Think Like A Game Designer - Rodney Thompson — Designing Across Platforms, Crafting Worker Placement Games, Delving into RPGs, and Transitioning from Tabletop to Destiny (#26)

Episode Date: March 19, 2021

Rodney Thompson has been designing games professionally for over 15 years. He has worked on some of the industry’s most significant properties, including Star Wars, Dungeons & Dragons, Lords of Waterdeep, Tyrants of the Underdark, and Dark Sun. He’s currently a designer for the Destiny franchise at Bungie and develops his personal projects at Scratchpad Publishing. This episode has a detailed deep dive into building worker placement games and roleplaying games. If you love these games, you’ll love this episode. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit justingarydesign.substack.com/subscribe

Hello and welcome to Think Like a Game Designer. I'm your host, Justin Gary. In this podcast, I'll be having conversations with brilliant game designers from across the industry with a goal of finding universal principles that anyone can apply in their creative life. You could find episodes and more at think like a game designer.com. Welcome to Season 3 of Think Like a Game Designer. I'm very excited to continue to bring you more amazing guests, design lessons, and tips about the gaming industry. But I also want to share something. new and exciting that I'm launching this year. In addition to the podcast and the book for Think Like a Game Designer, I'm also launching a masterclass for those that really want to go deep into game design and work with an incredible group of people to take your projects to the next level. We've already had an incredible beta group go through the course last year. It includes video lessons for me, access to an exclusive Discord group, monthly masterminds where we can dive deep into the actual problems that you have with your own. own designs and really walk you through everything that it takes to go from initial idea,

whether you have a project you really want to work on, or you have no idea where to start, all the way through to getting your game published, whether that's launching it via Kickstarter, launching your own company, selling it to a publisher, or whatever you want to do to make your game design dreams come true. If you think you might be the right fit for this course, go to think like a game designer.com to learn more. In today's episode, I speak with Rodney Thompson. Rodney is an incredible designer who has worked on countless games, including RPGs like Dungeons and Dragons and the Star Wars role-playing game, as well as board games like Lords of Waterdeep and Tyrants of the Underdark, and huge digital properties like the Destiny franchise. Rodney's breadth of experience really comes through here. And for those of you that are really into some deep dive, nitty-gritty nuts and bolts conversation about game mechanics, playtesting processes, and the details of how.

how you make a lot of these deep genres like deck building games, worker placement games, and role-playing games tick. This is the episode for you. We start off with a deep dive in playtesting and prototyping online and the tools and tricks and processes that we both use to get the job done, not just in a world of quarantine, but in fact with processes that have just gotten better than they were even before when we were able to playtest in the same room. We talk about the value of not teaching your rules to your players. We talk about how a free fan site for the Star Wars RPG led Rodney to his career working on the biggest brands in gaming. We talk about how Rodney's most successful board game got designed during his off time while he was

working as a professional designer. We talk about the origins of Lords of Waterdeep as a game about musicians. We deep dive into the secrets of making great worker replacement games. And when I say deep dive, I mean we really get into the weeds. And in fact, I tip my hand a little bit during this episode because one of the reasons why I was excited to talk to Rodney. We've been friends for a long time and he's got tons of great insights and so I've wanted to talk to him for a while. But I'm working on my own worker placement game because I've become enamored with the genre and I really wanted to create something very cool that was much more flavor forward than a lot of the worker placement games out there.

And so Rodney, having designed Lords of Waterdeep, I wanted to pick his brain and use him to help figure out my own project and get the best insights from there. So we talk about that a little bit and then I actually got some really cool playtesting done based on a lot of the lessons I learned. here. So if you have any interest in that genre, it's really, really fascinating stuff. And I'm going to do another episode later where I talk about the design process for my new game. We also talk about deck building games and lessons learned from Tyrants of the Underdark, comparing that to the processes I did for Ascension. I really spend a lot of time picking apart that game and talking about the good and bad parts of it in different ways that graphic design and specific choices about game engines can really impact what's going on in your designs. We talk about role-playing game design

and how Rodney's work on board games inspires his take on modern RPG design. And it's a really fascinating thing to see how those genres cross-pollinate to each other and what modern RPGs need to accomplish for a lot of their audiences, as opposed to some of the older genres that are out there. We talk about working on huge digital products for companies like Bungy, where Rodney works, and how the design lessons that we talk about in this podcast, how the design lessons of tabletop design and RPG design transcend all mediums. It doesn't matter what kind of game you work on.

