any and every game you can find and play it and if you like it awesome you know what you like about it you know what worked in it and you can you know have an idea of what you think would work for your games and if you don't have fun with it that's also great because you know what not to do you know what mechanics are at fun you know what you don't enjoy
[SPEAKER_00]: So you can take that and make a game that you have fun less, so other people will have fun went to.
[SPEAKER_01]: Great advice.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's not a one to one comparison, but before I got started in the actual place base and before I really started getting into TTRPGs, I managed to get myself into the home
[SPEAKER_01]: there's a surprisingly active home brew scene for that game, which for I brought it before another interviews, but for any listeners who are unfamiliar, you essentially play as a Disney villain and you are competing against other players that are playing as other villains and you are trying to accomplish your in-movie goal before the others, as you are
[SPEAKER_01]: working to try to get to your goal and sabotaging others to slow them down from reaching theirs.
[SPEAKER_01]: The way that the game is set up lends itself really well to home brew, because the gameplay is so insular and it's so thematically heavy and resident that you can really make any given villain to plug into that same system and it doesn't take all that much to make it work.
[SPEAKER_01]: A common hurdle that I fell into and a lot of other creators fell into, in that home Bruce scene, I kind of have a joke that everyone follows the same trajectory when starting doing home brew for that game.
[SPEAKER_01]: Everyone's first villain is Ogie Boogie.
[SPEAKER_01]: There were like five or six people who made Ogie Boogie before the game eventually released an official one.
[SPEAKER_01]: But even beyond being literal there, you would start off doing
[SPEAKER_01]: basically a kind of cookie cutter concept that is largely a reskin of existing mechanics in gameplay.
[SPEAKER_01]: You would start simple and start predictable.
[SPEAKER_01]: Then everyone's second villain is way too complicated.
[SPEAKER_01]: and then people start to dial it back in and settle down and find the balance.
[SPEAKER_01]: I definitely fell into that rut.
[SPEAKER_01]: Literally, my first one was Okibugi, and then it took me a little bit of trial and error to find the right balance.
[SPEAKER_01]: I kind of skewed in both directions of hugely complex builds and very simple ones before I found the balance that I enjoyed riding.
[SPEAKER_01]: The simpler
[SPEAKER_01]: tended to be the more effective ones, tended to be the ones people resonated with more, and usually were cleaner in their design.
[SPEAKER_01]: There was a lot of elegance in doing something simple but effective.
[SPEAKER_01]: So, pairing down and focusing in that way, I even though it's not a one to one, I very much see the value in that mindset.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, absolutely, and I mean, it's great that you bring up like home brew stuff because I think that's a great way to get into designing for TTRPGs.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, my first game that I ever designed was a hack of the one page came honey highest.
[SPEAKER_00]: So yeah, there's there's a lot there for home brew because you have all the existing mechanics and now you have to just think of like okay what's one thing I can add what's you know maybe a little bit of
[SPEAKER_00]: twist that I can put on it and then you're more free to explore and to question, why is this mechanic like this?
[SPEAKER_00]: Or if I made this game, I would have made this mechanic a little bit different and then that naturally builds into, well, if I did make my own game and then you start building your own game and things flow sort of naturally from there.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: And it is so satisfying to see it come together.
[SPEAKER_01]: I love honey-hiced.
[SPEAKER_01]: I know this is somewhat of a tangent, but just jumping off of you starting off with a hack of honey-hiced.
[SPEAKER_01]: I consider honey-hiced my first real-foothold into the TTRBG community.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was the first one that I jammed and it was one of the first experiences I had.
[SPEAKER_01]: playing for TTRPGs.
[SPEAKER_01]: And it's just such a great, simple way in.
[SPEAKER_01]: We are actually one of my players is currently working on doing a hack of honey heist to potentially do for bonus content for our show.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's awesome.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, honey-highest is like the quintessential one-page RPG.
[SPEAKER_00]: If you are somebody who wants to get into designing one-page RPGs, play honey-highest, read honey-highest, look into it because it is like the perfect encapsulation of how do you make a hook that is simple and intriguing to players and how do you make mechanics that are easy to digest?
