691 - Collaborative Storytelling and RPGs
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Hello and welcome. My name is John August. Oh, my name is Craig Mason. And you're listening to episode 691 of ScriptNets. It's a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Most weeks we discuss storytelling designed to entertain an audience watching something in a movie theater or at home on their couches. These are passive viewers, consumers, numbering in the hundreds, thousands, or millions.

But Craig, what if your goal is just to entertain a few friends around a table? Well, in that case, I think we know exactly what we do. Today on the show, we'll discuss role-playing games, their history, their narrative design. We'll talk about Dungeons & Dragons, sure, but also a host of games that have pushed the forum to new areas of collaborative storytelling and world-building. To help us do this, we welcome a man who literally wrote the book on it, Stu Horvath.

Welcome, Stu. Hello. Thank you for having me on. Hey, Stu. All right. The book in question is Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground, a guide to tabletop role-playing games. It's out from MIT Press. It was a former One Cool Thing of mine. It is glorious. Congratulations on this book, Stu. Thank you. It's very large. Don't drop it on your foot. It is so, so heavy. It is a sizable tome. And it's great. So I want to talk to you about...

tabletop role-playing games in general the history of them but also the evolution of the form because craig and i come at this mostly from playing dnd and a lot of video games but so much interesting stuff has happened at tabletop and i just really want to talk about this and the similarities the differences between the kinds of writing that craig and i do and the kind of storytelling that's happening in these games

There's so many different kinds of storytelling that it used to be such a narrow kind of thing that was very dice-driven, very simulation-driven. But now there's just all kinds of storytelling that happen in role-playing games. It's almost impossible for me to figure out a place to start. We'll do our best. And so we'll get into that. And then in our bonus segment, we're going to be members of

I want to look at your appendix chapter because you talk in this appendix D about the concept of dungeons as narrative spaces, which seems like it should have always been there. It seems like this idea that's fundamental to human psychology. But as you point out in this appendix, dungeons are actually a surprisingly recent literary thing. So I want to unpack that a bit. Happily. My next book is about that, actually. Oh my gosh. So a preview of an upcoming book. All right. It's going to focus on dungeons. I love that.

Yes. So, Stu, talk to us about what it is you do because this all came about because you are a collector, right? Yeah. So, like a lot of folks who played Dungeons & Dragons when they were a kid and other role-playing games, I lost a lot of stuff, either to the attrition of borrowing and lending. I had a flood in my basement, which is a surprisingly common occurrence for folks. And I eventually just started kind of wanting those things back and innovating.

And in collecting them, I saw that there were more things out there that I had never heard of that were really exciting, right? And to this day, eBay has become the bane of my wallet's existence. I'm actually in the process of trying to sell some stuff off to make room for new stuff. I accumulated all this cool stuff and I just got really, really excited about it. So I started an Instagram feed, sort of dedicated daily posts there.

to role-playing games and supplements and things that sort of affected the development of role-playing games that I otherwise thought were interesting. And out of that sort of daily writing process, it just very naturally turned into a book. There's also a podcast that's

Basically the same thing. You pick a role-playing game and talk about it for 20, 30 minutes. Which you apparently have over 300 different role-playing games that you cover in your book, which is astonishing. So are you going to get to our... What are we at, John? 691? 691. I don't know if you're going to get to 691, but you'll at least get to 300, which is amazing. And I'm curious, given that you've been doing this for a while...

I suppose it's a good thing that as you create a book like this, the audience for RPGs seems to have exploded. How do you greet the increase in popularity? Are you excited? Are you a little worried that perhaps this kind of special space is being invaded? Or is it just an opportunity to sell a whole lot more books?

I mean, I like money, so selling books is a big benefit. No, I welcome everybody in. I think that it was always sort of a hobby that was looking for its players. And I think that the more people who come into it with different ideas, the more types of games and the more sorts of experiences that the games provide and the more options everybody has to play more different games. There's

There's so many new fine-tooth experiences that are coming out of this indie scene right now that, like, is just fed by people who, like, they come in through the big game, 5th edition Dungeons & Dragons, and they kind of, like, filter out. And it's not a lot of people who filter out into the larger hobby, but the people who do come brimming with new ideas that they want to, like, fiddle with and tinker with. And from that comes so many cool new things. And that's what I'm here for.

Well, going back to your collection, one thing that strikes me is that we talk about these things being lost to basement floods.

But the whole reason that there is this collection that exists is there's so much material. There's a materiality to the history of role-playing games. These were published and printed things from these tiny presses or sometimes bigger presses that existed that people could purchase in hobby shops and game stores or out of the back of Dragon Magazine. And so you have a massive, huge collection, but there are likely so many more things that don't exist simply for lack of

enough copies of them being out there in the world. And what your book does so well, it's really charting the gross, the experience of how everything fed into the next thing.