These lessons are universal, and Ronnie is living proof of that, having been able to take all these lessons and bring them over to work on some of the biggest franchises out there. And then we talk about the secret sauce for success when we are working with huge digital companies and how you build cultures of creativity and innovation that can work at scale. This has been a huge thing for me that I've focused a lot on over the years as my company has grown to ensure that we keep cultivating a attitude of innovation, keep allowing room for failure. and creativity and learning how to let go and as a manager or a CEO or a founder to make your definition of success change so that it's more about your reports and the people that you are training and teaching and managing that their success is what your success really is. And learning to let them fail and let them evolve are really critical tasks. And it's so many phenomenal lessons in here.

And like I said, this one gets crunchy. It's in the weeds. It's stuff that I love. If you listen to my last episode with John Zinzer, it was a lot more fun, high-level stories that were kind of accessible to anybody. And here, this is one where, you know, some parts of this are going to lose some of you out there where you don't, if this isn't of interest to you, but for some of you, this is gold. And if the parts of where we get in the weeds about a game genre you don't like,

turn you off, right? If you're not super into worker placement games, but you love RPGs or you're really interested in a digital game, don't give up on the episode because there are gems here for each one of you. Talking with Rodney is always super fun. I'm super glad to get to share this with you. That's more than enough preamble because there's plenty to get into. So without any further ado, I give you Rodney Thompson. Hello and welcome. I'm here with Rodney Thompson. Rodney, it is great to get to speak with you. It is excellent to speak with you as well. It's been too long. Yeah, yeah. We would always kind of see

each other and have some brief conversations when we're at conventions. And obviously, we're currently in a world of no convention. So this podcast has actually become like my main way to reconnect with friends and deep dive on some great conversations. So I'm really excited to talk with you about about a few different things. Sure. So, you know, I usually start these podcasts with kind of an origin story discussion. But you and I were talking before we started recording about, you know, the remote work life. And I actually think that would be a great place to start for this podcast. Because, you know, while eventually this pandemic may go away and while we're recording this, we'll know, I think that very many things about it and the way that we are now working remotely are going to stay.

And so maybe you could talk a little bit about the pros and cons and maybe some best practices of being a game designer now having to work remotely. Yeah. So my day job is I am a design lead at Bungy. I work on the Destiny franchise and currently work on Destiny 2. So, you know, during the day, I'm working on video games, right? First person shooters. And early on in the pandemic, like literally the first week of March, when we first started getting the inklings that it could be bad,

my company did a really good job of transitioning is to work from home almost immediately. They had a lot of good foresight to basically say, like, okay, we need to be prepared just in case it gets bad, and then they pulled the trigger in a hurry. So I've been working remotely for over six months. now. And I would say, you know, we, I mentioned it before we started recording. The big advantage for me is that I have reclaimed two hours every day that were previously dedicated to driving into my office, right? But the thing that I've lost is, you know, as soon as my company

pulled the trigger on working home, other companies in the area started following suit. Wizards of the Coast was only a week or two after that. And I still have several members of my gaming and playtest group that work at wizards GenCon, etc. So like a bunch of different local gaming companies that have offices pretty much quickly transitioned to work from home.

But that means that I lost my face-to-face game play testing essentially, right? Like my group is a lot of us have kids. Some of us have health issues. So we were just like, let's be extra cautious. So

I haven't had people in my house playing games since like the last week of February essentially. That's that's been that was that was really scary at first right because I was like well am I going to be able to to even work on tabletop games like so much of tabletop gaming is the social aspect of it right the like seeing your opponent or your collaborator if it's a cooperative game or whatever right seeing you know your friends and and just like having the the tabletop game as the excuse to be social with each other right. So I was really concerned at first, but in some ways, I might even say it has gotten a little easier to do some playtesting and to do some game development.

And what I mean by that is, A, I got more time, which is great. Like just extra two hours every day that I can spend with my family. That's two more hours every day I can spend working on side projects or whatever. But the other thing is a lot of the digital play spaces, right, like tabletop simulator or tabletopoe, that allow you to load in your own assets and everything. I have actually found that prototyping for me maybe goes faster because I am like, so one of the things I've been playtesting a lot during the last six months is a new tabletop role-playing game. But my tabletop RPGs tend to be pretty component heavy because I like to apply a lot of board game philosophy to the RPGs, right?

And so like we'll be playing the game. and in the middle of a two-hour session or whatever, I'll be like, okay, well, this mechanic isn't working. So let's change it to BX instead of Y. I will quickly update the digital file, load it into the gameplay space, and immediately all the assets in the digital tabletop space change to reflect the new development that we've created, right?

