Intro
I'm visited by Andie Margolskee, the author of the first crowdfunded adventure for Draw Steel: The Great Thaw of Gryzmithrak Spire. We talk about the adventure, sure, but with Andie having designed adventures for multiple systems, we end up talking a bunch about what different systems are good at.
I'm Jon de Nor and this is Goblin Points.
Interview
Jon: Welcome to Goblin Points, Andie.
Andie: Hi, thanks. Happy to be here.
Jon: So, tell us a bit about yourself and also how you came across I guess Draw Steel, but maybe also Matt Colville and MCDM.
Andie: Sure, yeah. So, I run a small tabletop publishing company called MargoMods. I've been doing that for a couple of years now. I came across Matt Colville's work first on YouTube with the Running the Game series, which I think is probably a common story across people in this space. I remember buying Flee Mortals, thinking it was the best 5E monster book I'd ever seen and it completely rewired my brain forever, combat and running combat-
Jon: Wow.
Andie: ... , and I was really inspired to bake that into my own design. And then when they started up their own RPG BackerKit I was like, well, I have to pledge this. I have to follow along for this process and see how the sausage is made. And that's been a really rewarding and interesting experience so far.
Jon: I watched an interview where he actually mentioned Flee Mortals as part of your inspiration. It might have been in relation to the Murders at Lorelahc Manor. Is that the right pronunciation?
Andie: Yeah, so Murders at Lorelahc Manor was my first Kickstarter for 5E, which was a pair of murder mystery adventures, because I a mystery buff. I like writing complicated intrigue, inter-faction conflict and mysteries where the answer's really surprising. So, I put together a murder mystery Kickstarter and baked in, especially some of the minion design from Flee Mortals, some ideas there. Because I just really like the idea of high stakes, fast combat that ends quickly in the context of a murder mystery, because you want to keep the mystery ball rolling.
Jon: Yeah.
Andie: You don't want to get bogged down in long combat for an hour and a half, three hours or whatever until the end in the climatic encounter and then it's okay to pull out all the stops and go big with the encounter. Yeah, there are some really interesting ideas from Flee Mortals that made their way into that book.
Jon: I have tried to run small mysteries and I've always ended up with whenever combat comes up it just falls apart.
Andie: Yeah, the key is to make your accomplices and your minions easy to kill, but threatening in their own way. So, I gave these ink doppelgänger creatures the ability to petrify you in ink, but they had to hit you enough times to get it to start to trigger. And you can knock them down in one hit, but there are a bunch of them in a horde.
Jon: Right.
Andie: And that works really well, especially in a mystery, because one of the things that 5E players do all the time when there's stuff to investigate is they split the party.
Jon: Yeah.
Andie: Which is just a very natural thing to do when you're gathering clues, because it doesn't feel threatening, but in that mystery you're surrounded by enemies and you just don't know it yet, which I think is really fun.
Jon: I was actually wondering, because I was looking at these mysteries: Now that you've worked on something for 5E and now you're working on this adventure for Draw Steel, I was wondering do you think it is possible to make those mystery adventures for Draw Steel or are they better suited for 5E, which is geared towards being more inclusive when it comes to different kinds of playstyles?
Andie: My gut reaction is that it would work perfectly in Draw Steel.
Jon: Oh really?
Andie: And the reason for that is because there are still these set piece encounters at the end and in Draw Steel you can still... I would probably rearrange some things and maybe incorporate negotiations or montage tests or something like that.
Jon: Right, yeah.
Andie: There would be work to do, but the conceit of a mystery is there are clues to get in a variety of different ways and there are enemies to find and defeat. You can map that story structure onto anything and so I don't think that would be a huge problem. I would just have to make new stat box and redo some mechanics and change it from DCs to different difficulty tasks and work in some successes and failures with consequences and whatever. I think it would be doable. Actually, I think it would be fun.
Jon: Interesting. I would have thought that, with the focus on combat that Draw Steel has, it would not maybe fit as well, but I guess I just need to do more montage tests.
Andie: So, I don't even know if I agree with that. In that book in particular, one of the design choices that I made was I had investigation tables; you would investigate a murder scene and collect clues and you would roll an investigation or medicine check and depending on the result of your roll you would get more and more and more clues. So there were 15 to 20 brackets, 10 to 15, five to 10 and one to five. And all you have to do to keep a mystery progressing is make sure that even on a failure you get something.
Jon: Okay.
Andie: And you can do that in Draw Steel just by saying, 'Okay, that's an easy test where you get a success then there's a consequence'.
Jon: Yeah.
Andie: And that's really easy to map onto a mystery. But I also spend a lot of time thinking about mysteries, so I'm sure that I'm barrelling through some of the challenges.
Jon: Moving onto more Draw Steel centred stuff, the reason that I thought of you recently is because of your adventure that you're crowdfunding over on what they call Crowdfunder. First of all, can I ask about the choice of platform?
