Transcript: Weak, Strong, and Regular Moves (Dream Askew / Dream Apart) with Austin Walker

Listen to this episode here.

Austin Walker's new game Realis is on Kickstarter now, and it's been making splashes in the indie rpg scene since last year when the ashcan came out. The game's core mechanic, Sentences, feels like the exact kind of mechanic I love covering on this show. But where did it come from? I asked Austin to come talk to me about it and bring one of his influences, and he came back with another dice-less, GM-less resolution mechanic: the token economy of weak, strong, and regular moves from Dream Askew / Dream Apart. So today we're completing Dice Exploder's accidental Dream Askew / Dream Apart trilogy (paired with the episodes on lures and setting elements from the past couple months) and then digging into what makes this system work and what Realis learned from it.

Further Reading

Realis is on Kickstarter now!

Follow Sam’s game Band-Aids & Bullet Holes on Kickstarter!

Dream Askew / Dream Apart by Avery Alder and Benjamin Rosenbaum

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Austin on Bluesky

Sam on Bluesky and itch

The Dice Exploder blog is at diceexploder.com

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 try and chisel away at the stone all around it. My name is Sam Dunnewold and my co-host today is Austin Walker. And boy, does Austin do a lot of cool shit, so I’m going to let him walk you through all of it.

Austin: Hey everybody, I am Austin Walker. I am the lead designer and writer on Realis, a science fantasy tabletop role-playing game that is on Kickstarter right now. It’s being published by Possible Worlds Games — just to say, Tyler Crumrind has been an incredible help for that. I’m also the host of Friends at the Table, an actual play podcast now in its 11th year.

We are currently doing an ongoing campaign of Fabula Ultima. I’m also the co-host of A More Civilized Age, a Star Wars podcast where we’re currently working through the 4K fan releases of the original Star Wars trilogy. And I am also the co-host of Shelved by Genre, where we are currently reading through The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien.

Sam: Austin is here because he’s currently got a game on Kickstarter: Realis. What is Realis? It’s a place — a cursed orbital sphere of a thousand mystical moons filled with magic and impossible technology. And of course it’s also a game, one of diceless storytelling where characters deploy sentences which are rewritten over the course of their saga.

Realis’ sentences are the kind of mechanic that made me want to start Dice Exploder in the first place. They’re things like “I always kill my foe,” or “when I have the proper tools, I always heal my patient’s wounds.” These are just true statements while you’re playing the game, until they conflict with each other — and then the juice really starts flowing. It’s such a delicious mechanic and I wanted to hear from Austin all about where it came from and what influenced his design.

And he came back with another mechanic for us to talk about: weak, strong, and regular moves from Dream Askew / Dream Apart. I’ve recently covered on Dice Exploder both setting elements and lures from Dream Askew / Dream Apart, but today we’re really getting into what maybe I should have started with — the real meat of the game. It’s a diceless token economy.

And talking to Austin, it’s so easy to see how he got from here to Realis later on. So let’s get into it. Thanks to everyone who supports Dice Exploder on Patreon, and here is Austin Walker with weak, strong, and regular moves from Dream Askew / Dream Apart.

Austin Walker, thanks for being here on Dice Exploder.

Austin: Hi, thanks for having me.

Sam: So we are here today to talk about Dream Askew / Dream Apart — weak, regular, strong moves and the token economy of this game. Last week we talked about lures, or I did anyway with the Tabletop Book Club folks.

I think this is going to be a nice sequel episode to that, to really get into the details. Maybe we did these in the wrong order, but whatever. Tell me, overall first, what’s Dream Askew / Dream Apart in your words, and then what’s up with this particular mechanic?

Austin: Dream Askew / Dream Apart are a pair of games by Avery Alder and Benjamin Rosenbaum. I believe Dream Askew sells itself as a queer struggle after the apocalypse. And then Benjamin Rosenbaum’s Dream Apart is a Jewish fantasy in the shtetl, drawing on Jewish folklore and Jewish history. The two of them are diceless tabletop role-playing games where players navigate the needs of their own characters and of the community, and the threats that those communities face.

Mechanically, it takes on the big ideas from the PBTA era of games and the designs that the Bakers initiated into great fame and influence over the 2010s, and then shifts them away from dice-based play — really underscoring the mechanical structure of storytelling in a way that I find fascinating.

Core to that is the system of moves and tokens. Moves are something that Apocalypse World probably brought to the forefront — I don’t know that I would say it started them, but it definitely helped crystallize that formation in a lot of people’s minds.

The core thing here is that it moved from “you roll some dice to see if you do the thing you want to do” to “you can do the thing you want to do if you’re in the right position, if you have the token for it.” And sometimes the thing you want to do is not positive, because it’ll get you a token so that you can then do the big thing you want to do later.

Sam: Right. It’s really good at incentivizing people to get themselves in trouble, at least for the kind of role-playing that I’m doing. So I want to go back and read some of the text from the book out loud here.

