Transcript: John Wick (2014) and Genre Emulation with Sam Roberts

Listen to this episode here.

My new game Band-Aids & Bullet Holes is still on Kickstarter! Check it out today.

In honor of BABH, this month on Dice Exploder I'm covering mechanics from other games that inspired it. In keeping with this show's increasingly loose definition of "mechanic," today I'm joined by Sam Roberts (Escape from Dino Island) to tackle one of this game's greatest influences: the 2014 Keanu Reeves movie John Wick.

The first half of this ep is basically a movie podcast. We go deep on what makes John Wick tick (in brief: the first 30 minutes). But the back half we get into the extremely popular concept within indie rpgs of genre emulation: making games that evoke another piece of media or genre of media. What makes genre emulation work? What do we think most people get wrong when they attempt to do it? And is it even a worthy goal?

Further Reading

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John Wick (2014)

Escape from Dino Island by Sam Roberts and Sam Tung

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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 promise to let it live if it tells us what we want to know. My name is Sam Dunnewold and my co-host today is Sam Roberts. My new game, Band-Aids and Bullet Holes, is still on Kickstarter. It’s a melodramatic action game of bloody revenge — a one-shot, capsule game, box set, deck builder RPG.

Today I am once again joined by Sam Roberts to talk about it. You might remember him from the episode we did on Prestige Classes a couple years ago, from being a fixture on the Dice Exploder Discord, or from his hit PBTA game Escape from Dino Island, co-designed with Sam Tung. This episode is another in the mini-series I’m doing about the mechanics that influenced me as I was designing Band-Aids and Bullet Holes.

Or at least I say mechanics — but you’ve read the episode title by now. We’re talking about a movie today. We’re talking about John Wick. Because I usually skip all the crap about describing Band-Aids and Bullet Holes and just go with “my John Wick game.”

I’ve become increasingly interested in the way people bring all kinds of expectations about the fiction and genre of a game when they sit down to play it at the table. Where do those expectations come from in this game? It’s John Wick. It’s Kill Bill. There’s maybe a couple other movies, but that’s basically it.

And it’s not just players who are doing this — designers often talk about their games as genre emulation too. People love the idea of taking something they love from another medium and making a game engine that allows them to generate more of it. But how do you do that? What are the important parts of John Wick that you’re trying to make more of? What’s actually going to give you the feeling you want, and what’s just texture? Or is the texture what’s important?

Here’s something Sam said to me right after we finished recording: a good adaptation of a genre or media property isn’t interested in how you feel about the thing now. It’s interested in how you felt when you were experiencing it for the first time, and what the characters are feeling within the story. That’s what I want to do. So let’s talk about how Sam and I did that in our genre games.

To get into all that, first we have to talk about the movie — and we spoiled the shit out of this thing, especially the first 30 minutes. Heads up if you care about that sort of thing. Thanks to everyone who supports Dice Exploder on Patreon, and here is Sam Roberts and John Wick.

Sam Roberts, welcome back to Dice Exploder. Good to have you here again.

S. Roberts: Great to be here.

Sam: So we’re not talking about a game today. We’re talking about John Wick, which is a movie from 2014, directed by Chad Stahelski — a stunt coordinator who gets promoted. There’s a script from Derek Kolstad. I don’t know exactly how it all went down, but they made this movie and it came out.

I knew it was an action movie going in when I saw it in 2014, but I didn’t really know anything else about it. I really want to talk about that first-time feeling versus what it has become — because people are bringing John Wick as an identity now. But I want to start by asking you: whenever it was that you first saw it, what was that like?

S. Roberts: It’s funny — the experience you’re describing seeing John Wick was my experience seeing The Matrix. Another Keanu movie. It was a rainy day, we’d seen the Super Bowl trailer, we just went to the movies, sat down with no idea what we were going to see, and had our minds blown. Keanu just has the ability to do that in a way that’s underappreciated. He picks good movies.

But I saw John Wick after the hype a little bit. I don’t think the second one had come out yet, so it wasn’t yet the John Wick universe — I’d just heard it was really good. It was out on streaming. I was home alone one night and I was like, time to watch a dumb action movie. And John Wick is the perfect dumb action movie. I think there are a lot of people who want John Wick to be something more important or richer than it is, and it’s just a perfect dumb action movie. Everyone in it knows what they’re doing. Everyone is playing their part perfectly. I love it.

Sam: I watched Point Break for the first time recently at a revival screening at Vidiots here in LA, and that also was just a perfect dumb action movie. Then I came home and rewatched Speed, and now we’re just listing Keanu Reeves perfect action movies. The Matrix does have something more going on, but the rest of them — there are all these movies that feel like the platonic ideal of a classic cable movie that was always playing in the '80s and '90s. It’s not like any individual thing is a home run. It’s just that everything is pretty fucking good — no mistakes. All hits, no misses. It just stacks up and you never get taken out of it. It just builds forward until it’s simply fun. This is what movies are about.