So in some ways, like the prototyping process is like being all digital, now that we've all gotten more familiar with, like, I primarily use tabletop simulator. Now we've gotten more familiar with it. It's actually, I would argue that in some cases it goes faster. Like what we've lost in the social dynamics, we may have gained in efficiency. So it's been interesting. I could not agree more.

I mean, I felt the exact same fear, right? So maybe I was a couple weeks behind you because we went. We were already working 50% remote as my company because it's just a lot of times. It's just more efficient, but like that tabletop experience was hard to think that we could replace it. But then by the end, by mid-March, we kind of gotten to that point of like, okay, this isn't, you know, we need to be serious about this. We can't, we can't be coming in. And by the end of March, we were, we had established that very same sort of process. It's actually, you know, where we use a customized a program called cocktail to turn our spreadsheets into the output file we need for tabletop simulator, imported the tabletop simulator, and have a new file ready to go immediately.

and we're able to iterate and, you know, update very, very quickly. We also have someone on our team who is, who is pretty good at doing some of the scripting. So actually, like, playing the games, like, even like, you know, working on deck building games or whatever, like the shuffle and redeal and redraw and set everything up now is like one button click instead of having to do all the things. And the number of hours that I've wasted, you know,

cutting and sleeving and pretty good prototypes is like, you know, all of that has become more efficient now. And I'm curious just to dig into a little bit more detail. So do you have customized programs that you use? Do you just do it? How do you, how do you, just so, you know, for people following along at home, you know, that what would they, how would they be able to implement this process? So I, um, as a part of running my own little side publishing company, I, uh, have forced myself to learn a bunch of the different software, right?

So for example, Adobe ind design is where we, where, like, I've traditionally done all my, like, layout work and everything. And, and usually I, I, like, hire a graphic designer to do the layouts, but I need to know the program in case I need to make a tweak or, an update or something like that. So what I've actually been doing is I've started doing a lot of my design work directly in indesign and like mocking up card formats and like I am not good at graphic design but I can like sort of vaguely mock up like okay this card is going to have this on it and it needs to have this information. And so like I start in indesign. Whereas like in in the past, in the physical world I would use like Excel or Word or something like that. I've started working

directly in Indesign. And, you know, this is, I don't care about editing mistakes during the basic play testing process. So when it gets time to be edited, I'll have to export to something else. But like, for now, I'm doing all my work in InDesign with, you know, vaguely correct layouts, right, because, you know, graphic presentation is a big part of it. And then I export from Indesign to just image files and then load those image files into tabletop simulator.

inside tabletop simulator I have I actually really like the Steam Workshop like how many utilities I've been able to find I'm I am not great at the scripting side of Tabletop Simulator but what I have been able to do is find things

like here's a thing that you can drop onto your table and what it'll do is you put a deck of cards here and a discard pile here and it's just got a one button thing where it recombines those files shuffles them and then you're ready to go from there. So I think, like, just being able to take advantage of the excellent scripting work that other people have done has been a huge, huge boon for me. And beyond that, we're using Discord for

our voice and video chat. Like, I try and still do video chat with my playtesters because I think like seeing faces and seeing reactions and, like, you know, you can know when someone is in the zone versus bored, right, when you can see their face, right? Right. If you can't see their face, you might hear silence, and silence could mean either one of those things, right? Like either that person is concentrating hard on their hand or they've clicked away and they're playing mine sweeper or something, right? So, like, it's being able to see faces, I think is still really important for me. Excuse me. Yeah. Yeah, 100%.

And this actually kind of changes into a little bit of a really interesting discussion, which is, you know, one of the key skills as the designers to be able to read your playtesters, right? to be able to understand what's going on because they will tell you things. And what they tell you is useful, but it is a tiny, tiny fraction of the real value that you get. And that watching what people do and how they react and whether they're leading in and excited or they're leading away or they're checking their phone or like those sorts of things gets you so much more information.

And so being able to get that video conference there is very valuable. And am I mistaken or I think you were the one that told me about this where you would had the policy of and that you would let people just play with a game before without rules to see what they did. Is that right? Was that you? No, not without rules, but one of

the things I do like to do is instead of me teaching anyone anything, like hand them even my like crappy prototype rules and say like, you go play this now and I will watch you play and not teach them a game, watch them learn

the game themselves. Yeah. Yeah, those are super valuable setups and painful. We're like, and believe it would be painful. Definitely painful. The instinct to jump in is so strong. My favorite, though, is one of my previous podcasts with Eric Lang, where he'll be actively hostile to the playtesters when they try to ask him questions. They're like, oh, wait, what does this mean? It's like, I don't know, man, that seems dumb to me.