I found this first paragraph in particular really interesting. We have this section header, “Making Moves,” and then it says: “Whenever your character takes action, that’s you making a move. Moves are how the story unfolds. By default, a lot of the moves you make are ‘take action, leaving yourself vulnerable.’ But anytime you’re called upon to act, you can look at your list of moves and choose a different one to inspire your narration.”

I was like — every time I take action as my character, that’s making a move. That is such a fundamental reframing of what moves are from Apocalypse World. And in a way that makes it much clearer too, where there are plenty of things I’m doing while playing a role-playing game that aren’t my character taking action. Saying “no, anytime your character is taking action, that’s you making a move” — that’s your turn, almost. That feels helpful.

Austin: Right. I think they’re doing slightly different things. In Apocalypse World, it makes sense for moves to be discrete things when you take particular types of action — there’s something genre-wise happening that’s a little different. Once you say “OK, you’re going to pick up the dice to roll,” there’s uncertainty happening. The reason those moves have to be distinct is that’s when something uncertain might happen.

Whereas in Dream Askew / Dream Apart, once you establish that framework, it doesn’t matter what you’re doing — it’s all moves, right? It’s all actions. That means that even if what you say is “I lean against the wall and give someone a look,” that’s as important as if you look at your sheet and say “I’m doing the regular move of take action, leaving myself vulnerable.” And I think that’s only possible because it’s a diceless game.

I want to be clear — when I said I think they’re doing two different things, that wasn’t me dismissing the underlying thing you were getting at. I just want to make sure we don’t fall into the trap of saying this is an evolution that leaves the other one behind. They’re doing different things, I think, on purpose. I would tell different stories with both, if that makes sense.

Sam: Well, it’s using the same term “move” for two different categories of thing, because in Apocalypse World some moves are diceless, right? There are plenty of moves that are just like “oh, you did the thing, here’s the thing that happens.” In Apocalypse World, you’re not always making a move when your character takes action, but in Dream Askew / Dream Apart, you are.

There’s still that division in Apocalypse World between what am I doing out of character and what am I doing in character. So it’s reframing the definition. I don’t think one is better than the other — both of these games are fantastic.

Austin: It also does two other things. Going back to what you said — when we talk about what’s happening at the table, you described it as being sort of like you’re taking a turn. It helps us realize that sometimes you don’t have to pick up the dice or announce “I’m using my move” in order to have been in the spotlight for a little while. So it’s a way to ensure that there is care at the table around time and attention. “Hey, we’ve really seen the Iris a lot in the last 10 or 12 minutes — what’s going on over there? What’s up with the Stitcher?”

I think that also ends up being a good way to manage that part of play that doesn’t always register when you’re just thinking “well, I haven’t rolled dice in a while.” That doesn’t mean you haven’t been doing something, haven’t been taking actions, haven’t been making moves.

I think that in comparison with Apocalypse World, it’s very easy to dominate a session for an hour without having rolled any dice and kind of feel like “well, somebody else got the last dice roll.” That’s not an evil thing — we’ve all stumbled into that. But saying “no, every time you take an action, you’re making a move” does help you think about the structure and flow of play.

Sam: You started this a while back. We’re digging into one of the specific moves that’s called out in the text here. “Take action, leaving yourself vulnerable” is, I believe, the only move that all the playbooks share — it’s a standard move, so it doesn’t engage in the token economy. We should explicitly lay out the token economy.

Austin: Right. Let’s explain this. There are playbooks in this game — even though it’s a GMless game and you also get to play the environment and the threats and the other factions in the world, everybody has a character who is theirs.

Sam: Yeah, I’ve liked this term “protagonist character” that’s come up in more games recently in the GMless space.

Austin: As I’m editing Realis — which is not a GMless game — I’ve been like, “hmm, is protagonist character still something useful to me?”

Sam: Yeah, maybe — because “player character” implies the GM is not a player anyway. So anyway: every playbook has a set of weak moves, and the weak moves are typically some variation on “get yourself into trouble.” It has a set of strong moves, and the strong moves are some variation on “get yourself out of trouble” or “show off how you’re cool.” And a set of standard moves that are kind of other things you might be doing, and they don’t engage with the token economy. I really want to talk about the standard moves later, but for now, that’s what we need to know.

One of those standard moves — I believe the only move all the playbooks have — is “take action, leaving yourself vulnerable.” And I love what you were saying earlier about how when your character leans against a wall, the game says that’s a move. So you must be doing one of the things on your sheet. You’re probably not engaging with a strong move or a weak move, so probably you’re doing one of those basic moves. And since all the others are more specific, probably you’re taking action, leaving yourself vulnerable. “Why are you vulnerable right now?” That implicit question every single time leans into what makes this token economy so exciting — that attention to story structure.

The game, through its token economy — and there’s a sidebar I’ll read in a second — really leans into the idea that we are here playing with typical story structure. We are using this system to mirror and facilitate the regular beats of a narrative that we’re used to.

