Character Creation Cast

ReCast - Character Evolution Cast E03 - 8 Kinds of Fun with Jim McClure

Episode Summary

On this final ReCast episode, we delve into the Character Evolution Cast backlog to pull out our interview with Jim McClure, host of the Talking Tabletop podcast, designer of Reflections and Satanic Panic and owner of Third Act Publishing to learn about how the theory of the 8 kinds of fun can help players hone in on their interests and communicate with their GMs for the best play experience.

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Episode Transcription

Transcripts Automatically Generated - Not 100% Accurate

Ryan Boelter  0:01  

Welcome to the last of our recast episodes for 2019. This episode we dig back into the evolution cast episodes, to pull out one of our favorites, the eight kinds of fun episode with Jim McClure. This episode was so well received in the community when we put it out. And time and time again, we kept hearing about how it helped people have more fun at their tables, after having a conversation about this, both with the players and the GM, and working towards better experience for everyone. This episode completely opened my eyes to my own gaming style. And it was super interesting delving into things with Jim. We really hope you enjoyed this one again, or for the first time if you haven't heard it yet. In other news, next week's episode marks our 100th episode currently in the feed We hope to bring you a special New Year's episode that day reminiscing about 2018. And looking forward to 2020 before we pick back up on our regularly scheduled programming in January, so thanks for sticking with us. Thanks for coming on this recast a journey with us this month. We really, really, really needed the break. And this really helped us both have a lot of fun with picking out old episodes that we wanted to showcase. And also it gave us a well needed respite, just for this very, very hectic month. So thank you again. Having said all of that, let's get on with the episode Shelley. Enjoy


Amelia Antrim  2:26  

Welcome to character evolution cast a show where we discuss what to do with all those characters we just made. I'm one of your hosts Amelia and today my co host Ryan and I are joined by Jim McLemore, designer of such games as satanic panic the terrible RPG and reflections.


Ryan Boelter  2:41  

Jim Welcome to character evolution cast. Thank you so much for joining us.


Jim McClure  2:45  

Absolutely. Thank you for having me on. I'm I'm so excited even though I'm taking what third or fourth seat at this point two other individuals that have specifically called me out for such but I'm here and I'm excited and we're going to be talking about one of my favorite things today so I could not be more excited.


Ryan Boelter  3:02  

Oh, yeah, we are very excited to can you go ahead and tell us a little bit about yourself, Jim and some of the cool things that you are involved in?


Jim McClure  3:09  

Oh, God, I was like unprepared for that particular question. Um, yeah, I host a semi infrequent show here on the one shot Podcast Network called talking tabletop, where I interview notable personalities from the world of tabletop. I am also the owner of third act publishing, which is a small press RPG publishing company that does wonderful games such as the ones that you all just mentioned. And then the other big thing that I'm super excited about, which literally just got announced like right before this this episode is airing, is I am also lead designer for role 20 you all probably know role 20 that place online that virtual tabletop where 3 million people go to play RPG, they're getting into the game design business and I've just spent the last nine months in essentially secret working with a wonderful team of people designing the game burn bright Which should be in public play test now for those that are enrolled 20


Ryan Boelter  4:04  

Oh, that is very awesome.


Jim McClure  4:05  

So excited. Oh my god, I can't even I can't even handle it.


Amelia Antrim  4:08  

That's so awesome. I feel like that's like the perfect work for you. Like the ideal person to work on that


Jim McClure  4:16  

paid work for RP geez yes that I will always to consider that the perfect work for me. So anyone listening to this? Yeah, yeah, I like doing that.


Amelia Antrim  4:24  

Yeah, find him pay him he'll do stuff.


Jim McClure  4:27  

I enjoy money and doing stuff this


Amelia Antrim  4:30  

money and or gaming, preferably both. So Jim, one of our goals on this show is to make really great characters. But we also want to introduce our audience to people who are doing really cool things in the RPG world. And so we want to make sure we take time to do some of that here. So we're going to start by getting to know you a little bit better.


Jim McClure  4:52  

Okay, I've never heard that question before. Okay. Okay. Are you ready? I'm ready.


Amelia Antrim  4:56  

Okay. Why are tabletop role playing games, the highest form aren't known to mankind.


Jim McClure  5:01  

To start with I want to tell you that that's beautiful phrasing of that question one of the one of the best phrase questions that I've ever heard it's absolutely phenomenal. But the reason that tabletop RPG or one of the highest forms of arts of mankind, actually we're going to technically answer that question today and it's because I think it engages in more types of fun than just about any other medium out there haha foreshadowing seriously, I I think art is is a to me and obviously there's 1000 different definitions of art. To me art is is something external that elicits an emotion from you. That's not a person even I guess you could maybe call people art I don't know the definition gets funny. I think RPG is are the absolute best medium to elicit emotion from an art medium because you are both creator and experiencer in a way that doesn't exist anywhere else. So that's, that is the short answer which will try to keep it that's that's going to be the theme today. Try and keep Jim short from ramblings but that's the reason why I say that tabletop RPG are the highest form of art known to mankind.


Amelia Antrim  6:06  

I want you to know that this entire outline is designed to not keep it short


Unknown Speaker  6:12  

for choice on your end


Amelia Antrim  6:13  

or choice here


Ryan Boelter  6:18  

all right Tim, people know you as a GM a cast member on evil campaign and Game Designer a podcaster. What projects so far has been the most satisfying for you.


Jim McClure  6:30  

So the honest to goodness most satisfying project that I have I've worked on at this point has been burned bright, the role 20 RPG that just got announced. It is this wonderful design space where I'm going okay, we are designing a game specifically for an audience that is accustomed to playing I'm going to say very traditional tabletop. If you look at the metrics, d&d, and Pathfinder d&d, and its various versions of Pathfinder represent something like over 75% of the people playing games, so we know that That's a very heavy portion of that market. However, I am one of these horrible indie designers and I like my little indie designs and I want to bring a lot of the the cool, interesting design tech to this space but yet still have it in a very familiar place for people that have essentially only play D 20. Games. So it has been a really unique and interesting and satisfying experience to get to develop this game that is for a mainstream audience, but is introducing them to indie design components all at the same time bringing some brand new design tech into the RPG world we have. We have a core mechanic that is I think it is simple, intuitive and has never been seen before anywhere and I'm Oh, I'm so excited for it. So that would be my most satisfying experience so far. I've had a lot of a lot of good experiences. But developing reflections was was really a lot of fun. It was kind of this crazy Easy, like smash deadline together with making something that was was new and interesting, and also working in a design space that I hadn't really seen before, because I there's a little bit of backstory to it, but essentially, reflections got developed and went to Kickstarter in three weeks was about the time period because there was, yeah, yeah, never do that to yourself. I would never ever do that to yourself. We're driving down North Carolina before origins. And literally on that 10 hour drive, I designed the core mechanic for that game. And it almost did like almost no mechanics changed from that. It was one of the at this point only times in my design career I decided I was like, yeah, that works. It does exactly what I want it to do. And I don't have to fiddle a little bit except for the hatred mechanic which I changed like six times during the process, but if we ignore that one mechanic, everything else fell, like perfectly into place. And then once the game got out in the world to hear so many people come back To me, you know, I've got several stories involved with it but there's one person that found a date after he came to America by pitching reflections and literally is the first day they played it I was approached by another another person out of England who was doing a live action play version of reflections to hear that kind of feedback and to get those kinds of interactions is very very satisfying for me as a designer is hearing that kind of feedback from people your favorite part of it I feel like it would be for me just like hearing how people interact with your stuff has always been really satisfying to me. It's it's very important to me I will not say it's the most important thing to me I'm I look at and kind of my my design space and and people are getting to know us more and more about me I kind of have to work in my own systems. I don't I don't there's nothing wrong with designing and power by the apocalypse or other people's game space but that doesn't get me out of the bed in the morning. Like what gets me out of bed, the mornings I go. I want to get this kind of feeling. In these kind of emotions across design mechanics that do that, and the absolute most satisfying for me is when it's a puzzle, like it's a puzzle that needs


Amelia Antrim  10:09  

like solving that.


Jim McClure  10:10  

Exactly. And, and, and it's when it when it makes it click, it's perfect. So for example, reflections, you know, in that that was a game where it's like, okay, I want you to play out essentially the three act structure in an hour. That's the goal of the game, because I know that'll give you an emotional gut punch. So that's all I'm going for. How do I make the mechanics make you as the players act in the right way during each of these scenes, because it's not an intuitive thing. Our mind actually fights against the three act structure. How do I make you do that? And when the mechanic came together working clicked, it was like, there it is. And it's working. And it's great and that's actually the most satisfying for me which is very selfish but yeah, it's honest.


Amelia Antrim  10:51  

know we talked a little bit about that with Alex when we talked with to her about Star crossed to about that feeling like you're some kind of sorcerer because you can Make people do what you want with your game like I that seems like such a good feeling to be like you don't even know


Jim McClure  11:07  

that's real life magic baby that I can I can I can type words into a screen and make you feel emotions thousand miles away that is that is witchcraft absolutely


Unknown Speaker  11:16  



Jim McClure  11:18  

all of the delicious power yes


Amelia Antrim  11:22  

all right so Jim we have to have this conversation oh okay but I'll five All right.


Jim McClure  11:29  

It's like literally the best right? It's so good It's so good. It's oh my god it's because you're you're and now now we're like immediately going deep into the weeds because you're you're my fellow Phoenix voice your ganja because you understand and everyone else is just wrong.


Amelia Antrim  11:47  

Right? It's absolutely


Jim McClure  11:49  

yes. Phoenix lambaste clam.


Amelia Antrim  11:51  

Yes, we were. We were talking about it this morning, the cast of shadow of the Cabal and I said, Jim, and I need to play a game that is just too easy. Absolutely. That's the whole game. That's my


Unknown Speaker  12:03  

message the world.


Amelia Antrim  12:07  

We want just by showing up.


Jim McClure  12:08  

Exactly, exactly. That's that's called being Phoenix. Yes. You won the life lottery and oh five our congratulations, you were born in the best clan. You must have done something good in your past lives.


Jim McClure  12:20  

But no, no, it's absolutely it's absolutely phenomenal. Have you looked much at the upcoming fifth edition?


