PODCAST · arts
Dice Exploder
by Sam Dunnewold
A show about tabletop RPG design. Each episode we bring you a single mechanic and break it down as deep as we possibly can. Co-hosted by Sam Dunnewold and a rotating roster of designers. diceexploder.com
Episodes
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De-Roling with Caro Murphy
Transcripts available at diceexploder.com Further reading Back Tower Runners on Kickstarter! DrachenFest Incantrix Productions Imagi-Ne'er-Do-Wells Socials Caro’s website Sam on Bluesky and itch The Dice Exploder blog is at diceexploder.com Our logo was designed by sporgory, our ad music is...
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Our Lives in the Wood with Kendo Smith
Transcripts available at diceexploder.com Further reading Our Lives in the Wood episode 5 This Game Takes Place in Your Home Town Socials Kendo on Bluesky and the web Sam on Bluesky and itch The Dice Exploder blog is at diceexploder.com Our logo was designed by sporgory, our ad music is Lilypads…
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What Is There to Eat in Duskwall (Blades in the Dark) with Jeeyon Shim
Transcripts available at diceexploder.com Note: the "What Is There to Eat in Duskwall" pages of Blades in the Dark were written by Andrew Shields. Further Reading Blades in the Dark by John Harper Socials Jeeyon on Patreon, Bluesky, and itch Sam on Bluesky and itch The Dice Exploder blog is at...
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Duty Stations (Night Witches) with Ash Kreider
Transcripts available at diceexploder.com Further Reading The Watch 2e is on Kickstarter now Night Witches by Jason Morningstar Socials Ash on Bluesky Ash's website, including listings for their games and books Sam on Bluesky and itch The Dice Exploder blog is at diceexploder.com Our logo was...
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New Episodes Next Week + An Announcement
Transcripts available at diceexploder.com
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Deckbuilding (Signs of the Sojourner) with Lady Tabletop
Transcripts available at diceexploder.com Further Reading Signs of the Sojourner by Echo Dog Games Band-Aids & Bullet Holes by Sam, on Kickstarter now Slay the Spire 2 by Mega Crit Socials Lady Tabletop on itch Sam on Bluesky and itch The Dice Exploder blog is at diceexploder.com Our logo was...
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Minigames (Firebrands) with Viditya Voleti
Transcripts available at diceexploder.com Further Reading Band-Aids & Bullet Holes on Kickstarter Mobile Frame Zero: Firebrands by Meguey & Vincent Baker The King Is Dead by Meguey & Vincent Baker Stewpot: Tales from a Fantasy Tavern by Takuma Okada Socials Viditya on Bluesky and itch Sam on...
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John Wick (2014) and Genre Emulation with Sam Roberts
Transcripts available at diceexploder.com My new game Band-Aids & Bullet Holes is still on Kickstarter! Check it out today. In honor of BABH, this month on Dice Exploder I'm covering mechanics from other games that inspired it. In keeping with this show's increasingly loose definition of...
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Character Nonmonogamy (Space Post) with Sidney Icarus
Transcripts available at diceexploder.com Today is the launch of Band-Aids & Bullet Holes, my melodramatic action game of bloody revenge. It's a one shot, capsule game, box set, deckbuilder rpg. Check it out. In honor of BABH, this month on Dice Exploder I'm covering mechanics from other games…
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Calling Cards (Band-Aids & Bullet Holes) with Lady Tabletop and Seraphina
Transcripts available at diceexploder.com My first stand-alone print game, Band-Aids & Bullet Holes, goes live on Kickstarter next week on May 5th. I have a lot to say about it, and I'm gonna say a lot of it: May's going to be all episodes about mechanics from other people's games that inspired…
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Keys (Lady Blackbird) with Whitney Delaglio
Transcripts available at diceexploder.com I love pregens! But why do I love pregens? I dug into this a bunch on an episode last year with Aaron Lim about the characters in Last Train to Bremen: I love being given a clear goal and baseline temperament when I sit down to play so I can get into…
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Weak, Strong, and Regular Moves (Dream Askew / Dream Apart) with Austin Walker
Transcripts available at diceexploder.com Austin Walker's new game Realis is on Kickstarter now, and it's been making splashes in the indie rpg scene since last year when the ashcan came out. The game's core mechanic, Sentences, feels like the exact kind of mechanic I love covering on this show....