Austin: Totally. The leaning-on-the-wall example might be “taking action, leaving yourself vulnerable.” But by asking “wait, what move is that?” you might come to realize that actually it is “threaten or coerce someone.” Oh — I’m threatening or coercing someone in this moment. I’m leaning against the wall with my arms crossed and, by my body language, they know it’s a threat. “Oh, that’s not what I meant at first, but now I’m exploring the space of what I mean.”

And so it gets to something that I think role-playing games are really good at. We talk about different types of media having different affordances. The novel is really good at interiority — you can use all that text to explore the interior of a character. Film can do a lot visually in a split second that would take the written word a long time to describe. One of the things role-playing games can do, but don’t always do, is play through the ambiguity of action — and the drama of that ambiguity — because you can slow down and go, “wait, what does that mean? What were you trying to communicate?”

There are lots of games — including Realis, which I don’t think is as good at this as Dream Askew is — that don’t quite get to: “when you do a thing, there’s ambiguity in it, let’s talk through what that is.” In Dream Askew, the way that’s done is, “hey, it’s a move.” So when you lean against the wall, are you taking action leaving yourself vulnerable? Because if so, that means someone might take advantage of that vulnerability. Or are you confessing something and seeking forgiveness? Et cetera. That is a really powerful component of the game.

I will say — we’re slightly wrong. There is another move that basically everybody has, but with one variation. There’s a strong move — a move you have to spend a token to use — and that move is “get out of harm’s way,” which is the same for everybody except the Tiger character, who has “get yourself or your gang out of harm’s way.” There are things that are the same across playbooks but with minor differences, which is also one of the ways the game works. There’s no action you could do that you couldn’t find an appropriate move for — it’s just that what those readings are changes from class to class.

The lean-against-the-wall maneuver might be different for someone playing the Hawker than for the Tiger, the Arrival, or the Torch. The fact that you have different moves available to you, sometimes with only slight differences, means that the same physical action might result in a different move. I think that’s a really cool way to conceptualize playbooks, classes, archetypes — whatever you want to call them.

Sam: Yeah, absolutely. I want to give Avery Alder — who I believe wrote a lot of this text — an opportunity to chime back in here. We read the first paragraph of “Making Moves,” but I want to read the next one out loud because I think it’s great: “Making a move means taking the prompt and running with it, letting it guide what you say next and how you play your character. The move might point toward an outcome, but know that what happens next may still surprise you. You don’t always need to announce the move by name, but sometimes it can be helpful to do so, because it will help ensure that all the players are on the same page.”

The thing I pull out of there is that even though this is a diceless game, this text is correctly pointing out that there’s still uncertainty every time you make a move. And that uncertainty, I believe, comes from not knowing how this thing is going to crash into the other players at the table. Whatever you say next — you don’t know what other people are thinking, you don’t know what they’re going to say. That’s where the uncertainty in the game still comes from. And that’s such an underappreciated part of diceless games — people are so focused on wanting randomness without appreciating that the uncertainty is still really, really present.

Austin: It’s still really open-ended. That comes from the ambiguity of language — to her credit, Avery is like, “hey, part of the value of speaking the name of a move out loud is it helps narrow that ambiguity.” Because I’ve played this game and there have definitely been times when I say “I lean against the wall” and someone goes “oh, Austin’s character is trying to threaten me,” and I have to be like “oh, actually, I’m taking action, leaving myself vulnerable.”

And so we can all get on the same page — “oh, the camera actually frames this in such a way that makes me look vulnerable. It’s shooting down at me. There’s a slump in my character’s shoulders.” Being able to clarify through the moves makes things crisp in a way that if I just described the action, might not be. It’s OK to leave that ambiguity sometimes, and there are other times where it’s really important that we get down to it.

It’s kind of like having a playbook. We don’t think about playbooks like sports playbooks very often, but that’s —

Sam: — what the Bakers have said. That’s where it came from. That’s why they called them playbooks.

Austin: Yeah. When you think about it that way — if you think about a football play, you know where you’re supposed to stand, what route you’re supposed to run, where you’re supposed to pass the ball, what block you’re supposed to provide. That is part of the value of having these moves written out.

And it’s not just for loose company. You could imagine a version of this game that has only three moves: “I’m acting without a token,” “I’m acting with a token,” and “I’m acting to gain a token.” I’ve seen some people play in that space, and there’s value in it — if you’re at the right table with the right people and the right tonal match, you can do a lot with that incredible ambiguity.

But the moves provide something else: the opportunity to narrow ambiguity when you take action, and to surprise even yourself. There are so many times in playing this game where I say I’m doing a thing, look down at my sheet and go, “oh wait, what move am I making? Oh, I’m making that move. Where’s that going to take us?” That is, I think, the strength of it.

It’s also why this was such an influence on Realis. Realis has these sentences that are not dissimilar from moves here — all like “I always do blank.” It’s exactly that kind of narrowing the possibility space, narrowing the ambiguity by making a really clear, crisp claim about what it is I am able to do in this moment — and that comes from here as much as anywhere else.