Amelia Antrim  12:27  

Yes. So I have played through the beta twice, I think. And that's what we're going to be playing when we start the new season of the shadow of the Cabal podcast, too, cuz I'll be on there for next season. Are


Jim McClure  12:39  

you excited for it?


Amelia Antrim  12:40  

Oh my god. I'm so excited. So excited. Yeah, no, I'm so excited about the new edition because I think that it, it does a lot more with the social stuff that I think some of the older additions we're really trying to do but just couldn't quite get there. Yes, because that's my favorite part of that game is like the drama and the emotion and the like the feelings. So I think that the new edition takes a lot more of that into account like also miss some stuff about fourth edition but


Jim McClure  13:06  

the Albert the outburst mechanic is the most brilliant mechanic they put into L five or it is I love it it is we


Amelia Antrim  13:14  

we we have the option of saying like no I don't want to have this outburst right now where we're like why would I not want to do


Jim McClure  13:23  

ya know and that's like my a lot of my feedback that I sent to them in regards to it is a hey yeah, you should honestly you shouldn't be allowing people not to have the outbursts it's one of the most fun and interesting and dynamic things. I it was one of those I read it and I was like yes, yes I'm happy when I see something that I myself did not think about and is better than anything that I came up with I'm like yes that's why you people are in charge of designing this game. Now if only they would do my court battle system for social combat but that's that's for Jim Samurai game apparently when that'll come out. So Oh,


Amelia Antrim  13:55  

yeah. need to know all about. I like that when the beta came out of He's like, Is it going to be rolling keep is it gonna be fantasy flights narrative dice? And it was like


Jim McClure  14:03  

yes, exactly. No, it was wonderful marriage of the two.


Amelia Antrim  14:08  

It made me so happy. Okay,


Ryan Boelter  14:10  

I really love seeing both of you geek out over this game that I literally have not heard about until this year. This is


Jim McClure  14:17  

sir climb out of whatever hole you have been buried in.


Ryan Boelter  14:21  

I apologize. I was a platinum boy back in the 90s that was my gateway system.


Jim McClure  14:28  

No, and I mean honest, honest to goodness, the elf I've a role playing game. It's actually the card game is much bigger than the role playing game ever was on it. But it's one of those where it does have a small player base. But as you can tell a very a very loyal player base who makes outrageous accusations about it like it's the greatest game ever made.


Amelia Antrim  14:48  

Oh, yeah, it's we have a lot of feelings. Like it's it's so, so good. It's so good.


Ryan Boelter  14:54  

I certainly enjoyed creating characters for fourth edition and I'm really looking forward to fifth edition too. So


Jim McClure  14:59  

did you all Did you all break it in the way that you actually in the fourth edition, just based on how the math and the rules you can start as a level two character without like any really gaming the system that much?


Amelia Antrim  15:10  

We all got pretty close. Yeah,


Jim McClure  15:11  

yeah, you can you can full on. And for those who don't know, there's only five levels in the game. And you can actually start as level two, based on a formula and a way to buy essentially requires buying a bunch of level one skills.


Unknown Speaker  15:24  

Yeah, but yeah,


Amelia Antrim  15:25  

because the insight calculation is just silly.


Jim McClure  15:29  

It's a good concept that has some execution problems.


Amelia Antrim  15:34  

That is like the subtitle of that game. It's, it was a good idea.


Jim McClure  15:43  

I do a conference or I do a seminar called the art of mechanics. I've done it a couple times at origins of Gen Con and meta topia and I talked about fourth edition all five are because of course I do. And it's it's one of the things I talked about where I go the the honor mechanic is what what ties ties that entire system together, but it's so underpowered, it doesn't actually work. So therefore the whole system falls apart. But if it actually works, it would be amazing. And most of us just treat it that way. Because the honest reality is the reason everyone holds to honor is not so much the mechanic to it. It's, you've invested so much of your life reading and learning and wanting to play a proper Samurai that you want to play a proper Samurai and that actually holds more weight than the mechanic but I can't give that proper points for good mechanical design when they should fix that slightly. But that's again, Jim Samurai version honor will have a lot lot stronger focus on it.


Amelia Antrim  16:39  

Yeah. And I think it does in the new game correctly, that it doesn't. But we talked about that when we're creating characters too, because Ryan said, so I assume honors really important and I was like, you would assume that wouldn't


Jim McClure  16:52  

tells you it's very important, but mechanically, mechanically speaking. It's not Yeah,


Amelia Antrim  16:57  

you use it for like almost exactly, but don't Okay, yep, it's okay. Okay, thank you for having them. I know Ryan, you can ask your next question.


Ryan Boelter  17:08  

Well, I guess without getting into too much detail, since we're going to be covering it later, what is your type of fun, Jim? Oh,


Jim McClure  17:14  

and this is really interesting. So we're going to get you get into it, because we are going to talk about the kinds of fun today. And there's two things I have to say up front before I can answer that question. First being that I believe every single person enjoys all eight kinds of fun. It's one of the core underpinning traits, so everyone enjoys those. And within the world of tabletop, what I've kind of discovered is it seems that most people have two of them that sit higher than anyone else that's not 100% universal, but how I personally look at players and how I shouldn't say judge players, but I totally judge players based on this is I kind of picked two. So I described myself as I Am a narrative expression player. And when we have our little little moment where we're going to figure out what you all are, we're going to figure out what two traits we assigned to you and what kind of players you think you are. But yes, I am I am narrative expression. And we'll get into Of course, what all that means.


Ryan Boelter  18:16  

Now that we know a little bit more about your gym, we are going to get into the really fun stuff. Our goal with these episodes is to help people become the best possible players at the table. And there is tons of GM advice out there and not nearly as much for players. In our regular show we cover how to make great characters. Now we want to cover how to play them.


Amelia Antrim  18:38  

In this episode, we are going to talk about different ways people interact with games and how you can understand your preferences as a player and how to use those to push you toward a better fuller experience. One great approach we're going to talk about today is through a game design theory called the eight kinds of fun,


Jim McClure  18:56  

can you go ahead and start us off with an outline of what these came to find our gym. Absolutely. So to start with, I want to give everyone a little bit of information as far as where this comes from. And this comes from a document called the N d, a formal approach to game design and game research. This is a wonderful document, I typically reference this more out to the game design community. But there's a fantastic read, if you're a player. And one of the it has sort of two big concepts in it, one of which we're going to talk about today, which is that there are eight kinds of fun. And there are eight kinds of ways that people enjoy experiencing games. So where this comes from is it is three people that got together sort of the main one, his name is Mark LeBlanc, and he's a MIT researcher. And this is sort of part of, of early stages of figuring out again, a formal way to go into game design as opposed to just like a well we like Mario moving from the left to the right and jumping. That seems fun. People kind of wanted like a little bit more in depth discussion. Like science behind this whole thing. So they put together this research paper called an MBA formal approach to game design. And as I said, one of the things that posits is that there are eight kinds of fun there are eight ways that people interact with games that make up fun and I think this is I consider this the basic fundamental building blocks like there's there's a lot of other approaches out there you know, starting in the most basic level our friends over the RPG Academy always say, if you're having fun, you're doing it right. And then Jim mclaury mutters under his breath Yeah, but which of the eight kinds of fun because there's a different kinds but a lot of us say we want to have fun and we know what fun is we know what it feels like and we know what not fun feels like but we have a lot of times a hard time expressing why we did or did not like something and then you know one of the common theories is sort of the three player types that came out from that which is the what are they called the game is the simulation isn't the narrative so i think is what that three someone will correct me if I'm wrong on that which I think is is close. is more detailed, but it's not all the way there. And what we find out is that if you engage your look at these eight kinds of fun, you can start really telling what aspects of tabletop play you enjoy. And you can start seeing it with your players as well. Or, again, we're talking four players at this point, you can start identifying what types of campaigns what type of games you enjoy playing, based on which ones are engaging with you. So we're going to kind of, again to give a quick rundown and then I guess maybe we'll talk about them individually because there's a lot of good things to talk about individually, but to give you the eight in quick succession, they are sensation, fantasy, narrative, challenge, fellowship, expression, discovery and submission. So those are the eight ways that we engage with a game that are fun. And as I said, Before, I posit to two things one, every single person enjoys all eight of these and everyone's going to have certain ones that are higher. It seems like to seems to be the magic number most people have to their life. Yes, these are the things that if I do these things, they're great. But as we talked about each one, you are probably going to realize both in yourself and in other people that you have played with, like, Oh, yeah, I saw them doing that. And I never understood why that makes total sense to me now, they were engaging in the discovery type of fun, or whatever your specific example might be. Our goal of this is going to be to help you, as a player identify, as we said, what you like enjoying in games and hopefully give you some vocabulary to be able to discuss that.


Amelia Antrim  22:35  

Usually, we see this kind of directed at gmms, and they're encouraged to understand this, in particular, to kind of set up a campaign that appeals to their players and to work those ideas into it. But how can we as players use this to understand what would further our experience


Jim McClure  22:54  

Okay, so the best thing I want to do is is Give. And let's give an example here. Okay, and and this will land for some of you and not for others. Have you ever been a player in a game? And the GM has kind of actively kept asking you like, Hey, tell me about where you come from, and your history and your geography and all of that fun stuff. And you're just like, I don't really want to do that chore because it feels like a chore to me. But everyone else really likes it. And there's other two players really enjoy it. Well, the reality is, they're probably actually triggering off of the discovery type of fun. But for you, that's something that rates very low, you're not interested in, you know, going through this, you know, geography space, and what city and what town did I come from and how many people are in that town and what's around the bend, so to speak, and that's not interesting to you. You don't necessarily know why and you're not really sure why they're interested in it. But through understanding the eight kinds of fun, you can start realizing like oh, That would trigger off of this kind of fun. And maybe that's just not something that I'm interested in. And what this will allow you to do is to sort of understand that at a much deeper level prior to the show, we kind of talked a little bit about beforehand. This is not one on one level play theory, this is more like a three on one level play theory. So this is going to be pretty, pretty high concept for some stuff on it. But I do think once we kind of get into it, you'll start seeing how all of this will click and how all of this will apply to help you be a better player.


