Transcript: Minigames (Firebrands) with Viditya Voleti

Listen to this episode here.

Further Reading

Band-Aids & Bullet Holes on Kickstarter

Mobile Frame Zero: Firebrands by Meguey & Vincent Baker

The King Is Dead by Meguey & Vincent Baker

Stewpot: Tales from a Fantasy Tavern by Takuma Okada

Socials

Viditya on Bluesky and itch

Sam on Bluesky and itch

The Dice Exploder blog is at diceexploder.com

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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 ask it which page to turn to. It continues to be the month of Band-Aids and Bullet Holes, my new John Wick-inspired deck builder RPG of bloody revenge, now on Kickstarter. Joining me today is Viditya Voleti.

I’ve wanted to have Viditya on the show for a couple of years now. He’s a great designer, best known for his lovely, quick and easy world-building game A Land Once Magic. When I invited him on the show a few months ago, he jumped at the chance to talk about Mobile Frame Zero: Firebrands, from Meguey and Vincent Baker, and the mechanical structure it’s most well known for. In Firebrands, you go around and take turns picking from a curated list of mini-games, each of which frames one scene through a detailed list of prompts.

And this isn’t just a couple of prompts — it’s two full pages and a whole booklet of mini-games you keep in front of you like a reference sheet while you play. Boy, does this work like dynamite. I love it so much. And Band-Aids and Bullet Holes started as a Firebrands hack.

The whole game had a list of John Wick and Kill Bill-style revenge movie scenes, like any Firebrands game — until I slowly realized the game just didn’t need any of that structure. It didn’t need a list of scenes to pick from. It needed a list of characters to pick from on your turn. So what does that look like?

We get into it. Not just why we love Firebrands and what makes its mini-games such a fantastic piece of design, but also how it might change, be reformatted, transformed into something entirely new. Thanks to everyone who’s already backed Band-Aids and Bullet Holes on Kickstarter. Here is Viditya Voleti with Firebrands mini-games.

Viditya, thanks for being on Dice Exploder.

Viditya: Yay, I’m very happy to be here. Incredible.

Sam: What are we talking about today?

Viditya: We’re talking about Firebrands and mini-games and scenes.

Sam: Start with Firebrands big picture. What’s the deal? What are you doing in this game?

Viditya: Mobile Frame Zero: Firebrands — we’re all from a different faction in a Gundam-style universe. So we’re all mech pilots, mech war, sci-fi, space things. You play a singular character, everybody else plays a singular character, and you pick a scene to do with somebody or everyone. Like, we want to have a conversation, so you could do “a conversation over food” — cool, our scene is set as a conversation over food. What are we eating? Where are we? And then each scene is very back and forth with small mechanical prompts.

Sam: Yeah, let’s be clear that this is not just “ooh, we’re having a conversation over food, start roleplaying.” It’s like: okay, setup. Ask your chosen partner how you two came to be eating together. Other players can join freely if it makes sense for their characters to also be present at the meal. What do you notice about each other? What have you heard during the meal? Anyone can ask for details about the setting, occasion, and circumstances.

And that’s the first chunk of like five big chunks of how this mechanically goes down. You’re going through it, reading this stuff, like “oh, I guess that’s true now” — “oh, I’m being asked questions, great.” Pausing in reading the rules to answer these questions. And then many of these mini-games, including a conversation over food, end up at a situation where you’re taking turns choosing prompts. Here we’re taking turns choosing topical questions, like: “I make an ignorant social or diplomatic blunder — do you let me recover gracefully, or do you hold it against me?” “I hope you don’t bring blank up — do you?” We just go back and forth from a list of like 15 of these things.

Viditya: I’m glad you read it out, because I love how these prompts are written. It’s really fun.

I like Firebrands as a system because it is almost roleplay-optional. The first time I ever played The King is Dead — another Firebrands game by the Bakers — I speed-ran it. That was kind of the reason we were playing: can we speed-run The King is Dead? And so a lot of this you can just answer back and forth within the topics, but you can also break from it and explain the situation. “I’m feeling expansive — what do you want to know about me?” You could then answer out of character, do all of this out of character, and it still builds this beautiful story.

Or I can say “I’m feeling expansive” and then show you — okay, let’s get into it. And I think that’s really fun.

Sam: Prompt games are just great. There are a few things in what you were saying that I wanted to pick up on.