What do you do? You know, like really, really funny. That seems very much like Eric. Oh, yeah. Yeah, no, he's he's he's he's he's he's he's the punk rock of a game design. So okay, so great, you know, to start here. And I'm glad that we did because a lot of people have entered this world where they think they can't do tabletop game design anymore. They think they're going to be, you know, they're blocked. And in fact, you could turn this crisis into an opportunity. And in fact, is one of the things that I've been I've been working on over the last year is actually building an online course and teaching exactly the step by step. for how to do this sort of stuff and put together, you know, the process. And it's very similar to your process, except I'm too lazy to learn the graphics programs

myself. So we built a custom program with a partner to, you know, basically take a spreadsheet and auto-import it into your layouts and set or export everything. Because I believe a bit, but there's no, there's no single right answer. The right answer is whatever is like easiest and fastest for you to be able to iterate and get through the loops and get the game on the table, whether it's a real table or a virtual table. Yeah, definitely agree. Okay. So, since we diverged from my usual starting point, I want to, I want to wind back the clock, and you work on such an incredible variety of games, you know, both in sort of

huge franchises and, you know, digital games, like you mentioned, working at bungee, working on role-playing games for Dungeons of Dragons, Star Wars, and, you know, all kinds of cool, cute brands. You have, in many ways, multiple dream jobs for people, I would guess, a majority of our audience. how did you get started? What was the process for you for getting into this industry and getting enrolled? Yeah, so it all actually goes back to the summer after I graduated from high school. So I, you know, in high school, I played RPGs. I was really big into the West End game, Star Wars game, right?

And this was, West End had collapsed at that point, and Wizard of the Coast had picked up the Star Wars license. And I was getting ready to go off to college. And I was like, well, I want to take all my notes. with me and all my homebrewed stuff, but I don't want to lug all these notebooks with me. So I actually created like a little website for myself that was just like, here's all of my homebrew material, right? So I go to college and this is, you know, 1998, so the nascent days of the internet. And people started finding the website, right? And like, you know, then I started producing more content for it. And then eventually that turned into like, oh, I actually run a

Star Wars RPG fan site. And I got to know a lot of the designers at Wizards of the Coast, just remotely nerthing. You know, like I say, I'm a freshman in college at this point. I start, you know, getting news scoops and things like that. But my site becomes like a news site for the Star Wars role-playing game. And so eventually, after about three years of running this site and then producing like daily content for both the West End Game Star Wars and the D-20 Star Wars game, I'm in a real bind because I was paying my way through college with a little help for my parents,

but for the most part I was having to work to pay for college. And like I'm looking at, this is like fall of 2000. I'm looking at it. I'm like, I don't think you can cover my tuition and my housing next year because I was going to college in Knoxville, Tennessee, but I'm from Chattanooga. So I was like living in the dorms. I'm like, I don't think I can pay for school. And so I was looking at having to drop out.

And then I get a call from Christopher Perkins, who is at the time the editor of the Star Wars role playing game at Wizards. And he's like, hey, we've got a freelance project coming up for you or coming up. And we'd like for you to try your hand at it because we see you're producing regular content. They contacted you out of the blue just right when you needed it? I had a good relationship with Wizards, just like a fan relationship with them. like I would do interviews with them or like you know like whenever there would be a big news

scoop I would like go and try and you know get more information out of them and so like we had a good fan relationship but we didn't have any kind of professional relationship and so they basically had a gap in their schedule and Chris and J.D. Weicker who was

the other designer that I was going to be working with we're basically like let's give this guy a shot because he's producing like at that point I was every day releasing a new piece of content, whether it was like a starship or a character or whatever, right? And so, yeah, they contacted me at just, like, could not have been a more fortuitous moment because I was like, oh, like, yes, I will take this job that will allow me to pay for my tuition next year, right, and be able to stay in school.

And so that was the Star Wars Heroes Guide, which was like a big, like, player supplement for the D20 Star Wars RPG. And that ended up being the first freelance job I took that kicked off my RPG freelance career. And so from there, once you've written a book for Wizards of the Coast, that opens a lot of doors for you. And this was 2001 timeframe. And so, like, early D20 boom. And so I went to Gen Con that year.