So many of these games were a pushback reaction against Dungeons & Dragons and reincorporation, and then old school role-playing comes back in. It's just a great history, but it's all possible because there's a record. It's like we know so much about the ancient Egyptians because there were just so many tombs full of hieroglyphics that we could actually study these things versus other cultural innovations are lost to us because there's not stuff around to document.

the beauty of the whole hobby is that it's, it's, it's a tinkerer's hobby, right? Like immediately after Dungeons and Dragons came out, people were like, well, this is cool. And like, as a basic idea, but I could do it better. I could fix it. I could, I could, I could do things to it that are going to make this the best game. I love nerds. Yeah. Yeah. They're like, not bad. Could do better. Like,

Exactly. And there was this really influential publication. It was APA, Amateur Press Association, which is basically like a bunch of zines that was produced monthly, sent to a central editor who bound them together and then sent them out to everybody who paid for a subscription. Started almost immediately after D&D. Lee Gold has kept it in print up until April of this year. So 50 years. Incredible. Monthly. I think she missed two or three...

in that entire run. It's insanity. But it was a real testing ground for those kinds of ideas. If you look back, especially in the 90s, like right before the internet sort of made that sort of stuff more faster and digital and online, you can see a lot of game design just happening in those pages. And it's all about people...

People just sharing ideas and arguing about them. Gygax hated it, too. He thought it was really cool initially, and then he was just like, oh, no, these people are like, they're bootlegging my stuff. Could you give us a starting place? Like, when do we need to start thinking about tabletop role-playing games? From your book, spoiler, I know it's Dungeons & Dragons, but can you talk us through the history? This is 1974 we're beginning, and can you just...

Talk to us about the transition from military simulation games to role-playing games and sort of what the innovation was that made D&D sort of the starting place. So...

Yeah, 1974 is when Dungeons & Dragons first comes out and is published. It is the first commercially available role-playing game. Prior to that, there's this big scene in the Midwest which is focused on military war games, sort of reenacting existing battles like Waterloo or battles in the Civil War, World War II.

That has a very long tradition that goes back to H.G. Wells created a game called Little Wars, which he played on the floor. Peter Cushing of horror movie fame was a big proponent of that game. There's great videos of him painting his miniatures. Wow. That goes even further back to the Prussian school of wargaming, which was like an actual...

teaching officers how to command on these sand tables with miniatures and terrain. There's two things that sort of happened. Lord of the Rings gets popular and fantasy figures in a military setting are something that people get interested in in the late 60s, early 70s, which leads to Chainmail, which was Gygax and some collaborators created this war game in which you could have optional units that were fantasy, you know, wizards and dragons and such.

And we should say for listeners who are not big D&D people, so there's Gary Gygax, who is acknowledged as the person who created what we think of as Dungeons & Dragons, with many collaborators and a complicated history there. But it's his name on those initial books. It's Gygax and Dave Arneson. Dave Arneson, yeah. The Dave Arneson part comes from Minneapolis, I believe. And he was playing, I can't remember the fellow's name, but the game is Bronstein. And the idea was that there was this war game that was happening, but there was also a village and people had...

actual specific characters that they were playing in the context of this war game. That idea of players controlling one singular character instead of a unit of characters or an entire army, plus the advent of fantasy influence in the war game sphere sort of collided into this storytelling game that grew out of the collaboration between Arneson and Gygax.

In your book, I'm looking at an image from the 1977 White Box edition of Dungeons & Dragons. And the title on the box is Rules for Fantastic Medieval War Games Campaigns Playable with Paper and Pencil and Miniature Figures. Which is just such a mouthful, but that's how they had to frame it. So it wasn't saying role-playing game yet. It didn't seem to have the full sense, or at least it wasn't presenting itself as like, this is a thing that you play make-believe with your friends. But it quickly kind of became that.

What were the first moments where D&D sort of broke out of just a very small Midwestern nerd culture to become a national thing? I think it was almost immediate. Okay. Because I think that there were small pockets of interested board gamers all over the country who immediately sort of glommed onto this thing that was new. And you can see the tunnels and trolls everywhere.

comes out almost immediately after. And I'm pretty sure he was based in Arizona, so pretty far. And then there was already a pretty big wargaming scene in San Francisco, the Bay Area, with Chaosium. You know, there's this sort of urban legend that Greg Stafford, who founded Chaosium, a friend of his ran into a guy who was at a print shop where D&D was being first made, and he got one of the very first copies. It's hard to imagine in a world of snail mail only, but I do think that it proliferated really quickly.

rapidly and immediately there were different games kind of coming out to iterate on the basic idea of role-playing now so we don't have audio or video i think it's initial play sessions but how closely do we think they resemble like what we think about dnd today was it players controlling individual characters going into imaginary dungeon-y rooms and fighting a monster then moving on to the next room was that always there from the start how did that happen

I think that it was. I think the idea of the dungeon, I think, was almost sort of an accidental innovation for playtesting. It was just a situation that gave you infinite possibility, but only a very limited number of options at any given time because you only had so many routes out of a room, right? Gary Gygax playtested in Castle Greyhawk, which was his mega dungeon. Dave Arneson had Blackmoor, which was a different kind of, a little bit more like a campaign setting.