The first is how much this game feels GM-less. There’s no central GM except for the Bakers — the designers. I’ve actually never played Firebrands, only The King is Dead, so a lot of my stuff is coming from that. A lot of the mini-games from Firebrands were directly ported over with minimal adaptation to The King is Dead. But it really feels like while you’re playing, the Bakers are facilitating for you — like they’re GMing for you.

At the start of a conversation over food, you have “what do you notice about each other? What have you heard?” That’s exactly the kind of thing I ask players when I’m GMing and they’re coming in to have a negotiation. And because the Bakers are so hard-framing scenes and procedures for you, I think it also allows you to do PvP a little better, because they’ve confined the bounds of that PvP really well.

And the thing about the prompts — something really nice about them is how much they’re sort of asking for your consent. When I ask you a prompt, I’m asking you to consent to a certain plotline happening. Because of the way they’re written, and again the bounds that the Bakers are putting on things, they’re making sure everyone maintains consent. That’s a huge part of allowing for that PvP.

Viditya: Yeah, it’s like a safety tool is not a thing that you do at the beginning of this game — it is built into itself. It is such a philosophy of the game.

I’m not normally somebody who does intimate roleplay. It’s just not what I do, mostly because I tend to trip up — I’m almost intimidated by it. But almost every Firebrands game I play, I actually really love doing “stealing time together,” which is the usual name for it. And there are two things specifically about how the game facilitates this beautiful consensual storytelling — both in how it does combat and sex. There’s something there thematically: what is sword-fighting but making out, and what is making out but sword-fighting?

Sam: And there’s also this incredible thing in the combat of these games where very often — in the mini-game “a tactical skirmish,” you’re in your mechs doing a big fight — when it’s your turn to make a move, you pick one that says “submit or withdraw now” or “my force spreads itself too thin and you pick off blank who was struggling.” It’s like: I submit now or my guys get fucked up. It’s this interesting commentary on violence — I’m willing to throw my people away to keep this going. And again it gets back into that consent thing: this maintains consent, but it’s also thematically really interesting as a statement.

Viditya: There’s a fun thing where you can choose, because what the game cares about is a cool story. You’re here understanding that this is a dramatic story you’re telling. So with “meeting sword to sword” — the one-on-one version of tactical skirmish — one of my favorite leads is: “I overreach slightly and you have an opportunity to slip in a dirty little cut. Do you take it?”

That’s a thing I choose in narrative. I get to be like, oh, I have an opening. But the cool thing is all of these things are always pushing it back at you — I set a thing, but then do you take the opportunity? I think both answers are so cool. A yes and a no mean so many different things. You back and forth it and it’s so fun.

Sam: It’s so much fun to choose how I want to be vulnerable to you, right? And then you get to choose whether to take advantage of that vulnerability or not.

Viditya: And then “stealing time together” — one person does an advance, and then the other one chooses an answer, which are two different prompt tables. All of the advances end in “may I?” So it’s like: “I touch your wrist — may I?” “I touch your hand — may I?” “I touch your fingertips — may I?” But then it can also go: “I loosen your clothing — may I?” Or: “I do not only touch but kiss you as above — may I?” And then the answers are like: “you may,” or “you may, but first I want you to blank — will you?” And then there’s even: “you may not, but instead I make an advance — may I?” or “you may not, and I withdraw to a more comfortable distance,” or “you may not, and I break off and depart.”

The scene makes sense in my brain. It’s like: I reach out to touch you, but I’m never forcing it on you. You can always back out or always pull in. It’s really wonderful.

Sam: Yeah, just constant checking in. The other thing I was thinking about immediately when you started talking about this game is how much the quality of the writing is what these things rely on. It’s not just the baking in of consent and choosing your own vulnerability — it’s having well-written sentences. Having sentences where when you say them out loud, they sound good coming out of your mouth.

There’s this thing I’ve found with a lot of people who read text at a table: you’ll sort of run down the garden path of a sentence, get lost in the middle, and then have to kind of — it’s like you’re reading a sentence you haven’t read before, so you say it with an odd cadence. A lot of people have that happen when they’re playing read-aloud games in person. And the quality of the writing here is so high that even when that kind of thing is happening, it sounds good coming out of your mouth. The sentences themselves fucking rule.

Viditya: And that’s why this is kind of a game where you don’t need to roleplay — because they’re written really well. And importantly, which I think applies to any prompt game, the prompts need to be well-written and full of flavor. But then specifically in a story-forward roleplaying game, it’s dripping with intentional verbiage that is still very important to the world itself. These aren’t broad prompts about the type of scene — they’re very specific prompts about the type of story it’s telling.

