 I'm Rym. Scott. We're the host of Geek Nights, the late night podcast, radio show for Geeks, filled with so much fake energy because it's 10.30 in the morning at MagFast. And we went to bed at five, playing a board game. So the title of this panel, or this lecture, is Beyond Dungeons & Dragons because D&D is very nearsighted. I mean we've played D&D for a long time, you've all probably played D&D, and we have to stress this, I cannot express to you enough how much I love Dungeons & Dragons. It made role playing what it is today. It's an incredibly important game. You would not be here if it were not for Dungeons & Dragons. In summer camp I played Second Ed out behind the cafeteria all night, all the time. We're going to crap all over Dungeons & Dragons for the rest of this panel, but just know that one, that sentiment is what drove us to do it, but two, this is all with love. D&D is great at certain kinds of games, and if you want to play those games... Games involving Dungeons and or Dragons. There are a few things better than D&D at that. We can argue about First Ed, Second Ed, Third Ed or Fourth Ed, but the reason we do this panel is that most people, one, they know about indie video games and indie movies. You're at Magfest. Indie video games are probably like your life. You're playing all the cool $2 games on Steam and whatnot. People do not seem to understand that, look, they're indie role-playing games too. D&D is not the only role-playing game in the world, right? It's like people, even though WoW sort of dominates the MMO world, people understand that there are MMOs besides WoW. I mean, that Star Wars game actually, a lot of people are freaking playing it, right? But people don't seem to understand there are RPGs, tabletop ones with the dice that are at D&D. Some people don't even realize that there is even more than one, and even people who do realize there's more than one, they think that there's only a few. They think there's like D&D, White Wolf, Gerps and, you know... Now, in a way, you can say that there is almost only one, because all those kinds of games people know about, like Gerps, even paranoia to a degree, they all actually have very similar mechanics, very similar design, and there's a field of game theory, which for any of you who were at the Gaming Intellectuals panel yesterday, I talked a lot about game theory, but I had to pull it back. Game theory is not nearly as fun as it sounds. It is full of scary math, and it's about games, but in this tangential way. So we're not going to talk about game theory, but there's a subset of game theory called mechanism design. It's the idea that if you're designing a game, maybe you have a vested interest in how people play that game. You want to encourage certain kinds of behaviors. You want to make an economy in the game where the utility or the fun of all the people involved goes in a certain direction. D&D has a certain mechanism design and encourages a certain play style. But how many times do you want to play a role-playing game? You're like, yeah, let's be like investigators in the high court and we're like political drama and intrigue. Let's use the D&D system because everyone knows D&D and doesn't work so well, does it? You end up, no matter what you're trying to do, you end up stabbing stuff and looking for treasure because that's what the rules make you do, right? So if you want to play a game where you stab stuff and look for treasure and maybe you sometimes hit things on fire, D&D is the best choice. But sometimes when you want to play an RPG that does not involve those things, D&D not so awesome. So before we go any further, we have to ask a very important question. You have to define the terms what you're talking about. What is a role-playing game other than a miserable pile of Mountain Dew? So role-playing game, RPG, the term is used to describe a lot of things. That is a role-playing game by most people's definitions. Let's say, yeah, Final Fantasy, that's an RPG. Maybe now we've kind of nuanced it. You can see why they call it an RPG, right? Because they made Final Fantasy sort of based on tabletop role-playing systems. They had characters with stats that you can use to get levels and gold and you have classes. So mathematically, numerically, it looks sort of like a tabletop RPG. And you are playing a role. There's a story and you're following it, but you're not really influencing it. It's not like if you killed that imp but not that imp, the second imp goes off and finds an empire somewhere. The game pretty much just goes on. So it's a game, but there really isn't any role-playing beyond the kind of... Does anyone actually recognize this? Because as the years go on, fewer and fewer people... Does that love me? If you say yes to this question, she thanks you and the game goes on. If you're saying no... But that must. And then the question is presented to you again. You pretty much have no choice but to say yes. You can only, you know, if you say no, you just get asked over and over. Or you can just turn the game off. You can just turn the game off and your story there. So this is role-playing in some ways, but not really. It's primarily a game. Most of what's going on is a mechanical game. There's no role-playing in a sense that we'll talk about in a moment. So what about just this? This is role-playing. I'm playing a role. I am Hamlet. I am Macbeth. I'm playing a role, a character. But it's not like Shakespeare was rolling dice to figure out whether or not Hamlet is a little wuss or not. Maybe he was. They had dice in there. They're only playing a lot of things. Ophelia failed her sanity check and that was the end. So this is role-playing, but where's the game? So I'm going to give you the answer to the next set of questions first. Conflict at its core. Raw conflict. What makes a story happen? What makes a game happen? Can you name a story that doesn't have conflict at all? No conflict. You could have some really, really crappy slice of life thing. Like, la, la, la, walking down the street. Oh, man, it's really nice today at the end. Would you watch that? There are people in Japan who would. There's a show called Vinsho Town, but it's not an anime con. So we're going to skip that. Name any game that has no conflict. If there's no conflict at all, then is it really a game? If there's no decision to be made at any point, if there's no disagreement, then at best maybe you're writing a story together. Hey, King Koopa, what do you want, Mario? Can I sort of have to print this back? OK, at the end. And there's two kinds of conflict. Conflict between the people involved in a story or a game, and then the conflict of the story itself. And there's separate things to a degree, actually much more than people would realize. But obviously, this is what we're talking about. Bunch of nerds sitting around a table, rolling dice, making stories happen. The key is, why do we really play role-playing games? We're playing them because we like Star Wars, but we want to make our own Star Wars. We want to make our own story. That time when I got the McGuffin and then I dropped it in the lava, and it exploded, and the town downstream got destroyed. And then you go up to people at convention, like, oh, man, my D&D character, he's so awesome. And then one time we did this great, and you annoyed the hell out of everyone. Everyone hates you. Mountain Dew and Cheetos, I should know. This is actually our gaming group from about eight years ago. You sure those aren't sunshades? Most of the people in that picture have no idea that we have shown this photograph to thousands upon thousands of people for the last five years. Look at that hair. It's that person. Anyway. Yeah, I'm standing up on the couch taking the picture. The idea with the table is our role-playing game is you get all your friends together, and you want to tell a story. And a story involves conflict, of course, right? But you want to tell the story together. You don't want someone to tell a story to you. Then you can just sit around and have someone read a book to you out loud, which can be fun. But it's not much of a game. The definition we use for role-playing games, the purposes of this discussion, is that our role-playing game is a mechanism of conflict resolution. Now note that I do not specify whether or not it is conflict resolution between players or between characters. There is a mechanism to resolve conflict. It's not