Amelia Antrim  24:30  

When I think about it, from my personal experience, I played in a game with people who really loved like the sort of combat simulation kind of games, they did a lot of War Gaming, miniature gaming, that kind of stuff. And so when we played it was just like combat, okay, long rest, combat, long rest, and I was like, This is not fun, and everybody else around the table is feeling like they're having a really good time and I'm like, this is not, I don't care like how many squares on the grid. We have to go together. This like, this is not what I wanted this to be. And so for me, finding a group that played in a very different way was this realization of like, we are all playing tabletop games. We're all playing role playing games. You guys are playing d&d. I'm over here playing d&d, and my d&d looks nothing like yours, because I'm engaging with it in a totally different way. Because that was not what I wanted. What I want is to role play and tell a really cool story. I don't care about your grip. Like that's not for me. But for some people it is like they really love that and so they can find that game that works well for that situation.


Jim McClure  25:37  

Absolutely. And and we will talk about just that specific situation should be no shock at all that obviously you're queuing in on the challenge type of fun and we can start obviously, figuring out where where your particular likes and interests are. But I do want to note one thing I think this is why this conversation is so important for tabletop and why in tabletop RPG is we kind of have that This conversation that doesn't really happen in other versions of games, you don't really hear that many people in the video game world in the board game world going. I mean, everyone has like the types of video games they play, you know, all I like MMOs or I like this or I like that, because they've broken those down. And in MMO only engages in a couple of these eight types of fun. a board game, you know, only engages in a couple of these types of fun, you know, a big strategy board game engages in a couple and a light fun party game engages in a different couple, but you're really getting that same experience for it. tabletop RPG Geez, most of them can engage in I'm going to say seven of the eight we're going to talk about there's one that I don't think tabletop does very well, but it's actually the I'm gonna say it's the holy grail of game design. Just no one realizes it yet. And that's a different discussion for a different day. But it's part of the reason that we have all of this long discussions on like, well, what type of game are you playing? Exactly you said, people are playing d&d entirely differently. And that's because there's seven of the eight kinds of fun that d&d can engage with. Which ones are the core focus? And if you're not interested in those, you're going to have a boring time. Other people are having a great time.


Ryan Boelter  27:17  

Yeah, definitely. In a traditional sense, we often think of the jams as being kind of in charge of the game. So what sort of advice would we have for players who look at this list and realize that a game they are playing isn't engaging them in their preferred ways?


Jim McClure  27:34  

Yeah. So so the advice would be is is and I think sort of one of the next steps we should do is kind of go through and discuss a little bit more in depth about these eight but the thing I would say is, a lot of times a lot of gems legitimately I'm going to say try that they go, hey, what kind of game are you all interested in playing? And typically, we come down to one of a couple different answers, which is Oh, I want to combat heavy game. Oh, I want a role play. Heavy game I want political intrigue, I want a mystery. I want a quest. And these are okay at describing them. But everyone listening can probably right now think of a game where it's like, yeah, I want a political intrigue game. And then we play political intrigue and it just didn't land with you and you might not be able to explain why. What we're going to do here is to give you very specific vocabulary that you can go to your GM and go. I like to play in these types of environments because that's what what Jim goes is is Jim, Jim, as as discussed, I am a narrative expression type of player so when a GM asked me, What type of game are you interested in playing, I go, I want a game. I don't care whether it's a quest, or whether it's political intrigue, or whether it's combat heavy, none of that actually, really the end of the day matters to me. What matters to me is do we have a cohesive story with a beginning, middle and end and can I express the kind of player and the kind of character that I want To play, those are the two things that matter those can fit into many different ones. But if I don't have those, even if it's a political intrigue, which is my bread and butter, if I don't have those, I'm not having a good time. So now I can go to my gym and go, here are the things that I want. You know, I want a cohesive story because I am very keyed into the narrative type of fun. If we don't have a cohesive story, if we're honest to goodness, if we're letting every single player add whatever they want to the story willy nilly and never progressed past act one, I'm going to stop having fun. So I'm not a person that necessarily enjoys games that give a lot of creative control to the individual players. I kind of like those in a one shot type setting where you're not really going to get a whole story, but for longer games. Jim Maclaurin doesn't like those because I'm so keyed into a specific aspect of the narrative type of fun. And those are the kind of things that we're going to learn about.


Amelia Antrim  29:54  

I feel like this is a good place to have this discussion, because I want to talk about how people can figure out what What kind of fun really speaks to them and so I think the best place to start is to kind of go into each of them and figure out what they are. Let's


Jim McClure  30:08  

absolutely do it. Does everyone have their pens and pencils ready because there's gonna be a test at the end. Oh, yeah. Alright, so


Unknown Speaker  30:15  

here we don't think that I won't write up


Amelia Antrim  30:18  

because I will do it


Jim McClure  30:19  

you should test your audience and if they get below 70% fire them as a listener. I, I wholeheartedly endorse that. All right, okay, so let's do it. Let's do do the rundown here. So first one let's talk about is sensation. Okay, sensation is it is a very interesting type of fun. This is the enjoyment of sensory input back to you. Okay. This is music. This is minis on the table. This is you see people that love to paint minis and miniatures there, there is that tactile enjoyment. It's hearing the dice hit the table. It's playing music in the background, while combats going on all of the mood lighting. All of those are sensation type experience. It says and it's one of the core and the eight ways that we engage in actually fun is getting that sensation input. A couple wonderful examples from this. We, you know, I'm very involved. I play a lot of games on role 20. I've heard a lot of people say like, and roll 20 is hard for me because I kind of like to have my dice and I like to roll them what they're asking me. Yeah, when you're one of those people absolutely. Like


Amelia Antrim  31:23  

that's the only reason I like Shadowrun shuttle runs a terrible game. But you know what? I like rolling a bathtub full of dice. It feels good. Absolutely you do.


Jim McClure  31:31  

It is absolutely true. And that is sensation fun. Like That is why you enjoy that because it's one of the core ways that we enjoy our senses fire off and it gives positive signals to our brain that we're doing something I'll give a specific example that I've never heard anyone call out dread. A lot of people are familiar with dread. It's a tabletop game. It's a horror game where you have a Jenga tower and you pull blocks from it. Jenga is the only and I believe this only game Where the core mechanics fail condition has a sensation input. In every other game, we have sensation inputs for success, we roll our dice and then we count it up. It's like yes, but when we fail, it's crickets. This is a game where everything's quiet essentially on a success but on a failure curve, plateau, plateau, plateau, plateau plateau. And I think that is one of the really interesting, unique aspects to it. So sensation is one of those type of fun for you know, the people that there are people that enjoy maps and Mini is not because they're interested in challenge, but because they love having all of that tactile feel to it. So that's our first type of fun is sensation. The next type of fun is fantasy. Okay, now Now we want to give some specific terms here. I don't necessarily agree with all of their word choice on the eight kinds of fun, but it's again, it's a wonderful framework to work from fantasy is not the genre of fantasy. fantasy is the concept of diving into a world that's not your own and forgetting about the actual world you live in. So this is fully immersing yourself in the play experience because of the world, the setting the people that you're interacting with all of that things. It's it's from a technical term we would call it inside the magic circle. There's a lot of video games are really great about this RPG or not so great about this but essentially doing specific cues to get you into into the world. One of the things I do this is this is slightly slightly GM advice, but one of the things that I do is, every time we start a game, like when I sit down with my group of people, it's like it's time to play I go wary travelers, you all may have heard me make this joke on podcasts and no one laughed because no one had a clue what was going on but it's a joke for me and I'm totally fine with that. But it's a concept of getting you into the world and and as as l five our players. Oh my god, do we love this type of fun and do we love sitting there and reading about setting over and over Star Wars fans? You know how many books how much information is there? How much Lauren They're about reading through and learning about all of this. That is all that fantasy immersion. And I want to point out something very specifically because those of you that are into it, you love it, man, you love reading through everything, you love learning everything. And you also know that probably not a large majority, but a majority of the people that arrive at the table, don't really care. They're not going to read 20 pages of stuff, you know, why would I do that? And it's because they're not engaging with fantasy in that way, the same way you are. So that's the fantasy type of fun and it's immersing into the world itself. Next one we have is narrative and this one is is fairly straightforward, but also powerful and problematic. narrative is exactly what it sounds like. It's the the enjoyment of story. It's the enjoyment of engaging in a story, which sounds very simple and very directed. It's like yeah, don't all RPG tell stories, and to a degree they do but here's Good


Jim McClure  35:04  

experiences, at least for me because I'm a big narrative. Yeah, um, they should absolutely they should. So but here's here's the there's a couple fascinating things about about narrative. We have been bombarded with narrative since essentially the first day you were born. Every book we read every TV, every every TV episode, every movie, everything is constantly bombarding you with narrative structure. But we're never really taught narrative structure, we just kind of intuitively pick it up. And what can happen is if you are a narrative player, when suddenly the game is not going based on your narrative structure, it starts in not feeling right. So like, Why Why am I just not into this? I was super into this thing when we started. We had a great direction for it and we're still going somewhere but it feels very hollow. For some of you That may sound very familiar. And a lot of times what that is, is you're used to a narrative with a certain type of structure. And when you don't get it, you feel lost and you really want it you crave it, you have that desire for rising tension, finale, cool down rebuild, and the cycle of narrative that we again get hit with everywhere. This is a Jim mclaury pulling a nonsense statistic out of the air, but probably 80% of narratives that you have engaged with in your life have followed the basic three act structure, we've learned to really, really like it because it's a really good structure. And if you're in tune to that, if you very much enjoy that type of fun, and suddenly you just get stalled in Act Two forever, like a lot of games do. Suddenly, you're going Oh, why? Why am I not enjoying this? And a lot of times the answer is because you want that full narrative experience and you're not getting it. So if you are a narrative player, it is one of the things to understand is Okay, here's what I want, I need to formulate to my GM, I need to directly tell them, Hey, I, this is the kind of game I want. I want a game that has a beginning, middle and end, and then a new beginning, middle and end and then a new beginning, middle and end. And if we never get to that endpoint, or if that endpoint is two years down the road, I'm not going to have fun. I'm not going to enjoy that, because it's not engaging with my type of fun. Does that make sense?


Ryan Boelter  37:25  

Yeah, it makes a lot more sense today than I was originally thinking.