He was very interested in reenacting some of his favorite fantasy stories that he had read and kind of adapting them to play through, whereas Gygax is more interested in sort of testing the cleverness of his players. But I think that in play, it's a much different thing back then because you have all these folks who are really interested in simulating things like combat. So there's weapon speeds and lots of crunchy numbers happening.

And there's a ton of players. They're all running potentially multiple characters at the same time. There's something called a caller who is like an intermediary between the players and the DM to help manage the size of the group. But I think that the actual play loop is really still explore, fight, and loot.

rinse and repeat. Well, there is certainly explore, fight, loot. But on top of that, there is our beloved RP, roleplay. And...

I'm curious. I mean, looking at role-playing games, one thing is very clear. By the time, say, it gets to John and to me when we're in middle school, we're playing, you know, other than D&D, we're playing Top Secret and we're playing, you know, these other games where it's quite clear that the people who are making these games understand that RP is just as important, if not more important, than D&D.

explore, fight, and loot. I mean, we love, believe me, we love rolling for initiative. But I wonder if in Arneson's way of like, I'd like to just give myself a chance to be a part of stories I've already read, or Gygax saying I'd like a chance to create my own dungeon with my own monsters, that the players almost from the start were saying, yeah, yeah, yeah. But also,

We'd like to write because really RP is writing. It's improv. It's creation of character. The interplay between the characters is some of the most fun. I mean, when you look at, you know, critical role, that's 98% of it at this point is RP, right? Right. So where do you think the actual business of role-playing games figures out and adapts to what the audience seems to be wanting? Yeah.

It takes a long, long time. Interesting. I think that broadly the hobby struggles with codifying role-playing with rules. I think that it's always been there, but it's been something that has been outside of the scope, especially in the early days of the mechanics of the system. I'm running an old school style game that has lots of random tables right now. And...

It's cool. I've never ran a game like this before. I used to run very narrative heavy stuff. But now, I'm just giving myself over to randomness. And...

From that randomness is where the beauty is. It just presents situations and combinations of things that you never would have expected. And they are exactly improv cues for the players who then give me material back and it goes back and forth. But there's very little, like, in terms of rule structure, we're playing old school essentials, which is basically...

basic Dungeons & Dragons. There's no structure mechanically in the game for that. We're just kind of making it up as we go along. I think that's always been with the hobby until the 90s when you have like the storyteller system and it starts building into more structure for narrative in games. So Stu, this feels like a good moment to talk about crunchiness of rules versus sort of the

The airy-fairy, we're all playing characters, it's a narrative, and it's very player-driven. Because that tension feels like it's always been there. And most of the new versions of the game have been trying to push in one direction or another direction. We have things that are very open-ended. I had Craig and our group play through Dungeon World, which was too open for them. But then we've also struggled over just like...

A D&D session can get lost in the, Craig, what was it this last week? Whether a hold person could be defeated by lesser restoration. Yeah. It's one of the annoyances, but also one of the great joys of D&D. I love it. I love it. It's those esoteric rule decisions. Can you talk to us about, because looking through this book, 300 Games, it feels like a lot of it has been each game figuring out its own balance between these are the rules and this is the...

what's open for discussion and interpretation. It absolutely has been. And there's just such a gradient of options out there now. In the early 2000s, that's when sort of the indie storytelling scene really opened up. And these are just very, very open, loose improvisational games, really tightly focused in terms of theme. And they're fantastic to read about. Mm-hmm.

They always have very clever mechanics. Dread is a good example. They use a Jenga tower for their conflict resolution. Oh, that's genius. Every time you do something, you have to pull a piece out, and if the tower stands, you succeed. And if the tower falls, it's a horror game, so your character dies. But that's it. That's the only real rule. Everything else is just...

almost like small improvisational theater. I love reading that stuff. I can't run it, and I have a really hard time playing it. The structure of the rules is sort of the thing that sets me free. I need something to sort of lean on, or I start to panic. Well, I'm just like you. I mean, the rules...

let both sides of your brain work together. So screenwriting is kind of the rules medium of writing because we're constantly dealing with these constraints, general format and the fact that whatever we write has to be able to be filmed and so on and so forth. It is a more narrowly crafted way of thinking and creating that

And I find that when there aren't any rules. So John and I played, what was it called? The one we played with Kelly? The Asko, episode 142. There you go. So it was so much fun that night in part because Kelly's hysterical, but I wouldn't do it again because there's no rules. And...

I love the idea that you get to ping pong back and forth between your right brain creativity, coming up with characters with flaws. How do they talk? What decisions would they make in certain circumstances with? Okay, but now we have rules. So the other part of this is what do I do in my next turn? I've got options. How can I sort of maximize my impact here?

engaging both sides to me is really important. I love an RPG that gives me both. Just because we recently put this out as a YouTube video, when Greta Gerwig was on the podcast, she was talking about how she grew up in sort of the mumblecore movement, which was

wildly underscripted. And basically they'd have like a description of what kind of happens in the scene, but then you just have to improv throughout it. And she was so frustrated because she felt like the text actually set you free. The text gave it a form and let you explore and go further. And without that, you're just sort of like floating in a dead air. You don't commit to things because there's no text to come back to. And it feels like rules are part of that. Like you're coming into a game with a set of rules and

opportunities to succeed or fail can be really important. And so finding the right balance between, okay, looking at everything in a table versus now I'm going to go do this thing, I can do anything in the world is the real struggle.