Sam: We’re going to get a lot more into Realis later, I think. But the thing I want to underline for me — the listing out of “here’s a bunch of specific moves you can make” — is that it gives me scaffolding and specificity to zero in on the game’s genre and fiction so I don’t have to deal with the blank-canvas problem of “what am I supposed to do now?”

I’ve been thinking about this a lot with games lately. What I want from games is a curated experience. If I’m going to just go make stuff up with my friends, I can do that. But fundamentally, I’m still at the table for the same reason I’m going to the theater — I want a director or a designer or a writer to take me by the hand and show me their thing. I don’t want them to say “figure it out, good luck, here’s a 20-sided die.” I want to show up and be told “one of the things you can do is stare deeply into someone’s eyes” — this specific set of things. To me, that’s the purpose of rules in role-playing games as opposed to just co-writing: to show up and be handed this incredible toolbox.

Austin: Yeah. The act of designing and playing games for me is such a process of figuring out how far down that line I want to walk before it stops being fun — and how far away from that line I want to walk before it starts becoming really fun again. You could just do co-writing. I like co-writing. I’ve been running an actual play podcast for 11 years; there’s a little bit of co-writing in that. Mostly we’re playing games, though, and I’m glad — it does give me something different.

At the same time, I’ve hit points where I’ve been like, “there’s too much game here right now. The game has overwritten us or denied us the opportunity to fill in the blanks.” I don’t think there’s a universal formula for getting that right.

To be more specific: a game like Dream Askew takes place in a post-apocalypse. Avery does a great job of setting up some key structures — the apocalypse hasn’t arrived equally across all social strata, there are people more on the outside and more on the inside, things like that. In that way, it’s kind of like Apocalypse World: “yeah, apocalypse stuff is happening.” But it doesn’t say there was a gas shortage. It doesn’t say, like Death Stranding, there are former Amazon delivery drivers who’ve become bandits. It’s not very particular about groups, factions, or reasons for the apocalypse. If something supernatural or super-scientific exists in the world, it leaves a lot of that space up for the players. There’s a lot of empty space to fill in.

Austin: And then also — mechanics can do this too, right? Games that have ammunition are saying something different about the world than games that don’t. I tell this story about playing Torchbearer eleven or twelve years ago where we got into a dungeon, got to a big trunk surrounded by sleeping guards, and opened it to find a huge expensive carpet we needed to carry out.

The only way we could fit it was to dump all of our food rations into the trunk and take the carpet. And we just had a blast imagining all these orcs waking up going, “hey, where did our carpet go? What’s up with all this food?” That game produces that. The mechanics help create a genre space, a genre simulation. There are lots of great games that do this, many of which don’t even realize they’re doing it.

For me, there are times when a game has given me too much of that, either mechanically or just from digging into the book — it takes over my own imagination. Something like Dream Askew really hits the middle tightly: flavorful, a clear invitation to a narrative space and style of play that’s interested in particular thematics. This is not a post-apocalyptic game interested in tactical gunfight decisions. It’s interested in violence, sure, but it doesn’t fill in all the gaps that I’m excited about filling out with my friends.

Sam: Yeah. Something that I think helps a lot there — and that I also see a lot in Realis when we get to that eventually — is just how much the quality of the writing matters in making this thing work. The poetry of the moves in this game, the word choice, the tiny individual pieces of writing, the pick-list options on character sheets — every part of this game, especially the moves you’re using over and over again, being so high quality is in part drawing that line you were talking about. It’s being super evocative and specific, while also asking “so what does this mean exactly?” It’s inviting you to take this one given in the world and expand around it — interrogate the world, your story, fill in the blanks.

Austin: Yeah. I think about something like the Iris, a character who has these kind of psychic touches — if someone’s fighting the Iris, that means the psychic maelstrom exists. But you then get to decide: what does the psychic maelstrom look like for your world? What has it told you? What’s your experience of it? That’s to say nothing of when you get into the other side of the game and start playing not just your protagonist character but also the setting elements.

Sam: Yeah, I did a whole episode on setting elements a couple of months ago.

Austin: Perfect. So we don’t have to get into that. But that’s part of how moves work — they’re in relation to setting elements.

Sam: And the setting elements themselves also have moves. I believe they don’t play into the token economy in the same way, but they’re continuing the language of moves in how you’re intended to think about them.

Austin: Yeah, exactly. They don’t gain or spend tokens, and they don’t innately give tokens to the protagonist players.

Sam: I’ve got a question for you. The token economy implies a certain story structure — and I think it implies a pretty traditional Western story structure, right? You get in trouble, then you get out of trouble, you get into trouble again, you go around and do the thing.

And obviously that works really well — there’s a good reason for bottling a game economy around it, which is that it’s a style of story that most of your players, especially in the Anglosphere, are going to be very familiar with. You can count on them to intuitively understand it even if they could never put it into words.