S. Roberts: What makes John Wick work, and where a lot of the imitators fall short — the joke in Hollywood used to be “it’s Die Hard, but in a whatever.” And then suddenly in 2014 it overnight became “it’s John Wick, but with a pig,” “it’s John Wick, but he can’t feel pain,” “it’s John Wick, but he’s a woman.”

And I think the beauty of John Wick is that it knows it’s a little campy, but it never leans into this B-movie thing you’re talking about. I watched Fight or Flight the other night — Josh Hartnett, it’s John Wick but on a plane. I liked it, it was a fun hour and a half. But there are so many moments where it’s like “oh yeah, and then there’s going to be a chainsaw on a plane, isn’t that nuts?” And John Wick never has a moment like that. John Wick is like: we are in the places these characters would be. These characters are acting the way they would act. Every actor is playing it to the hilt, but very earnestly.

Sam: There’s this classic thing where in a comedy, the characters don’t know they’re in a comedy — so the way you do good comedy is you treat it like a drama and trust the writing to be funny. In the same way, the characters in John Wick don’t know they’re in a John Wick movie. This is just how life is. It commits so hard.

What you just said is something I’ve been saying for years. You can go back and hear an early episode of Dice Exploder where I talked with Jemarune Games about Mörk Borg — we talked about how Mörk Borg is a comedy game, and that was sort of our thesis. In the same way, John Wick kind of is a comedy. There’s so much in it where the hyper-seriousness becomes dumb. One of my first experiences with it: the trailer had come out and there’s the line of Keanu saying “everyone keeps asking if I’m back, and I haven’t really had an answer. But yeah, I’m thinking I’m back.” A friend of mine kept saying that over and over before the movie came out, and every time he’d laugh hysterically at the seriousness of it. Writing that line is so hard. But the movie nails it — it gets to have its cake and eat it too, being so silly and taking itself seriously and never ever breaking.

S. Roberts: That line is such a perfect example. It gets played like a big beat, it’s played like a quip — but there’s no quip. There’s no cleverness to it, right? It’s just: there are people asking me if I’m back and I’m thinking I’m back. And also — you don’t know this when you’re watching the trailer, but when I was rewatching the movie in advance of this, I was really surprised to discover that it happens like two thirds of the way through the movie. He has murdered so many people before he says “I’m back.”

Sam: That actually transitions really well into what I think is the key to John Wick, and why most of the sequels don’t work for me — which is the first 30 minutes. I checked the timecode. It’s like exactly 29 minutes before the fighting starts. That means you have 29 minutes of a 141-minute runtime where we haven’t seen John Wick kill anyone. For a long part of that, if you go in totally blind, it’s not even clear this is going to be an action movie until maybe 10, 12, 15 minutes in. Let’s go through the plot. John Wick is a guy. His wife dies of cancer — very sad, very tropey. And then —

S. Roberts: Wait, can I — I actually think it’s really important that the very first thing you see is John Wick bloodied and dying, looking at a video of his wife. Even if you think there’s going to be fighting, you think he’s going to get his ass kicked. Totally.

Sam: But so then we cut from him — beat up, watching phone footage of his sad wife on a beach — and then he’s just living his life. He’s sad. It’s very gray and foggy. He goes to his wife’s funeral and Willem Dafoe is there, and they have some sort of interaction that makes you go, oh, there’s history to this world.

Then John Wick gets delivered a dog. His dead wife set up a dog delivery so he’d have some creature to love after she was gone. He takes care of the dog — takes him out to poop, gives him cereal for breakfast because he doesn’t have dog food. He’s trying to love this creature but doesn’t know how. Then he takes his car out and drives it really crazy. He’s got a sick car — you can see him do action stuff. This man is sad, getting his anger out through driving. It’s very much like that Bob’s Burgers episode where a kid says “I get my feelings out through dancing.”

S. Roberts: Also, he drives his car right up to — if I remember correctly, he’s basically playing chicken with an unmoving airplane. So you also know this guy has a death wish. The only reason he’s alive is because of this dog.

Sam: And then on his way home, at the gas station, some obviously-Russian-mobster young punks show up.

S. Roberts: The great shit-heel actor Alfie Allen from Game of Thrones, just perfect in this role. Everyone in this movie is perfectly cast.

Sam: So perfectly cast. He’s like, “nice car, how much?” And John’s like, “she’s not for sale.” And the guy says in Russian, “everything’s got a price, bitch.” And then John Wick says in Russian back, “not this bitch.” Oh — he speaks Russian. There’s more past here. The guys leave.

That night, they come to his house, take his car, beat him up, and kill his dog. That’s the big thing everyone knows about this movie — they fucking kill this dog. John puts himself back together in the morning. He cleans up the house.

S. Roberts: Cleans up the house — which I love, because he’s so precise. I think that’s part of why this movie works. Even though it’s so over the top and so campy, he just cleans up the house and you see him scrubbing the floor. He takes the collar and puts it on his nightstand.

Sam: They really rub it in that his dog really died. This is the cutest dog that has ever been on film, too.

