Transcript: Calling Cards (Band-Aids & Bullet Holes) with Lady Tabletop and Seraphina

Listen to this episode here.

My first stand-alone print game, Band-Aids & Bullet Holes, goes live on Kickstarter next week on May 5th. I have a lot to say about it, and I'm gonna say a lot of it: May's going to be all episodes about mechanics from other people's games that inspired me in this design.

Today I wanted to talk about Band-Aids & Bullet Holes straight up, but I didn't want you to just take it from me all the stuff I love about it, so I'm handing the show over once again to Lady Tabletop and Seraphina Garcia Ramirez. They're gonna tell you about Band-Aids & Bullet Holes through its core mechanic: take a marker, sharpie your character's core traits onto playing cards, then shuffle those up and flip them at each other, high card wins. As Sera says, somehow adding flavor to the classic card game War makes it so much better...

Further Reading

Band-Aids & Bullet Holes on Kickstarter

Socials

Seraphina on Bluesky and itch

Lady Tabletop on Tumblr 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!

Credits

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

This episode was edited by Em Acosta.  

Sam: Hello and welcome to another episode of Dice Exploder. Each week we take a tabletop mechanic and track down whatever safehouse it’s holed up in. My name is Sam Dunnewold and I’m not on this episode, I’m just here for the intro. Today I am once again handing the show over to Lady Tabletop and Seraphina Garcia Ramirez, because I have a game coming to Kickstarter.

Band-Aids and Bullet Holes — you’ve probably heard me talking about it by now. It’s a deckbuilder RPG built for one-shot bloody revenge operas inside a tight-knit clique of professional assassins. It’s John Wick: cartoony and poppy and violent, and it’s on Kickstarter next week. I have so much to say about this game. All May I’m going to be doing episodes about games and mechanics that inspired the design of Band-Aids and Bullet Holes, and I’ll have plenty to say about the game myself then, as well as on a bunch of other people’s podcasts throughout the month.

But today, ahead of Kickstarter’s launch next Tuesday May 5th, I wanted to publish a whole episode about the game — both so you know what it is and maybe you back it, and also to get you a baseline of how it works before I spend a bunch of episodes talking about it in this upcoming series. To do all that, I thought it’d be nice to give myself a fucking break from talking about it and hand the show over to two of the game’s biggest fans, Lady Tabletop and Seraphina. I gave them full rein to do whatever they wanted on this episode, to just introduce Band-Aids and Bullet Holes to you. And they turned in an episode all about calling cards — basically little poetic character traits that you write directly onto playing cards with a permanent marker while playing the game. Your character gets a few of them, then you shuffle those up and flip at each other. High card wins. Except that simple, maybe tiresome mechanic of War the card game takes on a new life when you layer a bunch of flavor on top of it. I’ll leave it there and let LT and Sarah get into it all.

Thanks to everyone who supports Dice Exploder on Patreon. Here is Seraphina and Lady Tabletop with calling cards from my game Band-Aids and Bullet Holes.

Lady Tabletop: Welcome to another episode of Dice Exploder, where each week we take a game mechanic and send it to sleep with the fishes. I’m your host Audrey Stoles for this episode and with me today is Sarah, and we are talking about what mechanic today, Sarah?

Seraphina: We’re talking about calling cards from Band-Aids and Bullet Holes, an upcoming game by host of the pod Sam Dunnewold.

Lady Tabletop: Yes, host emeritus Sam Dunnewold wrote a game about assassins out for bloody revenge. So what’s the deal with this game?

Seraphina: This is primarily a one-shot game where you’re sitting down with some friends, busting open this box, and basically with no prep telling an action-war John Wick kind of story. You’re playing as Ferrymen, which is the game’s in-world word for assassins — part of an assassin culture that exists in this sort of mythical, larger-than-life city. One of these assassin characters is going to be the Bloodhound, the quote-unquote protagonist, the one who wants revenge because someone killed their dog, kind of thing. And one of them is going to be the Bastard — that awful, awful human being who killed that dog.