Jim McClure  37:29  

Perfect. Well, that's


Ryan Boelter  37:30  

really, I feel like narrative is like, the easiest one, I always thought, but it's the story. And it's like, as long as you're in the process of telling the story. That's narrative, but I never thought about the importance of the bookends in the story, and I'm like, I can think of so many games that I played in where we've had a beginning. We've had a middle, and the middle, and the middle and the middle. Yep.


Amelia Antrim  37:56  

Well, I feel like we talked about that a little bit. When we talked about You know like are three dimensional characters in fiction and like sort of plotting things out. I mean this is one of my personal game theories is that meta gaming is not bad. When you write a book you don't sit down and go just like vomit up whatever and like hope for the best you plot it out and so like there's no reason that RPG is don't need to be like that too. And you need to have an endpoint in mind like things should not go on forever but


Ryan Boelter  38:27  

from what I'm thinking is you can have a lot of smaller beginning middles and ends and an overarching beginning middle and and as well I would imagine in this sort of


Amelia Antrim  38:39  

a little arcs in your in your full


Ryan Boelter  38:42  

Yeah, so you have like this


Amelia Antrim  38:44  

and waving my hands again.


Ryan Boelter  38:46  

You would have this major storyline going, but you also have these smaller storylines that are you know, starting and wrapping up within a short period of time the which would be probably very satisfying for us. somebody that's of the narrative type of fun


Amelia Antrim  39:03  

is the difference between an episode and a season of television like,


Jim McClure  39:07  

yeah, and there's actually a really important thing on that. So so one of the things for people that do enjoy narrative type of fun, and this is some of my own personal resource, because again, I do rank narrative is my top above all else, with expression just slightly below that. But you know, one of the things that's interesting is the amount of time you can engage before you have a wrap up, everyone can feel everyone's probably at some point, again, either in a in a book series or a season of television or even a movie, I felt like this thing has drug on too long. You know, with with the exception of movies, one of the interesting things is, we kind of engage with stories. We have been taught that a story arc happens in about 10 to 15 hours. That's a season of television, that is the average reading of a full length novel. We've been very subconsciously taught that now. I personally think that tabletop plays out a little bit slower than That just because you know, things don't progress at the same narrative speed. So I engage like when I'm running games for like 15 to 20 hours play at the table, I need to have a finale. And if I don't have a finale By that time, it could very much start to drag on. Now those are by no means hard numbers. But it is something to think about. If you're in a player and you feel like this stuff is dragging on count how many play sessions have you had, you know, since you had a satisfying conclusion to something, you know, if it's been a while, have that conversation with the GM like, hey, this thing feels dragging on Can we just solve the thing and then move to the next thing? Because that would feel really good to me. And don't


Amelia Antrim  40:43  

Yeah, where you going with exactly.


Jim McClure  40:45  

ever be afraid for that? Just like, No, I'm fully engaged. But if you give me three more play sessions of this, I'm not going to be engaged anymore. It's something to be very aware of. And again, be very forthright with with your GMOs when you're talking about this. You want to be having fun, don't let it Not be fun to you so that's that's narrative um let's let's keep it moving here. The next one is a and then we can talk after we will get them all out and then we can talk all of our own wonderful


Amelia Antrim  41:11  

we can talk about how narrative is the


Jim McClure  41:15  

narrative is the highest fun known to mankind right?


Jim McClure  41:20  

challenged This one is is obviously also fairly straightforward, which is, it is the concept of you enjoy winning, you enjoy overcoming you enjoy, you know, through through your own rather be choices or your own strategies. You enjoy beating the challenge. This is the excitement from slaying the dragon. This is the excitement from mid maxing your character to the point where it's the best it can possibly be. It's so good. And it's so enjoyable to just win at times. And this is this is challenged now. There's interesting pitfalls that come into challenge because Challenges a funny thing that we have to deal with because we only as humans understand overcoming a challenge. If there is loss involved with it, it's it's why we need to fail roles in d&d. It's why we need that we need to sometimes lose combat and we need to have lost to feel like we have succeeded. And the example that I give power by the apocalypse is a very, very common very good game system. A lot of people listening this have probably played power by the apocalypse games. A lot of these games go to very extreme pains to make it so that you never really fail. Now, the problem is, you'll hear people go like, the game systems just don't grab me. And a lot of times when I hear that it's because challenge players aren't really getting engaged with power with many power by the apocalypse games. Now powered by the apocalypse games are great for two of the three acts of narrative. They're grateful fantasy, they're amazing for expression. They're pretty good for discovery, they do a lot of really good things, but they have kind of lave kind of really cut off. The thing that makes challenge satisfying. So a lot of challenge players don't enjoy those type of games. Because again, if you're always succeeding, it doesn't feel good to a challenge player to succeed. So if you enjoy challenge if you enjoy overcoming, you know, my biggest advice for it is, like, don't see that it's kind of weird. Um, I, I hate that I see RPG community into halves. But I still kind of do which is your traditional RPG players who play d&d and Pathfinder in these games and challenge feels like a given on those games like that's just part of the accepted experience too many of them not all of them. And then I see the indeed good designers in the indie game players who go like no, I don't like challenge isn't a thing that I want to do. Engage with and enjoy with but it is a very interesting concept and if you enjoy challenge don't ever be scared to go to your GM and be like yeah I want a fight that's hard I want you know circumstances that you know I have to you know skin of my teeth when and if I don't get that I'm not having fun likewise make sure all of your other players are on board with that type of experience because Amelia you were given the situation where you were seemingly with a group of challenge players who were loving it but you don't sound like you're a challenge player.


Amelia Antrim  44:36  

I mean, yeah, and that's you know, I'm sure a thing that we'll talk about at some point to here is that I am certainly not against those sorts of things like a we've talked about how much we love l five Rnl five are certainly has like those challenge components to it. Do I love that game? Yes. Is that my favorite part? Definitely not. But in small bits. I'm perfectly happy with you know, any of the These kinds of things because I can engage with them. They're just not my top choice. If you asked me to rank them that would be toward the bottom. Is it horrible? And like, does it make me sick to have to do it? No, but it's just not like that great, you know?


Jim McClure  45:17  

Exactly. And never look at any of these as if they are a problem. One of the things I see people sort of say and do a lot is they talk about you hear advice of like, Oh, it's a min max player, like, you know, he's been Max's character to some sort of absurd level, like, just get over yourself, don't do that. And what I would like to express from this is they are engaging with their type of fun, which is just as legitimate as us wanting to engage in our narrative type of fun to tell them No, you're wrong, you're bad for doing that is to try and tell them that the thing they're engaging with is wrong. And that's just not a it's not reality be it's unfair to them. So understand Stand, you know, oh, you have a challenge player that you're playing with, they enjoy this type of stuff work with that celebrate with that if you are a challenge player, you know, understand that talk to your GM talk to other players like, Hey, this is something that I do. And this is something I'm enjoying doing. And there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. It's what you enjoy.


Amelia Antrim  46:19  

Well, yeah, and I think not everything has to be for everyone they go, you know, like I said at that previous table, like they were all having a great time, that's fine. That group was not the group for me. And I'm okay with that. That's, you know, they are lovely people. But that was not the game that I was interested in playing. And that's totally acceptable. Like we said before, too, if you're having fun, you're doing it right. But you can have fun over there and I can be like, not interested in that kind of fun and it is not a judgment on you as a person or on that game system or anything like that. It's just, it's not for me, that's fine. You are more than welcome to continue to exist. Just like over there. Exactly. where I am right now? Exactly.


Jim McClure  47:02  

Okay, so that that's challenge type of fun. Let's, let's move on from there. fellowship fellowship is a really interesting and a really powerful one that a lot of people don't necessarily realize and fellowship is just the enjoyment of doing something together as a social group. Okay, this is we are coming together and we're all getting together on Friday night and we're going to have have Mountain Dew and recei PCs which every time I say that sounds derogatory, but I go that's legitimately what I do. So like, I love it, I don't care but it's it's the enjoyment of just coming together with a group of people and doing something and that in and of itself is fun and it's engaging I'll actually once we get through all I'll tell a story about one of my players who, who very much engaged with the fellowship tough type of fun. The there's some interesting things to realize about this. You may have heard some of your fellow players or you may yourself be this way who's they're the ones that are like Every time people ask me like, well, what did you know? What did you like what you didn't like, etc. They go, Oh, I loved everything. It was great. And every game they've ever played, they loved everything, because they're in a room with four to five of their friends doing something together. And that in and of itself is as good of enjoyment as I get from a successfully executed narrative. It is just the enjoyment of doing stuff as a group. Additionally, if you're a fellowship type of player, one of the things that that you may notice you really don't like is character backstabbing. You know what one person stealing from the other party members, that type of stuff because that is getting in the way of your type of fun, you want to work together to do a thing, and you don't like when the group you're supposed to be working with and enjoying with are suddenly working against each other. So those are some of the things to understand about the fellowship type of fun. And again, it's very powerful because humans are very, very social creatures, but it's not one of those. That's necessarily, you know, always at the forefront of people's minds.


Amelia Antrim  49:03  

Well, I think it's the reason that I continued to play in a game that I didn't love for so long. Like the game itself was not that great, but it was like, this was my time with my friends. And so that part was like I liked that more than I didn't like the other parts of the game.