So then we cut to John Leguizamo, also perfectly cast. He runs a chop shop, and the Russian mobster punks show up and say they need a new VIN number on this cool car they just stole. Leguizamo’s like, “where’d you get that car?” And then we cut to John Wick showing up at the chop shop, asking if it’s there. And Leguizamo takes like 15 seconds to pour himself a drink and pour John a drink before he replies, “it was.” Then we intercut Leguizamo telling John what happened — such a great device, just so you can have that pair of lines: “is it here?” / “it was.” That pair of lines is what John Wick is. That’s what makes this movie fucking good.

S. Roberts: John Leguizamo is the heart of this movie. I mean, the dog is obviously in some ways the heart of the movie. But what happens is Leguizamo shows up and punches Alfie Allen in the face for this stupid thing of stealing John Wick’s car. Then John Wick shows up, asks about the car, Leguizamo’s like “it was,” John has a drink with him and leaves.

Then Leguizamo gets a call from the big man —

Sam: The dad of the Russian punk — who is obviously like —

S. Roberts: A high-powered mobster. It’s Michael Nyqvist, who is fantastic in this role also. Not Russian, but you believe it.

Sam: And this is the heart and soul of the movie for me — the dialogue on that phone call. The Russian mobster calls up Leguizamo: “I hear you struck my son.” And Leguizamo’s like, “yeah, well, he stole John Wick’s car and killed his dog.” And the mobster goes, “oh,” and hangs up the phone. That “oh,” by itself — it’s everything. That was the moment where I was like, this is an all-timer movie. He just says “oh,” hangs up, and we know everything we need to know. The entire movie is in a single syllable. It’s so perfect.

S. Roberts: It is. And the reason I keep saying Leguizamo is the heart of this movie is because — knowing where the movie is going, it’s hard not to watch that scene knowing the hell John Wick is about to unleash. But there’s a subtler piece: the mobster is essentially saying, “okay, Leguizamo — I’m the mobster who will kill anyone who messes with me, I have no qualms about hurting people — but you’re my chop shop guy, and you punched my son for a very good reason. That’s cool.” In a lesser movie, Leguizamo would be dead just for this crime of messing with the boss. But there’s such a code of honor undergirding this whole story. This is the first moment where it’s like: a guy in a very messed up situation does right by everybody, and everyone lets him walk for it. You’d watch so many other movies where he’d be dead, and it would feel wrong.

Sam: That’s exactly why everything about the movie is encapsulated in that “oh” syllable for me — it’s setting up the code of honor that blows up into the mythology that takes over all the sequels. But in this first movie, it’s all about underpinning the moral philosophy of the universe John Wick exists in.

Then we get about 10 minutes of the dad Russian mobster yelling at his son. The build here is really good. We get incredibly tight scene work — the shitty guy from the insurance commercials is his right-hand man, just a guy you want to punch in the face. He’s like, “hey, you’ve successfully taken over the whole underworld, congratulations — why do you look so sad?” And dad mobster is like, “where’s my son?” — then immediately starts beating up his own son. “You punched John Wick, you fucking idiot.” Then you get the iconic line:

S. Roberts: And the consigliore keeps wanting to get out of the room — whatever his name is — and the dad’s just like, “no, you stay. You watch me beat up my son.”

Sam: Then you get it: “you’re talking about this guy like he’s the Boogeyman.” “No, he’s not the Boogeyman — he’s the guy you sent to kill the Boogeyman.” And then: “I once saw him kill three men with a pencil. A fucking pencil.” And he’s walking away, doing this little thing to the insurance commercial guy, miming stabbing him in the neck with a pencil. It’s so over the top, so silly — he’s trying to scare his own son, and it’s also just straight-up exposition. If you didn’t get it before, here is everything you need to know about this man. And then you get nothing clever —

S. Roberts: Nothing. There’s nothing clever in the movie up until this point. In fact there are times where it’s un-clever — John Wick’s code name is Baba Yaga, which is an old lady witch because… sure, do they know Russian? I’m not sure. But there’s so much integrity to everybody’s reaction. The “oh” is not a clever line. A fucking pencil is not a clever idea — we’ve seen the Joker kill somebody with a pencil in The Dark Knight. But every single one of these things is acted with such intensity and clarity. You know what everyone’s thinking. It’s so pure.

Sam: And the other incredible moment — I promise we’re basically done with the first 29 minutes, and then we’re going to skip to him killing a bunch of guys and the rest of the movie.

The other thing I love is: the Russian dad calls up John. We’re watching John in his basement, using a sledgehammer to dig up all his old materials from his assassin days — a chest full of gold and guns and all this stuff. Then the bright red landline in his basement rings. It’s the mobster: “hey John, I heard about your wife. Sorry she died. Can we do anything here? Let’s not resort to our baser instincts.” He gives this whole speech, leaving pauses for John to speak. John never responds — he’s silent for the whole conversation. Finally the mobster says “let’s not resort to our baser instincts” again, and John hangs up on him. We cut back to the mobster — he sighs, hangs up the phone. The insurance guy asks, “what’d he say?” And the mobster goes, “enough.” That’s a fucking great line. That’s everything.