And then there’s a whole host of lovely characters who are dancing around that delicious violent scenario.

Lady Tabletop: Yeah. And all these characters are basically a deck of cards each — and when I say deck I really mean like three to six-ish cards. So when we talk about duels, we’re essentially talking about War, the card game that we all played as kids — flipping cards against each other, high card wins. That’s the underpinning of the mechanics of this game. And the cards that are in your deck are the calling cards, which is what we’re talking about today.

Seraphina: I have to say right off the bat, I have a vendetta against this game, because for a long time one of the core pillars of my game design philosophy was that I really, really don’t like War the card game. I played it at camp and stuff when I was younger, and I remember being that kid playing it thinking: this is terrible, I’m not enjoying this, I feel really bored.

There’s no strategy, right? It’s random chance. People loved house-ruling in strategy, but at least the way I played it, it was purely random chance — it’s a game where I could get a monkey to play for me and nothing would change. That was something core to my game design thinking for a while: War is objectively bad. Nothing redeemable about it. Throw it in a fire and burn it.

And then I sat down with Sam at a con a year and a half ago, he pulls out this game, and I’m like, okay, I’m really mad — because actually this is War and it’s really, really good.

Lady Tabletop: So all you needed to do to make War good is to force narration upon every flip of the cards. That sounds like a really negative way to describe this game, but frankly it rocks. Calling cards — specifically, each character has three, and there are two pre-generated ones. Things like the stench of cigars, light-up combat boots, operatic score, bisexual lighting… or “low sexual lighting.” Yeah, that one’s always really fun.

Seraphina: And you get to fill in the third one yourself. They are items, ephemera, motifs — that character’s literal and figurative calling cards.

The game comes with a set of pre-generated characters, pretty straightforward: they have a name, some lovely art, something that they need, and then two calling cards. Each character has these two predefined ones. But when you’re going around the table deciding who’s going to be the Bloodhound or who’s going to be the Bastard, you also pick a third calling card — one that you just get to make up.

There are some tables you can roll on, or you can draw a random card and have the game tell you what the calling card is. But in my experience playtesting this a couple of times now, people love just coming up with ideas — reading the vibe of the character and coming up with a third thing.

Lady Tabletop: So do you have a favorite that came up in one of the playtests?

Seraphina: Yeah. One of the characters is Lockhart. Lockhart has two predetermined calling cards: an animal head mask and a pool cue. And I don’t remember who at the table decided this, but the third thing they had was a rubber chicken. Right off the bat — delicious, right? The idea that this badass assassin carries around a rubber chicken.

But then every time it came back up, either during a duel or during a narrative scene, whoever was playing Lockhart always found a way to weave that rubber chicken in. I remember at one point I was playing them for a scene and having this dramatic argument with someone. We had decided that Lockhart never actually spoke — they only communicated via gestures and symbols. And this character had denied them what they wanted. So as Lockhart’s turning to leave, they turn back, look at this person, and throw the rubber chicken on the ground — calling them chicken, right?

And aside from the rest of the things that calling cards do mechanically, there’s that element of two being predetermined, giving you the scope of the character, the idea of who am I engaging with — and then you get to contribute to that. You get to add on to that. It’s beautiful.

Lady Tabletop: Yeah, it’s a lot of fun to customize. I’ve fully playtested this game several times and it’s really interesting how the characters differ each time despite being pregens. You’re always going to get Barf, the saddest wet sack of a man, but exactly how he is a sad wet sack of a man is different every time. One time I played, we gave him Chapstick as his third calling card, which just really adds a layer of even sadder —

Seraphina: Yeah, that’s really good.