just a gentleman's agreement. For collaborative storytelling, that more than one person is telling a story. I mean, if I sit, and I roll dice, and I tell a story, and write a novel from rolling those dice, I'm doing something interesting. But I don't think it really fits our definition. Right? I mean, you could sit down with your friends, with no books, no dice, no pencils, not even anything, and sit around a table and decide to tell a story together. I'm like, oh man, what should happen next, rim? Oh man, I think the dragon should totally look like he's dead, but then wake up and totally slash the guy. Oh man, that's a great idea. No, there's no dragons. Right. What dragons? You could just agree on everything and sort of work it out and tell a story. But eventually, what's going to happen is you're going to have some sort of argument. I want there to be dragon in the story. I don't want there to be dragon in the story. And what you do with a role-playing game is you bring out some dice or something of some nature, some kind of game to decide who gets the story to go the way they want it to go. So bear in mind, for our discussion, this is a role-playing game, a mechanism of conflict resolution for collaborative storytelling to make our stories happen in a collaborative way. So this tapestry generator, if you've never seen it, I drew all the pictures that are about to follow. And if you've seen the tapestry generator, email me if you find it. It disappeared from the internet. But I use this as a way to kind of illustrate role-playing games. At the top there, King Harold. That's actually King Herod. Our game master. We've got our player character, the PC, the little dude standing there. Nice to be here. And what does Dungeons and Dragons do? What does it do well? And by Dungeons and Dragons, we also mean Gerbs and White Wolves. And all the games that they're having are the RPGs they sell at the game store. Most Palladium games, pretty much everything you see at a typical store is the same as D&D at its core, mechanically. So D&D is great at mediating conflict between a bunch of PCs and a whole wide world of three-headed dudes and goats and bulls trying to sleep. And the game master mediates this conflict. Yeah, pretty much all the conflicts in D&D are between the player characters and the environment. You're trying to climb over a wall. You're trying to fight a monster. You're trying to fight an NPC. You can fight each other. That usually just means the game is over. So D&D, for a certain kind of story, does this really well. If you're doing the bearded pretzels, let's go into a dungeon and have some fun. Well, there are other things that fit the definition of going to a dungeon and have some fun. But we have to pause that. I'm having fun in the dungeon. Because we've all had great stories with D&D that weren't PvE, that weren't just player characters fighting monsters and challengers presented by a game master. But you can only evaluate a game by the contents of the actual rule book. Because everyone is going to say, everywhere we've done this panel, people sat there at this point thinking, I've had awesome D&D games. That was you. That wasn't D&D. That was you. The power was in you. Because if you tell a good story, if you're a good actor, if you're a good storyteller, you can use any system in the whole goddamn world to tell an awesome story. All right, you ready? What's a really crappy game? Candyland. Candyland's pretty crappy, right? We can add role-playing to Candyland all on our own without changing the rules, right? It's like, I talk about the magical epic quest I went to save Queen Frosty. Here we go, right? And I could if I'm an awesome storyteller. And so my friends collaboratively tell a story as we play Candyland. Every time you move, you have to narrate, you know, everything that happened when you moved from green to blue and passed by the gooey gum, right? And you can tell an awesome story. Does that mean Candyland is an awesome role-playing game? Fuck no. Right? So if you even know, you know, so if we can tell an awesome story while we're playing D&D, does that mean D&D is good? Not necessarily. D&D could just be Candyland. So what's the point of a role-playing game then? Because the answer is, you all know, you've played tabletop games. Most of us are not good actors. We're not good storytellers. We say things like, my character tries to seduce the wench. Why not? Because it gets really awkward when you and your friend are role-playing out the wench seduction in your game sometimes. You know, we're fighting about Mountain Dew and Cheetos. We can't really role-play that well. If we were good actors, you wouldn't need a role-playing game. So if the system's not giving us anything to help us role-play, then why even use the system? Why not use the system? Tricks us into role-playing that makes us role-play. Even if we don't realize it. We have a great example of how there was a game that we played that we'd never heard of before. We're gonna talk about it. And it literally tricked us. We looked at the character sheet and we accidentally role-played. So D&D, we know what is good at. Let's talk about what is bad at. Two guys come up. One guy's trying to sell a cat and one guy's got a bull stuck on his head. Now what does D&D tell me to do? If I kill these guys, I get to roll a whole ton of dice. It's like an hour of five-foot stats rolling dice and peeling surges. Do this experiment. Go home, print out a D&D character sheet and grab a highlighter. And every, it doesn't matter which edition. It could be one, two, three, four. I don't care, right? Reptink box, whatever. Highlight every part of the character sheet that involves fighting, right? Look how much of the character sheet is like not highlighted when you're done. It's pretty much your name and maybe the diplomacy check. And that's it. So D&D drives us to this. The game gives you all these crunchy things to do all these dice rolls. I got a fistful of dice. I want to roll them real bad. Real bad. I paid money for these D20s. I don't get to use them that often. I want to use these fuckers. Oh man, it's freaking time. How can I use them by stabbing things? Let's go. Yes. But let's say I want to help the guy get the ball off his head. All right, roll a dash, roll a strength check. I want to convince the guy to give me the cat. Roll a diplomacy check. What fun is there in that? Now many times you have great role-playing experiences. I once played a D&D game where we didn't roll dice for four hours. We role-played out this bitter party in this elven court. And we've all done things like that. At what point was D&D involved in that? Did you roll a single die during those four hours? Not once. Not once. And rolling a diplomacy check is really unsatisfying. You roll it and it's this binary successor failure. It's like, all right, the guy gives you his goat, whatever it is. All right, I guess I've got it. Okay. And if we role-play it out, too, look what happened. How many times do you know a guy who has a charisma of three in game? But he's a smooth talker. And your role-play is his way out of everything the whole time. Character's got three intelligence and he solves all the puzzles. Yeah. So D&D's not helping us here. In fact, it's harming us. You can feel those tracks. The game is pushing us in a certain direction. You call it railroading. You've heard this term before, but it's not the game-master. It's the game itself is railroading us. The game-master's just a pawn. Yeah, he's usually talking about railroading when they mean like, oh, the DM rode a plot and he's forcing you to go along that plot, right? But it's also, look, the game is forcing you down a certain course of action, right? You have to solve your conflicts by stabbing things. And the game psychologically suggests, you know, very strongly that you should do that. Because that's where you get, what do you get in D&D? You get golden experience. How do you get golden experience? Stabbing shit. Now, game-master's- You don't get it for turning the, you know, displacer beast into your pet, right? They'll often do things like, oh, I'll give you 100 XP if you role-play this, you know, it'll give more awards for the role-play. That's not in the rules, though. Well, they're in the rules to a tiny degree, but there's a fundamental problem with every version of D&D. If I give one player experience for good role-playing over another