And I started talking to different publishers. I was like, hey, I've written a book for Wizards of the World the Coast and they're like oh well you know if you can write for them then maybe you can write for us and so that kicked off what would eventually become about a six year freelance RPG gig uh and then in 2006 i went to uh i got invited to come visit the wizards of the coast offices turns out that was actually a soft interview uh for someone to run the Star Wars role playing game at Wizards. And in February of 07, I packed up everything that I owned, left Knoxville, Tennessee,

and flew to Seattle and have been living in Seattle ever since. I started working at Wizards, started working on the Star Wars RPG, and yeah, that's what kicked it all off. That's fantastic. And I love sharing these stories. You know, like everybody's story is unique, but the universal principles here are just,

I hear it over and over and over again. You started just doing something because you loved it, and you built something because you wanted to see it exist, right? You loved Star Wars RPG. You built a site to have your own content on there. Then you put it out there. People started reacting to it, and you just started creating. And you created for multiple years without any financial reward. It was just a passion that you had.

You started doing the work for free that you loved to do. And that got you attention. And then when the opportunity presented itself to then be able to do that work for pay, of course you jumped at that chance. You also built, sorry, the other thing there, I know,

I just wanted to underline is like, you also built relationships during that time, right? You were a good person to work with. When you were talking, you know, there are plenty of fans that I,

you know, connect with that some of them are not the people you want to be talking to regularly, right? The other ones are like, they're super friendly and interested and adding value to the community and you're thrilled to give them your time and you're thrilled to build relationships with them.

And so then you built those relationships that turned into work. You did a good job on that work. And then all of a sudden, now you're in the industry now. It's much easier to roll things forward and get a job and do the thing. So for everybody out there, right, this is a process that's started in high school, so I don't care where you are and what's going on. And it's easier than ever now to be able to put work out there, do the things, get noticed, get things connected. And so it's just a great,

it's a great story and just a, you know, almost as close to a prototypical version of, of getting in the game industry as I can think of. So that's, that's fantastic. Yeah. I would say also like, you know, looking across other big milestones in my career, almost all of them have been cases where I was just like, I'm just going to do this thing, right? Where nobody asked me to do it. And I just sort of was like, like board games, right?

Like the first board game I really worked on was Lords of Waterdeep, right? And it was something that me and Peter Lee just started working on in our free time. Like there was no board game on the schedule that we were working on. We were not tasked by management to work on boards of water deep. It was just something that, like, he and I got a wild hair. And, like, at lunch or after work or, you know, early in the morning before everybody got in, we would spend an hour working on it. And then eventually it turned into, even today, probably still my most successful board game.

Right. So, like, you know, it was, it was not drawn out of me by someone else or by someone asking me to do it. It was, you know, me and Pete just decided to do it one day. Yeah. This is something you're passionate about and excited about. It's one of the things that I found, too, that, you know, look, making games is a lot of work. Making great games is a huge amount of work. And if you're not excited about it independently, you're most likely you're just going to stop.

You're not going to finish. You're not going to do the extra work of making that next iteration of the prototype, dealing with difficult feedback, trying to iterate and build new things. And so having something that you're passionate about, not being worried so much about, is this going to be the thing the market wants, but building a thing that you're, you know, know you want to see and then after that you'll start to test it and see what people like and what people don't and and and so that's it's a great insight um so i was going to talk about role playing games but now that you brought up lores of water deep i think i'm gonna we'll come back we'll

circle back the role thing is because i am uh i am very personally interested in this for multiple reasons one i think you did a phenomenal job with lords of water deep um i've it's i've i've i've recently done a kind of survey and played a huge variety of worker placement games. And one of the things that really struck me is that most of them have the most boring flavor of all time. Like I, from my perspective, of course, other people love it. You know, it's like you're farming, you're building a village, you're doing a thing. Right.

And I come across Lord's Water. It's like, awesome. I'm like, you know, I've got heroes and adventurers and I've got like a cool, you know, I'm in the Dungeons' World where I actually like enjoy the story. And so as far as I know, it's like the only one that even comes close in that space for worker budget games. Maybe I missed some, but...

I think you could argue something like Yado is the samurai game that is kind of similar in a lot of ways. But yeah, it's... I think what you're hitting on there is that the sort of worker placement tactical or strategy type game genre tends to have like

more, I don't say passive, but like less conflict-oriented themes in general. Because like in a lot of ways, worker placement is like a conflict of opportunity and not a conflict, like a direct conflict. And so I think that there's a lot of people that sort of look at that. They're like, okay, well, this is not a mechanic that is suited to players budding heads with each other thematically or like mechanically. So therefore it doesn't thematically appropriate either. and then we sort of looked at the opportunity of like, well, if you are a secretive lord of water deep

and you're sending agents out to do all these things in secret and everything, in a lot of ways, like, yeah, you are not engaging in direct conflict, but your pawns are, right? Like, this is totally a thing in fantasy fiction, right? That, like, the evil overlord doesn't get his hands dirty, but the minions do, right? And so, like, we'd sort of pull back and said,

like, no, no, no, you're not your pawns, you are someone who is controlling a group of pawns, essentially. And that sort of made it easier to adapt to a more conflict-oriented theme. Right. And so what, it's funny to me, because when I think about the mechanics of it, you know, it is this, they are often very direct conflict over limited resources is sort of what you're doing in a worker place for game. And so it's like, you know, it doesn't make sense to me.