Andie: So, Shae is the other author on this project. We're part of this small community which operates out of the Storytelling Collective. This is the Adventure Writers Academy, which is just a small group of people who write and publish tabletop stuff. We have weekly meetings and stuff like that. There's a book club and all kinds of stuff. The woman who runs that, Ashley Warren, turned us on to this event, which was the Tabletop Non-Stop event run by Crowdfunder and she was just like, 'Yeah, people should do this. That seems fun.' And Shae and I were like, well we operate well with deadlines so why not. We decided to put something together, wanted to see how it would go and it's gone great. It's gone fantastically.
Jon: Yeah.
Andie: We didn't have a very big goal because we weren't tryna make a very big project and I've been, personally, so surprised and overwhelmed and happy with both the reception of our project and also the willingness of the MCDM Draw Steel community to pitch in for community copies, for instance, for people who maybe wanna try out the game, but don't wanna pitch in money yet. There are so many community copies that will be available when we launch and I think that is awesome.
Jon: I saw that as an option and I have to admit I purchased some community copies too, because the original pledge wasn't that much, at least not for my wallet, so I felt obliged to spend a bit more. But moving on from the platform to the actual adventure. The Great Thaw of Gryzmithrak Spire. Am I pronouncing that correctly?
Andie: You absolutely are. We picked a ridiculous dragon name in the tradition of Matt Colville. You know, you gotta write to the setting and his dragon names are always intense.
Jon: Just earlier today I recorded the monthly round up episode of Goblin Points and I refer to the adventure twice. I don't know why I ended up putting the name in twice when I... So I had to practice basically before I got to that section and I was just really hoping that I pronounced it correctly.
Andie: Yeah, no, you nailed it, you nailed it. So, Shae and I actually talked about the name of the dragon quite a bit back and forth where he was like, 'I don't know. I feel like it's too many syllables'. And I was like, 'Shae, find me a dragon name in, for instance Flee Mortals, that isn't three syllables or more'.
Jon: Yeah.
Andie: And, yeah. Yeah, so Gryzmithrak is this dead Rime dragon who still persists in this adventure, because her heart is this magical artifact operating as a seal on this prison of this very destructive fire elemental that Gryzmithrak and her legion of kobolds, the Rime Legion, sealed away centuries ago and plunged that entire area into a snowy, perpetual winter. Which is better than what it used to be, which was this hellish, fiery wasteland ruled by an angry fire elemental.
Jon: So, in the adventure itself, that prison of the fire elemental is about to break down. I'm assuming that's the great thaw.
Andie: Yes, that is the great thaw. The snow is melting, the prison is breaking and there's this cool bit of lore in Draw Steel that dragons in Orden, or I guess Vasloria-
Jon: Probably, yeah.
Andie: Yeah, they are transformed elementals in response to condensed emotion, which I just thought was a very cool bit of lore, because it gives you a way to make dragons be this high powered elemental creatures. And so this breaking down of the prison is happening alongside this transformation from elemental to a dragon, actually. Which is alongside this upwelling of new kobolds, the Calamity kobolds, led by their pontifex who claims to have found a new saint in their heroic kobold ancestor, the great inventor who fought with Gryzmithrak, but he's lying.
Jon: Oh, okay.
Andie: He's lying and actually he's been worshipping this elemental / firedragon for quite some time and is on the verge of breaking him out.
Jon: I see.
Andie: And that's the underlying intrigue going on.
Jon: You've ended up smashing your goal of $250. Really, congratulations.
Andie: Yeah, thank you. We're super happy about it.
Jon: So, I saw one of the stretch goals is to get some, let's see, custom art. That's the one that was just unlocked. Is that all done by Shae or is it?
Andie: No, so for one of my projects, which is in prelaunch on Kickstarter, called Exoecology for Monster Hunters (it's a big monster book for eco-horror mystery adventures in D&D 5E) I've been working with this artist who does fantastic character art. His name is Angelo and he's been doing a lot of characters for that book. We have a great working relationship, he does a great job and I knew that I would want to hire him if we raised enough money to warrant custom art. And we did and so we will, and I couldn't be happier, because he does great work and I'm really interested to see what he does with Shieldmaiden Voss and the pontifex.
Jon: Ah, the pontifex again.
Andie: Yes, he'll get the art. He's a big deal.
Jon: I think you mentioned it in the Crowdfunder description, or I might have read it somewhere else, but you used to work in climate science I think or you have got a PhD in oceanography or something like that. Is that correct?
Andie: All of these things are correct. So, just a brief overview of my life: I was a high school teacher actually for a couple of years also, teaching environmental science and biology and chemistry to high school students; decided that I wanted to get back into science, went and got a PhD in Chemical Oceanography studying low oxygen regions and climate sensitivity of highly sensitive region of the ocean and continued that work into my post-doc. So, for 10 years I was doing climate science research using mathematical ocean models.
Jon: Wow, okay. And then, this is what's a bit wild to me at least, is at some point you decided that you wanted to do TTRPG publishing instead, which seems like an insane career move.
Andie: Hey, I mean, I can't say that it's not a wild thing to do, but I will say I am a lot more creatively fulfilled. It's a lot more fun and I get to interact with a lot of people who are really excited about the stuff that they do.
Jon: Sure.
Andie: And so I am much happier doing this kind of work than I was during either my post-doc or my PhD.
Jon: Wow, okay.