player, that player will level up faster than everyone else. Once you're leveled up more than someone else, D&D sucks. It doesn't work anymore because now the player who's higher level either isn't challenged or the players who are lower level, they can't beat anything. There's no win. So I can't give one player rewards contextually over other players without unbalancing the game and because of the system, the nature of D&D, an unbalanced game tends to not work out that well. So all your rewards are meaningless because, you know, at least individual rewards because everyone has to get the same rewards or your game breaks, no matter what you do. So what do we do now? Now, notice this is player versus player. First off, any time a player in a game says something like, you know, you're arguing about what you should do, he says, no, well, that's what my character would do, so that's what I'm doing. There's no such thing as your character. Metagaming is always called such a bad thing. What if there's a role-playing system where metagaming is handled in the rules and encouraged? You use meta information to make the game better. So instead of the argument of, I totally, you know, try to, like, stumble upon the ring that he's got in his pocket. I don't want him to get the ring in my pocket because it's awesome. Yeah, but it'd be totally awesome if my character, like, found it and there's this conflict. Yeah, I mean, what's the best stuff? The awesomest parts of, you know, role-playing games where the guy rolls the 20 for the epic win or the one for the epic failure. If I roll for the one for the epic failure and drop the magic ring, that's fucking awesome, right? You can remember that. Or he rolls the 20 and notices my magic ring. That's when the awesomest shit starts to happen. But if I just manage to keep it totally secret, nothing happens. There's an example of this. That was the Luke Crane who rode Burning Wheel and a couple other role-playing games. Jared Sormason did a panel in a lecture called Games Are Mind Control. And they got two audience members up and they basically said, you're a hobbit, you've got the one ring, you're another hobbit, you really want the one ring. Go. And they kind of walked by each other, like, warily. That was it. And then they... He's not Sauron, he doesn't know I have it. He can't feel it. Yeah, and you know, if you play a role-playing game, it's like, you know, I tried to go after the ring. No, your character doesn't know I have it. That's right. It's Medicaid. Medicaid. And I don't want to give it up. So let's do this again. I have the one ring. I don't want him to know that I have the one ring as a character. But the game master says one simple thing. Medigame all you want. So I walked by and the players actually did this. They actually, these two suges we bought from the audience, did this. Guy walked by like this. Ah! I presented the conflict. My character would never do that. My character would punch me in the face if he knew I did that. But he's not real. You're playing for your enjoyment. Not your character's enjoyment. Yeah, your number one goal, I mean, a role-playing game isn't about winning, right? It's not like, you know, you can win D&D. It's not like the board game we played last night where you're trying to win, right? There's a victory condition. The victory condition is everyone at the table is awesomely entertained for the, you know, duration. So you should always do the thing that is the most entertaining for the people at the table, regardless of whether your character has a high level, low level, who gives a shit. And if you want to explore this more, we have a lecture we did called Losing Should Be Fun where we talk about losing for an hour. Too much meta, right? We have plenty of meta here. Too much meta. Let's talk about characters though. Say two PCs disagree about something in the game. I want to go left, you want to go right. I want to be a pirate, you want to- Ninja. Be a ninja. All right, pirate, party of pirates, party of ninjas. So what tools does D&D give us for these characters to resolve their conflict? I think we know what D&D gives us. We're going to go down the right hand chain where I'm going to stab you. No, here's just even worse. Say we do this. We roll all his dice. We ride that track. What consequences are there of conflict? I get him down to one hit point. That doesn't mean crap. All right, kill him. And now my game's ruined. So what else can we do? Roll diplomacy versus diplomacy? That's bullshit. It's like, okay, we might as well just randomly decide which way we're going to go. And then I have to go the way that you want. I'm going left and you're going right. No, you all know what really happens here. Get on the full-on Game Master Express. The Game Master's just like, all right, kids. You're going east. There's a dragon to the west. You can't go that way. Yeah, yeah. You ever know that the best, the good D&D GMs, what they'll do is that there are three pads. And no matter which one you pick, it's going to be the same room. Yep, that's the good trick. To make you feel like you're making a meaningful decision, but you're on the railroad, right? You see these other tracks. You think you switch tracks, but no, they're all going in the same town. So what do we do now? What about when the players, or a player wants to do something different from what the Game Master wants? The classic, we buy a boat and become pirates. And the Game Master's- Well, let me throw this adventure book in the dungeon. Game Master's looking at the dungeon he spent a month building. Let's tell an awesome D&D story. We were playing some high-level D&D because we were punked with middle-school-aged kids. And we're like, yeah, it's awesome if we have more levels. Let's get level 15s, all right, yeah. And then it's like, all right, he builds his giant evil castle with the evil wizard for us to go in and get the evil wizard. It's on a big, scary cliff with lightning like Castlevania. And Druid's like, hey, there's a big castle on the cliff. Yep, it's over there, an evil guy lives in it. Yep, some of the two giant earthworms, the castle falls in the ocean at the end. So not only does the Game Master express the game, but now we have the danger of the conflict actually ruining the game. The players are now wanting to leave the game entirely because they want to play the pirate thing. There's no way to resolve this whatsoever in the context of the game. So what about this? There are role-playing games where there isn't a Game Master. There's no Game Master. So imagine D&D without a Game Master where there's a disagreement about the direction the story is going to go. Now it's a train without an engineer. So what are we getting at with all this? It turns out that there's a whole bunch of different role-playing games to handle all these situations, thousands of them. I like to use this great. On one side, we've got pure game. On one side, we've got pure role-playing. On one side, on the top, we've got purely directed or mediated storytelling. The Game Master wrote a story and you're just going through the motions, revealing the story. At the bottom, completely collaborative. No Game Master, no book whatsoever. And it turns out that there's stuff all over this. These are some examples. Let me monopoly is just a collaborative game. Super Mario 1 is just a single-player game. Jane Austen, just a story, just role-playing. One person did a role-play through one story all the way through to the end. Whose line is it anyway? Some improv comedy? There's a little bit of game there, just barely. And there's a whole bunch of- You can technically win, right? Yeah. So there's a little bit of game and a whole bunch of role-playing. So where is D&D in here? Well, it's right about there. It's actually mostly game. Most of the game is actually about fighting. It's mostly top-down. There's no mechanic for the players in the book to do things like push the story in a certain direction. There's no thing in the book about the consequences of failure other than dying, getting resurrected, losing levels. And you might be saying, hey, there's a whole lot of role-playing in D&D. What are you talking about? Well, that role-playing, like we said before, is brought to the table by you. It's not in the book. And it's not in the book. It's not part of D&D. So you can't give D&D credit for something that you did. Just like you can't give