Tag Archives: DIE

Articles, System Hack

System Hack: Mashups

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Hobby games is a pretty broad field, with both upstarts like TTRPGs and trading card games as well as board and miniatures games which go back decades further. The whole field is brimming with designers taking their ideas about set, setting, and mechanics and committing them to cardboard and plastic, creating new and weird accessories or just sticking with humble dice and meeples. When you combine the recent renaissance in hobby board games (driven, like TTRPGs, by Kickstarter and the internet) with a few decades of family board games that everyone seems to have kicking around, there’s a lot of potential just sitting there.

TTRPGs are just as able to use weird, custom accessories as any board game, and in some cases all it takes is one designer with a weird idea to make something new. Where I think is the most fertile ground is the RPG mashup: taking accessories you may already have in your game cabinet and making new games with them. The hobby has figured out this works great with Jenga, and as you’ll read about in a moment, someone is trying it with the classic family (dis)favorite Monopoly. As far as other games, the sky’s the limit…but there is an extra layer of challenge involved with taking an existing game and both changing the experience while preserving the original bones.

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Articles, Editorial

The Endie Awards 2025 – Aaron Edition

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This post is brought to you thanks to Lady Tabletop, who prompted folks to write about their own gaming experiences of the year and give out their own fun awards. Like Seamus I thought this was a neat idea, and was also glad (and relieved) that ‘The Endies’ weren’t trying to be yet another award given out because someone disagrees with the ENnies. Thinking back on the year and giving your own awards is more useful (and more fun!), anyway.

I had a much more constrained gaming year than Seamus in part because I had a very busy year; in the middle of this year my partner and I moved, which involved buying a condo, selling two condos, moving one person once and another person (and a cat) twice. In a way I’m surprised I got as much gaming in as I did, and also surprised I was able to write anything from May to August. Still, the difference in absolute number hides the point that Seamus made to me that, due to the number of campaigns I’m in and how often I run, I probably ran and played more sessions by absolute count than Seamus did.

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Articles, Level One Wonk

Coring the Onion: OSR structuralism and non-OSR games

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The RPG theory ship sails on unbidden, even as RPG networks of practice seem to be drifting apart. In November, there was a great post over on The Dododecahedron which bucked the trend and pulled theory work from outside of the author’s primary discipline, the OSR. Starting from a description written by Vincent Baker about the PbtA ‘conversation’, Dododecahedron author Rowan describes OSR play as an onion with four concentric layers: Character on the outside, then working inward to Mechanics, Procedures, and finally Adventure. Adventure is in the middle as the diegetic ‘fiction’ that the players are engaging with is the source of truth for OSR play. From there are Procedures, which describe the rules for how to go about play; that is to say, what travel looks like, or when random encounters occur, or how to track consumables. The next layer out is Mechanics, which describe the “rules” as most RPGs understand them; this is where initiative, ability checks, and all those specific bits live. Finally on the outside is Character, where elements like attributes, experience points, and skill ratings, all the things that make characters unique, sit.

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Adventure Log, Articles

Adventure Log: If you could DIE all over again

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Playing the same scenario over again is a tough proposition. As good as the first time went, finding something else to discover, some other way to engage with the scenario, or simply just another perspective is not easy. Admittedly, the core scenario of DIE, Reunited, isn’t any old module. This past month my group played it again, and doing things over again was a core component of the twist I introduced.

You’re likely familiar with the first time my group played Reunited, it’s the basis for Seamus’s review of DIE, and it was an incredible experience sinking our teeth into the game over one long day. There was interest in revisiting DIE this year, and my thought was there was going to be one of the scenarios for the game; last year I ran Distant Fans from the core rulebook and it went well, though not quite with the same gutpunch as Reunited. When the stars aligned and our gaming weekend was going to step down to six people on its final day, I decided to lean in to returning to the gutpunch. Arguably, I leaned too far.

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Articles, Level One Wonk

Big groups, small games

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For the most part, the ideal size for a gaming group is five, four players and a GM. This is driven by group dynamics; researchers wrote in the Harvard Business Review back in 2018 that the ideal group size for meetings is between five and eight, at least if the point of that meeting is to have a productive discussion and get things done. Roleplaying games skew to the lower end of this mostly just due to the fact that in addition to the actual ‘meeting’ of a game, there is also the need to manage that many characters, their contributions, and their stories.