[SPEAKER_00]: Honey-highest
[SPEAKER_00]: quintessential one-page TTRPG for learning how to make one-page TTRPGs.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's such a good starting point, and while we're on the topic of recommendations, pulling from your own pool of games, are there any that you would recommend for anyone wanting to look into your work that they should look at first?
[SPEAKER_00]: Ooh, that's a cut one from my own.
[SPEAKER_00]: who I would say a good game to lay and to sort of, you know, get the feel of like playing RPGs and what is fun in a one-page RPG.
[SPEAKER_00]: I have two games, one is fun guy force, and the other is amphibious adventures.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm big on a liberation.
[SPEAKER_00]: From GuyForce, you play as cute little anthropomorphic mushrooms and you go on cute little mushroom adventures Whereas in amphibious adventures, you are different kinds of frogs in a frog kingdom going on frog quests.
[SPEAKER_00]: those I think are very fun because they do follow the honey ice rule of playing as something that isn't human while doing things that that non-human shouldn't be doing.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like that's such a
[SPEAKER_00]: easy formula to hook people and, you know, honey ice is bears doing a heist and to be his adventures is frogs going on a quest.
[SPEAKER_00]: It is very easy to hook into very easy to understand as far as it games that I have made that are good on ramps to learning how to make one page games.
[SPEAKER_00]: Probably what is a man.
[SPEAKER_00]: It is a game that I had made for a RPG jam.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's the 24 word RPG jam in which you make an entire game in 24 words or less And you do not know how hard it is to write even a single sentence.
[SPEAKER_00]: with that limit.
[SPEAKER_00]: I cannot tell you how many times I had to delete lines going back and forth on different word choice of like, how can I get this as succinctly as possible?
[SPEAKER_00]: Any of those
[SPEAKER_00]: RPGs that are like make a game in x amount of words or less.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think are really good on ramps to learning how to write and how to make RPGs because they are the most extreme example of how can I get across this game in as few words as possible.
[SPEAKER_00]: How
[SPEAKER_00]: How can I get across the mechanics, the vibes, and everything about this game in as few words as possible?
[SPEAKER_00]: And what is a man is about being an alien trying to blend in on earth?
[SPEAKER_00]: It's very simple, it is very easy to understand, it is 24 words, and by God did it kill me to have to pare down to those last few words.
[SPEAKER_00]: It is...
[SPEAKER_00]: So much fun.
[SPEAKER_00]: I love doing those kinds of jams where you have to make a game with certain restrictions.
[SPEAKER_00]: There was another game called conversational baseball, which is designed to fit on a business card, which is another design constraint, but it was so much fun to make and so much fun to think about.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it was, you know,
[SPEAKER_00]: any sort of jam or game that is made with those kind of constraints on them, particularly word count, I do recommend because yeah, they're very good at getting down to the core of what the game is.
[SPEAKER_01]: Absolutely.
[SPEAKER_01]: Those are some very fun limitations to work with and I find that limitations really do a lot to breed creativity and game jams are so good at that.
[SPEAKER_01]: I
[SPEAKER_01]: And one of the things that you learn very, very quickly doing improv is the more narrow and rigid the boundaries are on what you can do, the easier it is for your brain to fire off and make creative connections and choices.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's a little counterintuitive.
[SPEAKER_01]: But it's framed usually in short form improv of getting suggestions for scenes or putting these rules and restrictions on the players to challenge them and to limit them as a way to make it quote unquote harder in actuality.
[SPEAKER_01]: That makes it significantly easier because it narrows your selection goal of what the scene can be about and what your choices are within the scene from literally anything down to
[SPEAKER_01]: a much narrower scope that you can look through and more quickly and effectively pull and make choices from.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I've seen that kind of principle apply very, very well to other design things.
[SPEAKER_01]: I know creative writing challenges with limitations tend to spawn a lot more creativity.