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The Awards 2024 with Nico MacDougall
Transcripts available at diceexploder.com Follow Band-Aids & Bullet Holes on Kickstarter! The Awards are back! The rpg awards show with a bent towards indie games and the guaranteed worst SEO of all time is back for another around, and the current steward of The Awards - Nico MacDougall - is back...
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Lures (Heaven in the Dust) with Barclay Travis and Bee Alexander
Transcripts are available at diceexploder.com Bee and Barclay are the hosts of Tabletop Book Club, a podcast that is exactly what it sounds like. It’s a show with such fun energy, and of course good design talk. Because Barclay has a new belonging outside belonging game that's just come out…
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Always Give Them The Clue (GUMSHOE) with Tristan Zimmerman
Transcripts available at diceexploder.com My friend Tristan Zimmerman is currently crowdfunding Ballad Hunters, a GUMSHOE game, meaning it’s based on a core mechanic built for investigation games and gathering clues. That mechanic goes like this: “always give the players the clue.” Simple! And I...
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The Voice of the Text (Triangle Agency) with Seraphina Garcia Ramirez
Transcripts available at diceexploder.com I bet you’ve heard of this game Triangle Agency. Big exciting Kickstarter, super flashy product design, a game with… spoilers in the back? It’s corporate horror, it’s packed gorgeous art, it’s a game I spent 20 sessions with in 2025. And I… had a pretty...
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Draw Maps, Leave Blanks (Dungeon World) with Tim Denee
Transcripts available at diceexploder.com If the thesis of last week’s episode was “hey the fiction of your game matters a lot and can even have mechanical effects,” how do you know how deeply to define that fiction? Maybe no one in indie games has recently faced that question on quite the scale…
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Doskvol's Lightning Barriers (Blades in the Dark) with Nova
Transcripts available at diceexploder.com In Blades in the Dark, you play as criminals in Doskvol a haunted city where the ghosts are such a problem that they built giant lightning barriers around the whole city to keep them out. That sentence alone already makes me want to get the game to the...
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Setting Elements (Dream Askew / Dream Apart) with Kodi Gonzaga
Transcripts available at diceexploder.com There's many ways to decide who has authority over what in an RPG. Traditional games have a bunch of players with one PC each and a GM responsible for everything else, while Dreams Askew / Dream Apart by Avery Alder and Ben Rosenbaum takes a very…
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Afterimage: The Experimental Role-Playing Laboratory
Dice Exploder: Afterimage is alternative show format, a cross between play report and personal memoir. The Experimental Role-Playing Laboratory, or ERPL, was a thrice a year mini convention put on by students at my college back in the 00s and 10s and onward to this day. It's how I got into indie...
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2025 Year End Bonanza
Transcripts available at diceexploder.com It's the Dice Exploder 2025 year end bonanza! This year I'm joined by Lin Codega and Diogo Nogueira to go over a whole bunch of game mechanics that we think represent where rpgs were at in 2025 and where they might be going in the future. Further Reading...
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Inventory Tetris (Mausritter) with Quinns
Transcripts available at diceexploder.com Mausritter is an old school dungeon crawling game where instead of playing as elves fighting dragons, you play as mice fleeing from owls. It’s not unlike any number of other old school games like Cairn or Into the Odd, but its inventory system is the only...
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The Brainer VS The Brain-Picker (Apocalypse World 2e/3e) with the Bakers
Transcripts available at diceexploder.com Apocalypse World 3rd edition is on Kickstarter right now. In many ways, it hasn’t changed much. In many ways, it's a whole new apocalypse. So I thought it'd be fun to have on the Bakers and go through a playbook - the Brainer in 2e vs its equivalent the...
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Actual Play: Void 1680 AM Community Broadcasts with Ken Lowery
Transcripts available at diceexploder.com To close out this miniseries on actual play, I wanted to feature a game that I think uses actual play as a game mechanic. Hear me out. Void 1680 AM is a solo playlist-building game in which you create a fictional radio broadcast. Except when you're done,...
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Actual Play: 4AM at a Diner (Last Train to Brooklyn) with Linnie Schell
Transcripts available at diceexploder.com Last Train to Brooklyn is an actual play from Twice Rolled Tales where they play Last Train to Bremen on a New York City subway car. It's also probably my favorite actual play full stop. Why? I think because it leans into what I'm most excited about this...