One of the things that really differentiates role-playing games, especially from theater, I think, because, like, theater is, like, right there, right? Like, aside of the fact that you have, like, the script, but it's, like, it's almost role-playing games, right? It's the dice, I think. And it's that randomness.

I don't think it's so much about rules crunch. I think it's more about where you decide to have the randomness that makes it a role-playing game that is the thing people are trying to position. So like with Dread, the randomness is literally just that tower. And with it just all the way over there in the corner that one time...

I don't have enough structure in the game for me to kind of figure it out. Whereas these random tables, you know, we have combat and it's D&D, but the real juice of it is when we hit something that has random tables where I get to roll and it just creates these situations on the fly. That's where I like it, you know? Sure, I mean, you get suspense, but you also get a constant opportunity to react, which is fun. I mean, in the end...

The most important letter in RPG is G. We're there to play a game. We're there to have fun. And the more we get a chance to react, I mean, games, you know, the first games we play, the simple ones as children, they all have either dice or a spinner or cards. There's always random chance. That's part of what makes it a game. So I want to talk about some of the similarities between the experience of playing a role-playing game and other things that film and TV writers do. I've often said that, like,

our weekly D&D game feels like, oh my God, this is the most expensive writer's room you can find. Because you have a bunch of well-played writers who are all around a table working together to sort of tell a story together. And whoever's GMing that session is kind of the share runner, but there's a much more sort of a shared authority. They're coming down with the final rulings on some things, but the experience of playing the game is everyone should be contributing and everyone is coming into that room with...

a point of view and a character and a voice and a sort of unique approach to the world. Craig, I mean, that writer's room analogy holds for you? It does. I mean, we have to expand it a little bit to include a rock star because we have Tom Morello that plays with us. But it does. Everybody in there either is paid to tell stories or is paid to analyze stories.

And we all love the structure that comes with a good tale. But I think also for me, I think we all appreciate the fact that we don't have to actually create a great story for anyone else. It's for us. And that means we don't have to tie off loose ends. We don't have to do setups and payoffs. We can be kind of sloppy writers. And in being sloppy writers, we're,

I mean, the stupid crap we do. And one of the things about our groups, whether I'm DMing or I'm playing, is the utter futility of plans. I don't know if you've noticed this, Stu, but like when you're playing and especially when you're DMing, like everybody loves a plan, right? We're so familiar with the scene where people plan stuff and then they pull it off. Ocean's Eleven, plan, execute, awesome, awesome.

I don't think one of our plans has ever worked. I mean, it is incredible. And sometimes they go so bad so fast, it's hysterical. And I love how not in control we are because when we're writing, we have both the pleasure but also the accountability of being completely in control.

And I would say a similarity between sort of the experience of writing, you know, for movies or television and playing this is like, there are still scenes. Like each encounter is essentially a scene. It's a moment. There's a, there's, it has a beginning, a middle and an end, which is really what we're looking for in scenes. But there's a lack of structure overall. Our storytelling lacks, as Craig was saying, like,

The payoffs don't always come. There's not a sense of kind of where we necessarily are at in the journey. A lot of times these campaigns end up being more like a soap opera that's open-ended. There's not like one final thing you're going to get to. And talk about sort of like the laughs around the table. We're participants rather than the audience or we are the audience ourselves, which makes things like critical role videos and stuff like that

this sort of weird middle ground because are you a virtual player with them are you an audience that dynamic is relatively recent and also new i've always felt that role-playing game sessions are great in the play of them and they make for really poor storytelling afterwards like i i like to somebody that has not played the game they really are you had to be there oh yes so stuff like critical role has always sort of let me scratching my head because i don't i don't quite

feel like I'm in the game, like you said, or an audience member or what. I'm not getting what I'm supposed to get out of it. I will say, though, just to Craig's point about plans, my current game, they'll play an all week and then they'll set off into the wilderness and they'll hit a random encounter right outside of the settlement and that'll be it.

It's just like they don't even get to the plan. They never got to the plan. Well, you know, it's interesting because we can talk about Critical Role for a second. For people who don't know, Critical Role is a show. It's an internet show. They have like a cartoon. It's an empire. And it's generally run by a man named Matt Mercer, who is the DM and general storyteller. And then he has a fairly stable...

theatrical troupe that play characters. A lot of them are voice actors. Our own Ashley Johnson is one of them from our Last of Us universe. And you do follow along with them. And there is, I think they have the benefit of a little bit of editing and preparation. So there is something going on there behind the scenes that

I think does help curate it a bit because when you're playing pure RPG, it is not efficient. There are long stretches that if anybody else were watching would be falling asleep. Yeah. I mean, just there's a lot of like, okay, we've captured somebody. What do we do with them?