the Candyland credit for the fun you had at the licorice, whatever the fuck. So we spent about 22 minutes talking about all this stuff. But the thing is, you don't need to understand mechanism design. You don't need to understand why the mechanics do things they do. You just need to stop playing D&D and play some different. You just need to play some games. So what we're gonna do now is talk about a whole bunch of different D&D RPGs. Now, this is just a small sampling. If you go on the internet, you will discover the world of D&D RPGs and be heavily enlightened. You can find a game for just about anything. So what I suggest you do is get together with your role-playing friends, right? And think of a story that you want to tell. Think of the genre. Think of the kind of plot, the kind of conflicts. And then find a game that matches that. And then you'll be in business. Now, if you have questions about these games, we probably won't take questions at the end of this. Find us through the comment and ask us. Email us. We'll actually respond. Join our forum. We've done so many episodes and all these different indie RPGs on Geek Nights. All these lectures. We got a ton of stuff out there. And pretty much just about every question that you're going to ask is that, you know, a lot of the same-tickle role-playing questions. Go ask Google before you ask us. Just, you know, it exists. Start with Inspectors. I'm just curious, anyone ever heard of this game? Played it a few people. A few people. Here's the deal. This game just makes Ghostbusters the movie happen. Or, with a slight tweak, it makes Cthulhu Eldritch Horror happen. Well, I mean, Ghostbusters already has some Cthulhu Eldritch horror going on. Yeah, but Ghostbusters is also kind of funny, kind of quirky, but also kind of serious. All right, so here's how Inspectors works. I'm just going to tell you the basic mechanic here. There's a whole bunch of rules, obviously, but it's actually kind of a small book, only about Yee-Bing. I've got it with me. I actually- You get the character sheet slide? Yes, I do. First, look at this character sheet. That doesn't really look like a character sheet you're used to. It looks really fun, actually. There's a few stats on it. It's mostly flavor tags. There's almost nothing. All right, so the way this works is you have four stats. So let's pick a stat. Academics is a stat, right? And you want to do something academic related. So, Rim, what do you want to do? Well, we know that the guy disappeared from the train at night, so I go into the microfiche archives and look for, like, other train disappearances for the past 100 years. OK, so he's going to research train disappearances, right? OK, so roll your academics roll. I failed. I rolled a perfect failure. All right, a perfect failure in Inspectors means that the GM says what happens. As you go into the microfiche archive, you're digging around in the microfiche, but suddenly, you know, you hear something going on. And before you know it, the microfiches are flying at you and cutting you up. Oh, my God. There's some kind of crazy monster going on in here. Let's try this again. I roll a perfect success. I roll the D&D equivalent of a 30 on a D20. Tell me what happens. What do you mean tell you what happens? Well, I mean, you roll the success on the thing you wanted, so you get to say what happens. I, all right, in the microfiche, I find a record that every year on this one day there's a report of someone disappearing from the train. And in fact, it's always a middle-aged man, just like the guy we were investigating. And it's always on this one train line. I just wrote part of the story. I got control of the narrative. You roll dice to see who gets to control the narrative. Yep. Now, the other thing is you can even roll in between. Like, if you roll so-so, it's like, OK, you get to say what happens, but the GM gets to put in the complication, right? There's a little compromise going on if you roll in between. So that's pretty much how Inspectors works. And it's totally awesome. Now, there's one other mechanic I just want to show. How many times you played a game where you want to have, like, the secret hideout. We've got our home base. We've got our hold. You don't want to use the old Dungeons and Dragons Cyclopedia hold rules. Why not just make that part of the game? There's a shared character sheet for your hangout. There's shared resources. There are die pools you can grab stuff from. It abstracts all of that. So you don't have to have someone sitting there writing down, we have 498 electron pieces, five copper pieces, a dead rat, and some nunchucks. What's the prime time? Prime time adventure. So this is just the character sheet for prime time adventures. It's also a very small game. Prime time adventure is a game designed to create television shows, right? You've got a lot of you go to anime cons. You'll want to make a game that isn't anime, that isn't Bezem. This makes a season of an anime. Yeah, think of any of your favorite TV shows, right? It doesn't matter what genre it's in. Any TV drama that's episodic, you can use this game to play it, right? Now, the key mechanic in prime time adventures that you have to worry about, right, is the episode focus. Basically, you see in the bottom, I guess your bottom left, right? These little dots. And what you do is before you even start playing, you put down a number for each episode of how powerful your character is going to be in that episode. Because, you know, you watch an episodic TV show, it focuses on different characters, right? There's the Fluttershy episode versus the Rainbow Dash and Rarity episode. You could use this for a pony game, no problem. Oh my God, we're doing that. So, you wouldn't even need to modify it at all. And, you know, so you write down, like, you know, okay, in episode two I'm gonna have four, and in episode three I'm gonna have two, right? And then all the conflict resolution in this game is based on cards. So that number is how many cards you draw. So, you know, in say episode one, it's a Twilight Sparkle episode, the rim's Twilight Sparkle, it gets four cards, and I'm with Fluttershy, I only get one card. So what do these cards do? They help, if you have more cards, you're gonna get your way when this conflict's happening. So, we've made a game that tricks you into writing how TV shows go, even if you know nothing of our writing TV shows. You're gonna play out a TV show, it's gonna ebb and flow, and the characters come and go, just like any TV show you like. Right, here you go. All right, we're not gonna answer any questions or listen to anybody. One other thing I'll point out is that look what's on the character sheet. Nemesis. You have to write down who your nemesis is. So, you've decided, all right, I have a nemesis. Every show, everyone has like their foil, the person they fight against. I mean, I'll stop making pony references, but I was gonna make another one. The other thing is in this game, it's a turn-taking game, right? And a lot of times you'll play a D&D and you'll get like the turtle, which is the person who sits there not doing anything, but you'll get the roach. The roach is the person who, when the spotlight is not on them, they'll be all up in business, right? They start role-playing with you in character while the Game Master's meeting and I was like, yeah. But then as soon as the spotlight's on them, they scurry into the darkness, like a roach. And they go somewhere else and start role-playing in the background. In Prime Time Adventures, a lot of RPGs now do turn-taking where it's your turn to make a scene. It's your turn to make a scene. It's your turn to make a scene. And it's like a TV show. It's broken into scenes. You go around the table doing a scene with each person, do-do-do-do-do-do, like that, right? And that's how the flow goes. But notice how simple the character sheet is again. It forces you to distill your character. In this game, what is important? What my edges are, like what I'm good at? Who I know, my connections? Who my nemesis is? Yep, all right. It forces you to make a character that fits the game. You don't have that, you know, thousand-page essay on how your uncle is Kelvin Blackstaff that the Game Master's not even gonna read. Remarkable. Oh, shit. There's no dice in this. No, Free Market, it's a big box. It's like a lot, it's kind of expensive, but it comes with a ton of shit. It looks like a board