Sam: But also, sometimes I show up and I don’t want to do that, or I want to push against it. I think this game certainly leaves space for that. My favorite thing to do in Belonging Outside Belonging games like Dream Askew / Dream Apart is to play for the high score of tokens — just hit weak move after weak move after weak move and see how deep a hole I can get into before something breaks. I like games in part because they allow you to push on them in ways that would be extra-textual in another medium. I like showing up and being like: where are the edges? What are the systematic assumptions being made here? Do we have to follow those?

But I’m curious to hear from you: we’re modeling this traditional structure — is that good? How do you feel about that here?

Austin: I don’t think that not modeling it will save us, necessarily. Not modeling it is really fascinating and interesting. There are games that are interested in other types of narrative loops. A game I have really strong positive feelings about — even though we ended up moving away from it, and I have some critical thoughts too — is The Veil, the kind of post-cyberpunk game with its system of emotional spikes. I don’t know if you’ve played it?

Sam: No, I haven’t. But I’m playing Under Hollow Hills right now, which is already sounding very similar — it’s much less about consequence and more about how every interaction changes one or both of the parties involved. What does that mean, rather than conflict exactly?

Austin: That’s really cool. Part of it for me, as a player and storyteller, is that I’m really embedded in that traditional structure — though there are lots of sub-structures inside of it, to be clear. The Campbellian hero’s journey stuff is often seen as the model, but even within the subcategory of people who want to catalog and analyze story structure in the Western mode, you actually end up with a bunch of different story maps. There’s a lot of space there.

What tends to be absent is the unresolved conflict, or the conflict that resolves itself without direct confrontation. There are elements like that that don’t find their way into a lot of Western story mapping, especially. But you can play this game that way — and I think that’s what makes games really interesting.

The classic example: you don’t have to run to play Super Mario Brothers. You can stand in place and jump until the timer runs out and you die. Is that a valid way of playing it? Sure, of course — but that’s the whole game for you then. The space of improvisation lets you push back against some of those pressures. But it does mean you may end up with a different play experience than everybody else.

Coming back to your core question: I think it is a really difficult and really fun challenge to build a system that pushes against those strictures. And achieving it would be remarkable — partly because you have to achieve it not just for yourself, but for players who are going to come in with their own ideas about what a story looks like. It’s really hard to get them on board if they haven’t already done the pedagogical work of learning what other story structures exist. So I’m not dismissing it as a goal, but I am cautious about saying Dream Askew is limited because it can only do what genre fiction has been doing for several thousand years. If that makes sense.

Sam: Yeah. I think most of the games that are succeeding at doing something different tend to not be trying to tell stories in the first place — a lot of worldbuilding games, right? Like Street Magic or something like that.

Austin: That’s a great thing to think about. When you eliminate the protagonist as the perspective character, when you divide the player from a singular goal or their character, you immediately end up in this other space.

Sam: The other thing I was thinking about was Wanderhome, which is based on this same token economy but also explicitly trying to do a different model of conflict with these same mechanics. Where like your loop can be: describe the scenery, then help someone, describe more scenery, then help someone — whatever the pig is, right?

Austin: And you know what else actually fits this? Warhammer 40,000. Truly, any hard tactics game — Cyberpunk 2020’s Friday Night Firefight rules — they don’t care about the narrative structure endemic in Western literature. They care about whether 17 bullets are going to hit you in the torso. Roll 30 dice to find out. That’s how Shadowrun works.

There’s a sort of double bind of the story game — “let’s get closer to the narrative structures we’re all familiar with and finally tell the types of stories we’ve been chasing in all these dice-heavy, crunchy games.” That’s awesome. And also now we have a different gravity to contend with.

The thing that’s never going to happen in Dream Askew is that someone kicks down the door and — with no one at the table deciding this explicitly — guns someone down because that’s what the dice told them. Someone makes that decision in this game. That’s one of the great powerful things about it. When something shocks the world, someone has come up with that idea at the table — and they may have stumbled into it, but someone has voiced it. It isn’t a game where the dice are going to surprise you in that same way.

Sam: Right. That’s a strength and a limitation of the game — someone is having the idea, someone is offering that up. So we can pull back from it more easily if we need to, because we’re in conversation the whole time. But the dice aren’t going to inject that element of surprise into the game in the same way. It has to be someone willing to step up and say, “what if they just got gunned down here?”

Austin: 100 percent. It’s very telling what I jumped to there — I’m thinking of a particular Friends at the Table example. That’s a thing that happened in one of our seasons, and it was like “oh my god, I didn’t expect this to just happen like this.” And it changed the trajectory of the final act of that season in some ways.

Sam: I do also think that Dream Askew, like Apocalypse World, is a game that is really interested in violence — not in a “let’s roll some dice and do tactics” way, but in the consequences and the costs and the benefits and the appropriate times for violence. All of that.

I want to move us towards talking about Realis a little bit. So Realis is a sick-ass game. I’ve read the Ash Can and I really love it. I can’t wait to get my hands on the full thing because I feel like what the Ash Can was missing was what I hope is like 120 pages of stuff at the end — lots of sentences that are already written.