So when I read the chase scene — you are chasing somebody, I choose a person to be chasing — and it’s like: “I plunge through stinking muddy water. Follow me if you want, but you’ll need to ignore the stench and filth and ruin your clothing.” That says so much about the world and the types of characters you can make. And specifically in Firebrands, it’s space opera mech-fighting — there’s literally an aristocracy as one of the factions. So just the prompt of “you’ll need to ignore the stench and filth and ruin your clothing” — I might be like, no, absolutely not, I’m part of the Empire, I’m not going to fucking do that. Get away. But then maybe the revolutionary is like, I’ll chase you through hell and mud and brimstone — you’re a noble rich boy, yeah, I guess you got away.

And it’s not just because it’s fun. The chase could just be a bunch of “I run through mud, it slows you down, I dash through the streets” — but it’s not.

Sam: Yeah, you can almost treat it like you’re doing mix-and-match poetry with what the Bakers have already written.

Viditya: Oh my god, it is like poetry. It is like call-and-response poetry.

Sam: Yeah, totally. Okay, so we’ve done a lot of talking about the micro level — how Firebrands is working at the prompt level and how good the poetic text is. But that’s not actually what I summoned you here to talk about. I want to talk about the mechanical framework at large.

In a lot of ways, I really think the big-picture mechanical framework here would hold up even if the writing kind of sucked at the floor level. Even just the idea of: here are nine scenes you could potentially choose when it’s your turn — that’s huge for helping a table roleplay. The idea of taking turns framing scenes is huge. It’s a great way to structure a GM-less thing. Fiasco is not a lot more than that, and I really love Fiasco.

And having this list of scenes — even just the titles. The mini-games are: “a solitaire” (which is its own whole episode of this show and I’m going to breeze right past it), “an animated disagreement,” “a chase,” “a conversation over food,” “a dance,” “a free-for-all,” “meeting sword to sword,” “stealing time together,” and “a tactical skirmish.” I feel like you could just say the title and kind of know what we need to do to turn that into a good scene.

So much of what makes a good scene is people coming in with some sort of goal. The worst scenes are scenes in D&D where you’re kind of just sitting around: “well, what do you want to do?” “I don’t know, what do you want to do?” Just totally direction-less. But immediately coming with “a chase” — who’s chasing, who’s being chased, why? The why is even optional; we find out the why. But we both know immediately: you’re trying to get away, I’m trying to catch you. That’s drama — let’s get into it.

Viditya: Oh god, yes. It’s so beautiful, because the games kind of tell you: read the list of scenes out loud. Don’t explain the whole system, just let everybody at the table know what’s all available. And genre is so important to this. Let’s take The King is Dead — we’re talking about Firebrands games overall. One of my favorite Firebrands games, if I could shout it out, is They Came to Play Ball by Ade Slattery, which is science fiction gonzo sports tournament — space gym. It’s space gym! It’s weird, it’s so fun. And the thing is, you go into that game to play ball, you’re like “we’re telling a sports story.” So you know what the games are: “practice together,” “blowing off steam,” “a conversation over drinks” instead of just food. You pull on the genre.

In The King is Dead, which is like medieval Game of Thrones, when you “meet sword to sword,” you pull on that idea so clearly in your mind — we are going to fight, and it’s going to be brutal. But it’s also going to be intimate. It’s about the conversation we’re having. Or: I’m choosing you to fight, but I’m a scrawny little prince and you’re the butcher of some battle — what’s going to happen is I’m choosing to fight you because you’re going to beat the shit out of me. That’s the point of that scene in this story.

And these scenes are so importantly picked out. Every Firebrands game cares about these scenes happening. The fun thing is that it is a limitation — the structure is very limited. What you were mentioning about going into a scene not knowing what to do, I’d even apply that to PBTA games. I have that problem sometimes, because you don’t have as direct a lever as just “roll a d20, see what happens.” I kind of have to grasp at moves and be like, okay, I want to trigger this move in this scene, so I have to tell the tale — but what am I going for? What’s the point? But in a Firebrands I’m like: this game only cares about these types of scenes. A dance will occur. A free-for-all has to happen. When do they happen, how often — it’s just so easy.