Andie: So, I started small, or relatively small. Where in 2023, I started publishing expansions to official Wizards of the Coast modules like Sunless Citadel and Forge of Fury and publishing them on the DMs Guild, because I wanted to run more D&D, but the official modules weren't doing it for me. They didn't have things that I needed. I needed characters that were interesting with compelling motivations and high stakes conflict that I cared about and that my players might care about. So, I basically had to write an entire overlaid narrative for those modules and thought to myself, 'Well, I might as well publish it, because I'm putting in all this work anyways and I might as well learn how to do layout and commission a little bit of art and see how it does'. And those are two bestsellers on DMs Guild; they've done quite well. People are still buying them, even now. That was exciting, but the DMs Guild is good for general exposure and getting your feet under you but is not a way to make money really.
Jon: No, it's rough.
Andie: Yeah, and so I started looking for other ways to actually at least get my investment, not in time but investment monetarily, back on these projects, because I wanted to keep going bigger and bigger and bigger. And that was where Murders at Lorelahc Manor came in, because I was like, well, everyone's doing Crowdfunders; I'm sure I'll do better there. I can do bigger projects, see how it goes, commission a bunch of art and just keep ramping up, because I am addicted to that next bigger step and being more and more ambitious. Yeah. So, that's how I ended up where I am. Now I'm in the midst of working on a very large Kickstarter, which is Exoecology for Monster Hunters which I mentioned, and doing a bunch of smaller projects to keep my brain agile and dabble in other systems. And now I'm addicted to Draw Steel so I can't resist just thinking about how fun it would be to write about the wode and the elves and just all the creepy fae stuff that I find to be really fun. I've actually been recently reading Matt Colville's books.
Jon: Oh, right, yeah.
Andie: I finished Priest a couple of day ago. Now I'm a third of the way into Thief. I'll be done in a day or two.
Jon: Yeah.
Andie: And I just like the world; I think it's really fun. This high fantasy, action, gritty combat stuff is not something that I've gotten satisfyingly anywhere else.
Jon: No, yeah, I agree. It feels very different reading both Matt's novels. I also find it interesting you find the wode such a fun concept, because that's something that really doesn't interest me at all.
Andie: So, I'm like an environmental scientist, right. I'm a climate scientist.
Jon: Okay, fair enough.
Andie: So, having a place of spooky trees where you have weird and wonderful things happen is perfect for me. I love coming up with interesting story lines about nature doing really messed up stuff, because a lot of it is allegory. I don't know, I just think it's fun. I think there's something there. There are always spooky trees in all of my adventures. In Exoecology there's this twilight glory seed mother that shows up. It's this awful creature made up of vines that reach out and connect all of the trees and creatures in a forest into a central hive mind and turn them into these undead thralls. And so the trees sleep in the day and hunt at night.
Jon: Wow.
Andie: Which I think is such a cool vibe.
Jon: Okay, that's fair. That's pretty cool.
Andie: Yeah, that's the kind of stuff that gets me excited.
Jon: You mentioned designing for different systems, I guess, because I also noticed you've made a couple of things for Candela Obscura, I think.
Andie: Yes, I have.
Jon: And I think that's interesting because, this might be my own assumptions showing through but I think a lot of people usually design mostly for one system. Or rather, I should say, I think people very often design only for 5E.
Andie: Sure, yeah.
Jon: That's what I'm actually trying to say. How different is it to design for different systems? Because D&D is very malleable, I guess, to what kind of adventures and things you could do with it. Draw Steel tries to do something more specific and Candela Obscura is just not very like any of those, at least in my mind. I haven't played Candela Obscura, I have only an overview of the rules and how it's supposed to be played. How different are the systems to actually design for or are there very many overlapping ideas that just express in different ways, but that are not actually that different when it gets down to the metal, I guess.
Andie: So, it depends on what you're tryna do.
Jon: Okay.
Andie: Different systems have different strengths. That's inescapable. Combat in D&D versus combat in Candela Obscura versus combat in Draw Steel will feel different.
Jon: Sure.
Andie: Draw Steel is the most tactical of those three, Candela Obscura is mostly vibes, and D&D is somewhere in between. But that's just the combat system. I'm very interested in narratives and really interested in characters and really interested in mysteries. And a mystery, broadly speaking, is you collect clues until you've solved it. And that you can overlay on literally anything. So take a murder mystery for instance, it has a very particular structure: You have to find a body, you have to discover there was a murder; you have to canvas the suspects, which can involve interrogation or using magic on people (that's some of the stuff available to you in D&D or Draw Steel or Candela Obscura even); and then you go around and you gather clues, which is sort of an exploration. And at some point you're gonna get clues and leads that produce some kind of escalating tension that lead you to the climax when you finally discover what the hell is actually going on. And you can nest that mystery in as many other mysteries as you want to scale it up to a world or a political system or a city or a nation or a multiverse. You can nest those game structures within each other, or story structures I guess I should say, and that doesn't depend on your system at all.
Jon: Sure.
Andie: That's just a story structure and I'm very interested in story structures and telling interesting stories. The game mechanic stuff is like, 'Well, how do you make the climax interesting?' And the answer will be different in those different systems.
Jon: Ah, yes, okay.