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Actual Play: An Uncomfortable Offer (Maia's Game Room: The Electric State) with Maia Wilson
Transcripts available at diceexploder.com One of my favorite parts about these episodes where I'm highlighting a single moment from an actual play is how many practical lessons I can bring back to my own table by going beat by beat through a significant moment in play. And today, Maia Wilson has...
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Actual Play: A Tree Shanty (My First Dungeon: The Wildsea) with Brian Flaherty and Elliot Davis
Transcripts available at diceexploder.com In The Wildsea, you play as sailors on a sea of trees in a climate post-apocalypse where the climate won. And in the My First Dungeon mini series of this game, today's co-cohost Brian Flaherty took it on himself - along with co-player J Strautman - to…
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Actual Play: The First 30 Minutes (My First Dungeon: Orbital Blues) with Rowan Zeoli
Transcripts available at diceexploder.com It's a new series on Dice Exploder all about actual play. For five episodes, instead of breaking down one mechanic, we're going to break down one moment from one actual play show. And to kick things off, I'm joined by actual play critic and...
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You Will Die In This Place with Merrilee Bufkin and Jay Dragon
Transcripts available at diceexploder.com Last summer a hot new game hit the indie rpg scene: You Will Die In This Place, a surreal and experimental... dungeon crawler? Technically? ...that seems to have more in common with House of Leaves than it does many roleplaying games. And for a couple…
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Love, Sex, and Romance: The War (Will That Be All?) with Kim Lam
Transcripts available at diceexploder.com Today we’re wrapping up the Dice Exploder series on love, sex, and romance with Will That Be All? by Graham Walmsley, a game about the social relationships between the downstairs staff at Melton Hall, a fictional British estate, over the course of about a...
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Love, Sex, and Romance: Big Chunky Prompts with Tasha Robinson
Transcripts available at diceexploder.com I’m back! Alex and Sharang have done an amazing job talking love, sex, and romance over the past month but I have plenty to say on the subject myself. In particular, I wanted to approach the conversation Alex and Sharang started about the quantification…
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Love, Sex, and Romance: Physical Touch with Alex & Sharang
Transcripts available at diceexploder.com In this final episode hosted by Sharang and Alex, perhaps their climactic episode, they are turning up the heat on sex mechanics all the way to physical contact, both as a way to simulate sex acts through other kinds of physical touch... and through…
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Love, Sex, and Romance: The Phallus with Alex & Sharang
Transcripts available at diceexploder.com Our series on game mechanics centered around sex and romance continues with returning champions Alex Roberts and Sharang Biswas, and today they are talking about dicks. “The phallus.” Or more generally, physical objects. I did some episodes on physicality...
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Love, Sex, and Romance: Roll to Seduce with Alex & Sharang
Transcripts available at diceexploder.com Alex Roberts and Sharang Biswas are back for round two, this time with “roll to seduce,” that classic action so many people try and even succeed at taking across any number of games. If I roll high enough on my persuasion check, surely the dragon will…
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Love, Sex, and Romance: Sex Moves (Apocalypse World) with Alex & Sharang
Transcripts available at diceexploder.com Love, sex, and romance: huge human topics, wildly under-discussed in roleplaying games. At least in my opinion. So today on Dice Exploder we’re kicking off a new miniseries on the subject hosted by NOT ME. Instead, for the next four episodes, Alex Roberts...
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Rolling the Dice... On Camera! (The Die Guys) with Moira Joy Smith
Transcripts available at diceexploder.com Moira Joy "MJ" Smith is the Dungeon Master for the Try Guys D&D actual play show "The Die Guys". She created the show in 2024 along with the Try Guys, and I was her right-hand dude during production and the show's video editor. Today, ahead of a whole...
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Afterimage: City of Winter
Dice Exploder: Afterimage is a new show format I'm trying, a mashup of This American Life with a play report. I have a box full of memories that lives in my closet, a pair of drumsticks, a half smoked cigar, a thimble full of sand from a beach I've never been to. If I passed away and you were...
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Afterimage: Yazeba's Bed & Breakfast
Dice Exploder: Afterimage is a new show format I'm trying, a mashup of This American Life with a play report. When I was in the third grade, there was this cartoon that aired while I was coming home from school, so I could only ever watch the second half of episodes. The name of that show was...
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Party by the Apocalypse preview: an Apocalypse World sex scene
Hello and welcome to Party by the Apocalypse, an actual play miniseries where we play Apocalypse World while breaking down how it works and the choices we're making as players so you can learn how to better play it. Party by the Apocalypse is Dice Exploder’s first foray into actual play, and the...