Jim McClure  49:19  

You know, it was engaging with some of your preferred types of fun but not others. Haha, yes. Okay, so that's, that's a fellowship again, that I don't think is a whole lot more that really needs to be dug into that. So let's move on to expression. This is my number two expression is getting to express yourself or a piece of yourself through play. Okay, getting to put yourself into a game and this is dangerous territory because I'm known as like the guy who always plays the crazy villains, and that's because there's a piece of Jim deep down in there, that's a villain he is and he doesn't get to come out very often because I keep Be a villain to my family and friends, I can't be a villain at my day job. But there's some deep dark places in there. There's some very selfish places in there, I will very much accept and acknowledge that. And through role playing, especially villains, I get to express those in a wonderful, safe environment. Now, there's a lot of people enjoy that type of fun, there's not nearly as dark as as mine. And I do very much enjoy it from other aspects as well. You know, I am I am a person that if you can't tell from this conversation, I overanalyze things a lot. And I have to understand and things. I love playing characters who don't care about that, who just act on instinct and go because that's not something I get, but there's still a piece of me in there somewhere for it. So expression is just the enjoyment from getting to play yourself in some aspect, even if what you're playing is significantly different than you. Does that make sense? Yeah, I think so. Absolutely. So expressions a very powerful one. I'll Till I have another story afterwards to about expression because expression can manifest in very very interesting ways. There are people that min max their character as a form of expression play again, I've got a member in my home group that is that way where they are mid maxing their character not because of challenge but because of expression, which is really interesting. So we'll move on, we've got two left and then we can kind of dig into whatever juicy details we want to from their discovery. I talked a little bit about discovery before so the discovery type of fun is is that the enjoyment of of finding something new or undiscovered, what's what's above that hill? what's beyond that hill? You know, what's what's underneath that lake? What's in that chest? It's the wanting to find something and something new and something exciting and the finding of it in and of itself is fun. You may very well be a player or have played with people who who go all of a sudden like We're in the middle of a quarterly drama. And then suddenly they're looking under the bridge for stuff. And it's like, why are you doing that? And what do you hope to find? And what are you going to do it when you find something, you know, and and there's actually nothing wrong with that play, what they're doing is they're trying to find something. And the finding the thing in and of itself, again, is as fun as that group that just enjoys slaying the dragon and all being almost dead at the time, finding the thing under the bridge is just as satisfying for it. One of the other things that this manifests itself in interesting ways is all the people that do deep reads of lore. lore is another way that discovery can be found. Have you ever been reading through lore and found that tiny little nugget of information that's just like, Wow, that's a cool little thing. Well, that's not necessarily so much your fantasy engagement of immersing into the world it is the Oh, I just discovered something I found that this piece of hidden knowledge I found out that the the dragon clan you know, don't have access to enough fish and fish is the only proper thing to eat so they eat goats on the mountain but to keep within proper protocol they call it mountain to now I love it and I fully know like I don't enjoy that when I first discovered I didn't enjoy that because that emerged to be more into the dragon clan because the dragon clan just sit on their mountains and be losers you know i don't care about them


Amelia Antrim  53:22  

okay, no, but like that was my favorite and I just like really dude come on you might as well like the lions well I


Jim McClure  53:33  

gotta I gotta be quiet because d'amato is a dragon clan fan. So


Unknown Speaker  53:38  

yeah, so


Unknown Speaker  53:40  

before he I know, I know that he


Amelia Antrim  53:43  

I feel like this is the kind of information we should have had to disclose.


Jim McClure  53:51  

Oh, goodness, but But yeah, so so discovering those little tidbits of information again that that didn't make me really feel like deeper into the world, but it was like a Discovery It was like, oh, here's this little thing and and you just get this sudden little burst of enjoyment that is hard to express and that's discovery fun. I just found this thing one of the the clear examples, which which comes from the video game world is for those that have played Minecraft, I'm a big fan of Minecraft. Minecraft has some very interesting things with the kinds of fun it's actually why the games as good as it is, but for anyone who's played that game, and it just started walking a direction and then suddenly found this crazy geographical feature. It's like, that is so cool. That's discovery type of funny. It's looking and discovering the new and exciting and and tabletop as a player you might be someone that very much enjoys, you know, having a world map and having it mapped out with your hex grids and everything like this. And it may not be from a challenge that you somehow want to beat the world but it's a I want to know that this section of the map is Uncharted so I can go there, I can enjoy that. And if you do enjoy that, have that conversation with your GM. I mean that's going to be you know, obviously you're going to hear that advice. A lot about this because a lot of times discovery players suffer when you start doing political intrigue or things of that nature because it's like, okay, we're in court talking to people again, and I guess it's dramatic, but all I really want to do is go dig around under the bridge, you know, understand that that's the discovery type of fun and that you want to be able to engage an experience that


Amelia Antrim  55:22  

one more, we can do it,


Jim McClure  55:24  

we can do. Okay. So the last of the eight in the particular order that we described them in is the submission type of fun. So the submission type of fun is the enjoyment of whips and chains and ball gags and it's typically as compared with the dump now.


Jim McClure  55:40  

I got through the joke, okay, I'm happy. I'm so proud of.


Jim McClure  55:45  

So the submission type of on what this actually is, this is the one that I do not think tabletop is good at and there's specific reasons for it. And this is the most I'm gonna say undiagnosed, kind of fun. A lot of people don't realize how much They enjoy submission. So with all that preamble what submission is, is the enjoyment of doing an activity that doesn't require a lot of thought, but just keeps you busy. It is the Candy Crush type of fun. It is the I'm sitting on my phone playing Candy Crush and two hours disappear. And I don't necessarily feel good about myself when it's done. But I still do it. And submission is I mean, as so many of essentially the entire Free to Play model of video games right now is based around this type of fun that sort of engaging and tabletops tried to engage with it. It's tried to do it with things like downtime rules, but it doesn't do it very well because there's a pretty decently high cognitive load that you have to have to do anything in tabletop like nothing happens automatically in tabletop, you have to write numbers, you have to roll dice, you have to make decisions. So it's very, very hard to engage with these submission type of fun within the world of tabletop. I do think that is the holy grail that if a game designer could make a game, that a tabletop role playing game that gives you the submission kind of fun, you would have a lot of people going like, Man, it's not really that great of a game, but man, I just keep playing it, you know, which doesn't sound like high praise, but that's what that type of fun actually is. So we don't need to spend a lot of time on it and say less you all, but believe somehow that you're engaging the submission type of fun through tabletop, but it is something to be aware of.


Amelia Antrim  57:32  

Yeah, it's, I mean, it's a lot more passive, which I just think that you know, even you look at the size of a rulebook in role playing games versus any other kind of board game or anything like that, and and right away, I feel like you can kind of tell like, this is not a passive sort of casual engagement kind of thing. Like there's too much already before you even started to really just kind of let it happen. It doesn't. It doesn't just happen.


Ryan Boelter  57:56  

Exactly, exactly. It almost feels like with technology. The way it's going nowadays that this sort of fun could be incorporated into a future sort of game, if you blend some sort of technology with like an app or something like that, I'm not sure how that would work. But it seems like it's something that somebody could latch on to relatively soon, I would imagine.


Jim McClure  58:22  

And, and you're seeing that space get explored in the board game space more and more. And I think it would be be Well, again, we're slightly off topic for that. But any of the game designers listening like, Ah, that would be the space that i would i would be investing some time and energy in.


Amelia Antrim  58:37  

Yeah, I mean, if you like, you would almost have to, like, I don't know what automate part of it or something like that to like, make it really,


Jim McClure  58:43  

yeah, it's


Amelia Antrim  58:45  

game design. My like, my brain does not do that.


Jim McClure  58:48  

It's why I say I personally think it's the holy grail because I don't know how to do it, and I've not seen anyone else do it. And I think it's just again, I ultimately think that type of fun is at all With the tabletop experience, because exactly as you described it, tabletop experience is a very active experience. submission is a very passive enjoyment. Those are the eight kinds of fun. And those are how we explain it. So kind of, as we talked about, you know, I think and again, I do want to stay, every single person enjoys all eight of these, it's just at different levels. Okay? I've never met anyone that doesn't like a story. I don't think it exists. Some people might go like, No, I don't really enjoy submission type of fun. But if you actually dig down and look at your interests and all that, you're gonna go, yeah, you have probably several downtime activities that you enjoy doing, just because it lets your brain run on autopilot. And that's great for us. We enjoy that. So everyone engages with these different eight types of fun. It's just at what different levels for it. So me personally, like I said, I am a net I described myself as a narrative expression type of player. If there is not a cohesive story, I'm not in Joining the game it's as flat out in this cold and straightforward as I can get as a player though, one of the cool things because I know that is I get to kind of engage and introduce my own story into the games I play you know a good example of this and because you've already had john adams on the program, and we played his game into our world, you know, again, I kind of played the villain but I played Aaron cross and you can see where I make a story where there's that as a game without a GM we were all players in that game. And I make a progressive story with a beginning middle and end just through my own sheer almost a force of will and desire for it because I can engage that I know you hear people say, you know, hey, do do your own player argue for a lot of times have control over your own player arc. And through conversation with your GM you most certainly should. If you enjoy that type of fun like I do, talk with them, engage it, make sure that arc is happening. And then the other side is expression I need I come to table Top to express a piece of myself, I want to bring it to the table, I want to to enjoy it. And those are my top two above all else, you know, my, my bottom ones are I'm going to say kind of kind of ever I don't say ever changing. But discovery is not something that interests me very high at all that would be sort of towards the bottom of it. Although I do get again tinges of excitement every every now and then on it. And then fantasy actually as odd as it might sound for me being an L five or player, the the immersing myself into a world is something that I don't really strive for, and I don't go for and that can be be frustrating to some gems that have run games for me who want me to do a lot of that stuff. And I go, No, I'm not at all interested in your world. I'm interested in me as a character and what my character is doing in the world, but it's all very inner personal. I don't care about your 10,000 year war, it doesn't matter to me because I'm not engaging with that. So having said that, this this is our little workshop session. And we've gone through everything. So whoever wants to jump in first, what do you what do you think your two types of fun are?


Ryan Boelter  1:02:06  

I was pretty confident before you started.


Amelia Antrim  1:02:12  

Kim does that to people?


Ryan Boelter  1:02:15  

Cuz I was coming to it and I was like, Oh, well, this kind of makes sense fantasy narrative. I like diving into the worlds I like having a cohesive story and I like playing through that sort of story. But then I'm thinking, well, are those the most important things? I would probably say, My Top Tier piece for this would be the fellowship. Because knowing what I know, you gather with my friends, we could be playing board games, we could be watching movies, we could be playing RPG, it doesn't matter what we play. I have tons of fun playing with them. So I mean, really, that that's the part that That gets me going the most is having that social interaction with a bunch of my friends.


Jim McClure  1:03:07  

Okay, if you had to pick a number two, what would your number two be? Under fellowship?


Ryan Boelter  1:03:12  

Yes, yes. The hardest. Yeah. Cuz, okay, sensation I get, I kind of understand that that's probably a middle of the ground sort of thing. I like playing with the little minis when they're available. And I like rolling the dice. But it's not important to me I have equal amounts of fun on role 20 or if it's just, you know, theater of the mind sort of role playing, that's perfectly fine with me. So I'll put that in about middle ground fantasy. I love diving into these complex worlds. But I would put maybe a story above that. But now, when you're talking about expression, I love diving into the character more and putting myself into that sort of character. How


Jim McClure  1:04:00  

might be one that you need to dwell on for a little bit, or it very may well be you. You've got a top one and then three that are all, you know, around equal, you know, so yeah, it's some interesting things to to think about. And then look at the type of things that you're engaging with as as a player forward. Amelia, what do you think?