Andie: And what are the obstacles between you and the clues, or the leads, or how do you interrogate people? In Draw Steel that might be a negotiation or a montage test. In Candela Obscura it's going to be a little bit more free form. You're gonna be asked for some skill rolls and you'll discover some stuff and maybe encounter intermediate monsters and get some bleed and do some dramatic role play. And in D&D 5E it's again sort of in between the two. You do a mix. I, as an academic, am used to seeing patterns and being like, 'Those are the same thing at their roots and so it's simple. And you can just think about that part in the same way, and the different parts you can adjust to.' And I think that's just how I was trained, so I don't think it's...
Jon: That's really interesting, because as part of Draw Steel's development they changed the dice resolution mechanic basically: First moving from the two D6 to the power roll and then the two D10s with the power roll. And I saw people online mentioning that they're basically over a year into development, they've got basically a year left and they're even now changing dice mechanics; this is big trouble for this game. For me at least, not on the inside but at least close to the sausage making, I guess, that didn't seem like a really big deal to me, because in some ways it's not the core part of the game really, which dice you roll. The goal of the game is to create cinematic heroic fantasy and what kind of dice you roll is secondary to that goal, I feel. What you're saying about mysteries is that, 'Well, mysteries are universal. It's just how you do the details that differs between the different systems.' And, I don't know, it felt similar to how Draw Steel was designed that, 'Yeah, we've got this vibe that we're trying to hit. And how we roll dice, that's secondary. That's just in service to hit this vibe.'
Andie: So, I don't wanna discount the role of statistics in games.
Jon: Okay, fair enough.
Andie: The likelihood of certain outcomes is important to the feeling of the game as you're playing it, because if you're playing a game where you're expected to fail when you roll you're scared when you have to.
Jon: Yeah.
Andie: And there are games that are designed around that and that's important to preserving the vibe. And that's going to be more suited to cosmic horror, Cthulhu stories or whatever, where it's like if you're in combat, 'Oh no!' And that's the point.
Jon: Yeah.
Andie: So, I don't wanna trivialise that. Dice mechanics are important, they're critical and they play an important role, but I think an even bigger choice that they made is skipping the attack roll. You hit, you will do damage, so will the enemies. You do always march towards this win or loss condition, which is that you've run out of hit points or your enemies do. So that choice to never miss cuts out a lot of weird edge cases in particularly D&D that can feel really degenerate and weird and you're like, 'That's unrealistic'. Or just create this perverse game outcome, which especially in Draw Steel, since you want to incentivise the accumulation of victories you want to get people to actually make a choice between resting and victory point accumulation, you have to have this steady march towards a win or loss condition. So, having the enemies always hitting you and always depleting your hit points means that that choice will always be meaningful, which is an important part of what a game is.
Jon: Yeah.
Andie: Those meaningful choices. So, I am a staunch defender of the importance of game mechanics, but I also recognise that you can do a lot more with a system of game mechanics than a lot of people think you can. And stories are stories. That's just where I'm at. People are people, stories are stories. You can do a lot of things. So, that's how I think about it.
Jon: I'm not a game designer, or I'm not a designer at all really when it comes to TTRPG stuff. To me as an observer, I guess, it felt... I do a lot of research on what people are saying about Draw Steel and about MCDM as part of doing the podcast so of course I come across a lot of criticism too, and let's not dwell too much on that, but I just found it so interesting because the change of the dice to so many people it seemed so much like a red flag to them that the game was struggling to figure out what it was supposed to be and for me it seems so insignificant. That's where I'm coming from. Where people were going, 'Oh no! They haven't figured out how to roll dice yet. Which ones to roll and how often you should roll them.' And to me, that was like, 'Yeah, but that's not really...'
Andie: I think that there's a lack of recognition there of how strong the pull of their game design tenets are, because they've had on their mind this entire time this tactical, cinematic, heroic fantasy. That's been their goal the entire time. And the choices you make along the way and the things that you cut on the cutting room floor are still in service to that goal. It's like, if you didn't change things along the way then what are you doing? I don't know. You have to make changes, that's how it goes, that's what development is.
Jon: Honestly, it feels a bit like a lot of people start with the dice mechanic and then build a game on top of it. It feels like a very significant part of what their game is about. So, if you change that, you've basically changed the whole game.
Andie: So, I think that there is a little bit of truth to that. Like I said, I'm a staunch defender of game mechanics and their importance. If you're playing Kids on Bikes, for instance, with the exploding dice you roll a maximum on the die and then you roll another die because you rolled maximum and you can keep exploding, exploding, exploding - that creates an experience at the table, which is this slot machine version of like, 'How high can we go?' These are the really high octane exciting moments and you design a game around that, because that's the kind of feeling that those dice evoke. But if when you set out at the beginning with a particular kind of roll and it works a little bit as you're getting your feet under you and then you realise, 'Actually, that's not hitting the note that we want,' of course you have to change it. It is an important part of the game, not because they don't know what they're shooting for but because they know that they haven't hit it yet. And that's important.
Jon: Yeah. That's a way better way to say it than what I said.
Andie: I spend far too much time thinking and talking about these kinds of things, so.