So all the setup’s done — the mobsters send everyone to kill John Wick, we watch them infiltrate his house, there are two dozen of them, and then John Wick kills all of them and spends the next 100 minutes killing everyone he encounters. That’s the rest of the movie.

There’s a lot to talk about in the rest of the movie, but to bring us back to what you were saying early on: John Wick is a fantastic movie because these first 29 minutes work so well that when it’s finally time for him to start killing people, it feels like a release. We’ve had this build-up — what’s it going to be like when he starts again? — and then it comes and lives up to the expectation in our heads. We get to see John get beat up a lot, which is interesting. We’re along for the ride of the cathartic release for the rest of the movie because the setup did such a good job building the mystery of who this guy is and what he’s going to do.

S. Roberts: And I think John Wick works specifically because I’m pretty allergic to movies with overlong setups where you kind of know where you’re going — I’m like, his dog’s dead, we know he’s going to kill people, let’s get to it. But that’s not true of John Wick. It works because it’s also kind of a chess match. You’re meeting Willem Dafoe, so you’re excited because you love Willem Dafoe and you know he’s going to come back — that’s juicy. But from the moment John has this interaction with the young mob son, you’re like: who’s going to make the next move? How are they going to play it?

And John is patient, methodical, driven — that’s how they describe him. There’s this sense that everyone is trying to figure out how to play it: the mob boss, even John himself a little. He cleans up. There’s this “you have to do things the right way” quality to it that makes it all feel like it’s building — like at any moment it could start. That’s what’s fun. It’s holding you in that tension, as opposed to just investing you in characters via a tragic backstory, which they actually get through really fast. That part is over in like three minutes.

Sam: And the movie is fundamentally uninterested in his tragic backstory. That’s why it’s the most tropey, bullshit dead-dog-dead-wife backstory of all time — because the important thing is just getting him to the point where he wants revenge.

S. Roberts: Right. But it’s very interested in earning the violence — in convincing you that what should happen here is that he absolutely slaughter everyone. Because you want that. Even in 2026, even in 2014 — I remember watching The Matrix, there’s that scene where they gun everyone down in the hallway. And even in 1999, as a 14-year-old who loved every movie with gunfights, I was like, what did these guys do? They were just standing in a building and now they’re all getting murdered.

There’s a part of this that is about earning the fact that every single person who dies in this movie gets what they deserve. The movie is making you think: could people get out of this? Is there a way out? And the answer is no.

Sam: And talking with you, it’s really interesting how much it’s about honor. The villains throughout the movie tend to be people who’ve broken the unwritten or written rules of the world. When the young mobster comes and beats the shit out of John Wick, the issue is not that he beat up a random person — it’s that he beat up one of us, someone who belongs to this world. Later, you’re not allowed to kill people at the Continental, the special assassins hotel. And one of the main sidekick villains becomes this assassin who’s willing to break that rule because she’s only in it for money — not for the honor.

I don’t entirely know why John is in this world, but I do wonder. He got out. But I have a question.

S. Roberts: This is my big question about the movie — and then we should start talking about games. What is her plan? She’s only in it for the money, she doesn’t care about the rules — how does she think she’s getting out of this one?

Sam: They haven’t established that this is a global organization yet in this first film. Maybe it’s just the New York scene. Maybe she can just fuck off to Europe and be fine. Once you build out the world of the franchise, there’s no plan that makes sense. But in this movie, we just don’t know how local the rules are.

S. Roberts: Because it does feel very small, in a way that’s very satisfying. It feels like the New York ring. And even Michael Nyqvist as the mob boss — he feels powerful, with a lot of connections and resources, but not infinite, the way a lot of these bad guys do in superhero movies.

Sam: OK, so I want to get to the thing I’ve been trying to say forever, and then hopefully we can transition to the game stuff. I think audiences watched John Wick and took away the wrong lesson about what makes it awesome. A lot of people really latched on to the texture — the weird gold pirate coins, the mythos, the implication of this wider world of professional assassins. “That’s what’s cool, it’s the world-building.”

And for me, that is completely the opposite of what’s effective about John Wick. What makes this movie and this genre work is those first 29 minutes — the setup, the character, the motivations, the chess match feeling, the world being populated by the best cameos of all time, everyone being an important person, no civilians. The importance of honor. That’s the foundation everything else gets built on top of. And yeah, the pirate coins are fucking dope. I love that stuff. The fact that you can’t kill anyone on Continental grounds is cool — it implies something larger. But that’s texture on top of the building blocks that makes this work.

S. Roberts: You have triggered my trap card. Because I agree with you fully — and I think there’s something that has become very common, maybe increasingly common: people really liking something, latching onto it, and feeling “I want more of that” — and thinking the answer is to literally get more of that thing. Star Wars is the classic example. You walk into any room in Star Wars and there’s a whole world implied. The cantina —

Sam: Who the fuck is that guy with his weird head, what’s he doing?