30 minutes of back and forth argument, debate. Yeah, and war crime is being considered as being committed. Yeah, inevitably the discussion ends when one character just murders the person. So like...

And then that gets discussed. So it can be almost like watching a congressional hearing. It's really... But if you're in the congressional hearing, I suppose it's probably fun. So for... Yes, I think it is this weird curated experience that... And people are very connected to those characters, which I think is great. People who get it really, really love it. They are really into it. And I love that for them. And to the extent that it might inspire...

people to play their own games, I think they will be shocked when they play their own games to go, oh, this isn't anywhere near as consistently entertaining and crazy as Critical Role. This is actually, this is more like a deposition. But hey, I love a deposition. I'm curious from a writing point of view,

Since some of role-playing is pre-written, obviously each RPG creates a set of rules and a general structure of how to play and allows a game master to create whatever story they'd like. But...

As was the case with D&D from the start and moving forward through most RPGs. They also write modules that they hand you and say, here's a story you can guide players through. They will wander through in their own path, you know, and you can customize, you can homebrew it, whatever you want. But here's a story we've written. I'm curious, since you are such an impressive student of all these RPGs, you mentioned the

D&D 5e, the fifth edition of Dungeons & Dragons that came out a little over 10 years ago now, which absolutely changed everything and has not just the most popular version of D&D ever, but it's the most popular version of any RPG, I think, tabletop RPG ever. Why did that work so well and how much of it had to do with the writing of the early adventures?

Hmm. That's a very interesting question that's probably going to get me into a lot of trouble. Go for it. I actually, I think that one of the things that 5th edition Dungeons & Dragons did sort of proliferate

poorly was their prepackaged modules. I don't think that there's really, for me, I don't think there's like a legendary classic in the bunch, partly because so many of them are very reflective of earlier material that's been remixed. Right. Almost all of them off the top of my head, like Tomb of Annihilation really kind of goes back to Tomb of Horrors and so on. I think that maybe those provided a sort of a controlled experience for people to sort of experience these older elements

things that they had heard about in a way that was sort of new and had like a lot of guidelines and help support for the players and the people running them. I think that it's just it was a bright and easy enough system to sort of pick up and at the right time it kind of came out of fourth edition that didn't have the right amount of adaptation. People weren't into that system. This felt

but new, I think that the pandemic really juiced it. I think that it was really easy to adapt to online play at a time when online play was about to, you know, just become the only thing that you could do. So in 5th edition, and for folks who aren't aware of it, we're talking about the 5th edition of D&D, which reframed and reformatted a bunch of sort of how the game worked and was wildly successful. And it became sort of the baseline behind which a lot of other things are compared.

A thing I will say about the game as it's run by Wizards of the Coast, there's really good writing throughout. And if you look at the quality of the manuals and sort of how things are laid out, the world building that's around it is incredibly impressive. Where does world building begin in the history of RPGs? So we talked about like there's Castle Greyhawk, there's Ravenloft. Ravenloft, there's the things. Is Ravenloft the first of the sort of the, I don't know, cinematic games?

within these role-playing games? I would say so. The module Ravenloft sort of changes things. It really builds more of a narrative structure into the game outside of that looting mechanic gameplay loop.

Like you're there for a reason. You have a real villain for a change who has agency to work against you actively. He's not just waiting there at the end for you to fight him. No, he shows up periodically and tests your strength and becomes a real pain in the butt. That was just never done. And he was also a monster that combined sort of aspects of the player character. He was also a very powerful spellcaster. Yeah.

Which was surprising. You're going after a vampire, you know certain things about vampires in the context of the game, and then all of a sudden this guy's throwing spells at you. It was a paradigm shift. Yeah. I think people look back before that and they want stuff like Castle Greyhawk and Greyhawk generally to sort of be more cohesive characters.

at a more sensible world, but it really isn't. And even though Ravenloft changes things, it really is the 90s, 89, 90, when Forgotten Realms sort of starts to gather steam and Dark Sun comes out and then these things start to become real worlds.

Yeah, and also Ravenloft as a campaign, but also the books, which were very successful in themselves, is that one of the real innovations was that these role-playing games then spun off a bunch of other merchandise. In your book, you talk about the Dungeons & Dragons wallets and other things you can collect, but they spun off enough merchandise and

a lot of world building which happened sort of outside of the game it was a virtuous cycle it just all sort of fed into each other Dragonlance totally but Dragonlance is something that like they tried to make this big epic narrative but it didn't really work as a role playing game it was better as books yeah and the novels are the things that people really honed in on yeah yeah

So Craig and I have played Fiasco. We played a few other things along the way. I did a session with the Alien RPG, which I thought was fantastic. But you have much more information about sort of the innovations that have come from the indie space or other experiments we missed along the way. Help catch us up. Like, what are the threads that we're missing and what are the things we should be looking for now? Well, I think that if you've not played the original West End Star Wars game as movie people, that's cinematic role-playing. Great. It takes the language of cinematography

and applies them directly to the mechanics of the game. And it's great.