Jon: Also I want to ask, because I've heard somewhere that you mentioned you wanted to make some stuff for Daggerheart.
Andie: Yeah! Wow, these are deep dives. This is fun.
Jon: I find that system interesting. I haven't looked into the rules. I think I've seen the video with Matt Mercer explaining how to play the game that he released a month or two ago and that's basically my only deep dive into how the game is supposed to work, basically. And I find it really interesting because it feels like at least they're trying to do something different. It feels a bit like they're trying to do something similar to what MCDM is trying to do, where they have an idea of what kind of game they want and they're trying to design the game in service of that idea. I guess what I'm asking is, what do you think of Daggerheart?
Andie: So, I think Daggerheart is a really interesting experiment and I want to play more of it, and I will play more of it when it comes out in May and that's very exciting, and I think that they have a different goal than MCDM. So, Darrington Press is tryna make a game that is fiction first, really supports narratives and narrative outcomes and narrative choices, because, of course, Critical Role is a very narrative heavy game; they really value those role playing choices and so they've invested a lot of thought into a different part of fantasy tabletop gaming than MCDM has. So, MCDM, of course they do a lot of lore world building, but they have this beautiful tactical engine for running combat, which I really like. And Daggerheart is, I think, trying to give game masters the tools to run more narrative games. So, an example of that is instead of having setting books, they're functioning off of campaign frames, which are sort of like... My interpretation of them, again these aren't fully released yet so I don't know what their final form will be, but my understanding of campaign frames is that they're almost like quick and dirty what you need for a setting to jump into a story and maybe have a couple of new mechanics to change the game and adapt it to the story that you're telling. I think that that is a really interesting strategy, because... I think even part of their world building session at the start of a game is people choosing things on a map and saying what it is, the players. So, giving some of the narrative agency to the players. So, I just think that there are a lot of interesting choices that I know that they have been thinking about and I don't know what they'll land on in final version.
Jon: Okay, yeah.
Andie: And I am down to try all kinds of things, because I'll learn something from it and I'll take something away to my 5E writing or Draw Steel or even Candela Obscura, whatever. I learn something in each of these systems about what different mechanics do at the table and how to write around them and incorporate them into games. Like in Exoecology for Monster Hunters, for instance, I was thinking about what's an interesting way to do regional effects and capture that in magic items you've crafted from these monsters that you've killed.
Jon: Yeah, wow.
Andie: Yeah, sure, so that's one of the main shticks. And so there's like, you know, the cover of the book is this giant novacrab, which I think of as the crab version of a chromatic dragon. And so it's like this novacrab turns all of this place into lava burrows and fiery wastelands. And how do you make that an interesting mechanical thing, and I mentioned Kids on Bikes with their exploding dice mechanic before, it's like, what if all the fire magic in this area exploded just like it does in Kids on Bikes? And what if you had a little blow dart gun that shoots fire darts that could explode in your face and do more damage to your enemies and yourself? Expanding the AoE and increasing the damage and giving you some friendly fire. And I just, as a player, would be so excited to pull out an axe that did something like that, because I'd be like, 'It's time for this really risky maneuver. Everybody strap in.' And that does something at the table. So, I am interested in trying and writing for more systems and Daggerheart's on the list.
Jon: It sounds like you're actually building quite a few systems on top of 5E in the Exo, no wait.
Andie: Yeah, Exoecology for Monster Hunters.
Jon: Yes.
Andie: Yeah. I mean, people always do that with magic items. It's like, from a design standpoint, all different kinds of people will map on travel rules or downtime rules or crafting or whatever, and a lot of people do that with their items too. And so, the shtick for this book is, 'What if these creatures are being summoned from other planes and they're invasive species and they're ruining the material plane as they're here? And what if you could harness the things that made them dangerous?' And I think that's really fun. Because that's again my environmental science standpoint, where it's like... Okay, so the Galápagos Islands are full of weird creatures right, because they're a small island where the founder effect is really important and you get things that you don't get anywhere else. You have this small microcosm of weird creatures. And you can introduce a new creature that totally disrupts that ecosystem and devastates it, because you have this isolated island effect where it's a closed ecosystem and things that outcompete the other creatures will take it over. And what if you considered the entire material plane as an isolated ecosystem and introducing these things ruins that ecosystem? That's where the idea starts and I just think it's fun.
Jon: That actually makes me want to run more 5E.
Andie: Well, run this book maybe, not 5E in general.
Jon: Yeah, sure.
Andie: So, part of the reason that 5E is so pervasive in the tabletop space is because you can graft things onto it very easily, which some people would say is, 'Well, that's because it's not even a game'. And that's very silly, in my opinion. I think that's why it's been so long lived and so well loved, it's easy to add stuff to it.
Jon: I feel like, now that we're 10 years plus into the 5E era, I guess, it feels like more people are coming around to the notion that the strength of 5E is how flexible it is and that... I'm two minds about the thing, because on the one hand I want the game to be complete, but on the other hand it's very nice that you're able to customise it that much that you can make it somewhat your own or tweak it for different situations and still have a foundation that you always can rely on. Mechanics are the same, the spells, the classes are the same, but then we've got this extra topping of interesting stuff on the top.