[SPEAKER_01]: I've had much more success with narrower and more restrictive guidelines than I
[SPEAKER_01]: With villainous as an example, there were a couple of times in the home brew community where we would do home brew game jams.
[SPEAKER_01]: I remember one of probably my single best custom for the game was for one of those game jams where we had we had a two week restriction to make a villain that fit a certain theme and that was limited to a specific range of complexity.
[SPEAKER_01]: The theme was temptation, and within about five days I put together the best one that I'd ever made, which was the Audrey II plant from Little Shop of Horrors, and those limitations and restrictions are what I credit to it being as good as it was.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was a very simple concept and gimmick that
[SPEAKER_01]: as opposed to on the base game, every character has their own board with different things that you can do at each location that you can move to.
[SPEAKER_01]: Nobody shares a board.
[SPEAKER_01]: The only interaction you have with other players is you can pull from a deck that is unique to them of obstacles to slow them down as one of your actions that you can do.
[SPEAKER_01]: The way that I had built the Audrey too was
[SPEAKER_01]: You could not move, you were stuck in the same location the entire time, but as the game progressed, you would grow as you started eating more and more people.
[SPEAKER_01]: The space that you're on would get bigger and you would have more and more action economy as the game went on as you grew and got bigger and bigger with the ultimate goal being to grow past the bounds of the board.
[SPEAKER_01]: it was tons of fun and I absolutely consider it my strongest one and it is purely because of those restrictions.
[SPEAKER_01]: So game jams are fantastic for that kind of thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: That is really cool.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I mean restrictions absolutely breed creativity.
[SPEAKER_00]: The more open I feel like something is the more lost in the options you get, where you sort of like, oh, I can do anything.
[SPEAKER_00]: So what do I do
[SPEAKER_00]: you sort of have that decision paralysis, but when you get so much narrower, it makes you like be more creative, it gets you more in depth with it, and that's true for a lot of different things, I'll say, I am a huge fan of trading card games.
[SPEAKER_00]: I play Pokemon, I play Yukio, I used to play Harth Zone,
[SPEAKER_00]: And my favorite type of decks are ones that put restrictions on your deck building.
[SPEAKER_00]: So when I used to play hardstone, my favorite kind of deck was a highlander deck, where you could only have one copy of each card and it made me really think about like,
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, I can't have two of this really powerful card, but I have this other card that's sort of like that that can feel the same role if I draw it and like, you know, it's all sorts of things like that.
[SPEAKER_00]: Where you, the more you are limited, the more creative you feel, the more laser focused you are, it is a paradoxical, but very true.
[SPEAKER_01]: Absolutely.
[SPEAKER_01]: The more things that you can't do in a given creative situation, the more valuable the things you can do become.
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, absolutely.
[SPEAKER_00]: Going off of that again, that my friends that I played, that we didn't end up enjoying so much, was we
[SPEAKER_00]: played fates, which anybody who has played fates, there was a that is a super open ended game that like, you have your own skill words, you make your own abilities, you custom build absolutely everything, and that sounds really fun at first, and then you start doing it.
[SPEAKER_00]: In my friend group, it was
[SPEAKER_00]: who open ended.
[SPEAKER_00]: I know that I personally prefer a much narrower, more focused, more tightly gobbed kind of games.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, there's definitely trade-offs in both directions, but I have similar sensibilities and would tend to agree with you there.
[SPEAKER_01]: So we have basically come to the end of the questions that I had prepared for you before we wrap up are there any other miscellaneous things that you want to add, topics we didn't cover, things that you want to make sure that we get to and don't leave behind before we close out.
[SPEAKER_00]: I guess really the main thing is that I want to keep on his sort of a call to action that I have for game designers, for TM's, for anybody who is like in control of a creative media.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that is, be weird, be different, be something else because I feel
[SPEAKER_00]: Like a lot of stuff that I see gets very sanitized and very commercialized and very like tone a particular way to be as mass appealing as possible and I understand the value in that and I understand why people do it But I find that the projects that get here the projects that get very out there that get very light
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, you wouldn't see it on the front page of Google results and how things like that, I find are the most interesting and the most fulfilling to engage with.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I would encourage anybody who makes any sort of creative media,
[SPEAKER_00]: Get weird with it, get different the unique and don't worry as much about the massive heal of it, just make it as interesting as possible and don't limit yourself.