Lady Tabletop: — sadness to this guy. But yeah, so the calling cards help fill out your characters. That’s the first thing they do, but far from the only thing. The way scenes work in this game is that the player whose turn it is to start a scene gets to choose who they’re playing and then say what that character wants. The scene plays out with them going about asking for, taking, or getting what they want. That might end up in a duel, that might end up in using some of the other moves in the game. But the calling cards tend to come to bear most in duels, because you’re describing the actions you take in the fight associated with each calling card as you flip it. And in addition to the character calling cards, the venue — wherever the scene is taking place — gets to give a calling card to one of the characters in a duel.

Seraphina: Yeah. Duels have a setup procedure that happens before any of the blows are exchanged. Generally there’s someone playing one half of the duel and another person playing the other character, and the rest of the table is playing the city — taking on that collaborative role of fleshing out the environment and the other details of what’s going on.

Everyone takes a turn either giving one of the two characters a wound, which we can talk about in a minute, or giving them a location calling card. It’s this lovely bit of scene-setting where you’re thinking about who has the home turf advantage, who’s favored by the environment, and how can I capture that in an aesthetic element of the scene?

So if you’re doing a fight in a club, you’re thinking about the thumping bass — maybe the character who owns the club gets that thumping bass as one of their calling cards. And you’re setting up this moment later where when that card gets flipped, you get to narrate how it somehow helps in the fight, or how it accentuates this violent moment in the duel.

Lady Tabletop: Something where you’re like, “oh yeah, you can hear your heartbeat in your ears and it syncs up with the thumping bass in the club and you throw the first punch” — kind of thing, you know?

Seraphina: 100%. Yeah.

Lady Tabletop: This game really asks you to take on the role of director, cinematographer, choreographer. It’s very cinematic in how you’re asked to tie in the calling cards to the scenes. And I think it’s the most fun when you lean in. A lot of this game borders on the tragicomic, kind of the same way Fiasco does.

Seraphina: Yeah. It’s this interesting meld of tones because these are characters that are larger than life, so there’s an element of the absurd and the comical to all of them. But they’re also getting bloody with each other — there’s a lot of grit there. It’s interesting to see how a given calling card can be recontextualized in each of those moments. Someone’s punchable face can be a comedy beat when they’re being a jerk to somebody, or in a little fight it can be this kind of bait-and-lure — just this person’s expression reminding you of the history you have with them, really driving you to lose control of your actions.

Lady Tabletop: Yeah. And so as the fight progresses — you mentioned wounds, which are a specific type of calling card. Can you tell me a little more about those?

Seraphina: Yeah. The basic structure of duels is War, right? Each character is flipping a card and whoever flips the higher card wins a beat of the duel. These are typical playing cards, and by default all the calling cards use three suits of a standard deck: spades, diamonds, and clubs. Hearts are kept separate because hearts represent wounds. Different things in the game will cause a character to get hurt and add a wound to the deck, and within a duel, hearts are a triumph suit — hearts beat any other suit they’re played against, except other hearts.

So as characters get more injured, this is where that deck-building element comes in. You have that first or second wound in your deck and you’re better at fights. It’s that drawn-out element of like — John Wick is a better fighter the more injured he gets, up until a point. Because when you add that third wound, you’re dead. The character gets one last moment to describe their final bits of life and then they die.

Lady Tabletop: Now, the exception is if you are the Bloodhound — you have a special move. It’s “Call on the Past.” Pick one of your core three calling cards. The city sets a flashback to that calling card’s origin and describes how the memory of it gives you strength. You shrug off the wound you were about to suffer — don’t add it to your deck. So you basically have a chance to do this for each calling card that you have, and then you’re on your own.

Seraphina: Yeah. I want to really dive into duels as the beating heart of the game, because that’s certainly when calling cards are most present. From a design standpoint, a duel is essentially just a series of narration prompts — and we’ve all narrated prompts a million times. One of the things I really like about calling cards as a specific kind of prompt is how the way they work within duels breathes a lot of fresh life into that. Not only is each calling card a prompt — a visual or narrative element in the scene — it’s also tied to a value. When you’re setting up characters at the beginning, you’re assigning these calling cards random values.