Sam: I’ve been thinking about the PBTA thing a lot, since I’m Kickstarting Band-Aids and Bullet Holes right now, which has a little bit of this structure to it. In classic PBTA games, there’s very little assistance for framing scenes. Most PBTA games are still scene-based — they demand that you set up and run a scene — but they don’t give you tools to set up the scenes. What they have is a bunch of buttons you can press in the middle of the scene: the moves. So you end up in this scene, kind of looking at each other, sniffing out what it’s about, and then someone’s like “I’m going to growl” and now that’s what the scene is about.

That’s not entirely fair — Apocalypse World 3rd edition in particular has introduced a bunch of moves that trigger at the start of a scene to sort of solve exactly this problem. “Read a situation” and “read a person” are really clearly designed to be like: what’s going on here, let’s pull some conflict out of whatever is going on. But at the same time, it feels like you’re filling up the bowl of the scene, where Firebrands is like: here are eight bowls.

Viditya: Yeah! Oh, that’s such a great way to talk about it.

Sam: And I think these are two really different approaches — one being: hey, we’re going to set up the scene for you, frame this, give you that bowl, pull that string for you — and then have fun. Firebrands doesn’t work exactly that way, it really holds your hand all the way through a scene. But my experience with Band-Aids and Bullet Holes has been: I do all of this structure around creating the bowl and getting you into the scene, and then it’s “go nuts” — and people go nuts, because they know the genre, they know what’s going on, they can just freeform roleplay and do a great job. They just need to get to the moment of “I want something from you and you don’t want to give it to me.”

Viditya: And that’s it — now we got a scene cooking. Now we got a stew going. And it’s like expectation — the best part is you know when this will end, so you play to get to the most exciting ending. I actually really like the idea of: you don’t know exactly when a scene ends, but you know a scene will end. Which is weirdly interesting to me. You’re always playing towards ending the scene, whatever that’s going to look like.

Everyone has had experience playing a game where you’re just like, are we done? Have I actually done the thing I want to do? I should do a whole episode on cutting scenes — cut it earlier than you think is always kind of the answer. And the fun thing about Firebrands is that it tends to cut a scene pretty early. You just go back and forth three times and then you’re done, and maybe there’s some ending procedure, but that’s it.

And it’s fun that we’re talking about this in the context of PBTA stuff, because it is the Bakers’ lineage — they did Apocalypse World and then Firebrands came after it. I always call Firebrands scenes “what if a move was a single scene” — that is 100% what they are. The Bakers have explicitly called Firebrands a framework Powered by the Apocalypse. It’s like: what if instead of triggering multiple moves in a scene, you just do that whole thing once?

I want to quickly shout out another system I really like: Legacy: Life Among the Ruins, by Minerva McJanda, which takes PBTA to a very large framework. I think of it as very crunchy PBTA. It has these larger moves that are very Firebrands-y, where you’re doing a call and response and framing a whole scene. The Legacy system has you play a faction and then make individuals, so it’s very ensemble cast — you’re playing huge things, so the faction moves are really big and include a bunch of stuff.

So this lineage of thinking about PBTA — Powered by the Apocalypse as buttons you can press in a scene to get interesting things, but not really how to start a scene — and then Firebrands being like: you have the start, you know exactly what the scene is, it’s kind of contained. And then seeing it grow into Legacy — you can move around moves all you want, but once you trigger something, it could be this huge move that just feels like a Firebrands scene. It’s playing with scale: are you operating on the scale of a single beat within a scene, on the scale of a scene, or on the scale of —

Sam: An entire episode of television? Or a lore-dump, which sounds like what you’re doing in Legacy.

Viditya: Yeah! I love the idea of a scene being like: let’s just lore-dump.

Sam: Let’s just pause and do a couple rounds of Microscope in the middle of this, right? Like that’s the —

Viditya: And it’s great! And that’s kind of the thing — because each scene is a game, they’re called mini-games at some points. They’re all a short structure, but they can mess with themselves and their own structure within it.

Sam: I also want to hit on how much I love the idea of taking turns that’s baked into the process of picking a scene here.

Viditya: Oh yeah.

Sam: It’s like board games have got it fucking right — the idea that it’s your turn, on your turn you’re going to do one unit of play, and then it’s someone else’s turn. It naturally passes the spotlight. And because it comes with a framework, you know — we’re kind of doing this even in D&D. Everyone understands: we’re going to check in with you while you go to the shop, okay, now what are you doing over here. The GM is sort of going around letting people take turns, and then in combat, people are literally taking turns.