game. It does look like a board game. But basically, Free Market is this. There is a space station. It's called the Donut. It's up near Saturn or some shit, right? And a bunch of people lived there a long time ago. And their descendants still live there, and it's way crowded. But it's also the way future, like fucking Diva Naves. You might hear the term post-scarcity society. Oh, yeah, you got friggin' replicators, you got telepathy, you've been in people's memory. I mean, if you die, they just print another body and put your memories back into it. Yeah, it's sort of like paranoia, but the computer is actually good. Like actually, not kidding, it's a good computer. So in a society, in a world where we want for nothing, we can't even die. There's no laws because, what, I stole your muffin? You just print a thousand more muffins. I kill you, you just come right back. Yeah, in fact, it's good for me if I try to give you a muffin and you accept it, that's good for me, all right? I get mad flowed. So where can we have conflict in a game where literally I can print lightsabers? And if I kill someone, they don't even care. They might like... Well, they'll care a little. They might like do the equivalent of like downing me or frowning me in the equivalent of Facebook in this game. But yeah, free marketing is pretty awesome. A lot of people sort of can get the hang of it because it's kind of like, well, what do I do? But you do whatever you want. And it's like once you get the idea, like I can just fucking go nuts, right? It becomes like this fantasy fulfillment thing, but it also becomes sort of like this, oh, that's what the future is gonna be like. I'm gonna be prepared. And like these other old people. This is a game that's usually driven by the game master will say something like, all right, what do you do today? You can do anything. Oh my God, I'm gonna make tacos. Screw that, let's try it. Half the games are about food, pretty much. Yeah, we played one game. We were like, it's crowded here. That's kind of the one thing we lack for a society. Food cannibalism has happened at least twice in games I've played in. These games often get pretty dark, too. Gourmet cannibalism, and we've also seen a lot of... We played the... A lot of game designers in the game situations. Yo, dawg. Yo, dawg. Thousand and one nights. Now, talking about yo, dawg, this game, this is gonna sound crazy. This is the ultimate yo, dawg. The way this game works is you are playing courtiers in the Sultan's court at the height of like Solomon's empire. You sit around in the court. So it's up a ladder. And first let's talk about character creation. So you have to write down something you envy about every other character. No, think about what that's gonna do already. I envy your virility. I envy your wealth. I envy something horrible. It doesn't matter. On top of that, it's the Sultan's court. You can't insult someone directly. You can't like directly argue with someone. Everyone just be like, and then you're dead. Yeah, the Sultan will just kill you for disturbing his team. No one gets to be the Sultan, right? So what you... No one gets to be the Sultan. So what... And the other thing you do is you write down what you want. You want something. Or something you desire. I want to marry the Sultan's daughter. That's pretty good. I want to leave this court. I want to murder that dude. And then every night, we go in two phases. During the day, our courtiers talk to each other and talk until someone says, let me tell you a story. They then allocate roles to all the other players and you play these characters, playing characters in a game. This sounds like it might be really confusing. This is the only game I've ever run for people where everyone remembered the character's names of everyone else at both levels throughout the entire game. So you knew your own character's name in the Sultan's court and you knew the character in the story that was being told in the Sultan's court that your character was playing. Now, the way the game... Like, one game we played, it worked really well. I played this kind of Don Juan character in the court. I was a womanizing poet. I was beautiful and virile and strong and awesome. I envied the unit, Mustafa Bin Mustafa, played by my friend Pete. I envied his access to the courts, to the Sultan, to the heron, his prestige. He envied my virility because he doesn't have man bits anymore. So he starts to tell a story, a story about a eunuch. He says he assigned me, the virile guy, the Don Juan, the role of the eunuch to insult me. I, in the course of the game, insult him back by entering the stage. Hurt it, dear! I am the eunuch, big and stupid! He allotted himself the role of me, the Don Juan, the hero of the story because that's what he envied about my character. The rulebook also tells you to lounge while you play and to eat figs and dates and have honey and wine. Do you have olives? Yeah. This game is amazing. It's like 20 pages, this rulebook. So Dre. So, you know, we're used to playing games with dice, but some of the games you showed, you also use cards or other things, right? But I mean, you could really use any sort of mechanism, you know, we could use cups, or we could use pen spinning. Whoever the- Apparently in Finland, they literally use fighting each other physically. They love a fist fight. Right, but it's like, we can use pen spinning. Whoever the pen- I don't even think- Whoever the points at gets their way, I get my way. Right? You can use anything. In Dread, whoever came up with this as a genius, they decided to use a Jenga. So when you play this game, you build up a Jenga. Now, what does a Jenga do? When you play Jenga just regularly, right? It starts out pretty stable, get suspenseful, more and more, and then it falls. Right? I'm gonna say what Scott said, but let's talk about a horror movie. A survival horror movie, a zombie movie, a thriller, like a Jason movie. Starts out safe, tension builds, and then somebody dies. Tension releases. Builds again, releases. Huh, this Jenga set is a lot like that horror movie, isn't it? So you use Dread to basically play a horror game and the Jenga set, right? Basically forces you psychologically because you're feeling the Jenga. So your mood matches the mood it should be because the Jenga set matches the story the whole time, and the way it works is this. Rim, zombie's coming up the hell right now. I shot gun him in the face and blockade the door. All right, give me two pulls. Whatever, bam, bam. Your move. You pull twice, you freaking blow the zombie's heads off, boom, boom, boom, boom. You barricade that door, you're safe. You start to hear some scratching underneath the floor voice. I... It's not so safe in here. I look for an exit. Like I try to get up through the roof just in case. Like if you wanna climb up, if you wanna climb up through the roof, you wanna climb up through the roof just to make sure I can get out. Give me one pull, because there's a ladder, All right, that's fine. Whatever, one pull. All right, you climb up to the top. And as you're looking outside, the barn window, something comes and grabs you on the shoulder. Oh, now let's assume at this point that we've been doing this for a while, and the Jenga is just, the Jenga's starting to get a little shaky. That one pull was, you know. That's the thing, as the GM, I gotta manage it. At the shakier the Jenga gets, the more shit is coming on. When the Jenga's really stable, I'm not gonna be like 30 zombies, bitches. I'm gonna wait until it's real shaky. When it's real shaky, I'm gonna be like, yeah, you just got locked in the shopping mall guys, whatever. So let's say it's the most shaky. It's really shaky, like you don't even wanna touch it. I don't wanna pull. You don't wanna pull? I'm not gonna pull. I'm not touching the Jenga. Fucking zombies all grabbing you, and they're all over the place. They're all grabbing you. You can't even move. You're screaming, you're screaming, all your friends are downstairs. Zombies are gonna like, start chewing on your arm. So I fail to get what I want when I refuse to pull, but if I pull and succeed, I get what I want. All right, fine, I go for it. And I pull, and I knock the Jenga over. Zombies fucking eat you, all over the place. What the rules actually say is that your character dies in the most horrific, seen, appropriate way possible. Right. And then we reset the Jenga. Right, so he's out of the