S. Roberts: You think you want to know about all these characters. And then the answer is: you do not want to know about all these characters. Whatever answer they give you is going to be unsatisfying and boring and too much.

Sam: It takes away the sense of wonder that comes from the lack of an answer.

S. Roberts: Right. And it’s not just world-building — it’s a lesson I learned when I was writing a murder mystery web series. The thing I learned was: you always kill off a character right before they get boring. When you as the author know that they have no more story left, but it’s not obvious to everyone else yet. The character gets killed off, the audience is like “I love that character, I could have stayed with them forever,” and what you know is that if they’d stuck around even one more chapter, everyone would have been bored.

I talked about that a lot in the context of Game of Thrones, which was often really good at that. People were like “they’re going to kill Tyrion,” and I was like, they’re never going to kill Tyrion — there’s no version of the show more interesting with him dead than alive. Meanwhile, Alfie Allen — to bring it back to John Wick — you could have killed him off three seasons earlier. That was one they kind of missed. But should we talk about games?

Sam: Yeah, let’s talk about games. Genre emulation as a games thing. There’s so much in making story games where people are excited about genre emulation — taking a piece of media like John Wick and saying “how would this be a game?” There’s a new podcast, it’s Saada and Jess Levine. The premise is: someone brings a piece of media, and they talk about how it would be a game. I think it’s called How Would This Be a Game? We’ll put a link in the show notes. But people really want to do that thing. It’s complicated to do that thing.

So — what does genre emulation mean to you?

S. Roberts: In the context of games, it’s basically this idea that a certain game is recreating the tropes and themes of a given genre, so that if you play it, what you come out of that session with is something that resembles — to your satisfaction — the piece of media it’s inspired by. I’m most well known for Escape from Dino Island, which people always call “Jurassic Park: the game.” The idea being that you play a session and what comes out is basically your own personal Jurassic Park movie.

Sam: Yeah. I look at John Wick and the tone of it — so clean and clear. The aesthetics, even outside the cool mythological world-building feeling, the font of the subtitles, the cinematography. Fighting your way through two dozen guys in a nightclub with techno music going has such a specific feeling, and I want to capture that at the table. And I think people in game design often approach it from the angle of coming in from the texture rather than the structure and bones of the thing.

S. Roberts: I get it. Being very charitable about genre emulation: movies are very expensive to make, video games are very difficult to make, they require a lot of people and capital. So you or I cannot go out and make a John Wick. I understand the feeling of “I want more John Wick, I want to make my own John Wick — I have only hammers, and my hammer is tabletop RPG design, so I’m going to turn John Wick into a nail.” I support that. I played a long campaign of Masks that resulted in superheroes you’ve never heard of — but to me, they matter as much as Spider-Man. That’s cool.

But I also think it can be a very limiting approach to game design, and something I wish people attacked with a little more rigor and thoughtfulness.

Sam: Yeah. I sometimes want to capture John Wick at the table, but that’s inherently turning game design into trying to be a movie — and movies are good at different things than games. When you try to capture the exact feeling you had in another medium through gaming, you’re often striving for something that’s less suited to the medium you’re working in.

S. Roberts: And that cuts both ways. Look at a lot of the early comic book movies — Ang Lee’s Hulk, the Zack Snyder Watchmen. Those are movies trying very hard to take the textures and vibes of comics and apply them to film, and it totally backfires. A movie can’t be a comic. A comic can’t be an album. Every medium has things it does really well, things it struggles with.

So where I always start is: what makes this a roleplaying game? Even if I start from “I love John Wick and I want to make a John Wick-inspired game” — what is my John Wick roleplaying game? I’m curious to ask you that, Sam.

Sam: OK, so before we get to Band-Aids and Bullet Holes — I can’t believe how much of this episode has gone by without me talking about Band-Aids and Bullet Holes — I want to bring in the classic Powered by the Apocalypse thing, because a lot of people have said PBTA in particular is a system for genre emulation. And there’s so much I find wrong about that sentence.

I do think there was a long period where a lot of the main PBTA canon that was coming out was just trying to make an engine to emulate a particular genre, and a lot of those games really lacked specificity. I heard some podcast recently where Thomas Manuel was talking about this — I can’t remember whether it was one of the Rascal Book Club things or on Yes, Indeed. But I believe it was the second episode he did on Apocalypse World, which included a conversation with Luke Jordan and Lin Codega, in which they were talking about how games like Monster of the Week — and I think some of the early Magpie games — fell into this a little bit. You take Monster of the Week and it’s a game where you can almost fill in the game with the players’ understanding of the genre. The game just kind of falls away — it gets patched over with the table’s understanding of how the genre works. And then what’s the game bringing, exactly? Something kind of halfway.

If a lot of what the game is asking you to do is draw the rest of the owl via filling the bucket with the tropes you understand the genre to contain — that’s not what games are best at. You can do better than that.