Ideal doesn’t mean only, and an experienced GM can run games anywhere in that 5-8 range without too many problems, at least as long as they’re realistic about how long things will take. More and more, though, games are being written towards a specific group size, usually a smaller one. In some cases it’s obvious, like Fiasco: the number of turns in the game, and therefore the amount of time the game will take, is directly proportional to the number of people playing, and even playing with five people, the maximum number recommended by the rules, the game begins to sprawl and the story begins to sag. In other cases, the restriction comes from a clear place, but the question hangs in the air about how to subvert it. A good example of this is DIE: There are six roles, six dice. That’s how many there were in the comic, therefore that’s how many there are in the game.

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Articles, Level One Wonk

The funnel and beyond: Pre-play character creation

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In RPGs, character creation methods abound. You can create characters mechanically with point and option spends, build them alongside a backstory with a lifepath, or just roll some dice and see what comes out the other end. When it comes to actually aligning the characters with the game you’re about to play, so much so that you need to bring the GM along for the ride, I think I’ve found one of the best options. Now, one reason you’ve likely never done this before is that it’s time-intensive and it can be a lot of extra work for the GM if not all of the players. Another reason, though, is that to really play through character creation, you need mechanics to do so. Precious few games have these mechanics, but after giving one such system a spin I’m pretty comfortable saying it should be more of a thing for campaign play.

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Articles, Table Fiction

Table Fiction: DIE: Lenny’s Halloween Party Pt 2

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When the football players show up, it’s clear Lenny’s Halloween Party will be a success. That doesn’t mean everything will go smoothly, though, and especially not for Donnie. Be sure to read part 1 if you haven’t already, and then check out DIE on Cannibal Halfling Radio for another story. If you’re more interested in commentary than characters, though, be sure to check out Seamus’s In-Depth Review.

[Content Warning: This section of the story contains some mild sexual content, and casual homophobia like any of you who went to high school in 2003 probably heard regularly.]

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Articles, Editorial

DIE the RPG: In-Depth Review

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You’re dragged into a treacherous fantasy world made from your own fears, doubts and desires. There’s only one way to escape – but with limitless adventure within your grasp, would you even want to? You might very well have heard our first experience with DIE the RPG, based on the comic of the same name, when we featured it on Cannibal Halfling Radio: Now Playing! Jay, Evelyn, Fitz, and Max came back together to play one more roleplaying game and found themselves in the Fields of the Lost, facing down their own troubles. Well, last weekend I grabbed the d20 of the Master myself and ran a marathon session, ten hours long, and it was just as much of an emotional rollercoaster. With the book in hand and experience on both sides of the screen, let’s dive in for a proper review!

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Articles, Table Fiction

Table Fiction: DIE: Lenny’s Halloween Party Pt 1

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This past weekend, Seamus treated our shared gaming group to a full run of the ‘Reunited’ scenario for the DIE RPG. While you may have heard me run DIE on Cannibal Halfling Radio, the scenario I ran was an adaptation of both Reunited and the one-shot rules, and was significantly shorter than Reunited. When all was said and done, we played for roughly ten hours of some of the most exhausting, emotionally draining, and rewarding gaming I’ve ever done. As often occurs with emotionally involved games, several of us had gnawing itches to engage more with our characters; this included me. My character, Donnie, became the Fear Knight, and had to engage with the fear he had for the future and how it was shaped by his past. Although the character creation in DIE takes some time to let you build the high school version of your character, I needed more. Less than a week after the game concluded, I started writing, and the resulting short story is the product of my post-game rumination. This is Lenny’s Halloween Party, and it stars all of our player characters as they navigate the opportunity to throw a real high school party on Halloween night of their senior year.

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Audio/Video, Cannibal Halfling Radio

Cannibal Halfling Radio Episode 22 – Now Playing: DIE Pt 3

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Four friends who drifted apart came back to play a game together for old times’ sake, only to find themselves becoming their characters. Jay the gamemaster has vanished, leaving Fitz, Evelyn, and Max wondering exactly what is going on. When they track Jay down will the game continue, or come to a final end? Find out as the Cannibal Halflings find one another in the Fields of the Lost in the conclusion to our actual play trilogy of Now Playing: DIE the RPG!

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