Andie: At its core, you can play a tabletop game... I actually did this. So, I was hiking in the mountains with my brother and a couple of our other relatives and he asked if I could run D&D for them. I was like, 'No, we're in the middle of the mountain. What are you talking about? I don't have any dice, I don't have an adventure, I don't have anything. You don't have character sheets. There's nothing we can do.' And then five minutes later I was like, 'Okay, actually we can play D&D,' because I had an idea. All you really need to, quote unquote, run D&D, is have a system for skill checks, have a system for class-based abilities, which would have to be massively reduced if you're hiking through the mountains with people who have never played D&D before. And what I did was essentially I would pick a number in my head and decide how difficult it was going to be. So, let's say I picked 10 and I would say like, 'This is going to be an easy check'. This is all internal. 'And so anything within five of that 10 will pass.' And then I just say, 'Pick a number between zero and 20,' for instance.
Jon: Okay.
Andie: And then you add your modifiers to see whether or not you're in the band around the number that I chose. And you can choose zero and say, now choose zero between 20 and you've made it harder, because now they need zero to five instead of five to 15. And it's like a handwavey, like maths solution to ability checks, because I didn't have anything else. And you can, quote unquote, play D&D that way. And a lot of people would say, 'Well, that's not D&D, because you're not using the explicit class mechanics and you're not rolling dice and you're not doing that'. But it captures the vibe. You capture the essence of here are infrequent skill tests that you solve randomly with some modifiers to make you more successful on average than people who aren't as good at stuff as you are. And then you give some abilities based on classes where it's like, 'Do you wanna play a rogue? Cool. I'll give you advantages on hiding and stealth and whatever and make you do extra damage when you roll them.' And of course I'm not tracking exact hit point totals, I'm doing... I think Daggerheart does this where it's mostly just a number of hits; the hit point totals are just very small so it's easy to keep track of. You can just make small adjustments and capture the vibe and tell people that you're playing more or less D&D. It's like D&D Lite. So, I think I have a very flexible view of what a game system is and does, but it's fun.
Jon: I wonder then where does it stop being D&D and just start being a... My immediate thought was, what's it called? It's called Roll for Shoes, I think, have you heard of it?-
Andie: Oh, sure. Yeah, I've heard of this.
Jon: ... where you just start with a D6 and then you roll your way away from there. I'm just wondering where does it stop being D&D? Or in this case, maybe D&D is just a generic term for a TTRPG, which, for a lot of people outside the hobby, those are equivalent.
Andie: Yeah. So, technically it is not D&D. It's a D&D derivative, because it's got a different resolution mechanic, which is going to be important to the game, but it has all the trappings of D&D with the specific classes. And even just the actual moves; the rogue did actually get Sneak Attack. So, you just take the iconic class moves. It's almost like a diceless level zero D&D, is essentially what I did, where at level zero you get your most signature ability (so Sneak Attack, Rage, Wild Shape, stuff like that) and that's it, that's the only thing that makes it asymmetric between the players, which makes it simple enough to run when you're hiking the mountains and close enough to D&D for people to be like, 'Yeah, it kinda felt like D&D'. I mean, you can't do the tactical grid-based combat or whatever.
Jon: Sure.
Andie: But you can do a lot.
Jon: I just struggle with calling it D&D.
Andie: Hey, that's fine. I probably shouldn't call it D&D, but I like doing it to be incendiary.
Jon: I should say influenced, maybe poisoned, by the discussions on... Is D&D anything except just D&D? What are D&D even trying to do? It's survival horror when you're low level, but then it tries to turn into heroic fantasy, but you're never really gonna get there, because who plays past level seven or level 11? I mean, a lot of people have very many opinions about what D&D is and isn't. So, I think I'm poisoned by that discuss- Mostly just watching the discussions where people try to explain why, all the different ways that D&D might be good or bad, I guess.
Andie: I think that that discussion misses a critical component of what conversations are supposed to be about, because it's trying to put things in boxes and say this is the box for this thing, as opposed to, 'What can you do at the table. What's fun?' I don't know, it feels besides the point to me. I don't care what box you put it in, I care about what can we do together and what will be fun.
Jon: Okay, fair enough.
Andie: Yeah. So, I'm sorry for poking the bear and calling it D&D.
Jon: I don't actually really mind. I just never would have thought of calling it D&D, but I think that's just me liking to put things in boxes and so that's just my bias showing through.
Andie: No, it's a natural thing to do. I do it all the time. I'm not above this.
Jon: I was just thinking, I've had a lot of fun running one-page RPGs.
Andie: Yes.
Jon: And one of the ones I found the most fun, it's this one called Lasers and Feelings.
Andie: Okay.
Jon: The dice resolution mechanic it uses, you got a D6 and then you have a scale where, I think it's lasers at six and feelings at one. So, if you're good at lasers that means you're technical and if you're good at feelings, you're good at social stuff. It's technical skills and social skills, basically.
Andie: Sure.