why just because you guys, you know, started farming, I can't farm now or whatever, but, but, you know, the manipulation makes a lot of sense. So was that, was that the starting point for you guys? What made you decide that, that on your own, you're going to start developing this game? What was the, what was the inspiration? So it actually started, um, largely with two independent ideas. So like I said, you know, Peter and I just sort of did this out of nowhere originally. and I had just played a lot of Agricola, and I was really into Agricola. I really liked it, but man, like,

the setup time was just too high, and, like, the complexity level was too high for me to get on the table with my gaming group at home a whole lot. So I needed it. I was like, I really wish I could get, like, this kind of worker placement experience in a, like with a more streamlined setup. And so I was really Jonesen to create a worker placement game.

And then Pete had had had, had this idea independently. It was actually for a music game or what you're trying to do is like you're a band manager and you're trying to put together a band and like go play gigs, right? And so like, oh, like, you know, this is a gig at a coffee house. So I need like a bass player and a guitar player and a saxophone player or whatever, right? So he and I had kind of like had these two ideas. And I was like, you know, I feel like we could like fit these together somehow. Right. And we kind of talked about a little bit. And then I was on a train headed from Seattle to Chicago because I don't like to fly and we would do a game train trips to Jen Con, right, where we'd basically like pile into a train and like four of us would do nothing but play board games and role playing games for two days as we went across country. And so on that trip, I was like, you know, I feel like Pete and I have got something here. And so I like hammered out like the very first most basic version of the game. on that trip and I got back and I was like Pete what do you think about this?

And he looked at it and he's like, I think I know the math behind this game. And he slammed it in. And the very first version was actually like a completely different theme, but it was a different setting and everything. And we looked at it and we were like, you know, I think there's a D&D game here. Like we originally talked about it as like, you know, it's a music game or whatever. I was like, I think there's a D&D game here. And a lot of it just boiled down to the difference between putting together a band. and putting together an adventuring party,

it's not that different, right? Like everyone has a role to play, and they come with different, you know, backgrounds and everything. And so, like, it was just, it was one of those serendipitous moments where we had the mechanics, they had loose themes

that could be converted over pretty easily, and then once we put together that first prototype and played it, and, like, our very, very first prototype was good. And, like, we had fun with it. from there it was like okay we should actually make sure this is a real thing like we we should put some effort into this and and turn into something real and luckily we had uh you know the the resources at wizards to like dig into forgotten realms lore like we had a whole a library we could go into

and pull lore out of right and so it just ended up being like i say it was serendipitous it was like lords of water deep led a charmed life from the very beginning in a lot of ways because everything just sort of fell into place. Sure. Yeah, it's really interesting. I'm now just envisioning the Lords of Rock alternative universe that this could have been. That's pretty cool. So when you are building a worker placement game, what kinds of things for those out there that are thinking about this genre of game?

What types of considerations sort of drive the best of this game? And I will want to sort of pick out some of the specific choices that you guys made with Lords of Waterdeep. But what do you think makes for a great worker placement game? And how do you think about building those structures and that tension? Yeah, I think the key tension you want to craft with a worker placement game is a, like, it's a very narrow tightrope to walk, right? but like you want the player to feel a tension between the, you know, missed opportunities or competition over opportunities versus also feeling like you have plenty of real choices. And so a lot of the time what you're doing is looking at like, okay, can we create situations where players have a first choice and a second choice and a third choice and then a consolation prize or, you know, whatever the, the number of choices actually is, right?

And then as we develop, or sorry, as the game develops over time, we want to expand the possibility space, but maintain that pressure, right? And so, you know, a lot of games do this by essentially, like, you get more actions as the game goes on. And so we were just like, yeah, that's, like, that's the key, right? Like, at a certain point, we have to make sure

that the same kind of pressure exists on your choices, but that there is a broader possibility space, right? Lords of Waterdeep is a reverse funnel in a lot of ways. It starts out very narrow in that, like, you only have so many actions. They're all very basic. By the time you get to the end of the first round, almost every space is probably filled, but it hasn't taken that long, right?