game, literally. Like he just gone, right? Cause he died. And the thing is you play, everyone's probably gonna die one at a time. But you see, when the Jenga falls, whoever made it fall is the dead. But as long as you refuse to pull, which you can do, you'll just sort of stay alive, but everything will just keep getting worse for you. You fail at what you want to. Right, you'll just, you basically won't get anything you want. It'll just devolve into being really, really crappy, really, really quick. Now I have one other option. It's really rickety. The zombie's about to eat the girl. I can just look at the game master and smash that Jenga. On purpose. I then succeed in the most glorious way possible. And then die in the most horrific, seen, appropriate way possible. And then I sit over and you're still dead. But since you did it on purpose, the girl is still safe. So it's like, if you just, if you did it by, if you accidentally knocked it over, the zombies would eat you. If you purposely knocked it over, you would shotgun all the zombies, you had a bunch of extra shells, the girl gets away safe, and then you get to eat. It's child's play three when he jumps on the grenade. All right. That's dread. Shock. There's so much to talk about with this game. I'll just bring it up. It's actually space battles. So here are three mechanics. One, before you play, you distribute the game mastering. So you pick a bunch of, you pick a bunch of issues and then you line them up and then there's game masters for each thing. So we're playing this game. I'm the game master for space weapons. Anytime space weapons come up, I make the rules on the spot the whole time. I am the game master. He runs space weapons. So if there's any, it's like, well, you know, are the space weapons powerful enough to walk on planet? Let's ask Mr. Space Weapon GM. You know what? Yeah, in fact, they're so dangerous that half of the planets in the known universe have been destroyed by them. And here are the mechanics. All right. Well, I'm in charge of pirates. So whenever there's a question about pirates, like, hey, how many pirates are there? How much are they causing damage to the economy? You asked me and I'll tell you. It's got how many pirates are there? There is, basically it's half pirates, pretty much. For every pirate, it's a non-pirate. It's really bad. Basically pirates are taken over. Mechanic too. Oh, they just killed someone. Now there's more pirates. In fact, it spreads like zombism. If a pirate kills a human, then another pirate spawns. It's post-aparianism, touched by their newly appendages. So, mechanic two. Before you start, you pick two idioms of conflict as a group. Every conflict in the entire game must be framed in one of these two ways. We played a game where one of the idioms was sex or space battle. You would have to either resolve a conflict with sex or with a space battle. Pretty much any time anything happened in the game, any conflict between characters, you had to solve that conflict in the context of sex or in the context of space battles. So it's like, I want to rescue this girl. That's a space battle, you know? I want to convince the president to do something. Well, are you going to space battle him or sex him? Now the reason this happened is that one of these social issues we picked was actually gender relations in a future where there are multiple, there are more than two genders. There's neuters and there's cloning. What happens to gender in that situation? So that was part of the social science fiction that we were telling. Mechanic three, every player plays both a character, a PC who's going after something and the nemesis of another player. Right, it's another game where you go around in circles with the turns. So when it's, you know, it rims to my left, right? You flip your character sheet over, right? It's my turn, so I'm me, my character. Rim is my enemy character, who's an NPC that I sort of create, right? So, and then on rim's turn, whoever's sitting to his left is his nemesis and so forth. And I have to be the nemesis of the guy sitting to my right. So everyone's actually playing two characters and sort of an NPC for the guy to your right for him, his foil, and also your own character up against the guy on the left. Mouse guard, I didn't even read the mouse guard comics. Not enough. These are amazing comics. Are you kidding me? What's wrong with you? My summer name, David Peterson. This is a game that will make those comics happen for you straight up. Now the mechanics I want to bring up, two mechanics. One, character creation is mostly a series of questions. Things like, who are your parents? What was their trade? Do you save and sacrifice to be ready for winter? Or just live carefree? And depending on your answers, your character becomes more and more constrained. Character creation is a guided group process. Yeah, I mean, it is really just one of those point by sort of systems, right? But it disguises it. So they're not like, hey, do you want to put a point in Liz or a point in it? Well, are you the kind of mouse that saves for winter or are you the kind of mouse who eats all the food and lets other people save for winter? But it also, the way it asks questions, it forces you to distill your character down to what's important for the conflict, to what's important to the game. Mechanic two, it's a turn-taking game. Game master's turn, player's turn. On the game master's turn, he throws challenges at you. You can't do anything proactively. And your little mice, so all kinds of things are challenges. There's mud, there's weasels, there's a snow storm, there's a log rolling down the hill. And you've got to fight your way through the game master, beat you up and beat you up and beat you up. And eventually the game master's done beating you up because sometimes he's a nice guy. And then it's the player's turn. You can only do things on the player's turn if you have checks. You've earned the right to roll dice. You can role play all you want. You want to roll dice and make something happen. You have to spend the check. Because if you don't roll dice, nothing happens. You earn checks during the game master's turn by using your traits, by using aspects of your character against you. I'm cowardly, so I run away. You've got to check for that. Because you ran away at a really bad time and you could have saved someone. And you're a cowardly character. It says so on your sheet, you earn a check during the GM's turn when the log was rolling down the hill. This game tricks everybody into role playing surprisingly well. And it's actually a great game to run for people. Because during the GM's turn, you're thinking like, okay, yeah, we really want to save the day and do whatever mice are doing. But really you're just trying to earn a lot of checks for the GM's turn. So you end up just doing whatever your traits are all the time and usually to make things worse. Because if you do it to make things better, you know, like you run away at the right time, you don't get to check for that. So it's a great game to like get people into role playing. It's a great game for kids actually and I personally love it. But now we got to talk about the big one. Because the same person who wrote Mouse Guard wrote Burning Wheel. Burning Wheel. Burning Wheel. So you've been in this situation. You go to a game in con and you're walking down and there's that guy. He's sitting in one of those tables. He's got like a bunch of stuff there and he's trying to get anyone to look at, you know, he fixed D&D. He has a role playing system. He wrote, yeah, you rolled D30s. You know, in those days everyone was like, I got my D&D mod. It's so much better. Everyone should be, you know. Those games pretty much all suck. No one knows what they're doing. These aren't D&D designers. You just don't want to make eye contact with that guy. So I was at an Ubercon many years ago and I accidentally made eye contact with that guy. It happened to be in Ukraine. I made Burning Wheel. I sat down. I played this game and it was amazing. So I go to these guys. I'm like, guys, I found this game. And rightfully, well, somewhat rightfully, we're like, yeah. Okay, some guy modded and fixed the D&D. Sure, whatever. No, seriously. This was like point buy systems. Yeah, you know what? Yeah, no one's going to play that fucking weird ass game. It's not any good. We couldn't even get people to play Shadowrun. We're playing