S. Roberts: I have so many thoughts you’re making me think. But finish your thought.

Sam: One more thing before I turn it back to you: what Vincent Baker has always said about PBTA as genre emulation is that he does not consider his games to be emulators of genres — he considers them entries into genres. And I think that’s a much better way to think about it. Apocalypse World — as much as I might pitch it to people as the Mad Max: Fury Road RPG — is actually a different entry for telling a different kind of post-apocalyptic story. It shares some aesthetic qualities I can use to get people in the door with Mad Max, but it’s really standing on its own, bringing its own specificity. You could easily make a different post-apocalyptic game — like Dream Askew — that has a different set of aesthetics and feels like a different entry into the genre. That’s a much more productive way of looking at it.

S. Roberts: I find that completely unhelpful to me personally. I’m glad it works for other people, and I think it’s helpful in the sense of disrupting the idea that PBTA emulates genre and giving games more generally some value as opposed to being a secondary art form. Respectfully.

I think if you think about it — the My Chemical Romance album Danger Days is a post-apocalyptic album. If an album can be post-apocalyptic, I guess I can see how a game can also be in that genre. But I think there is something true about games — because they’re often defined by rules and prompts and whatever you use to build a roleplaying game — that gives them this inherent element of critical mode. If you’re making a game about a genre and you put a move in that says “every time this thing comes up, it’s going to work like this” — what you’re making is a statement about how this genre works. Which is different from Mad Max having the Doof Warrior come out with his electric guitar. That’s just a cool thing happening, not a rule that every time someone shows up they play an electric guitar.

I think both things are true, but the literal content of the move matters a lot. And a lot of the PBTA games we chafed at from a genre emulation perspective — Monster of the Week, for example, which I know people love and it’s just not a game that moves me — the reason it doesn’t move me even though I like a lot of the media it’s based on (I was an X-Files kid forever) is that a lot of what those moves are doing is very literal, very surface. “When you search, you might find this, this, or this.” Where PBTA moves really come alive in their relationship to genre is when they’re functioning more on the level of theme.

Sam: It’s more interesting when they’re describing the physics of the narrative rather than the physics of the physics. How do the rules of this kind of story function and tumble forward?

S. Roberts: Right. I’ll talk a little about Escape from Dino Island because it’s the game I made, so it best embodies my feelings about this. One of the things we did was create the basic moves and all the player-facing moves in a way that basically allows you, if you want, to not adopt an authorial stance at all. You can play the game just in the mindset of “my character is looking around, they’re seeing a dinosaur, what do I think they want to do next?” All the choices you’re asked to make are choices that character might reasonably be asked to make in those moments. What a lot of those moves end up doing is forcing questions of “am I going to help other people? Am I going to help myself?” And I think that — more than asking whether a dinosaur is going to jump out — is what makes it feel like that genre. Not because it’s mirroring the tropes, but because it’s making you think and feel the things you think and feel when you’re engaging with that genre.

Sam: We’ve got to talk about Band-Aids and Bullet Holes. You asked like 15 minutes ago what makes a John Wick game for me — well, I’ve made this John Wick game. It’s called Band-Aids and Bullet Holes and it’s on Kickstarter. Everyone should go check it out. Just go play it.

But what makes a John Wick game? I’ve been clear about this — it’s the foundation. The load-bearing walls. The first act of the movie. It’s characters who exist in this world and have vendettas. They have relationships with each other — a mix of owing each other debts for reasons of honor, or just owing each other because they like each other and have been vulnerable with each other. And then someone is going to become a wrecking ball inside that community, slamming into everyone like pinball bumpers, and everyone is going to have to react, take sides, call in favors, go to higher ground, try to stay out of it. Those are the things that are important to me about a John Wick game.

The way I accomplished that in Band-Aids and Bullet Holes was with a mechanic called a powder keg — essentially a scenario. One of them is called Dead Mentor. It’s like: Sam Roberts and Sam Dunnewold were both mentees of Sam Tung. And Sam Tung has been murdered horribly recently. I’m convinced Sam Roberts was behind it because you never liked him. So I’m going to come fuck your shit up. The first thing I’m going to do is go to Lady Tabletop and say “you need to help me fuck up Sam Roberts.” She’s going to be like “I don’t want to do that, we’re buds.” And I’m going to be like, “tough, you got to pick sides.” That’s the drama. That’s what John Wick is about.

Then there’s a whole procedure for setting scenes — I have to pick a character I’m going to play and say what they want and who they want it from. I did a whole episode about that scene framework. I don’t know what order these are coming out in, but either it’s coming soon or you’ve already heard the one with Eddie about how this game originally started as a Firebrands framework that collapsed down into one scene. There’s just one scene: you want something from someone and they don’t want to give it to you. That is maybe the foundational unit of John Wick. You want something from a person, they don’t want to give it to you, you can resort to your baser instincts — violence — or you can try to negotiate. That’s fundamentally what the game is about.