So in one game, someone’s snake venom nails might be a king, and in another game they might be a three. It creates this other layer where over the course of the game you get a sense of different things being more or less effective, which gives you another layer of narration to build on. Especially when a card that’s lost a matchup three or four times because it’s a low value suddenly wins — that extra context of the War structure and the value of each playing card adds a lot of texture to the prompt narration.

Lady Tabletop: I think so, because it’s a different scene if we’re talking about my 10 beats your eight versus my three beats your two. That’s a different conversation in the way things play out — how hard we’re hitting, how effective we’re being, and what these calling cards are actually adding to the scene each time.

Seraphina: Yeah. And there’s a lot of flexibility there, because those elements aren’t necessarily enforced by the rules — nothing’s telling you “if a card is a king, narrate hitting harder.” But because the structure of the War mini-game reflects the narrative flow of the duel, it’s another layer of aesthetic to the mechanic that you can incorporate if you want to.

It’s really interesting to see how different people choose to engage with that, both in terms of what kind of calling cards they choose to write and how they choose to engage with it. It’s something I really enjoy about how the characters change hands — each character has mostly the same calling cards throughout the game, and it’s always really fun to see one person’s take on how a calling card manifests in the scene versus another person’s, getting these different perspectives on what feels like still the same pure character at the heart of it.

Lady Tabletop: Yeah, it’s a really additive game at its core, and the calling cards are central to that. If I’m playing Barf — I’m just going to lean on my boy Barf again — and I start describing him and talking about his cigars, and they’re the last thing he got from his dead brother that the Bastard killed or whatever, and then the next scene you’re playing him and you add to that that his brother basically raised him and they grew up as orphans — we’re layering on top of each other’s stuff to expand these characters in the narrative.

And you don’t have to do that. You can get as in-depth or as not in-depth with these calling cards as you want. Maybe your character just has a big fuck-off sword or whatever, they just have that because it looks cool and you’re only ever describing the action of it. It doesn’t come up that there’s an origin, but it’s still contributing to how you play that character and how that character carries themselves in the story, even as they’re passed back and forth.

Seraphina: Yeah, it’s fascinating. On Dice Exploder, pregens have been a big topic for a long time, especially in the Discord server — lots of conversation about how effective pregens are as a tool for accelerating setup into play. You can shortcut a lot of time that might otherwise be spent on character creation. But there’s also this melding of minds between a designer who brings a really effective pregenerated character and the players at the table who make that character their own and flesh it out.

Especially at the scale this game is operating at — a very cinematic one or two session, snappy story where we’re cutting right into the action — I’m just going to compliment Sam straight up: these calling cards rock. They’re really, really fun.

Having calling cards that in three or four words bring that juice sets me up as a player really effectively at the table. I get to feel cool when I’m given this cool stuff to work with. And then when that cool stuff is so effective, I am set up to build on to it — flesh out those characters, give location calling cards that feel like they’re matching that tone when I’m playing the city. It’s another example of why setting people up so they’re not bringing this out of thin air creates an experience that makes me feel a lot smarter and more clever than I often am.

Lady Tabletop: There is something to be said for how much you get to chew on in the few words dedicated to each calling card. You’re absolutely right in complimenting Sam for this, because they’re really tightly written. The main thing is this game wants you to dive right in. It does not want you to overthink it. It does not want you to worry about a five-page backstory for every character. It doesn’t even really care a whole lot about the history of these characters beyond naming their relationships in the setup — the details come out as you play, and often the calling cards are informing that because you’ve got so much to chew on just in these tiny phrases.

And something that on this show both you and I have talked about before: the best prompts, the best random tables, the best hooks for anything are going to be things that are evocative and memorable. This game has that in spades with the calling cards — pun intended, groan, get it over with, whatever. There is so much temptation in giving pre-generated characters a table of potential stories and traits to give more context and more detail, and something this game really locked in on is the power of sparseness in your writing — not puritanical or boring minimalism, but the kind where each word is completely loaded.