But when you think about what the unit of play should be, in the way that the Firebrands system has thought about that, you get this really clear answer: I get to do a scene, this is roughly what a scene is going to look like, this is roughly how long it’s going to take, here are my rules for doing so. I feel like I get a fair amount on my turn, my time in the spotlight, and then we pass it off. It really is a good way of sharing time with the story and control over the story, in a way that feels democratic while still allowing you to get your fingerprints on the thing. It doesn’t need a GM. It’s just wonderful in all these ways.

Viditya: And this is not me taking shots at Belonging Outside Belonging — or “No Dice, No Masters” — but I think that is a long-form, GM-less, scene-based, roleplay-heavy game. And because it’s very freeform, and you’re just kind of making weak and strong moves, it’s a difficult game to play. I consider Belonging Outside Belonging difficult roleplaying. You’re like: should I be jumping in? Can I do this? Can I do that? But the scene structure in Firebrands, and the fact that you’re just taking turns — it’s so: okay, wait, you can wait. You don’t need to worry about being on all the time.

It’s also this nice, democratic, kind structure: when you pick a scene, it’s your turn, you pick a scene, and you usually always choose a partner or some number of people to join. I can be like: we’ve had this story going between the two of us — I want to do a dance with you. Two things happen: I get to point at a person at the table and say “let’s do something here, let’s roleplay” — there’s this nice inclusion and choice. I get to choose who I want to roleplay with. And then every game basically has the line “other players can join freely if it makes sense.” I think that’s really important. It’s also about consent: the turn structure means I can be like, I actually don’t want to roleplay right now, I’m going to step back — or I have an idea, can I jump in?

I’m a huge fan of the Firebrands thing where during the discussion, anyone can ask for details about the setting, occasion, or circumstances, and you just go. You can cut them off — hoots and boos, optional — and all these different things.

Sam: — the audience stuff. And then when you get into conducting the discussion, it’s like high school debate — I didn’t do high school debate, but it feels like it. Some people are in the audience, you’ve got two people with two positions on stage, we know they’re having an animated disagreement. But instead of just roleplaying that out, everyone in the audience gets a turn to choose from the list of challenges. The challenges are stuff like: “please express your position in the form of a slogan that people can rally behind.” “Please make a personal attack on your counterpart.” It’s so unfair in a way that feels really appropriate. You’re handing the drawer of knives to the audience to stab these people with, instead of to each other.

Viditya: Yeah, and you don’t have to be a good GM because they hand you these tools, they hand you the knives. It’s a good GM-less game in the sense that you get to be GM here and there — you get to be the director. I get to choose the scene I think the story should go to next. Is it a duel? Or we’ve been having a lot of combat, what would be really interesting is a conversation over food — we just had a battle together and we have to talk now. That’s something really beautiful.

And similarly, you can take a step back. If you’ve been in a lot of scenes, you can choose not to be in this one. Or if somebody has kind of been hogging the narrative, when it’s your turn you can just choose not to engage with them — “hey, I haven’t heard from you in a little bit, let’s have a scene together.” It’s really lovely.

You can step in and out of the story as you want, and everyone will always have a turn to say what they want, and everyone will always have a say on what they think narratively should happen next. It’s just a great framework.

Sam: I love “handing you the drawer of knives.” I love that. Because it works at a bunch of scales — it works at the scale of the prompts, and then you were just using it at the scale of the scenes, which as we were talking about are sort of prompts in their own right.

I think what good games are doing is building a foundation in their rules and fiction — everything the designer is offering to the table — that you then sit down and build on top of as players during the game. People have really different tastes in terms of how much they want the designer to come in, whether with fiction or mechanics. There’s a lot of different things you can do.

But fundamentally, that is what is kind of happening here when we play these games. And I love this framework because it so clearly flags exactly what you are supposed to do with the things the game is offering. It knows exactly what to offer and in what way. And this is not the only way to do this — not all games should be Firebrands games — but this game is just such a beautiful example of every thing being the exact right shape for what it is trying to do.

Viditya: Yeah. I wouldn’t say all games need to be Firebrands — similar, actually, to my Belonging Outside Belonging take. I actually tried to move some people who were playing D&D for the first time, that I was running for them. I was just not having fun running it, but could we try The King is Dead, which I thought was at least thematically similar? And they struggled with it, because it wasn’t what they thought. It’s actually too much hand-holding for people who are super used to freeform play. It was still unapproachable on a GM-less level for people who don’t really understand that, and it was really interesting to see.