[SPEAKER_01]: Absolutely.
[SPEAKER_01]: I always appreciate a big swing that didn't quite pan out a lot more than a project that played at safe and did okay.
[SPEAKER_00]: A thousand percent.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, for better words, the big swings are what you remember, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: It's like I'll tell you for personal experience.
[SPEAKER_00]: I cannot tell you a single moment from any
[SPEAKER_00]: I can't tell you a single story, be it other than the most infamous one, which is no Russian, because that is such a huge swing.
[SPEAKER_00]: It is so totally different from everything else, and it is such a huge swing that it sticks out.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I can absolutely tell you a lot of things about
[SPEAKER_00]: the first person shooter game bullet storm because it is full of big swings and a lot of them yet misses on.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm going to be like, oh my god, do I remember them?
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, in my personal opinion, it is worse to be bland and mediocre than it is to be bad 100%.
[SPEAKER_00]: a hundred percent.
[SPEAKER_00]: I would much rather something try so hard to be unique and fail than to just be mindlessly boring.
[SPEAKER_01]: Hundred percent agree.
[SPEAKER_01]: So that's going to just about do it for us for this conversation today.
[SPEAKER_01]: Before we go, though, can you remind us one more time where we can find your work in either the shows that you're on or the products that you put out?
[SPEAKER_00]: Absolutely, so if you would like to check me out as either a GM or a player you can check out the Game Master Monday mini series burnt Creek where I am a GM or you can check out dice themes wherever you get your podcasts from I have been a GM on a series there where we play I believe it's called wicked west where you play as monsters in the west I was a GM there I've
[SPEAKER_00]: play a long-running character core curie on the mask series kind of center heroes.
[SPEAKER_00]: Absolutely go check those out.
[SPEAKER_00]: It is so much fun.
[SPEAKER_00]: It has tea next.
[SPEAKER_00]: It has time travel.
[SPEAKER_00]: It has gay shit.
[SPEAKER_00]: It is awesome.
[SPEAKER_00]: as far as where to buy my games, a ladylike.its.io, that is ladylike.its.io is where you can buy my games.
[SPEAKER_00]: And if you want to keep up to date with my various opinions and what other projects I'm working on, I'm on Twitter at NEX ODS99, please don't ask what that means.
[SPEAKER_00]: I made it in middle school.
[SPEAKER_01]: Alright, excellent.
[SPEAKER_01]: And all of those links will be in the description.
[SPEAKER_01]: So, as we wrap up, I just want to thank you one more time for jumping on chat with me.
[SPEAKER_01]: This has been an absolute delight.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you so much for having me.
[SPEAKER_00]: This has been awesome.
[SPEAKER_01]: Alright, and thank you all of you for listening.
[SPEAKER_01]: One more time.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm Danger'd Andrews, the host and GM of D.N.
[SPEAKER_01]: Dark.
[SPEAKER_01]: I've been chatting with Izzy, and this has been Table Talk.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I hope you enjoy what we brought to the table.
[SPEAKER_01]: Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Table Talk, created, hosted and edited by myself.
[SPEAKER_01]: Danger Danders, with artwork by Jordan Nelson.
[SPEAKER_01]: Our guest this episode was Izzy, also known as Ladylike.
[SPEAKER_01]: Links to your works can be found in the episode description.
[SPEAKER_01]: If you're interested in being a guest on the show, reach out to us at dndarkpodcast.gmail.com.
[SPEAKER_01]: Our theme song and outro were created by Jeremy Voluci.
[SPEAKER_01]: Check out more of his works on Instagram at Jeremy Voluci underscore wreck of time.
[SPEAKER_01]: Thanks again for listening and we'll see you next time we have a guest take a seat at the table.