Seraphina: Yeah, I’m looking over the cards right now as we’re talking and the adjectives are doing so much work. Barbara Mouthbeka having “exact change” says a lot — not just having tea as a calling card, or “warm milk” or whatever. Her calling card is “blistering hot tea.” Obviously there’s a mountain you can read into that, and that’s natural and intended. I’m making assumptions based on blistering hot tea being the default. Someone else might make different assumptions, but then as we get to see those calling cards show up in scenes, the whole table kind of syncs up on what it means in our game that Antje has blistering hot tea. And maybe we decide, oh actually, that’s like slang and she always has the hottest gossip, right?

Or you can take it more literally — Antje’s fighting people with a thermos full of boiling hot tea. Any of those directions — the moment someone picks up a character and starts playing, they immediately go from these sparse but specific details to feeling like a really fleshed-out, complex character.

Lady Tabletop: Something that has come up in almost every game of this I’ve played is the inversion of the calling cards when a character dies or is effectively removed from the story. In the example of the blistering hot tea — let’s say Antje dies, and the thing we’re describing is her thermos of tea on the ground, rapidly cooling. That’s the final imagery you get from that. That’s the other really interesting thing about the writing of these calling cards: how easy it is to play around with them and how impactful you can make just a slight change to them.

Seraphina: And there’s something interesting there, right? Something I see a lot across four or five plays of this game now is these moments where there’s something that makes sense in the fiction that isn’t necessarily outlined in a move specifically, but a table can lean into it together. Like I can totally see Antje being set up as a close relationship of another character, she dies in an early scene, and I can totally see a table being like, “I think you should pick up that calling card and it’s yours now” — scratch out “blistering hot” and write “ice cold.” These mechanics function as little toys you can pick up and play with.

They’re not only a core part of the mechanical design of the game, they’re also these fiddly bits that you can, as a table, bump against each other because that feels right. And it works — they’re specific, but also mechanically very easy to manipulate and move around.

Lady Tabletop: Yeah, they’re not only mechanics you can fiddle with. They’re maybe the purest form of mechanizing the fiction, specifically because they have only the meaning that you’re giving them with these words and how you interpret them. Even though mechanically what it is is you’re playing War — high card wins. It’s just a really clean way to describe so many different things and to inform so many different parts of this game. A really solid bedrock.

Seraphina: You just reminded me — I’ve seen a few folks in the space talk about how roleplaying games are built on truth. We establish truths that we share, find different ways of encoding or documenting them, and then play is about taking these truths and seeing what emerges from them. Calling cards are ultimately the bits of things that we know are true about these characters. We know that Dr. Dilarosa has a hacking cough and horse tranquilizers.

When you have that really clear mechanical object or idea that stands in for a more conceptual truth — as we’re engaging in freeform narration of a scene — it’s a way for the play and the fiction that exists in our heads to connect with the mechanics that help us structure that play. Calling cards feel like a really clear example of that interface between the two. There’s a conceptual idea I have of a character as someone who carries around a puppy in a purse, and then there’s a mechanical meaning: this character has the six of spades as the “puppy in a purse” calling card. And one can tug on the other, right? When that six of spades pops up, it pulls on the fiction. And when the fiction gets changed through some move or some moment, we have a clear way to represent that — change the “puppy in a purse” to something else, or remove it from the deck, or change its value from a six to a ten. Because we’ve decided that actually this character knows kung fu now, whatever it is. It’s that clear connection between what we’ve understood as a group about the reality of the game and what the structure of the game facilitates.