Amelia Antrim  1:04:18  

I think that expression is probably my top one. I am a firm believer in the importance of playing things out and people are going to be really tired of hearing me say this, because now this is like what 1415 episodes of me saying the same thing every single time, that I am a huge believer in the importance of being able to play out really complex and emotional things in a safe space. That is what I want role playing to be. That is what I get the most out of. When I'm sitting at a table, I want to be able to like, act out all of these things that I can't do other places, and to sort of sort out all of those things from real life. at a table, that's super important to


Jim McClure  1:05:02  

me, right? And if you had to pick a number two


Amelia Antrim  1:05:05  

narrative, yeah,


Ryan Boelter  1:05:07  

yeah, I can see


Amelia Antrim  1:05:08  

I like, I like collaborative storytelling. I, I wish that I were good at writing like that I could write really good stories, I can't. But I like being able to engage with them. And collaborative storytelling, to me is like one of the highlights of role playing games like getting to sit around with other people and all sort of collectively make this thing. It's not so much like the other people that are there, but the fact that we're all kind of making this thing together. And it has, like I said, I needed to have a firm endpoint because I need that resolution of things.


Jim McClure  1:05:45  

So let me let me tell you about some of the interesting ones from from that I've engaged within within my local playgroup that you can kind of see how they manifest themselves in different ways and hopefully through listening to this you can understand as a player kind of, and start realizing how you engage with certain things. I have a player that is an expression sensation player well almost without question and that combination and how he does expression is I kind of references earlier he likes to min max his characters but he's never doing it from a challenge state of mind. He's a min maxing his characters not to win the game and not to win the challenge because he very much does enjoy can enjoy losing challenges. But what it is if we're being honest we've had big conversations about it is he is he's at a point in his life where he very much enjoys the the empowerment fantasy of I get to go into into a world and I get to play a character who is the best at something because he needs that it is something that he wants and desires with his world. So what he does is he goes through and he min max so that he is the absolute best at doing something, whatever it is and it expresses itself in many different ways. But for me People who would look at it would go like, okay, yeah, you min max, your your level one Pathfinder character to have a 26 ac like okay buddy I get it. But in reality he's not intentionally in a negative way trying to game the system. He's actually doing it through expression. And then the other side of him is sensation, which is, you know he is going to come to the table with minis, he spends hours painting them, he wants to see them in us. Even if we're just talking. He's like, Hey, can we set up the minis and all that and he's not being disruptive with that. He's just engaging with his sensation type of fun. So he's a very interesting person in that regard. I have another one of my players who is a fellowship challenge player. And fellowship challenges is really interesting. And I didn't realize this until I was a player with him in in actually my favorite campaign that I've ever played him, but we hit an issue because he he does very much enjoy he wants a challenge. He wants to be able to best that challenge. He's Thanks about that, but he absolutely wants to do it together as a group. And one of the things that come in and some of y'all may have seen some player behavior like this with your fellow players, or you may have even seen this in yourself, where you you are maybe even a little bit mad at one of the other players, because they're not optimized. They didn't pick the right stuff, and you just lost a combat encounter because of it, what they're actually is going on or could be going on. And with my particular friend, this is going on, he wants us to work together and optimize together to beat a challenge. And that is so amazing for him. That is everything that is that is my equivalent of that perfect narrative finale to a story arc. to him. It's working together and doing that. And when someone is not doing that, he doesn't feel like we're working together. Likewise, he gets very upset anytime there's interpersonal conflict, which kind of came up very naturally in a game. We thought it was going to be great. And he pretty much just nope out of the whole thing and did not care for it at all to the point that we had to retcon it because he is that big on fellowship type of play. He goes, I don't want conflict between us at all.


Amelia Antrim  1:09:14  

I can't fathom that, because I'm just always like,


Unknown Speaker  1:09:18  



Amelia Antrim  1:09:19  

exactly an event to each their own, obviously, but I'm just like, I'm trying to process that, that like, I'm always like, what is the worst thing that I can do?


Jim McClure  1:09:29  

Exactly, exactly. You know, but for some people, you know, that is what they engage with. And when that type of fun is broken, it's a can be a very, very bad play experience for them. So those are some of kind of some of the unique combinations that I've seen over the years. It's funny I think the most boring one is me I go narrative expression feels like like Yeah, all right, your tabletop player, Jim, I get it. I'm like, Yeah, I am. You know, I accept that. But there is a lot of very, very unique combinations and they manifest themselves in very, very interesting way. I'll talk about one other real quick for personally sensation. sensation is a funny one for me because I, I give it a midpoint because there are some things I don't care about minis I don't care about maps, I don't care about handouts, but I am the most mood susceptible person to music I have ever met, like music very much inspires me so there's some aspects of sensation I engage with and not others. So yeah, there's a whole bunch of interesting interesting information that you as a player can kind of gather if you start looking at these understanding what they are and then using that vocabulary to to go to your GM and go these are the type of experiences I want. What I think a lot of people end up in the trap just because they don't they don't know any better. I mean, I didn't know any better for a long period of time is going to the GM and going I want a combat focus game or I want a you know, political intrigue or I want a mystery. And I don't really want those things. I just in the past those type things have given In me my particular kinds of fun, and if I can express to the GM, I want a cohesive story with a beginning, middle and end. And I want the freedom to be able to express my character how I want. That is honestly what I'm looking for saying I want a political intrigue campaign will probably give me those things, but it might or might not having this vocabulary and having the understanding of these things should hopefully give you again, the ability to increase your play experience and understand what you enjoy at the table.


Amelia Antrim  1:11:32  

You know, I'm thinking back on picking our favorites before and and Ryan, I have to tell you that I know that fellowship is your top one because of when we recorded our edge of the Empire stuff. Because Ryan went first and Ryan picked to play a human medic. And then we went around the table and everyone else had chosen to play droids and Ryan was so disappointed


Unknown Speaker  1:12:01  



Amelia Antrim  1:12:03  

because like that was your and every time we make characters like when we did it for headspace to you had such a hard time being like, I'm not a good person. I was like Brian, you have to be a bad person. That's the whole point of the game is that you are not a good person. You you did something to somebody and you were like, but it wasn't that bad. And really, it was. You just can't like, I love that about you because I'm always like, everyone should backstep everyone like we're all just in a circle like Stephen people and Ryan's like, No, no, I'm gonna be the medic, and we're all like, we're gonna ruin that for you.


Ryan Boelter  1:12:37  

It's funny because you're kind of blowing my mind here with all of this because I was recently in a game where we were playing kind of people that didn't know each other. We all had them. Nisha starting out. And one of the characters was a monster type character, I think was an ENT or something like that something with two heads and was pretty darn Evil. And I'm sitting here playing neutral. Good d&d, of course, and I'm like, why am I not enjoying this as much? I mean, the role playing was amazing and everything, but that character was very antagonistic towards the other characters in the party. And I'm like, yeah, there's not this harmony that I'm kind of looking for. So it's not as fun. And it makes a lot more sense. Now,


Amelia Antrim  1:13:27  

I feel like how having these categories sort of brings up a lot of things. Like I would have said before about that D amp D game that like, I just didn't like combat and it's like, well, no, that really wasn't the problem. It was just like, challenge just doesn't, it's fine. Whatever.


Jim McClure  1:13:43  

Exactly. And and I'll bet you fully engage with with situations where we're combat as part of telling the story. It's an important piece in the story. And suddenly, it's like, oh, that's that's really good and interesting, and I'm totally on board with that because that's still combat but engaging with the type of funding You like to engage with


Amelia Antrim  1:14:02  

right yeah like this life or death duel that has these this outcome eventually that decides everything that's very important to me just slaying whatever dragon over there for no reason it's not like whatever


Jim McClure  1:14:15  

yeah so so this is this is the magic of the eight kinds of fun and it's one of those I I like talking about it and people I often not like people will tell me about it I'm like, this is kind of a concept that takes like an hour to describe but once I describe it, you know, and kind of go through everything you go, oh, okay, no, this totally makes sense. But it doesn't have a really great elevator pitch to it. But But hopefully you know, as as you all have listened to this, you know, it will give you it will give you tools and some understanding as far as what you can do to kind of engage with this further and hopefully, again, optimize your your own play experience and, and be able to work better with the GM. Where you were describing you know, that you you don't engage very well or You notice you had problems when the party isn't cohesive? Have you ever gone to a GM and go? Yeah, the type of game I want to play is a game where all of the party works together? Probably not. You may have I'm not sure but but it's not a way that people normally think about phrasing the kind of things that they want from a game. So now after after going through the eight kinds of fun, hopefully, this will be something that will will help you along your journey and in finding the type of player experiences that you want.


Ryan Boelter  1:15:27  

Yeah, definitely.


Amelia Antrim  1:15:28  

So do you think that the best way for people to do that is to kind of look back on their past experiences and see what kinds of games they enjoyed in particular or their other ways? Do you think that people can kind of really suss out what works for them?


Jim McClure  1:15:43  

Well, if they took all the notes that we told them to know to take, hopefully they'll they'll have it because everyone listens to podcast with with you know, a pad and a pencil next to them. But in seriousness, it's some of it's going to depend on you personally and how introspective that you are, you know, I I personally believe one of my qualities He says I'm very introspective. And it comes to again my whole thing I have to figure out how the thing works. It's a defining defining quality of Jim and that includes for Jim himself. You know, I'll some people if you're being honest with yourself, you know not everyone's that good at understanding yourself and what exactly you do in jive win. So the important thing to do is I think exactly what you said Amelia is, is kind of look at what games you have done and what you've enjoyed doing and don't try em. within your own mind. Don't try and sugarcoat it or justify it and go like, well, I shouldn't really want to win because games aren't about winning. Like if you enjoy winning, understand that accept it, embrace it, there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. If you're the kind of person that just like, Hey, I don't really care what we do, as long as there's a group of five of us together doing it. Do it don't don't ever think that that's bad. think that that's great. Understand. So my biggest advice is, is look at what the aspects that you're actively engaging look What happens at the table that you most come alive from and really think about what you're actually enjoying from that, and try and figure it out, because what it will do is it will only help you in the future to be able to engage with those things more and have more fun as a player.