D&D. So I made them come to Ubercon the next year hoping the same guy would be there. And he was. So I drag him up. Do for me what you did for that. And we had only done combat in that game. We hadn't even done any of the other stuff. So he sits us down, hands three character sheets, asks, does the bathroom. And the character sheets have a ton of shit on them. I think I have some character sheets. I do. And he holds them up. He's like, who wants to be the fruity elf? I'm like, yep. Who wants to be the bastard dwarf? Look at all the things. It's got a bunch of shit all over it. Who wants to be the bastard dwarf? Our friend Peter Olson, the same guy who played Moustafa, been Moustafa. What? All right, so we need to get these character sheets. You know, it's the elf piece of the dwarf and I'm the stupid human thief, right? And we're sitting there. And you're looking at it. He's looking at the character sheet and there's a whole bunch of crap all over it. Like, ooh, look at these numbers, ooh. But then you look right here and there's this big blob of tax. This is beliefs. Let me read for you the beliefs of the dwarf. This sword was a treasure of my clan for generations, stolen by foul Rodin and abandoned here. I'll restore it to its rightful place among my people. Words may be eaten, but blood is forever once spilled. Better a heated exchange than an exchange of blows. My companions and I have seen much hardship together. I'll get them home safely. Both my uncle Devalin is proud but destitute. I will do anything to restore his fortunes. So I'm reading mine in the dwarf's reading list and I know, I read the first one. The sword was made by my father using its markings. I will demonstrate his origin to my companions. They cannot dispute his ownership. And belief too, I must return the lost sword to my father so he will forgive me and allow me to return from my exile. And I look at Pete who started reading his sheet and say, I'm taking that fucking sword. And he's like, that sword was abandoned by the... And Scout chunks in you. And he said, are you in? We don't know the rules in this game. All we did was read these beliefs on the sheet and look at each other. So Pete insults my character. I look down right under beliefs, his instincts. Instinct one, never accept an insult. Back to the bathroom. And we notice and we're like, oh, we're ready to play now. We're ready to play now, we're ready to play now. He's like, them continue. Not even the game, that character, she tricked us into straight up role playing. We hadn't read one page of this book and actually only needs to read like 75 pages of this book. We're free online. This is the game we ran for a whole bunch of people at Megfest last year and they came back and wanted to play this some more. So there's so much, I can't talk about everything that's great about this game in terms of design and role playing trickery. But a few mechanics, one, to level stuff up. You have stats and skills, like strength is a stat. Well, not really strength, but the equivalent of strength. You have skills like carpentry or ugly truth, or persuasion or centaurious debate or drinking. Not as good as ugly truth. So if I want to level up, say climbing, I have to get a few routine tests, a few difficult tests, and a few challenging tests. Now here's the deal, with the dice alone, it is impossible to succeed on a challenging test. Yeah, let's look at the chart. Oh, let's see, a challenging test. Well, you roll four dice and you need six successes. How many successes can I get per die? One. This is the game where I'll go for it anyway. You basically have to succeed and fail at one thing to level it up. You have to fail to climb a mountain to be able to climb bigger mountains. You have to fail to kill an orc to be able to kill more orcs. Right, but unlike, say, like it looks in D&D. If you fail at climbing in D&D, what's the worst that's gonna happen? I roll the climb roll. You fall off and take some D6s of damage from falling. Do you want to try again? Yeah, I take 10. Oh, you take 10, you take 20, you're over. Congratulations. Or you just decide not to climb, now you're stuck, what do I do? I need to get over there. In Burning Wheel, every success and every failure makes something happen. If you fail, something will happen. You break your fucking leg. I failed, we were walking through the woods, my character lost my foot. It happened. One roll, it's like, nope, you failed the health check in the snowy tundra and you lost your foot, that's it. So think about that, imagine D&D where you had to fail and succeed at things in order to level up. And you level up individual things. So the things you're trying at, it kind of mimics the stories. I didn't have to go through the snowy tundra, but the GM's like, hey, you want to go through the snowy tundra? And I'm like, how many fucking dice is it? Oh my God. I'm the prodigal son of the prince, never ridden a horse, never picked up a sword. In the course of the story, I have to pick up a sword to defend someone. I start leveling up sword. I become a great knight someday in the context of the game. Yeah, but only have to get stabbed a bunch. Doesn't have to be stabbed, could be other things. Now let's look at the other mechanics of failure. In D&D, I know a guy, my aunt's an ABS, totally get me into the thing. You know, you have your character sheet, you've written down like my uncle's Kelvin Blackstaff. Doesn't mean anything. In this game, when you make a character, you spend points to say, my uncle is Kelvin Blackstaff. You don't write your separate page full of bullshit. Everything that's on this sheet counts in the rules and if it's not in this sheet, it doesn't mean that. If you pay to have Kelvin Blackstaff be your uncle, he is your uncle. That is the story that is it. And if you say, Kelvin Blackstaff, I go see him, the GM says, okay, you go see him. Is he not on your sheet? Yeah, okay, you go see him. He's there. So here's the thing. Kelvin, how's it going? It costs 15 points to be friends with the king. It costs 14 points for the king to know who you are and hate you. It costs even less points if you're related to the king. It costs even less points if you had sex with the king. Now in terms of that, you know, we're talking about things on the sheet. There's this idea of traits. You might write on your D&D character sheet, I have black hair and almond shaped blue eyes with gold fleckle. It doesn't mean dick. It's like, bring that up in the game and it's like, well, you don't get to roll any dice for that. I want a bonus dice for my sparkles, yeah, no. My character's hairy. All right, whatever, no one cares. In this game, if you spend a point on hairy, your character is hairy to a notable degree. Like if it says, hairy on here, that's hairy, right? You can get advantage out of it. Hairy is a point at which you could theoretically roll dice because of your hairiness. If there was, like, if you wanted to do a costume check to disguise yourself as a gorilla, you would get an extra point. But only if it actually says hairy on there. So everything in the game, there's a real mechanic behind it. Here's the final thing. If I'm gonna fight with Scott, we roll a whole bunch of dice and someone comes away with, like, a kidney stab. Yeah, when you, it's not like, there's no hit points. I mean, you get stabbed during big trouble. If we want to argue about what to do next, we roll a whole bunch of dice and someone's brain gets stabbed metaphorically. There is social conflict. I script a point, then a rebuttal, then an ugly truth in sight dismiss or something. He scripts a rebuttal, another rebuttal, and then a point and we play that out. And when you win the argument, right, you have to usually, someone gets their way or no one gets their way or there's a compromise. There's going to be something. So when you're doing that, let's go to the left cave, let's go to the right cave, you bring out the duel of wits, you have the duel of wits, and there will be an answer and you have to abide it. You can't just say, no, I'm not gonna, or you can escalate to violence. So you set stakes ahead of time. So, you know, two players or maybe a player in an NPC or a group of NPCs, for example, arguing against the king and court, agree on the stakes. The players are like, all right, if we win, king, you will execute your uncle because he is a traitor to the crowd. And the king says, if I win, I'm having all