Like round one goes real fast. Then as the game goes on, you're adding more action spaces to the game, so the possibility space is widening, right? Like, I have more choices, I have more tactical moves to consider on a round-by-round basis. But eventually, you hit that point where we add more player actions into the game. And so now, even though the possibility space is getting wider, the tension continues to ramp up, right? And so, like, now as a player, what you're doing is you're looking at these new possibilities, these new buildings that have come out, these new action spaces. and it's adding to the decision tree that you're making

or that you're going down when you're figuring out what's my first choice, what's my second choice, what's my third choice, right? And then as you go further and further into the game, other players are also having, they also have more complex decisions to make so that by the time you reach round eight, you're at the end of the game,

like the start of round eight, there are a huge number of possibilities for you. And those decision trees have gotten very, very complex. but because you have eased into it over the course of many rounds, you never feel like you're being hit over the head with super complex because like you get to round eight, you know what you need to do to finish out the game. Like I got to finish this quest or I got to,

you know, do this thing. Like you know what you need to do. So it's not so many options that you're paralyzed, but it is enough options that you have to really consider like, okay, my first action is going to be X. my second action could be one of five other things or whatever that depend on what other actions happen between my turn and the next turn that comes around.

So like the core tension, I think, of worker placement being opportunity costs versus feeling like I have the freedom to make interesting tactical decisions. Like that's that's the core of what makes like a worker placement game work. And honestly, like, it is probably the hardest part of designing one in a lot of ways because it's easy to create opportunity costs and competition of resources. It's really hard to maintain that and also give players the feeling that they have a lot of control and freedom because like those two things are in a lot of ways in direct opposition to each other. Yeah, 100%. I was such a great, a great breakdown. I want to pick up on a couple of points. I think identifying the core tension there of that missed opportunity

and having these sort of difficult choices to make. The way, so full disclosure, I am now working on a Worker Placement game. It's part of the reason I was super excited to talk to, and it is very theme-heavy. And so maybe at some point, if you want to take a look at it, we'll have a game session. But the thing that I started from, because my background primarily is in card game design

and those are things, is it very much feels like drafting, right? Like card drafting is. It is exactly that process. Instead, you're drafting locations. It's a sort of very public draft process. And that tension around drafting is very similar, where it's, all right, I have a lot, I have a variety of choices. And every one choice I make excludes necessarily the other ones I could be making and gives

other people the opportunity to take those things. And that even though my choices maybe, you know, grow over time, the choices I made previously create my own filter, right? So I know, you know, for a simplistic example, if I'm drafting a magic deck and I've taken only Red and Greed card so far, even though I now have a new pack of cards that has, you know, 15 cards in it, I can exclude three-fifths of them because there's no way I'm going to be picking the, not going to go into my deck. And so similarly, in a work of place with game, it's like, okay, I've gone down this path or I already have these resources, so I don't need those anymore. I need this specific type of thing is kind of the way

you get that increased total choice and total complexity, but give people by the time they get into the midgame, to the late game, they have a heuristic for being able to exclude and make easier decisions as they go forward. Yeah, it's interesting. You mentioned the drafting parallel because when we were working on this game, I was, we were at Wizard of the Coast, and like, even though Pete and I were on the D&D brand, we had a lot of interactions with the Magic team. And in fact, as Lords of Water heat developed more, we pulled.

in a lot of developers from the magic team to work on it. So, like, you know, I do want to sort of point out one thing, which is, like, while Pete and I can take a lot of credit for being, like, the people who started Lords of Water Deep, it would not be nearly as good as it was without the input of a whole bunch of other designers. So, like, there's that. But the reason I bring that up is because I had not heard the term worker placement when I was designed this game.

Because internally at Wizards, these kinds of games were referred to as, actually. action drafting games. Yeah, right. Yeah, that makes sense. So, like, the first time I was showing the game to somebody outside of Wizards, I was like, so Lords of Waterdeep is an action drafting game. We're blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And they were like, it's a what now?

Yeah. Action draft is just a much better term for that than work replacement. Work replacement, obviously, is thematic for the original style of games. Right, exactly. So, yeah, that's exactly how we think about it internally over here. And that helped me to. sort of come in terms of because I've done tons of games that you draft. I've made a game called dungeon draft where that's all you do.