Jon: When you create your character you choose, are you more technical or more social orientated. And then you choose a number between, I think it's five and two. So you can't be at extremes. Say you choose a four, so whenever you want to roll for something that the GM decides is a social skill you try to roll closer to feelings, closer to one. You have to roll below the marker that you set. And if you're trying to do something technical, you have to roll above it. So, the more feelings you have, the less lasers you've got basically. It's such a ridiculously simple resolution system, but it's just enough that I felt like there's at least something here that I can always come back to. Is this technical or is it not? And if it's not then you roll low and if it's technical then you roll high and then we'll see how it goes. I'd rather use that system, just roll a D6 and try to get higher or lower based on some arbitrary line that you've set for yourself than a paired down version of D&D, because then to me it's not even D&D anymore. So why am I clinging onto this other thing when this simpler thing that would work, I think, better?
Andie: So, I hear what you're saying and that makes sense to me. I don't broadly disagree; I just think that there is a part of the zeitgeist and the fantasy genre that D&D does capture that helps tone set for people to know what they're getting into.
Jon: Okay.
Andie: So, if I called it Lasers and Feelings, you're probably less likely to think of a setting that includes a lava spirit in a mountain on a volcano that we're walking on, because we're in Hawaii. And so it evokes a different image to play that game. I can call it something else, I can call it Charisma and Spirit. That's a terrible name, but you could capture the same thing and use spirits as magic instead of lasers. And so, yeah you're right, that's true, you could do that. I just happened not to, because in the five minutes that I was...
Jon: This is fair.
Andie: So, your comment about one-page RPGs reminded me of this fun challenge that I've been doing to myself and I recommend this to anybody just because it's fun (it's also potential train wreck, so fair warning): I have been challenging myself to run Draw Steel with less and less prep, because I'm trying to identify what the minimal amount of prep that I need to run a game is. Just out of curiosity and to identify what absolutely needs to be on the page when I'm writing adventures for it.
Jon: Interesting.
Andie: And so on Sunday one of my games got cancelled, and I had known for days that this was the case, but at 11am I was like, 'I bet I can get people to play Draw Steel today and I'll give myself five hours just to see if I can do it'. I asked some friends and they're like, 'Sure, yeah, of course'. I did it and it was a wild thing to do, because my friends aren't that familiar with the system, because they haven't played it that many times. Draw Steel is very crunchy, there are a lot of numbers, mechanics and things to keep track of, but it really forces you to try to prioritise what is absolutely critical for this session and to only do that. And that's a fun challenge, especially for trying to write adventures for other people, because that helps you identify what the absolutely crucial things are for the game. And of course you'll have to add more things to support people who are less comfortable with improving the parts that you're comfortable with improving, but some things you almost always will prepare ahead of time like who's the villain, what's the primary conflict and where are we, and how the players get involved. And with just those four things you can do a lot.
Jon: Interesting. That is really relevant for me actually, because I run a weekly game for six and a half years approximately and I've only recently started to figure out how much prep I actually need to do, because I've been over prepping for years. And I know this, I know I'm over prepping, because I notice it when I'm actually DMing. I notice that I've done so much work that I'm never gonna use.
Andie: Yeah, I write books before I sit down. I get it. We're there. We're on the same page.
Jon: And I always try to repurpose, but sometimes it's just, bah, all that work.
Andie: Especially since when I'm writing books I really prioritise letting people have choices. And so there will always be content that people don't get. In Murders at Lorelahc Manor there's an ice cellar behind the kitchen where you show up to this party, are invited just like the other guests, and you're in this dining room and you don't have to go in the cellar. There's a reasonably high chance that you don't, but you reward people for their curiosity and poking around and looking at stuff and that's where they find the four bodies of the murderer's first victims. And so you get a little bit of a heads up, like oh stuff is happening-
Jon: Wow.
Andie: ... , and getting early clues. But you don't need those early clues to solve it. It's just a reward. I get it. I get over prepping. I get wasted effort. I get trying to repurpose stuff and not being able to. We're on the same page.
Jon: I've finally started to keep it down, or reduce the amount of prep I do to see, 'If I just make some bullet points here, will I actually make that work?' Because I did an experiment early when I started to DM to try to just do minimal prep, because that's what everyone says. 'Don't do too much. Just the bare minimum. Just what you need and just improv the rest at the table.' And that was such a horrible experience for me, because I totally tanked and-
Andie: It's the bare minimum for you though. That's the key. If you personally need to write your boxed text beforehand, do it. Ignore all the people who are like, 'Oh, just improv that. Just come up with it on the fly.' If you need to do that beforehand, do it. It's whatever the minimum is for you. I feel very strongly about that.
Jon: I did the bare minimum what was basically possible and got scared after that for many years. So it's only recently, because I'm one of those that type out the... We play in Norwegian. We play a lot of English language adventures. I translate the box text to Norwegian and up until a coupla months ago I translated the whole thing, all the box text in the whole adventure I translate to Norwegian to be able to read it to my players naturally when they go into a room or whatever. And now I make some bullet points. Okay, these three sentences basically just saying it's cold in here or there's a few bodies on the floor, one of them is torn up, or whatever. And I just recently started doing this and it's actually working and I'm just so relieved, because just the amount of text that I need to write to prepare for one evening is reduced so significantly.