Austin: More than that, my friend. Thank god. I actually don’t know the page count yet because the layout isn’t done. But I will give you the numbers: it’s 55 playable classes.

Sam: Oh! So we can get straight into this — the meme I’ve been doing recently is I want games that have at the back of the book 55 myths, 55 swords, 55 whatever, 150, yeah —

Austin: So the middle of the book is 55 classes. Those are playable classes with four sentences each. But let’s give the high level.

Sam: Yeah, we’re going too deep too quickly.

Austin: Realis is a science fantasy game. It’s really deeply influenced by stuff like Book of the New Sun and by Berserk, maybe more than anything. In fact, the very first Realis sentence is actually something that happens very early on in Berserk, which I found recently. I’ll have to read it to you by the end of this episode.

It’s a world of a thousand moons orbiting a big, weird blue planet called Realis. There is a dead or dying or cursed sun that is smaller than that planet, above this sphere of moons. There is a void that’s rapacious and starving, trying to eat the moons that are closest to it.

And you play people in that world. There are kingdoms, monopolistic corporations — you could do Berserk here. You can do it anywhere on that spectrum from science fiction to dark fantasy. Characters are made up primarily of a collection of sentences. Those sentences say very basic things like “I always cure my patient” or “I always kill my foe.”

Those sentences have a rank, a sort of level of reality. They all start for player characters at rank zero. When two sentences conflict, when something is uncertain, you declare your means — normally one of these class sentences. Someone’s trying to hurt your friend, you go “I always kill my foe — I kill that guy.” To stop something, to change the world, you have to act. When you act, there’s the opportunity for someone to counteract you.

Maybe the person who’s trying to kill your friend has their own sentence: “I always wield a distinct and ornate weapon.” Those two things come into conflict, and if they’re both the same rank of reality, the tie goes to the defender — the person trying to stop whatever is happening.

When you act, you declare a big dramatic intent — not just “I’m doing the thing in my sentence,” but “I’m trying to do something.” Not just “I kill my foe,” but “I’m trying to impress everyone who’s watching” or “I’m trying to ingratiate myself to the person I’m saving.” If you succeed, you get your dramatic intent. You describe what happens.

If you fail — if the other person’s rank is higher than yours and they’re countering you — you mark your sentence. After you’ve marked it three times, you can realize it: you level it up. It becomes a plus-one sentence, but it also gains a new qualification that limits it. “I always kill my foe at night.” “I always cure my patient when I’m in the safety of my operating room.” “I always cure my patient when I have all of my tools.” You then do that — and that’s the game.

There are other types of sentences too: bonds between characters, sentences on the moons themselves that both players and the GM can use, faction sentences only the GM can use. And factions have NPCs with their own sentences, which also rank up and realize over the course of play. Eventually, sentences reach rank four — but instead of reaching rank four, they go back down to rank zero. They retire. “I used to always cure my patients,” et cetera.

That’s Realis in a nutshell. There are items called ephemera with temporary sentences, and all sorts of other mechanics. But that’s the heart of it. And there are 55 classes, which is where we were.

Sam: Yeah, that’s where we were. So it’s like: fuck it, the book is full of sentences and ideas and all this stuff.

Austin: 55 classes, 150 NPC classes spread out over 29 factions, give or take. 20 moons, each starting with six sentences. Over 100 illustrations in the book — every class has its own illustration from, I think, 17 different artists. So yeah, there is material in the book.

One of the big challenges is how much to say in the book versus how much to leave out. One of the things the book’s fictional authors — the “word-rights” — have said is “this is our Realis, yours might look different.” I find that one of the most fun things people do with Realis is make their own stuff, because writing sentences is really fun. So it was important to me to be clear: “hey, there have been a lot of versions of our thousand-mooned weird space system — what does yours look like? Here’s ours, and we’ll give you detail on ours, but you can make your own stuff that looks very different. It just happens to run on the same underlying engine.”

Sam: So I want to talk about the connection between Realis and Dream Askew here, because already just hearing that initial pitch, it is so obvious where a lot of the influences come from. It’s a diceless game. It’s not a token economy exactly —

Austin: Although there is a token in the game, but it doesn’t work in the same sort of exchange-rate situation.

Sam: That’s true.

Austin: We pulled the tokens out and reduced it down to one token.

Sam: Yeah.

Austin: It was one of the big things that fixed the game at one point.

Sam: Yeah. But also, the biggest influence I see is that poetics layer I was talking about before — the importance of word choice, and almost the writing of the game, whether it’s coming from the game’s text or from the players themselves, because the players are the ones who are realizing the sentences and then limiting them in a certain way. When you play this game and change your character, you are the one contributing writing to that change. That layer feels essential to Dream Askew / Dream Apart in the way I was talking about, but even more so to Realis.