of you executed for even daring to come into my court. And the thing is, you might end up one way or the other. You might end up, no one gets what they want. If there's a tie, which means that no one gets executed, or you might end up serving this compromise. Okay, well, I'll put my uncle in jail and kill half of you. Or I'll let you go, but I'm keeping all of your family's hostage and you have one week to find evidence. Yeah, something like that forces you to go in new direction. All right. So we talked a lot about Burning Weir. Because it would play it the most. So, King Arthur Penn Dragon, this game is made by Greg Stafford, who made the original Call of Cthulhu. And he was pissed off because a lot of people, when they played D&D or other role-playing games, they are knights. But they don't act like knights, not like real medieval knights acted, not like King Arthur knights acted. Not even like fantasy medieval knights actually act in the books. Yeah, this game forces you to act like a knight. You really have no choice. And we talk about railroads and stuff. This game was described to me by Scott as literally the exact opposite of Burning Weir in every possible way, but it is just as fun. Right, so think about this. You still make decisions, you still role-play, but you're sort of more limited because you have to be a knight, right? And you're in the times of King Arthur. That second book is actually the Great Penn Dragon Campaign, which actually is you play from the time of Uther Penn Dragon all the way up until Arthur is dead, right? And it's literally page, every page is a year in the story and you just keep going and you're gonna die, make new knights and have heirs and just keep going and going and you literally live out the entire story of King Arthur from the start to finish. But you're forced to do certain things. So each one of these, right, this is just one part of the complicated character sheet are your personality traits, right? So you're gonna have these opposed personality traits, 20 points on each line. So let's say you've got, and I think it's honest and deceitful, right? So let's say you go to someone and it's like, I'm gonna lie and tell him something, something, right? Because you don't want him to know the truth, right? He's gonna hate you, but you're so honest. You can't go against your honesty. So if you're like, you've got 19 honesty. If you have 19 honesty, not only are you honest, you are famous throughout the land for being honest, right? So for you to go against your honesty is like, whoa, you can't do that. So now you have to roll dice against your honesty, right? And if you succeed, you can tell a lie, but then you'll become more, you know, deceitful. And it's really, you know, so it's like, you must act like a knight. You can't, you know, and you must act as your character is. You can't just go off, do whatever. And the thing about this game is that, you know, there's a little bit less role-playing, a little bit less freedom, but it's a knight simulator. It makes you feel like a knight, you know, in the, they have a winter phase. And in the winter, you go home to your manor and you screw your wife or, you know, whatever. And you try to make babies and that sort of things. You have heirs, right? And you invest all your money to make sure that baby lives because, man, it's medieval times and it's all plagues and who knows what. So you get all this money and glory and you're pumping it into that baby to make sure you have an heir. But I mean, there's still like a 50% chance it's gonna get a plague and die or something. I mean, just how do you feel? You spend, you work so hard for all this glory and gold and you pumped it in this baby and it died. You're just like, no, no. The answer is lots of babies. Yeah. It makes you feel what the knight would have felt, right? If you want to feel like a medieval knight in the horrible dark ages, but there's also magic because Merlin's around at shit. I guess there's dragons. Then you can play this game. Dogs in the vineyard. Dogs in the vineyard. So dogs in the vineyard is basically sort of about these, you know, like crazy backwards religious community. You know, and there's these people who are the dogs, right? And they're sort of like the religious police. And it's like, well, when you get to be a certain age, you know, you become a dog and you get this coat and there's a whole backstory I'm not gonna go into. But the important thing about dogs in the vineyard is, you know, the mechanic of how the conflict works is you basically have to raise, right? So you get a whole bunch of dice out, you know, depending on whatever you're doing, right? And then you'll start being, you know, you get into a conflict with something. Like, all right, we're gonna have a shootout. I duck behind a barrel, right? And then it's like, okay, you can raise or see. I see. You see. All right, so what are you gonna do? I'm gonna run away. You're gonna run away. So you put out the number of dice, right? And there's like, you know, you can, you basically raise and see, like in poker, as you're describing all the things you're gonna do in the fight until somebody wins out. And then they're the one who gets their way. So you're having to shoot out. It's like, well, you know, it's not just like, I shoot them once, pew, I shoot them twice, pew, right? It's like, you're actually in an area. I jump on the chandelier and swing across and then, you know, throw some rocks at them. And, you know, you're basically saying all the different things that you do as you put your dice forward, you know, raising and seeing, and there's a fun little dice game you gotta play. So it's like, you know, a lot of times in D&D you'll say things like that. Like I swing from the chandelier and do something crazy. Like it doesn't mean anything. Maybe like, all right, bring your dice check. And not only does it mean something, you have to do something cool or else you don't get to put the dice forward, right? Which means you're gonna basically lose. So you better do something. Action castle. Anyone know about action castle? We might run it outside there somewhere later. Action castle. This is a role-playing game. We can all just play it right now together, but we don't have time because someone else will be in the room after us. Do you want to talk about action castle or do you just want to be like, yeah. We're, if you see us later, we're gonna try to get a big crowd and run action castle for everybody. We need to do it somewhere, everyone can hear. All right, this isn't actually a game. This is a book that you can buy. Have it right here. This is the Story Games Name Project edited by Jason Morningstar, right? And all this is, is a book full of names of shit for when you need to role-play. You need, this is a necessary book. You can buy it basically at printing cost from Lulu. I need an elven surname. I need like names of games cobalt play. Elven, page 11. You have the baby names both. Do you need a male or a female elf? I need a female elf. I'll roll a D20. Indelwyn, is that good? That's good. I also need a game that a cobalt would play with a prisoner. A game that, well, I think we might have some knowledge games. No, close enough. All right, let's check. Knowledge games, because I've read this book, are things like, am I beating you into unconsciousness or death? Will the human eat it? I'm using games of the gnaws. Number one, beat the halfling. Number three, on fire tag. This book is great. So the whole point of all this is that if you wanna play a story, you wanna tell a story through collaborative role-playing and if a game to set it up, pick the game that tells the kind of story you wanna tell. I guarantee there's a game for every story and every one of your heads out there. And unless your game, unless your story is stab, stab, stab, get treasure, D&D is probably not the game. Obviously we have one minute left, so we won't have time for questions, but if you enjoyed this at all, I highly recommend your website. Check out our YouTube channel, which you can find from there. Tons of our lectures are online. We're at the Pentarcade Expos. We're at all the gaming cons. We're everywhere doing this stuff. We have one more panel talking about money-making games I think tomorrow with Dr. Hazard, who has a real PhD in game theory. Oh, shit. And we have to get out of here. See you're on the con. And I guess we should end on. Huah! Huah!