And then on top of all of that is the calling cards mechanic. Every character is a little deck of cards. Lady Tabletop and Seraphina did a whole episode about these, so you can go listen to that. But the basic idea is: you take a playing card, you write some cool evocative trait on there — a nail gun, a toothy grin, bisexual lighting. Those are my three things. Maybe John Wick has grief over his wife and dog, a bulletproof suit, and guns. Lots of guns. When I show up and fight with you, I take these cards, shuffle them up, flip one over, and we play War — high calling card wins. But the fun part is not the game of War. The fun part is: my toothy grin beat your nail gun. You’re shooting nails at me and I’m just smiling at you, making you increasingly agitated — that’s a cool beat of the fight.

The calling cards are like a container for all the energy that people have coming into this genre — “I want to talk about the pirate coins, I want to talk about the bisexual lighting, I want to talk about all these aesthetic details.” Calling cards soak up all of that energy. They let people do that part of genre emulation in whatever way they want, bring their own version of John Wick — the cyberpunk version, the Toontown version, whatever — while the powder keg underneath is not mutable. That’s the foundation I’ve laid. The scene framing — always wanting something from another character — those are the rules. The flexible texture on top can look like whatever you want. And that, to me, is what a John Wick game looks like.

S. Roberts: I love that. I’ve been nodding my head, which doesn’t translate on a podcast, but I’ve been doing it many times. What I love about it is that the way you describe it mirrors the way we were talking about the movie in a structural way — which is that the calling cards are, literally, for those of you who don’t know, a game of War. Sam was not being facetious. It’s the classic card game.

You could play that game entirely without the calling cards, with them just being the nine of hearts or whatever, and the game would function. The stakes would be just as high because the mentor would still be dead and Sam would still be coming for me. What I love about that is that it’s in a sense a piece of film criticism you’ve created about the John Wick movie — the idea that what really matters is that someone wants something from someone else and they’re going to get it one way or another. All that other stuff — the bisexual lighting, the cool fonts, the soundtrack that sounds like it came out of the Y2K era — is just the icing on the cake. You’re saying that stuff a lot of people think is important is actually so unimportant you could get rid of it and the game would work fine. But then you add it in and yes — that’s the stuff that makes it interesting. What would a cake be without frosting?

Sam: Are we really going to just shovel frosting into our mouths? We know something’s missing there. I’d rather have the substantial cake, but a cake wants frosting too.

S. Roberts: You do want the frosting that makes every cake distinctive. And I think when you do that right in a genre game, it feels like you have created your own awesome cake, your own awesome John Wick movie. When you do it poorly, it feels like you have made a copy of a John Wick movie — you’ve hit all the beats, but you haven’t quite made your own John Wick experience.

Sam: We can’t do 90 minutes on whether games have stories. But I think in this case, they do.

S. Roberts: And so there was one more thing I wanted to bring up — this idea of the foundation.

Sam: So another thing that’s interesting to me — just saying all this out loud and talking through the movie, I’m realizing how much John Wick for me is a movie about building tension. Before every fight scene, there is a period of buildup. The nightclub scene is so iconic, but what makes it for me is what happens before: there’s a guy hanging around as a guard outside the nightclub. Suddenly there’s a gun to the back of his head. He goes, “oh,” you can see it in his eyes. And John Wick says, “hey, Marty” — or whatever his name is — and the guy goes, “John, you’re back.” They have a little conversation, John’s like “you want to take the rest of the night off?” and the guy’s like “yeah, I think I’ll take the rest of the night off.” Then John sneaks in and kills a million guys.

There’s more building of tension — we learn the layout of the place and so on. But that scene is all build, then the little release of the guard. But we keep building.

For Band-Aids and Bullet Holes, in a two-and-a-half-hour session, there’s typically one fight scene that takes 15 minutes, maybe two. There’s so much less time spent on the fights than in a John Wick action sequence, because I don’t think those fights translate interestingly to tabletop in the same way. Even the fights in Band-Aids and Bullet Holes are so much about pulling details of calling cards and combining them into one little creative moment, as opposed to the ballet of John killing 24 guys in a nightclub.

There’s this mechanic in the duels where you spend a lot of time taking each of your calling cards and setting them in the scene to build up the tension of “how are things going here?” Some people don’t like this because it can bump — sometimes it doesn’t make sense to set a particular calling card in the scene. But when it works, it’s like half of a duel is just the doo-da-loo — we get the shot of the hand hovering over the gun, the tumbleweed blows past, we get all those building details before the release. The whole game of Band-Aids and Bullet Holes is about that buildup until the one climactic fight at the end. That feels different to me — that’s something I’ve changed in my entry into this genre.

S. Roberts: I’m glad you said that, because I think that’s one of the really practical game design techniques you can learn from this. That kind of pacing is something tabletop RPGs do really well. If you’re trying to adapt something from film or narrative media into games, one of the things you’re going to struggle with is pacing. A movie has a soundtrack, it has an editor. When you’re sitting down to play a tabletop game, you’re fumbling over rules, talking to people, negotiating the fiction and fictional positioning — you’re just never going to get that ballet. But the thing you can do really well is do all that stuff — the fictional positioning, negotiating the rules, getting everything in place — until you have one pivotal thing that happens. In D&D, it’s the hit roll, the damage roll, whatever — there’s always a moment where everyone is looking at that die, and the fate of everything rests on whether it’s a 12 or a 13.