But I would put my money down on: every designer should play a Firebrands game. What you will learn is exactly what we’ve been talking about — the importance of setting up a scene and knowing when to end it, the importance of verbiage and getting somebody to jump right into the genre you want them to play in, how power can be shifted. Even in a GM game, just putting into your mechanics a bid for other players to get involved. It will just make you a better GM, because you’ll see how much more engaged a table can get when you let them into that seat even a little bit. I’m a huge advocate: play Firebrands, make more games that think about scenes the way this game does.

Sam: I want to flag a couple other random things. The first is I just love that the Bakers were like: why are you all making PBTA games that look exactly like Apocalypse World? You can push things this far. I think Belonging Outside Belonging games kind of did the same thing — just go invent an entire new kind of game. And I do think there is, embedded in this, you can see the mechanical roots of Apocalypse World while it looks really different. I think that’s really cool, and I think people should feel empowered to have their games look more different from Apocalypse World when they’re starting from a PBTA framework.

Viditya: For the design sickos or the academic-lineage-of-games people, you should also play the Bakers’ A Sundered Land games, because you’ll really see how slim a PBTA move can be, and also how Sundered Land is basically Firebrands — each game has very strict setup mechanics, but they’re all connected in a single way. I really love those. Nightwatch is one of my favorite games of all time. Just make a new game, but see how much you can stretch your inspirations.

Sam: The other big thing I want to call out is I love Stew Pot: Tales from a Fantasy Tavern by Yoshi Mocha, which I think is really remarkable for the way it keeps every scene really low-stakes. The mini-games are like: your retired adventurers who started their own tavern, and a bard has come in singing a song about one of your old adventures and getting it a little wrong. That scene is great and has made me cry. It’s really wonderful stuff, and it’s so radically different in terms of content and approach while keeping a really similar mechanical framework.

Viditya: Yeah, and to criticize some of my absolute favorite games — I think similarly with PBTA, designers aren’t deviating enough from the original thing they made. I find that a lot of Firebrands games still keep a lot of the same mini-games, same type of stuff. But Stew Pot was such a breath of fresh air because the types of scenes are very different. And the stakes — I love that you mentioned the stakes. I hadn’t thought about that specifically, but that’s exactly it. It’s such a minor thing, but it gets you to care about very specific small things in the same way that I would care about a big duel.

Sam: In The King is Dead, exactly. So yeah, huge huge Stew Pot — I did a whole episode on that one too, so people can go listen to that.

But okay, the last thing I want to talk about is my game. I’ve got Band-Aids and Bullet Holes on Kickstarter — go back it. It’s doing the John Wick thing: someone has killed John Wick’s dog and he wants to go kill them. Revenge. I wanted to do this Firebrands episode because I had this really interesting experience designing Band-Aids and Bullet Holes where I thought: okay, this is going to be a Firebrands-kind of game. I’ll just watch John Wick and write down every kind of scene, and those will be the kinds of scenes you can pick from.

There’s John Wick shows up at a bar and asks who killed my dog, and the bartender says I’ll never tell you, and then John Wick gets him to tell him. There’s John Wick shows up at a club and murders two dozen people. There’s John Wick has been shot and goes to the doctor and the doctor stitches him up. Cool, I’ll just make a list. It was a pretty small list — four or five things, which is another interesting thing. You don’t have to have a huge menu of options.

But when I started playing, people were just playing all of these scenes exactly the same way. All of the scenes were just the same scene: John Wick shows up, he wants something, the other person doesn’t want to give it to him, now you roleplay.

So it’s not a Firebrands hack anymore, unless you’re talking about design lineage. But I found that really interesting — starting from that framework of wanting to write down all these different kinds of scenes, and then finding what the commonality between all of them was and distilling down into that.

Viditya: I think that’s really beautiful. And it goes into genre emulation — if your game is about telling a John Wick story every time, then that’s exactly what you should do. Even if you’re not doing a Firebrands, you should just be like: these are all the scenes, these scenes should happen at some point. And it’s really cool to hear that the scenes happened exactly the same way every time, and not seeing that as necessarily a failure, but instead going: maybe I don’t need all of this stuff. What is getting people to make it?