Austin: Yeah. In some ways the actual touchstone for realization may be reading — years and years ago — the “how do you make your own moves” section of Apocalypse World. Towards the back, in the “Advanced Fuckery” section. Because cracking that open in my own head, I was like, “oh, they’re giving players a grammar to make their own stuff with.” Once you understand the format of what moves are — and this is for me part of why Apocalypse World became Apocalypse World, one of the ways it took over this little corner of the hobby — there’s so much magic in giving people the tools to make their own stuff.

For me, part of what I wanted to do with Realis was encourage players to do that as a natural part of play — not as “advanced fuckery,” but just as what happens when you level up. I don’t call them moves, they’re called sentences, it’s called realization, that’s what the fiction of the world demands. But they’re Dream Askew moves.

Sam: Like they are.

Austin: They are. In fact, every class in Realis basically has a weak move. The difference being that I don’t insist it’s a weak move — you could theoretically use Dream Askew moves this way too. But I explicitly have moves that are meant to get you into trouble in the same way that Dream Askew’s weak moves are.

The Berserker — the first class in the book — has “I always kill my foe,” but they also have “I always hurt those close to me.” Now, you could use that positively —

Sam: I’m immediately thinking: you killed that guy, but your friend got hurt in the process. Right.

Austin: Exactly. The Duelist says “I always accept a challenge.” Oh, well — some people you should not accept a challenge from. There’s stuff like that that’s super close to the weak move system.

But beyond that — there’s a character class nobody’s seen yet that’s one of my favorites. It has “I always remember what happened back then.”

Sam: To me, that’s a Dream Askew move.

Austin: You know what I mean? And that — or “I always know the best version of a story to tell” — I don’t get there without Dream Askew at all. Dream Askew recognizes that remembering something is as important, in a certain type of story, as swinging a sword or picking a lock. “I remember the formula to the alchemy potion we’re trying to make.” But also: “I remember what happened. I remember what you did when everything was in chaos.”

Sam: “I saw what you did — and I can stand up in the crowd and tell everyone about it, or I can threaten you with it in a back room.”

Austin: Exactly. Those are the dramatic intents. And the real trick of this is that I was very lucky to work with Avery for about 18 months on a video game that will unfortunately never come out. But Avery cracked the narrative systems of that game for the team, and part of the joy of getting to work with her was seeing her pedagogy in action — explaining the difference between different types of conflict resolution. Explaining that you can have outcome resolution — did you succeed at the verb you were trying to do, did the task go forward? — or dramatic intent. What’s the question when you roll the dice or enter a conflict?

And I don’t think I get to dramatic intents without talking through that stuff with Avery and that team. Weirdly, the game is being published by Possible Worlds Games, but previously I’d been working at a company called Possibility Space — and there’s something in my brain that twists them up sometimes, even though they’re very different experiences.

Sam: So any other direct influences between Dream Askew / Dream Apart and Realis you want to call out?

Austin: Taking violence seriously — which I think is interesting in Realis, because I have dozens of classes tied to doing violence or identified by their way of doing violence. It’s playing in dark fantasy, in science fiction and science fantasy that can sometimes be high adventure and sometimes be almost brutal dungeon-crawling. But the key is: when it happens, it happens big. This is not a game about doing five HP of damage to somebody. It’s a game where once someone is being hurt, they’re being hurt.

The Berserker is the only class with “I always kill my foe.” But I think that’s indicative of the fact that violence isn’t a little thing in Realis. Actions are big, and violence is a particularly big type of action. It doesn’t mean you can only play a game where hurting someone feels bad — you can have swashbuckling adventure — but the stakes are always right there nibbling.

The core of it really is these three jumps. The place this game starts is an image from Berserk, volume three, where Puck — this little fairy — is picking up this strange egg thing with a mouth and teeth and a nose, and flying away from a big gooey tentacle monster. And Puck goes: “When it comes to making a getaway, I’m the one with the advantage, fat head.”

That is the first Realis sentence. I saw that and went, “I have played so many things inspired by Berserk. None of them have hit this thing.” When the fairy is in trouble, he always gets away. That’s true about who he is. What if there was a game about true statements like that?

The two big touchstones I had immediately were Dream Askew and then instincts from Burning Wheel — maybe the other core thing here. The jump from that comic panel to those two things, and then to moves, made me realize: it’s not just that Puck says “when I’m in trouble, I get away” — that’s the Burning Wheel instinct. It’s that it starts at “I always get away from trouble.” Maybe later it could become something else. And then: what does it mean that Puck always gets away from trouble? Is it good for everybody around him that he always gets away? Are there times it would be good if he was able to stick around and help?

That stuff comes from thinking: is this a weak move, a normal move, or a strong move? And then going, well, what if I have that flexibility? What if it’s just the sentence? And then I try through the text of the game to lead people to think about playing them as weak and strong moves.

Sam: Yeah. One day I’ll be doing an episode about Realis on this show, and the thing we’ll be talking about is that chiseling-down of identity — that the game is largely about — which I’ve heard you talk about in other interviews.

Austin: Subtractive progression. Something like that is what I think I called it.