So give us a sense of a kind of thing that you're doing in a play session of the original Star Wars game. Oh, I mean, it encourages you to do smash cuts to pull out from the actual action and have these asides where you read dialogue between other characters that aren't there. And this idea of the rules say, like, start in media res. And it's all just sort of built around upping the ante and constantly referring back. And the great thing about Star Wars is you have the text of the movie is

to tell you how to play the game, right? So it's just like, do that.

at your table, except like with different characters and different situations. And it just, it comes together really well. It's just six-sided dice. It's a very simple system that's so good. I played that, John, with Ken White. That's great. It is really fun. And the simplicity of the dice is fantastic. So we have that thread. And again, the history of this, there's a lot of licensed products that are coming through. And sometimes they've had more control or less control. The IP holders have had more or less control. But there's also been this indie game sort of movement, which

I'm sure accelerated greatly with the rise of the internet and through the pandemic. Can you just talk us through that thread? Yeah, it was sort of a direct reaction, I think, to the D20 D&D. Starting in 2000, they sort of universalized their system, the D20 system, and everybody started to make D20 versions of their other games. It was a really bad moment for the industry as a whole because it sort of destabilized it almost completely.

Tell me more about that. How did it destabilize?

There was also some messing around on Wizards of the Coast part where they changed the terms of the licenses and they announced the 3.5 edition without telling anybody. So there's all this stuff that destabilized the market, made people not want to deal with it anymore. But everybody who was overcommitted to the idea of this system was sort of caught out and went out of business.

Now, one of the things that's always been a strength and a challenge for role-playing games is that, especially at the start, you had to basically know somebody who knew how to play the game in order to play the game. Like, you have to find out that the game exists in the first place and then go to a hobby store or a game store to buy something you could start with and then realize, like, okay, there's also monthly magazines and other places you can find out more information. But you still, you need somebody to play with.

I remember I was probably eight or nine, so I was really young. But you needed somebody or somebody's older brother to sort of teach you how the game actually worked because it's just, it's not obvious and not intuitive. And this was an era before there was YouTube, before there was the internet to be able to look things up. It's probably both the reason for success, but also one of the limiting factors is that it spreads from person to person rather than sort of

worldwide all at once because to play it, you have to play with a group of people around you. Yeah, it was like an older sibling thing. You know, like if you were a younger kid, your older brother or sister could sit you down and go, okay, you've seen me play with my friends. Let me pass it along. Yeah, if Diego Rodriguez's brother hadn't played D&D, I probably would never have learned. There you go. Yeah.

It really resists casualness in a lot of ways. It's gotten better. I also think that it just resists a good elevator pitch. It's really hard to explain it to somebody who has zero context for it. It's always like it's my friend Jason's dad coming downstairs and asking, who's winning? Oh, buddy. Well, I think that in a very...

admirable way the 2024 player handbook for dungeons and dragons really does try they they actually took time to start the book by saying what is this what actually happens in this and then they give you kind of an example of what some sample play would sound like and is it a little bit canned is it a little bit corny sure but if i didn't know anything and there was a time i mean the first i

The actual first rule book I ever picked up for an RPG was for Traveler. This was back in, I don't know, 1979 or something, 1980? I don't know, way back then. And it was just like,

Traveler, here you go. Here we go. You know, here's a bunch of tables. Here's this. And I'm like, what? But what is it? It takes time. And it feels like, in a way, they've grown up. Wizards has grown up enough to go, hey, a whole lot of people want to play this. Why don't we take eight pages to talk to the people that know nothing? And it's quite welcoming, I think. The last 10 years has seen an explosion in starter boxes. The fifth edition had one in...

Lost Mines of Handelfer. Yeah, and it's a huge success. People love that. That's one of the best. If there is a solid gold campaign, I think that one's great. For 5th edition, that's the one. That's the one. And I think it's telling that it's not one of the hardcovers. It's in the starter set. Yeah. But Chaosium does great starter sets. The Alien game has a great starter set. The Chaosium ones are great because they almost always have a solo scenario for you to play, which allows you to get into the game and figure it out and see what it's like without the onus of having to put together a group.

Can we touch briefly on solo RPGs? Because that's the thing that I sort of learned about from your book that I wasn't aware were a thing out there. So it's the solitaire version of some of these games and that there's, feels like there's some real innovation in them. Yeah. So it used to just be basically like the fighting fantasy games, game books, that kind of thing where it's like a choose your own adventure with light mechanics thrown in. Like Chaosium Solo is going to really resemble that. But in recent years, there's just a whole bunch of different approaches that people have taken to solos. Like,