Presumably players are going, “wow, that was great, I told a John Wick.” And you’re like, oh, cool. You did it — and so did everybody else who played this game, but like, you did it. I think as a designer you’re in the back of your head being like, is this okay? But then also every table is different. No table is talking to each other in the same way. So where did you end up? You were saying it’s no longer exactly a scene-based Firebrands thing, but you…

Sam: It is still scene-based. It keeps the structure of: you have a turn, and on your turn you pick the scene. But the way that you pick the scene is — no one is locked into one character. There’s a bunch of characters in the middle of the table related to whatever the revenge story is, right?

Viditya: And your opponent.

Sam: Yeah, so on your turn, you pick who you’re going to pick up and cast yourself as for this scene.

Viditya: Love that.

Sam: What does this character want? And who do they want it from? And then someone else picks up the character they want it from. So: I’m John Wick. I want the bartender to tell me who killed my dog. You’re like, okay, cool, I’m going to play the bartender now. And then you get to say: where are we? Are we at your bar? Are we at the laundromat? Did I catch you on a smoke break in the alley? Are we on top of a skyscraper, leaping out of an airplane?

You get to decide. And then now we’re in it. It’s very clear where to start — sometimes the exact moment is unclear. Typically it’s “John Wick walks into the bar,” but we could totally start with “I’m dangling off the helicopter that you’re in.” But then we just roleplay. And because the genre is so strong, at that point everyone kind of knows what to do. For Band-Aids and Bullet Holes, you don’t need all these incredible poetic questions because people have just read books and seen movies before.

It’s really just the tools of: here’s how you get good drama. You have a character who really wants something from someone else and that person doesn’t want to give it to them. That is enough for this genre.

Viditya: Yeah, that’s exactly it. An action movie is simple to emulate because you go: I’m going to be a cool guy, and eventually a cool guy is going to do a cool thing. But the cool thing kind of has to be built up too. So let’s build up to it — great, that’s easy.

I love the picking-up-characters thing too. The thing about Firebrands to relate this back: I really like about your game is it’s about that moment of “okay, we’ve done some roleplay, now let’s take a hot second to think about the meta and then jump back in.” It’s this cool-down overview, jump back in. Yeah, it’s that natural stepping in and out of character kind of thing.

Which I think helps create a cohesive story. And I love that picking the characters is also a part of that — “oh, I have an idea for this guy, this is the scene you’re going to do, let me be the bartender.” I actually think I have something I want him to do. And that’s a part of the meta negotiation that I think is so fun.

Sam: And it’s also — I’m just realizing that my list of scenes is the characters rather than the scenes. That’s interesting.

Viditya: What, really?

Sam: Oh, that rules. That’s just an interesting way to think about it. I wonder because sometimes in the same way that in Firebrands, sometimes you’re like: I know I want my character to come confront you about our past, so let me look at the scenes and pick one that’s going to allow me to do that. And sometimes I’m like: we haven’t had a chase yet, I’d really love to do a chase, let’s figure out a reason. Sometimes you have the reason and you find the game to fit it, and sometimes you have the game and you find a reason to fit it.

In the same way in Band-Aids and Bullet Holes — all the characters have their cards with a little art on them. Sometimes you look at the art and you’re like, I love the way Barf looks, I want to play as Barf. What can I have Barf go do? And sometimes you’re like: John knows who the guy is that he wants to kill and we’ve been playing for 90 minutes, so the scene is clearly “he goes try to kill that guy.” That’s so clearly the thing that happens next. And both of those things are great. I really love the flexibility of “oh, I have a great idea for what happens next” or “I like the look of that person, let’s go find out what their deal is.” Both are fine.

Viditya: Yeah, then I really think that your characters are your scenes. You’ve gone from “I don’t need to frame the scene” to “I, the designer, want to make sure that these characters are interesting — the characters need to be the thing that draws people to it.” And it’s just so cool. That’s such a fun iteration on this.

Sam: I’m excited about this. I’m going to start using that as a line now whenever I talk about the game.

Viditya: It really felt that way. I was like, wait — you’ve changed something in a way that’s so fun.

Sam: Yeah. One last thing I like to end with: anything else you want to say about Firebrands? I usually ask people that at the end, but I actually have one last thing I want to say about Firebrands. So I’m going to do it this time.

There’s this thing Jason Morningstar said offhand in a Discord comment once that I think about all the time — and I don’t know if this is his idea originally or someone else’s, or if I’m misremembering him — but: RPG design is deciding who frames scenes, who cuts scenes, and who resolves conflicts within those. And which of those is the game going to handle? Which of those is the game going to dictate? And which of those are you going to leave up to play culture? And that’s it. That’s what you’re doing when you’re deciding.