Sam: Yeah. Because it feels like the classic metaphor — the playbook or class is set in front of you as a block of granite, and by playing, you carve the statue out of it of who your person is. That feels like something Dream Askew and other games are not doing. This feels like taking technology from those places and remixing it a little to produce that kind of result.

Austin: Part of the appeal of Dream Askew is that — and you’ve written this in the notes for this recording, actually, though we didn’t talk about it — part of its goal was to be a really good one-shot game. A game you could play at a cafe or a bar, with very little prep, not necessarily tilted towards campaign play. And I think that kicks ass.

I also like playing campaign-based games. And even something like most of the PBTA games I’ve played — they have really solid progression mechanics, but the progression has rarely made me go, when someone takes a new move or an upgrade — if I’m the GM, I’ll often ask: “how did you get this? What happened that led to this development?”

But that requires entering the text and the play with that intentionality in mind, and generally it feels kind of flat. Generally what happens is someone has a new move and they use it in a cool dramatic way, but there’s no conversation about where it came from. Games don’t insist on that. And so I have always wanted a game to say: well, how did it get like that? And also to open up the space for: what if it got like that, but a little different?

I appreciate that you’ve identified that as the core thing Realis is doing — that chiseling away — because that was a really important thing for me as someone who loves a campaign game but also loves there to be as many vectors for storytelling and characterization as possible. When you level up, why is that not a key part of characterization?

Everything I’ve ever done to change myself is complex and weird and reflects some life experience — sometimes one I don’t even know, but that someone from the outside, like a therapist or a partner or a friend, might have access to. And we as storytellers happen to be people from the outside looking into our characters. So we can frame that: what does this realization look like?

There’s even a system in the game that lets you realize a sentence. If you lose one of those conflicts and you were the actor, your sentence gets countered — you can’t use it again for the rest of the scene. That leans on another very traditional Western storytelling thing: if you show the archer shooting the dragon and the arrows are bouncing off its skin, well, we’re not going to keep showing that. We get it. The arrows don’t penetrate the dragon scales. There has to be some other solution.

But when you realize a sentence — when it levels up — you get to use it again, you’ve essentially been uncountered. Now I have the sentence “my arrows always pierce the skin of a dragon” instead of just “of my foes.” And that I think is one of the really cool things about the game — when you level up, it’s supposed to feel like a cool and interesting thing is happening for who you are.

Because in that moment, if you’ve gone to “my arrows always pierce the skin of a dragon” — well, guess what? They don’t penetrate the skin of a human anymore. They don’t penetrate the skin of a goblin anymore. You’ve limited yourself in this way. That’s the juice in Realis: that tightening.

Coming back to Dream Askew — it’s games that lean on language in this way. You described it as “poetic language” before, and —

Sam: I am. I’m the one who’s saying it’s a superlative for you.

Austin: I’m saying it as a category of language. Language that leans into ambiguity, lets you play with narrowing and widening that ambiguity in ways that produce meaning. If you’re out there going to play Realis, my number one tip is not to preemptively narrow the meaning before the sentence gets realized. I see a lot of people who play it and go, “oh, I have a magical sentence — I’m going to narrow it down to a very particular vision of what magic is.”

Leave it open. Leave it open until the game makes you narrow it down, because that’s part of the juice of realization. And it’s one of the things that I wanted a progression system to feel like.

Sam: It feels like the melancholy of paying a cost, of giving something up. That’s what I get from reading the text and imagining it — I haven’t gotten the chance to play it yet.

Austin: Sometimes it feels awesome because you’re like, “oh my god, I have the key to the door. The dragon has a plus-one defensive scales, I could level up my sword to plus-two and pierce the scales.” That feels like you’re the coolest person in the room.

Sam: And then until the next time you need to fight a goblin.

Austin: That’s right. Exactly. “Well, I just can’t do that anymore.” Suddenly you’re looking at your sentence “I always hurt those close to me,” and going, “wait — if you can get me close to the goblins, I can hurt them, because they’ll be close to me.” And then: oh shit. The rest of my sentences also shift in how I read them when I’ve changed one through realization.

And again, all of that to me is in Dream Askew too — except for the progression part. In Dream Askew, your weak moves will shift as your game goes on, because you’ll realize that “at the beginning of the session, I was reading all of these moves one particular way, but under this new circumstance, I’ve come to realize that the most powerful thing I can do in this moment is lose in some important way. I should take a hit.”

Dream Askew, when it produces those moments — you describe the kind of progression in Realis as melancholy, but Dream Askew hits melancholy better than any game I’ve ever played. And I love it for that, as someone who is kind of a sad sack.

Sam: Yeah. Austin, thanks so much.

Austin: Thank you so much for having me, Sam.

Sam: Thanks again to Austin for being here. Run, don’t walk to Kickstarter and back Realis today — this game is just so exciting to me. Thanks to everyone who supports Dice Exploder on Patreon.

As always, you can find me on Bluesky at @diceexploder.bsky.social 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, Sam. And thanks to you for listening. I’ll see you next time.