Black Oath Entertainment puts these games out that are just where you're simulating everything as you go. And there's all these rule mechanics. So you are basically, you're not only like playing the game by yourself and it's a game that resembles something like crunchy or like a D&D, but you're also building the world as you go and creating these narrative touchstones. It's really very interesting. Yeah, it goes back to one of the kind of core mechanics of role-playing games is like,

play to learn, basically, like play to explore. Like you're building the world as you're going through it. The hex crawler kind of games were a lot of that, where like, you know, the map is not filled out until you get there. Right. And then there's games that are just journaling prompts, which have an underlying system to them. And Thousand-Year-Old Vampire is just an amazing game in that regard, where it's just these...

you're collecting memories and you can only keep so many of them and as you go the game is making you lose these memories it's a very sort of emotional and sad game yeah I mean isn't that what's gonna happen to me just like from living yeah

Yeah, yeah. Just think of it as being a thousand years old then. It's horrible. Dementia, the RPG, I don't know. That sounds terrible. I mean, but also beautiful. Yeah, there's a mechanic where you get a journal in the game and you can write stuff down, but there's also mechanics in the game that take that journal away from you. Of course. Once it's gone, those memories are gone. It's just like, oh my God. Flood in the basement. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. There's also a rise of sort of GM-less games where everyone is just sort of a player in it and you're all doing the thing, which is...

tends to emphasize the role-playing at all. You have a little section on Honey Heist, which was such a great example of just like the absolute most minimal game. There's like one page back and front and those are all the rules. Yes. And Honey Heist I've played is as ridiculous and as satisfying...

as the name promises. Just so folks know, you're playing bears and you're trying to steal the honey at the honey convention. And there's a table for random hats. So it's just amazing. And that's all you need to go. And it's great. As we wrap up here, I want to talk just a bit about Lovecraft because so many of these games, especially in the horror space, use like Lovecraft IP, I guess is the way to phrase it. And I think you do a good job in the book of talking about sort of like

Lovecraft himself is so problematic, and yet so many of these games are built upon these ideas that sort of come out of that space. And it's a whole vibe that wouldn't exist without him. Where do you see the current moment with these games, and where are we headed?

I think that in the last 20 years in general, I think that horror writers have explored the cosmic in ways that have left Lovecraft behind. So I think that there's different ways to approach it now that aren't... Like, everybody uses the word Lovecraftian as if, like, everything... Like, if it has tentacles, it's Lovecraftian. And it's not. Lovecraftian actually refers to the...

you know, the really peculiar racisms of one guy in Providence. And I think that we collectively, we've learned how to work with some of his ideas without kind of always bringing him along. Great. And I think that's good. I think it's going to get better and better as we go. I think it's also an interesting example of like,

by sort of giving yourself away or basically like not trying to bunker down and hold on all your stuff, your ideas get out there further. And so the people who sort of like, you know, it's like, no, use my characters, use these names, use whatever, allows that stuff to get out much wider. And one of the reasons we recognize his name is because not just what he did, but sort of the influence he had in a whole generation of

Right. And that's always been the case from the very beginning. It's just that he personally allowed it. So it engendered this sort of collaborative and free form expansion of his ideas. And that has definitely grown beyond what he was able to do.

would have condoned. And to bring this all back to the start, obviously, we don't get Dungeons & Dragons without Tolkien. We probably don't get the same version of Dungeons & Dragons without Tolkien there, but early on, Tolkien has said, no, you cannot call these things hobbits. That's my term, and that's why we have halflings in it, so it's lessons there. Didn't really slow D&D down, did it? D&D worked just fine. Yeah. Stu, because you play so many more of these games, if listeners are curious about, like,

trying out some of these things, what would you recommend as a first RPG for someone to try? A first tabletop RPG? If you're of a certain age, which is like having grown up in the 80s, I think that Tales from the Loop is a fantastic game to try.

just because it has a lot of nostalgic and emotional touchstones that will kind of like juice your engagement with the game. And it's a fairly simple, it's like Alien in terms of the basic system. So it's like crunchy, but also like pretty narrative. And I think that's a good one. But there's also a gazillion like simple games that you could play. Honey Heist, which is like literally printed in my book, the full rules, you can grab that or...

or there's so much stuff. Go to my website. Just look around. Go to his website. That is a great idea. Let us do our one cool thing. Craig, what do you have for us this week? Well, it's more of a hope than a thing. Sure. But Apple had their WDC 25, which is where they show off the stuff that's intended for developers. Oh, I guess it's WWDC. It is. Worldwide Developer Conference. Not just world. Worldwide.

And so this is the upcoming technology that is going to power things. So they show this to the developers. The developers then can incorporate it into the apps they're building so that Apple can make money off of their genius. There's, you know, a bunch of things in here that I'm like, okay, great. But the thing that I kind of zeroed in on is that they appear to be getting closer to what I think is going to be the really important shift in technology soon. Obviously, AI is taking over the conversation, but

but AI is a mode, right? It exists to accomplish things. The thing that I think will make a real difference, and we've talked about this before, is translation, the elimination of the language barrier. And it seems like they're getting closer. So they're providing something called live translation where text messages will be automatically translated as they go. And more importantly, spoken translation for calls in the phone app. That's the one that made me sit forward.