I’ve been working slowly on a car racing game based on the video game WipEout, which I love. You cannot do WipEout as it exists in a tabletop RPG — that game is all about speed and throbbing techno music, and those are two things roleplaying games don’t do well. But the way I’ve been thinking about it is: when you’re playing a racing video game, or skiing really fast, a lot of the time you’re just zooming around, holding the line. And then every now and then there’s a moment that feels like it goes into slow motion — this is the moment where maybe I’m going to pass this guy, or maybe I’m going to wipe out. So when I’m working on this game I still haven’t quite cracked, it’s like: you’re flipping over cards, then something happens, we pause, we do a bunch of stuff, then we resolve it. That gives you the visceral moment of slowing down, being in an intense crucible for a second — and then whoop, we speed back to full speed. If you can figure out how to do something like that, playing to the pacing strengths of the medium — you’re going to get something good out of it.

Sam: This is the classic thing about making any piece of art — it’s really helpful to come back again and again to the question of what do you want the audience to feel. Adaptation from one medium to another is so much about how do you maintain that feeling in the new medium. For me, the thing about John Wick that I want people to feel is that tension: am I going to resort to my baser instincts? Am I going to throw my life away for revenge? Am I going to ruin this friendship because it’ll get me closer to punishing someone evil? Am I going to make that hard decision? That buildup — that’s the excitement of John Wick.

And I’ve adapted that. That’s the feeling you get in Band-Aids and Bullet Holes, done in a completely different way. And I’m excited to play your racing game because that feeling of the zoom in real life is really cool — and I’ve totally felt that at the table before. But how do you capture it? You just have to try different things. You can’t just put a list of cool cards in your game.

We really, really got to wrap this up — but I’ll give you the last word.

S. Roberts: Go for it. Another practical technique that I think is super helpful — and very unexpected — is to see what happens if you get rid of all the rules that are enforcing genre. It’ll always happen that someone at the table has never seen John Wick. But most of the people sitting down to play Band-Aids and Bullet Holes kind of know what they’re in for and what they want to do. So you don’t need to tell them to play a cool badass assassin or make rules pushing them to play a cool badass assassin. That’s stuff they’re going to do naturally.

Instead, you can use your rules’ cognitive load to do things they wouldn’t necessarily do on their own — can you make your character do embarrassing or vulnerable things with these rules? I know this is something you were working on: giving people good reasons to say no, because that’s actually a pain point even when people know that what they’re supposed to do is say “absolutely not, John Wick, I’m not going to help you.” Why do they do it? What scaffolding they need to actually come up with a good explanation — that can be hard. Embrace getting rid of some rules you actually don’t need, because we know these genres. That’s part of the strength of a genre — you don’t need to explain what a detective is every time you make a detective story.

Sam: Yeah. I want to leave people with some homework — something we didn’t really get into but that I’m really interested in right now: what happens to your game when you strip away as much as possible and still try to have it be genre? What’s the minimum viable amount of game that’s recognizably in a genre?

I’d also be interested in approaching it from the other direction. Jeff Stormer has a podcast right now called Batman Bumps in the Night, where he and his co-host — whose name I don’t recall at the moment — are doing just pure improvised Batman storytelling. They’re making up their own Batman stuff. That’s the podcast. On the one hand, there are no rules. On the other hand, there are so many rules — so many implicit rules in the genre of Batman, at least in those two people’s understanding of Batman. And that’s what they’re using to play. Is that still a game? I think yes — but what’s going on there exactly? What do you need to make your game? What can you leave up to people’s expectations? And where are the pain points where you’re trying to do something different from what people’s expectations are bringing, and how are you going to push them away from those things? All of that’s really interesting.

Batman Bumps in the Night. You don’t need any rules to be Batman.

S. Roberts: So then what do you need rules for exactly?

Sam: Exactly.

S. Roberts: Can I give one piece of homework too?

I have a friend who used to have a saying — this was back when hipsters were a thing. “Those are just people who are like me and my friends, except they’re shitty.” I feel that way about genre emulation. I’m like, I hate genre emulation — but then I also love lots of games that are genre emulating, and I make a lot of games that are genre emulating.

And a good piece of homework: make a list of the genre emulating games you think are really cool, and the ones you think are really dopey, and see what the commonalities are — what’s actually working for you in the ones that work, and what isn’t. It’ll be a little different for all of us. It’s probably a little different for you and me, Sam. But I think that’s how you’ll figure out your way to explore genre as a game designer.

Sam: Sam Roberts, thanks for coming back on Dice Exploder.

S. Roberts: My pleasure. I’m so glad we settled genre emulation once and for all.

Sam: Thanks again to Sam for being here. Run, don’t walk to Kickstarter and back Band-Aids and Bullet Holes today. Thanks to everyone who supports Dice Exploder on Patreon. As always, you can find me on Bluesky at @diceexploder, and you can find my games at sdunnewold.itch.io. Our logo is designed by Sporgory. 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. Thanks to you for listening.

I’ll see you next time.