Andie: You should take a look at... What is it? I think it's Halls of the Blood King. This is an OSR adventure that is really good at very succinctly describing what is in a room or in a location and then giving you bullet pointed things of what are the interactable things in the room. Because as a GM that's all you really need. So, I've been adapting that strategy too in Exoecology and I'm sure I'll do it for this Draw Steel adventure too, because I'm addicted and it's useful.
Jon: Have you run anything from Where Evil Lives?
Andie: No, no I haven't.
Jon: Because they don't use boxed text either. They also have a bulleted list at the beginning of their room description where they just have like, 'Here are three sentences that should be mentioned when you describe this room'. And then there's like, 'And here are two secret things in this room, that also have a sentence associated with them if they discover something'. I've never seen those before, or anything like it. I've mostly run Wizards of the Coast stuff and then I did some stuff from Arcadia and now we're in the middle of this huge campaign thing that I kickstarted in 2019. And I basically said to my players, 'I've got this thing. I paid a lot of money for it in 2019 when I kickstarted it. Will you please allow me to run it?'
Andie: Cool, yeah.
Jon: And they agreed and it has its ups and downs. I have some serious problems with some of the dungeons. At least I think I'm finally starting to develop a taste for dungeons, because some of them are just so poorly... It's not that they're poorly laid out or anything, it's mostly the text that comes along with the rooms and the descriptions and how they organise the different parts of the information that in some cases is so confusing that it almost feels like they've only heard about how you should write an adventure and then just tried to do it.
Andie: It's an art. It's hard. So, there's something that... I think it's James Introcaso who said this and it stuck with me for a long time. I hope I'm not misattributing it. If that, I'm sure he knows it. Oh, wait, maybe it was Shawn Merwin. It was one of the preeminent game designers that I really respect who basically said boxed text is one of the only times that the game designer gets to talk to the players at the table, because all of the other text in a book is targeted at the GMs.
Jon: Yes.
Andie: And so that text is really important and you have to be really careful about how you write it, because you are directly talking to the players and you have to just convey the stuff that's important. If that's vibe, if it's tone that's fine; should do that carefully. But you have to convey the game-critical information, because you're playing a game.
Jon: Interesting.
Andie: So there are whole schools of thought on how to write good box text and there are a lot of people who have thought quite a bit about it. I'm almost positive that was Shawn Merwin, now that I think about it.
Jon: I remember I was running an adventure for a group of complete strangers. We were playing Draw Steel and recruited some people from the Discord server and I started reading some of the boxed text and in the middle of it I just went, 'Phew, this is much,' because it was so flowery, the language. It was so over the top for what I would consider necessary that just in the middle of this textbox I'm like, 'I'm just gonna read it as it is, but this is too much'.
Andie: Yeah.
Jon: So, I guess I'm just starting to develop a taste in box text and adventure design, I guess. We're nearing the end of the interview and I always ask my guests if they have something they want to recommend to the listeners. It might be anything they should check out or just be aware of. So, what have you got for us?
Andie: Sure. So, I am a murder mystery aficionado. If you haven't seen it, my top recommendation would be to watch Knives Out.
Jon: Yes.
Andie: And I'm sure that also, if you're more interested in running mysteries, you should check out The Alexandrian who has... Justin Alexander runs this blog that has this great series of articles about node-based design and the Three Clue Rule for mystery writing and that stuff is really useful for designing your own mysteries.
Jon: I really enjoyed Knives Out.
Andie: It's such a good movie. It's so good.
Jon: Yes, it is.
Andie: Yeah, I think writing something like Knives Out, where you have this layered intrigue and a surprising result that makes sense in retrospect, that's always the thing that I'm chasing in all of my mysteries. It's just so fun. That feeling is so fun.
Jon: That's one of my favourite parts, going back to some of the books that I've read earlier and then noticing all the small clues that the author left behind for repeat readers. I'm like, 'Oohh, I know'.
Andie: Yeah, but it's also not even just for the repeat readers: It's the foreshadowing that you don't know is foreshadowing that makes you pleasantly surprised at the end instead of feeling hoodwinked.
Jon: Okay, yeah.
Andie: Yeah, because if you have all those clues early on and people don't know what they mean, some people will fixate and be like, 'I don't know what that means'. And then when that question is answered they're like, 'Oh, I know what that means now'. And that's a really fun angle.
Jon: Andie, thank you so much for coming on. It was really a pleasure to be speaking with you.
Andie: Yeah, thanks for having me. This was a great time.
Outro
Thank you so much Andie for coming on. It was a pleasure to speak with you. Links to Andie's website with links to old projects, the crowdfunding page for The Great Thaw of Gryzmithrak Spire, the Exoecology for Monster Hunters Kickstarter, and their two favorite Alexandrian posts is in the episode description.
If you want to be featured on Goblin Points, or know of someone else who should be, leave a comment on YouTube or Spotify, or send me an e-mail on [email protected].
Links to the MCDM Discord server, the subreddits for MCDM and Draw Steel, the YouTube channels of Matt and MCDM, the complete link section, and this script is in the show notes. It's also on goblinpoints.com.
Next episode is on the 5th. That'll be the roundup episode for March. See you next time. Snakkes.