Now you can call somebody who does not speak the same language you do and have a conversation on the phone. If that works, okay. Yeah. Impressed. And we've been on this trajectory for a while. And so it's good. It's being introduced to your product. And I think we often say this on the podcast, this is the worst it will ever be. And so it may not be great out of the gate, but I think it will be transformational because I've definitely been in situations like

like, northern Greece and, like, we're going to a restaurant and, like, well, no one speaks English and so they pull out their, I don't know, it's like a Google phone and, like, you're just, like, talking back and forth and handing the phone back and forth and it translates but it's not the immediacy that you really want and so I would love to be able to be on a Zoom with somebody who doesn't speak my language

and have it really work. And I think we're getting closer to that day. So, I share your optimism. Yeah. My one cool thing is a video by Sara Bareilles and Rufus Wainwright. They were performing She Used to Be Mine. I think this is at Lincoln Center or Kennedy Center. So, this is the song from Waitress that Sara Bareilles wrote the musical for. Oh, yes. It's her singing the song with Rufus Wainwright. And it's

Craig, you'll love this. You love a good singer. I do. They are phenomenal together. So I'll put a link to the original video. But then also there's a whole category of like people reacting to it, including this one, this Australian vocal coach who's like going through sort of

watching segments of it, then talking through sort of like how they're doing what they're doing. And it's always so great to see experts really help you understand why this thing is working so well and sort of the techniques that they're using. So two videos I'll put in there, both about Sarah Bareilles and Rufus Wainwright singing She Used to Be Mine. Love it.

Stu, do you have something to share with our listeners? I feel like mine's not nearly as cutting edge, but I just finished watching the Kolchak, the Night Stalker series. Oh, yeah. Incredible. Tell us about it. I know almost nothing. I recognize it as a name. Oh, it's so good. It's such like an amazing. So there's a movie called The Night Stalker written by Richard Matheson with Darren McGavin as Kolchak, who's this

this hard, shouty, kind of awful reporter who finds out that there's a vampire terrorizing Las Vegas. And then, so he kills the vampire there and he gets run out of town and goes to Seattle, which is the second movie, The Night Strangler, where there's like an alchemist who's like the Count de Saint-Germain who's killing women to steal their blood to keep his like youth tonic.

So Kolchak kills him and then he gets a TV series called Kolchak the Night Stalker, which is like one hour creature of the week. Totally inspires X-Files and basically anything else that has that creature of the week format really comes right out of Kolchak. And it's just, it's great. It's like 70s. So it's like great.

gritty, but also like kind of hokey. And Darren McGavin's performance is just like through the roof. He's so endearing and obnoxious at the same time. It's 20 episodes and I'm sad to see it go, but I finished watching it last night and it's just, it's a fever dream of a show too. Cause like, I love it. After a while, it just doesn't make sense. He's so quick to like be willing to kill monsters. It's great. It's just, I love, you know how, you know, a program was made before the tyranny of focus groups and overthink.

Its title is Kolchak, colon, the Night Stalker. That wouldn't escape. That would not get off a piece of paper. But it ties back to the movie. I didn't realize how huge the movie was. Like millions and millions of people. It rivaled the Super Bowl's ratings. It was a TV movie. And like in 1971, it was just like... But to put things in perspective...

Back in 1971, everything rivaled the series. True, true. There was three channels to watch. Yeah. Like, do you know how many people watched the finale of MASH, which was the most watched thing on television, I think, of all time? Oh, like 70 million? Is that something? It is 106 million viewers. Good Lord. Jeez. That is... We watched it. I mean...

And if you adjust, they say, like percentage-wise of the population, if you adjusted that to our population today, it would be 152 million. You know, you get a million people to watch something now. It's like, meh, not bad. I think Magnum P.I.'s finale has something ridiculous too, like 70 million. Yeah, back in the day. There's only three channels. Great stuff. So, Kolchak, The Night Stalker. Yeah, it's really great. Seersucker Suit, bring it back.

We love it. That is our show for this week. Script is produced by Drew Marquardt, edited by Matthew Shillelagh. Our outro this week is by Nick Moore. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask at johnhawks.com.

That's also the place where you can send questions. You'll find transcripts at johnox.com along with a sign up for our weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. You can find clips and other helpful video on our YouTube. Just search for Script Notes. We have t-shirts and hoodies and drinkware. You'll find those at Cotton Bureau. You can find the show notes with the links for all the things we talked about today in the email you get each week as a premium subscriber. And thank you to all our premium subscribers. You make it possible for us to do this each and every week.

You can sign up to become one at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back episodes, including a fiasco episode, and bonus segments like the one we're about to record on Dungeons.

Oh, Stu Horvath, thank you so much for coming on the show. This has been a blast. Thanks for having me. So let's remind people, the book is called Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground. It is available everywhere. But where should people find you online? You can find me at VintageRPG.com. There's something like 2,500 entries, over 750,000 words and 2,000 pictures, all dedicated to role-playing games for your interest.

Edification and enjoyment. Amazing. I love it. Stu, thank you so much and stick around and we'll talk to you in the bonus segment. Right on.