Amelia Antrim  1:17:15  

And that's really what all of it is about is not even, you know, pigeonholing yourself into a particular kind of game or anything like that. But I think that you always get more out of something when you know what you're looking for, you know, like you go to the grocery store and like you are going to walk away happier if you went in with a list. Then if you just like, wander around and hope for the best, like you will come home with the correct things that way. And I think that this is the same kind of situation, knowing what you want is going to produce the best outcome. Hmm,


Unknown Speaker  1:17:45  



Ryan Boelter  1:17:46  

With all that in mind, now that everybody that has been listening knows exactly the type of players that they are and the games that they enjoy.


Amelia Antrim  1:17:54  

they've figured it all out exactly this episode.


Ryan Boelter  1:17:57  

Should players have these sorts of things in mind when they actually go to start creating their characters, as opposed to, you know, trying to figure out what sort of game they want to play.


Jim McClure  1:18:08  

I think interestingly, it depend because you could very much see kinds of fun and and obviously, I don't wanna say this goes against the theme of your podcast as Character Creation Cast, but there are some players that what they create is not going to matter. I could envision a fellowship sensation player that it's like that Just give me whatever you got, because I actually don't care about creating characters. And then there's people like me, where expression is my number two thing where it's all about creating the character. It's all about understanding that so I do think for for some people, it matters and for some people understand, you know, character creation might not be even something that you're interested in based on your types of fun. And for others, it might be a Oh, I enjoy expression in the way that I can go through and again, like the friend I said, that I can make myself be the best Something and I enjoy being able to be the best at something. So I can play that type of character, I can create that type of character and understand that and have that conversation with my GM and have that conversation my other players have going, I'm not trying to push this game into some, you know, massive arms race that I'm the best at doing something or that that, you know, we are so mechanically good that we're outclassing all of the things we're supposed to be fighting, but I enjoy doing this, I want to be this I want to express this part of me. So I think it will really really as you're creating characters, it's something to definitely look at, you know, a another great example of if you're a narrative type of player, which I am as well and you're making your character you know, one of the things that really, really helps is to you see this a lot of character questionnaires. What is your objective? What's your lifetime goal l five or I always think has the absolute best for this in the game of 20 questions. It says how are you going to die? I love answering that question. So much because it's like, essentially answering that question is, how do you want to live? But it's phrased in the way it says, What do you want to die doing? Or what do you think will die, and that will express how you live. If you're a narrative player, what you're doing is you're setting the starting point for your narrative, you don't want to have a completed narrative. You don't want to have nothing to work off of you want to set a starting point, if you're an expression, you want to have the pieces together that will allow you to express it. So as you're as you're designing your characters that you want to play, it's one of the things to really take a look at is what are the things I'm going to enjoy playing? How do I make a character that does that? And intuitively, I mean, you just said it, you enjoy fellowship type of play, and a lot of times you play healers and support classes. Why? Because you're supporting your friends around the table. It's engaging in that fellowship. Knowing that and understanding it will let you dig deeper and focus more on the things you're going to enjoy doing at the table.


Amelia Antrim  1:20:56  

Well, and I think sometimes particularly in games, where you have Have a session zero or something for those fellowship players, it's really important at that point to kind of discuss your party dynamics too, because there are, I like to play those games where there is inter party conflict. And so that is the thing that comes up often for me in session zero is I want to have these sort of hooks to kind of fight with other people. I like that kind of conflict. And for somebody like Ryan that doesn't enjoy that that's also an important thing to think about when creating those characters that like you don't want to have that and take an antagonistic relationship.


Jim McClure  1:21:33  

Exactly so so in in a session zero that you know, having that exact conversation that vocabulary you know, very much goes like oh, well we can have we can have a thing where where your character is liked by everyone and and Amelia is character likes them. But I mean, this character is antagonistic with other players, because then that's not as jarring to your experience. Now again, as a fellowship, seeing players fight still might not be exactly a reading that you enjoy doing. But it's also part of the negotiation. I think you're exactly right. That's exactly what the sessions you're supposed to be. Because the reality is you're never going to gather, you know, five people in a gym around a table that all are enjoying the exact same type of things in the exact same way. So everything with it is a negotiation about, you know, what we're going to do, what we're going to engage with and what we're going to enjoy.


Amelia Antrim  1:22:24  

We've talked about this a little bit, but do you think that RPG games are better at certain kinds of fun than others? And can we as players bring additional aspects that might not be there to begin with?


Jim McClure  1:22:40  

So yeah, so there's there's an interesting thing we talked a little bit about it, and I was only being half facetious at the beginning of this thing. You know, I, I do think tabletop role playing games can engage with more types of fun than most any other medium. Most of the other mediums engage with a very select number of these tapes. Top I think very much can engage with as we said seven of the eight. I don't think it does submission. Well for reasons that we already discussed on it. But I think that tabletop very well does all seven from that there's a little bit of game designer in me that's coming into place. It doesn't exactly behave. But actually, tabletop doesn't do challenge very well. And it's all because of at the end of the day, everyone realizes that the GM that's running the game is making up the numbers in some way, shape or form. Like ultimately, you're like, Oh, yeah, I'm playing fourth edition d&d. I'm doing the exact encounters, you know, that it told me to put in the place, but I'm still deciding how many spaces they are away. I'm still deciding who acts when I'm still deciding who attacks there's, there's not there's not an even balance there. And to some degree, everyone in the back of their mind kind of knows that. So challenges actually kind of interesting and can be frustrating for some people within tabletop role playing games. But most people aren't going to dig too deep into that and can just enjoy the Goblin fight for it being a goblin fight. So in I kind of got lost where I was going and what was the start of your question on that?


Amelia Antrim  1:24:10  

Well, how can we as players bring in additional aspects that maybe wouldn't be there to begin with?


Jim McClure  1:24:17  

Okay, yeah, as players to understand this, and what kind of you can bring to the table is is you very much can bring your own interests and desires. Now, some of these types of fun are more active and some of them are more passive, you know, fellowship and and sensation and submission are all more on the passive end of things. So those if you want to enjoy those, they need to be more of a conversation up front and setting the tone and setting what's going to happen at the table fantasies kind of a little bit passive at the same time. If you're a discovery type of player, you know, that is very much something that you can bring to the tale of your narrative player. That is something you can bring to the table. Obviously expression you know very much are things You can you yourself as a player can go, Okay, I'm going to establish my own narrative and I'm going to have my character arc, you know, be damned it's going to happen. That's, that's fair warning, you get Jim mclaury at your table. That's how that goes. Jim is having a character I don't care if we're playing an hour long game like it's going to happen.


Amelia Antrim  1:25:17  

This is a game of sorry. And now we have made up a whole story about this one


Jim McClure  1:25:24  

is struggling. His struggles to get to the store, and his his revenge list that he's making. But at the same time, he's also sad because his father had one. And he never came back to the store. But his mother said always forgive. So yeah, Marty. Yeah, we're already in Right.


Amelia Antrim  1:25:38  

I mean, I don't know if everybody else played that way, but


Jim McClure  1:25:42  

exactly know what I'm about. Exactly. Um, so you can as a player, very actively bring these things into it. But the thing to be careful about this kind of as we've talked always like, you need to have the conversation with your other players. And with your GM about Because a lot of the things if you notice when we always going through these, a lot of the things that I kind of brought out as I don't say problems, but what can be points of friction between players is when people bring these things into the game, without the buying of everyone else I use discovery is as a big example for that, oh, we are doing a quarterly drama, and everyone's very invested in it. And we turn to our Mantis clan, samurai, and he's digging through the hole of a boat out of the harbor. And you're like, Jim, what, what are you doing, man? We're having like doing right now, man. Exactly. That is engaging in bringing your type of fun to the table, but without understanding without buying from everyone else as far as what's going on for it. And the reality of that is you're probably doing because you probably got bored because you didn't realize you enjoyed the discovery type of fun and you're stuck in a courtly drama.


Amelia Antrim  1:26:52  

Yeah, I mean, I think that there's a lot of times where you can end up really disappointed by that too, because if the GM has this sort of put intermixing happened, you're out in the harbor digging in that boat, and they've got nothing over there, you're going to come away like, well, what was that? You know that there's no point in that, because that is not where the story is. It's over here. So not being honest about that, too can lead to much more disappointment than just like, neutral. Not fun.


Jim McClure  1:27:20  

Exactly, exactly. So so. So bringing your your particular interest is something that you absolutely should be doing. But you should be doing it in a in a very direct way. I mean, you at the beginning said like, you know, I don't think people should be discouraging meditite conversations. And I'm like, Yes, yes, absolutely. You're right, do not discourage as a matter of fact, directly tell everyone you're playing with what you want to do, you know, use this language to go you know, again, if I'm saying that you're saying we have a session zero, I'm gonna directly tell you, I want a story with a beginning, middle and end. And if it starts petering in the middle, I'm going to tell you because I'm going to get bored, because that's what I've experienced in the past. have these conversations. I mean, we're Getting together to have fun together, by all means, make it the absolute best you can make it if you are going to get bored stuck in one place because you're not discovering new things go, Hey, I want a game where we go out and explore and you know what if we're going to a quarterly drama, that's fine. But GM Can you at least as part of this make it so we need to go out in the wilderness and investigate something to find something or anything, you know, you're the GM you you do your magic, but I'm going to want that in the game or I'm going to I'm going to get bored with it. And that's being on


Ryan Boelter  1:28:30  

even like a quarterly drama thing that you're talking about. I can easily picture that drama being a distraction for this one player to sneak off and start looking around some rooms and trying to find some actual information that will help the drama progress.