Lady Tabletop: Speaking of game structure — one of the things I really appreciate about this game is that it’s a game that wants you to lean into your instincts for fiddling with design. Because you’re talking about all these ways to modify the cards, and very few of those things are laid out really explicitly in terms of when and how and why to do them. When should you change the rank of a card? When it feels right. So that is something really powerful with the calling cards as well — not only are they fictionally interpretive for you as the player, they are mechanically interpretive as well. That just speaks back to what you were saying about how both elements of the card are pulling on each other. It’s just a really tight, neat bit of design.

Seraphina: Yeah, I love deck builders — it’s a kind of game that I tend to enjoy on a pure mechanical level whenever I see it. And it’s really exciting to see this implementation in a tabletop RPG. Certainly not the first deck-building RPG, but I like how quickly, effectively, and simply we get into that fun play.

These decks start as three cards each. We’re not having to keep track of larger decks or count cards. We have those three cards, and over the course of the game maybe we added a couple of wounds, maybe a location calling card gets added in there, maybe we decided mid-scene you get a new calling card that sticks around. But ultimately it still feels really manageable. And also I get to do the fun thing of flipping a card and going “ha, my card’s better than yours and I win” — and that feels good.

Lady Tabletop: Exactly. I can’t say enough great things about this game. It was easily my most played game last year — really fun all around, really neat tech with calling cards. It makes me want to write a billion hacks and a billion little calling cards myself for this style of game. I can’t pay a higher compliment: if I want to fuck around with it, it’s really good.

Seraphina: I already have a couple of little ideas. The scheming of it — it invites you to hack in and design. It feels easy to decide “I’m going to write up a list of 13 new calling cards and take it in this direction — the tone is going to be more slapstick, or more sci-fi.” It’s fun to write prompts, and the baseline of this game sets a really clear bar for the quality and kind of prompts you want to add in. It’s a game designer’s dream.

Lady Tabletop: Yes, it is a game designer’s dream. Is there anything we missed that you want to talk about before we sign off?

Seraphina: Yeah — obviously we’ve talked a lot about calling cards and why I really enjoy them as mechanics. But I think something really important to talk about here is Sam. Sam’s made a really cool game here, and I am not being paid to say this, I’m not being asked to say this. But if you’re listening to this, you should back this game. You should check it out. The past couple of years, this project and Sam as a person have been really instrumental to me personally getting more involved with game design as a hobby and as a practice. I think he deserves all your support. So you should go spend a lot of money on this Kickstarter.

Lady Tabletop: You absolutely should back this Kickstarter. I have had so much fun playing this game, reading it, getting to see all the different iterations of it, and seeing Sam’s design process. It made me a better designer and a better writer. It makes me want to write a billion things and play this game a million more times, even though I’ve already played it a ton. I think Sam has written something really cool — especially the fact that it’s a one-shot game that you can play at home, that you can take to your local game shop.

I was actually able to sell my dad, who does not play roleplaying games, on this by saying “it’s a John Wick game” — and he loved it. So make of that what you will. I think Sam’s made a game that’s really approachable for people, and for as much as there is to chew on as game designers, there is something in this game for everyone. Just really fun, action-based stories.

So definitely back the game. With that, I think we’re at the end of this episode, Sarah. My name is Audrey, and you can find me online at Lady Tabletop — mostly just itch at this point, and Tumblr. I ostensibly host a solo actual play podcast where I play solo RPGs and invite listeners along for the experience. That’s called Alone at the Table, and you can find that on moonshotpods.com.

Seraphina: Yeah, I’m Seraphina Garcia Ramirez. You can find me on Bluesky at seraphimseraphina.bsky.social. You can also find my blog on my itch page, where I write and talk about games. If you have any thoughts about games or this episode and you want to come bug me, feel free.

Sam: Thanks to everyone who supports Dice Exploder on Patreon. Our logo was designed by SporeGarree. Our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey and our ad music is Lily Pads by my boy Travis Tessmer. This episode was edited by Em Acosta. Thank you, Em. And thanks to you for listening. I’ll see you next time — or sooner or later, you go back my fucking game I Kickstarted. Do it!