And I love strong and clear answers to those questions, which I think Firebrands really provides. Who’s framing the scenes? I get to frame the scene, but the Bakers are helping a lot. Who’s cutting the scenes? The Bakers are largely cutting the scenes, but we know they’re coming — we get to have our hand on the dial a little bit. Who resolves conflict? The Bakers are giving us a drawer of knives to choose from, but our options are really clear. And then we get to choose from those options. That’s really fun for me.

Viditya: And very explicitly, the game will say: after three questions, anyone can ask a closing question. You can play it out for multiple times, but straight up, when you’re done: do this, close it. And then I get to be like, cool, I’m closing it. We’re done.

Sam: It’d be really great if I just ended the episode on you saying “we’re done.” There, that’s the end. That’s really funny.

But I do want to leave it open: do you have any concluding thoughts on Firebrands as a framework?

Viditya: I mentioned that I think every designer should play a Firebrands game — that’s very important to me for so much of what we talked about. I also want to mention the Solitaire real quick, and actually two things. Mobile Frame Zero: Firebrands does not have an ending game, but a lot of Firebrands games have ending games, which I think is cool. They also usually include a Solitaire — a game you can play at any point by yourself, or choose to do as your scene.

You just do this thing. It changes your character, changes something in the world, but it’s minor and small. And it’s a breath of really interesting solo play in a GM-less game. It’s essentially a skip-your-turn in some form — you could just be like, I don’t really have anything, I’m going to do a Solitaire.

Sam: And it’s interesting because you can play it while other people are playing their scene. It goes pretty quick, so you can come back and be like: hey, by the way, while you were doing that, my people attacked your people — that’s what my Solitaire said. You can bring that little drama into the next thing. I —

Viditya: It’s so cool.

Sam: I’ve never actually had the Solitaire experience in one of these games. My fear has always been that people are going to be playing Solitaire when it’s not their turn and then miss what happens in the scene other people are doing, and that’s going to end up being a problem. Or like — I really love just the joy of being an audience member to other scenes when the people involved are smart and good. And this game really helps support people in being smart and good. I’m curious to maybe do the Solitaire episode after I’ve had the chance to play with it, because I think the benefits are so lofty and potentially great, and I also see those roadblocks and I’m curious how they play at the table.

Viditya: I’m very similar. I have played every Solitaire in every Firebrands game I’ve played, but it’s such a choice. I go: I should try the Solitaire. Then I try it and it’s really cool. But I’m also very much like: I love being part of the audience, I love being part of a scene. I think that’s also the beauty of this game — a Firebrands game caters to play styles. I’ll also know people who are like, I just need to take a second, or I don’t actually really care about what’s happening right now. And then they can Solitaire for a brief moment and they’re still part of it. I think they’re so fascinating, but they’re just not the type of play I do.

And then my final note is on a closing game, which I really like. The King is Dead is a great example — basically, the game can kind of end whenever, and ending play is…

Sam: “To end the game, resolve the outstanding questions you’ve raised.”

Viditya: Yes. It’s like: after once around, anyone can decide to end play on that player’s turn. But then in The King is Dead — which is about the king being dead and all these different families vying for the throne — once everyone has gone once, any player can trigger the coronation. And then you play the coronation. I think that’s really cool about Firebrands: it’s almost like a gate. Here’s a scene you can’t do until you’ve done something else. And then it walks you through an epilogue in such a fun way. The game knows when it wants to end, the game knows how it wants to end, but the players have so much power over when. And I think that’s just so much fun.

Sam: 100%. The game is incredible — in my top games of all time list. I really, really love The King is Dead specifically. Stew Pot is probably up there too. Play these games, they’re fantastic.

Back Band-Aids and Bullet Holes on Kickstarter. Viditya, thanks so much for being here.

Viditya: Thank you so much for having me. I really just came on and was like, “ah, Firebrands.”

Sam: That’s great. That’s exactly the energy I want people to bring to the show. Thanks again to Viditya for being here. Go back Band-Aids and Bullet Holes on Kickstarter now, and then follow Viditya on Bluesky at @viditya.voleti. Check out his games, including the lovely world-building game A Land Once Magic, on his itch page.

As always, you can find me on Bluesky at @diceexploder, and you can find my games at sdunnewold.itch.io. Our logo was 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. Thank you, Em. And thanks to you for listening. I’ll see you next time.