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Transcript

Welcome to the D&D miniseries! I wanted to kick this off with a look into the mechanical heart of D&D, but I didn't really know what that meant. So I asked my friend Tristan! Designer of the award winning game Shanty Hunters and author of the Molten Sulfur blog, Tristan now spends his time as a designer on Nations & Cannons, a hack of D&D set in the American Revolutionary War.

Tristan brought on a mechanized design principle underpinning D&D, the Adventuring Day, which says the game should be balanced for parties to go through 6-8 combat encounters between each long rest. It’s an interesting idea... even though absolutely no one in the known universe actually plays D&D like that. So where’d it come from? And how do you approach it as a designer?

Further Reading:

From the Dice Exploder blog: D&D Is A Comedy Game

Molten Sulfur Blog

Shanty Hunters

7th Sea

Mork Borg

Errant

Nations & Cannons

Socials

Tristan on Bluesky.

Sam on Bluesky and itch.

The Dice Exploder blog is at diceexploder.com

Our logo was designed by sporgory, our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey, and our ad music is Lilypads by Travis Tessmer.

Join the Dice Exploder Discord to talk about the show!