Amelia Antrim  1:28:47  

Well, all I can think is like a scorpion would be really good at finding those things through a conversation. Like it doesn't have to be like digging in the back garden to find a dead body like it can be information from people. And you know, there are multiple ways to do that. And I think as a player being open to understanding that you can engage with those things in multiple different ways to is really important. Absolutely. It doesn't always look the same. I think the other thing is remembering that session zero is not the only time that you can bring these things up, particularly, the example I can think of is, is fellowship. But I've been in games where there's been some potential backstabbing happening, and somebody has turned to me and said, Hey, out of character for a moment, Is this okay with you? And of course, being me, I was like, Yes, absolutely. Do it. Like, great, perfect. But having that moment, they're saying, like, is this going to be fun for you? Because if it's not going to be fun for you, let's not do it. That's totally okay. Absolutely. So anything else that you want to add that we maybe didn't cover here? Any last bits of advice or words of wisdom?


Jim McClure  1:29:54  

No, I mean, obviously, we've spoken it pretty, pretty great length on this thing. Um, you know, the the big thing You know, just to kind of reiterate what we've said all along, which is take a good as a player, take a good honest, look at yourself at what you enjoy at what you engage with, and use that knowledge and its tools that you were arming yourself with to have a better experience. And don't be afraid to start having conversations with with with your GM and your other players, that this is how I want to engage with the game. These are the things that I am enjoying, and do those. And I think if you do that, I know for me personally, it's gone a long way into helping me enjoy my games more and more.


Amelia Antrim  1:30:33  

I know I've kind of fallen into it by accident by just moving from one group to another and having this sort of aha moment of like, Oh, this is what I wanted. And this is what I wasn't getting before. But I think that if people have the chance to sort of take a look at it and not have to wait to stumble into it, you're going to have a better time, hopefully sooner.


Jim McClure  1:30:53  

And then actually, I'll give one other piece of advice to players out there. Once you figure out what what you do like and you do enjoy I would highly encourage you to intentionally try the other kinds of fun I'll give you I'll give you a personal story here I, I challenged forever was rated very, very low for me because I didn't I don't care about challenge I don't care about about beating things I never have. I've never been a big, big competition person. And then one day, actually within the last couple years, this is a more video game story, but a friend of mine was like, we're both big fans of megaman x numbers that game such a, such a good video game, one of the best ever made. And he he loves like every game he plays, he plays it the first time around on the highest difficulty level. And that's the type of he's a very much challenged type of fun player. And I don't like any of that. But we were watching some speed running videos and I got into speed running stuff, which is another rabbit hole that you don't want in your life, but


Amelia Antrim  1:31:51  

oh yeah, it's not Yeah, I'm


Jim McClure  1:31:55  

up there. Yeah. SGD q was just a couple weeks ago. Yep. So much.


Amelia Antrim  1:32:00  

My son is like he's like I know about this glitch and you can do this I'm like I don't care not like I could not possibly love you dearly but I don't care about what you're saying.


Jim McClure  1:32:11  

But But what what was interesting is we were talking about is like all right if you'd speedrun one game it definitely Mega Man X like I've played that game beginning to end you know, probably over 100 times I love that game so so much it's like imprinted into my mind and I was like I'd probably do that he goes we should totally do a challenge run and just do it like just Buster rifle only no upgrades, nothing and I'm like, I don't know. And I had an amazing time we got all the way to the final form of the final boss could not beat him. It's way too hard with no upgrades to beat him. You have to be absolutely insane to do that. But we got that far and there was moments in that where I was like, Oh my god, this is what people who enjoy challenge are enjoying like when I beat whatever that one there's that one sub boss that is just like a giant mouth small tank that For those who play you know, I'm talking about when you're going through sigma. And it's like when we finally it took us probably 30 runs on that. And man, when we finally beat that it was we jumped, and we hugged and we high five and it was just that and I was like, This is enjoyment of the challenge type of fun. I just had never experienced it in the right way before so one of the things I would say is, once you establish your type of fun doesn't necessarily you're going to mean you're going to fully enjoy the others but I would encourage you to actively try because you might just not have ever experienced it in a way that really worked for you.


Amelia Antrim  1:33:32  

You know what that doesn't entirely surprise me because just listening to you talk about like figuring out mechanics in game design feels like its own sort of challenge it is that like getting those things to click, feels really good for you. So like I think it makes sense that it's not in a in a combat overcoming this like we we killed the dragon we crossed the chasm, whatever, but like in your own personal way in this particular thing that works for you


Jim McClure  1:33:59  

and for all the capital Once I gave myself about how introspective I am, I never realized that until this exact moment when you said that, but that's absolutely true.


Jim McClure  1:34:06  

Yep. percent is full of insight


Amelia Antrim  1:34:10  

about other people.


Ryan Boelter  1:34:13  

All right. Well, thank you so much, Jim, for sitting down with us. We really appreciate it.


Jim McClure  1:34:19  

Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me on. It was a wonderful amount of fun. I was so happy to get to talking about again, one of my one of my absolute favorite subjects, and also, of course, to get on your wonderful podcast. Can you go ahead and remind everyone where they can find you and a little bit about your projects? Oh, yeah, sure. The best way to directly interact with me seems to be Twitter. I am at GM Jim mclaury. Which I'm more and more regretting that name because I've made it because I was I guess, known as a GM was sort of my first thing but now I'm like, Yeah, I guess I still do GM things. But anyway, so at GM Jim mclaury. That's Jay I am MCC LDR. He is the best way to interact with me on on Twitter. You can also So find all my game design stuff over at third act dot pub. That's th IR D AC T dot p up. And that's where all my game design stuff is also very much go on over to rule 20. And check out burn bright again, at this point. It's an open play test. I think it's two subscribers only. But yeah, that's pretty much where you can find me. And then coming up I'm going to have to Kickstarter is this year dominum Magica will be coming out, actually, very shortly after this podcast drops. We're going to Kickstarter and August 7. It's myself and Emily Reinhart have designed a magical girl RPG that has Oh my god, ah, one of the core mechanics for it is, Are you familiar with what a cootie catcher is? Which is the little Yes, the little thing, that piece of paper that that everyone in middle school, fold it up and you write numbers and you go, you know, open, close, open, close, open, close, you know, pick a number between one and eight yada, yada, yada, flip it up and tell your fortune that is a core mechanic of the game. It's how you do world building as you fill out a cootie


Jim McClure  1:36:01  

It's got it's got so many cool little things to


Amelia Antrim  1:36:04  

do the character sheets still have you draw like your your magical girl Oh absolutely


Jim McClure  1:36:09  

absolutely they do I know that


Amelia Antrim  1:36:11  

I didn't get a chance to play it in a cat a con but the other boys from shadow of the Cabal did and they have been talking about it non stop like waiting for this Kickstarter they're so excited about it


Jim McClure  1:36:23  

because because we because we were talking about it and and some of the things like the cookie kitchens I know that's going to be new like they had an experience that like I'm so happy with the direction the design on this game went yeah dominant magic is gonna be on Kickstarter August 7 and then reach of Titan which is my my big fighting giants game, which is going to be much more towards challenge type of fun with some very interesting world building and fantasy elements to it that I'm kind of excited for. But it's a game about if anyone's played shadow of Colossus, the video game. It is that the tabletop RPG Yeah, the only difference being obviously because as a tabletop You are a team of people Not a single person doing it. But yeah, thanks shadow of Colossus, if it's a group of four of you instead of a lone traveler, the RPG and that's going to be, you're saying all the right words that


Ryan Boelter  1:37:12  

seal the deal with shadow Colossus, and oh my gosh, I'm so excited for both of those now.


Jim McClure  1:37:18  

Wonderful. Well, those again Kickstarter, Domino Magica August 7, and that a reach of Titan will be in October.


Amelia Antrim  1:37:25  

We look forward to it and I'm sure we'll put it in our announcements and stuff when all of those are out because I know plenty of people who are really excited about it.


Jim McClure  1:37:34  

Oh, and the great thing about Domino Magica? Oh, if you back the Kickstarter, you immediately like immediately as soon as you back the thing we are shipping you there. We actually have these amazing slap bracelets that have fight like a magical fight like a magical girl with the logo on them. So if you back you immediately get one of these slap bracelets sent out to you for it and our only promises you have to take a picture of it on your wrist and post it on Twitter or Facebook or whatever but Yes, that that is it's gonna be awesome. It's such a stupid little thing, but I'm so excited for the slap bracelets.


Amelia Antrim  1:38:07  

Well, thank you so much for joining us, Jim. It was awesome to talk to you. And thank you everyone for listening.


Unknown Speaker  1:38:13  

Absolutely. Thank you for having me.


Ryan Boelter  1:38:25  

Character Creation Cast is a production of the one shot Podcast Network and can be found online at www dot Character Creation head to the website to get more information on our hosts this show and even our press kit. Character Creation Cast can also be found on Twitter at Creation Cast or on our Discord server at discord Character Creation i one of your hosts Ryan bolter, and I can be found on Twitter at lordan Neptune or online at lordan Neptune calm. Our other host Emily antrum can be fun on twitter at ginger reckoning. Music for this episode is used with a Creative Commons license, or with permission from the podcast they originated from. Further information can be found within the show notes. Our main theme music is hero remix by Steve combs. And it's you with a Creative Commons license. This podcast is owned by us under Creative Commons. This episode was edited by Ryan bolter. Further information for the game systems used and today's guests can be found in the show notes. If you'd like to leave us a rating or review. We have links to various premium platforms out there, including Apple podcasts in our show notes. Also, check the show notes for links to our other projects. Thanks for joining us. Remember, we find that the best part of any role playing game is character creation. So go out there and create some amazing people. We will see you next time.


Amelia Antrim  1:40:11  

Now we got to read some show blurbs


Unknown Speaker  1:40:13  

show blurbs.


Unknown Speaker  1:40:15  

Show by


Unknown Speaker  1:40:16  

show blurbs.


Amelia Antrim  1:40:19  

character creation Creation Cast is hosted by the one shot Podcast Network. If you enjoyed our show, visit one shot podcast com, where you'll find other great shows like Neo scum.


Ryan Boelter  1:40:28  

New scum is a narrative comedy podcast featuring five Chicago improvisers antagonizing their way through the role playing classic shadow run. It follows a group of misfits and outsiders z the acerbic cyber troublemaker pox the candy junkie klepto from across the pond tech wizard, the public access actor with a petulant thirst for adventure, and Dec Rambo the nastiest trucker this side of The roble Mason Dixon join the arrestable Neo scum crew on a pure aisle rockin road trip through a weirdo World of Tomorrow, doling out street justice to every debe they encounter, whether they deserve it or not.


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