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Announcement: Dice Exploder joins the Many Sided Network
Today the folks over at Many Sided Media, the production house behind My First Dungeon and Talk of the Table, are launching a new podcast network... and Dice Exploder is a part of it! Nothing on the show should change much, but today I wanted to sit down with Brian Flaherty, a co-founder of Many...
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Clarity (Changeling: the Lost 1e) with MintRabbit
Transcripts available at diceexploder.com In the unreliable urban fantasy world of Changeling, Clarity is a mechanic that measures... well, for now let’s go with a character's ability to trust their own reality. But finishing that sentence is kind of what this episode is all about, because…
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Question Oracle (Stoneburner) and rolling the dice again with Ray Chou
Transcripts available at diceexploder.com For the two year anniversary of Dice Exploder, my first ever cohost Ray Chou returns for what starts off as a brand new episode about Stoneburner by Fari RPGs and that game’s oracle mechanic: a way to use dice, random tables, and the careful framing of...
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10 Candles (10 Candles) with Jay Dragon
Transcripts available at diceexploder.com This is, at long last, the end of this Dice Exploder miniseries on larp. And I wanted to send it off by returning to the question I kicked it off with: what can tabletop designers learn from larp? To get into that, there’s few people I’d rather have on…
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Experience Design with Caro Murphy
Transcripts available at diceexploder.com Here near the end of Dice Exploder's larp series, I wanted to have on Caro Murphy (Galactic Starcruiser) to talk about experience design, and specifically how to think about curating all those parts of an experience bigger and larger than most of us at…
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Safety Tools, and Players Are More Important Than The Game, with Sarah Lynne Bowman
Transcripts available at diceexploder.com Safety in RPGs and larp is a huge topic, one I’ve wanted to cover on Dice Exploder for a long time, but one I’ve avoided it because it feels hard to approach inside the “pick one mechanic” format of this show. Even more than most mechanics I cover on Dice...
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Beats (Heart: the City Beneath) with Aaron Voigt
Transcripts available at diceexploder.com Last week, indie rpg YouTube essayist Aaron Voigt and I delved into Heart: the City Beneath, a surreal and maximalist dungeon crawler with lots to love. But when I ran the game, I had some trouble with it from a mechanic that by all accounts I should…
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Zenith Abilities (Heart: the City Beneath) with Aaron Voigt
Transcripts available at diceexploder.com Heart: the City Beneath. It’s a surreal and bloody dungeon crawler full of so much to love… plus some bits that drive me up the wall. This week and next I’m devoting TWO episodes to it. Today, it’s everything I love about Heart as seen through the lens of...
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Elf Motors with Chris Duffy
Transcripts available at diceexploder.com Over on the Dice Exploder discord, we welcome new members by asking them what their favorite mechanic is. It’s a great tradition, kicks off a lot of great conversations, but I have largely avoided having it turned my way. So today I thought let’s just get...
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Fateplay Scenes (House of Craving) with Sharang Biswas
Transcripts available at diceexploder.com Last week was a show about how it might work to frame a scene when you get to decide whatever you want that scene to look like. But this week, we're looking at the reverse: what happens when you're given a very detailed scene and must figure out how to...
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Spotlight Scenes with Moyra Turkington
Transcripts available at diceexploder.com When you’re playing roleplay-heavy D&D, what does a scene look like? Since the game doesn’t give you much in the way of tools for doing so, are you framing scenes intentionally or just kind of letting them happen? And if the latter, is that serving you...
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Frequently Asked Questions
How many episodes does Dice Exploder have?
Dice Exploder currently has 114 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is Dice Exploder about?
A show about tabletop RPG design. Each episode we bring you a single mechanic and break it down as deep as we possibly can. Co-hosted by Sam Dunnewold and a rotating roster of designers. diceexploder.com
How often does Dice Exploder release new episodes?
Dice Exploder publishes regularly with 114 episodes available. Check the episode list for the typical release schedule.
Where can I listen to Dice Exploder?
You can listen to Dice Exploder on PodParley by clicking any episode. We provide an embedded audio player for direct listening, and you can also subscribe via your preferred podcast app using the RSS feed.
Who hosts Dice Exploder?
Dice Exploder is created and hosted by Sam Dunnewold.
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