And so I know how to build tension around drafting. And that's a lot of what's sort of been driving my decision making here. And it's a more visceral form of draft. Like the traditional drafts where your cards are hidden is what I call a cold resource conflict. Right? Because we are fighting over the same resources, but you don't know when I take something specifically from you because the cards are hidden. in a worker placement game or an action drafting game where it's face up,

it's a hot resource contention where you're like, okay, when I put something here where I know that's what you want and I place something to take that space away from you, it creates a far more emotional response than a cold resource ship. Yeah, absolutely. Which is, again, why I find it somewhat ironic to me that these games are traditionally themed as so low conflict because I really do feel that there is a very direct conflict happening,

even though I'm not attacking you, the opportunity cost removal, you know, when I take spaces away from you and take away the thing you want, I feel that tension can be really wrapped up with the right flavor. Yeah, strongly agree. You know, I would guess, and I have not applied a lot of brain cells to this, but I would guess a lot of it is a result of the cultural origins of worker placement games, tending to come out of more European designers than American designers. I mean, like, I don't want to oversimplify things into like Ameritrash versus Euro games or whatever.

But I think that sort of culturally, we are more accustomed to, or we're more comfortable with conflict-based themes than maybe more European designers are. That may be an oversimplification. But that's my guess is that it is, it's just, you know, board games are a relatively young hobby or relatively young not hobby necessarily but relatively young modern board games are a relatively young industry right like you might look at like catan in the 90s as like the jumping off point for the modern board game industry so a lot of it could just be that the the design and the culture has not had the time to mature and cross-pollinate that's something like

you know movies for example have that have that have closer to a century of time. I don't know. Random guess. That's interesting. Yeah, it's an interesting. That's an interesting theory. I think, you know, yeah, I think a lot of it there, it does come down to sort of

tasted preference. And, yeah, the more that the, you know, the industry sort of, you know, crosses over and learns from what came before and, and merges genres. And the more you're going to see, I think, a lot of a lot of this, the bad thing. And again, that's sort of what drew me to the space is like, I love drafting. And I, the, you know, this worker placement as action drafting. I think is fascinating. And having played tons of the games,

I felt a lack of this, you know, whatever. I like the combat themes. I like being able to have some things that are directly there. And so anyway, that's what I'm building. Yeah. So I want to talk about a couple of the other choices that I thought were very interesting

in lowers of water deep and think through those. So one thing, you know, you have a process where midway through the game, everybody gets an extra worker, agent to place. And you don't, as I recall, I don't think there's a way for you to get additional agents

above and beyond the other players throughout play. That's correct. Yeah. And so this is one of those things where it's a huge development challenge. And I'm wondering if that was something it was ever considered. Right. If you give in a game where, you know, each action is precious.

Being able to get more actions and other people can become a potentially huge turning point, but it's also can be a fun thing to fight for. Other games solve this problem in different ways by creating a sort of tax on additional workers or increased costs for additional workers. I'm curious what went into that thinking or was it always that way where you just had, look, we're just going to give everybody an extra worker halfway through the game. It was that way from pretty early on. I won't say from the moment go, but pretty early on it was that way.

And you got to remember this game, we were designed this game about 10 years ago at this point. So at the time, some of that worker, or like additional worker tech that you're talking about, like didn't exist yet, right? And in the time we were designing this, we were looking at it and saying, like, you know, if I'm playing a game like Agricola, which was a big inspiration for us, right? If I'm playing Agricola, the expanding your family is a non-choice, right? Like, you just have to do it. Right. Like there were at the time, I think, very few winning strategies.

that didn't just jam on extra actions because they're so impactful. And one of the things we wanted to do with Lords of Waterdeep was because we were aiming at a, let's say, more introductory game or a game that is going to be a gateway game for people into the genre of worker placement, we wanted to try and sand away some of the places where you could make sort of critical mistakes like not pursuing extra actions. We wanted to basically make it, like, in some ways we wanted to pull the floor up. Like, we still wanted to reward, like, cleverness and good play with, like, high scores.

But, you know, I still, to this day, really don't like it when I'm three turns into a 10-turned game and realize I've already lost. Oh, yes. Yeah, and it's a huge issue with these types of games in particular, where it's like, it's a resource, you know, exponential resource growth. And it's like, oh, I'm obviously out of this. Yeah, that's a great, it's a great lesson. Yeah, and so like we were just looking at it and saying like, you know, competition over actions, like it could be really interesting. But I think we have enough other interesting competition in the game that this is a place where we can just use the good parts of additional actions in that it maintains tension on the possibility space of your turn. We can keep that, but take away an opportunity for players, especially players who are,

might be new to the genre or even just new to the game, a place where they could make a critical mistake that is going to cost them the game before we're even halfway through, right? And so, like, that was the impetus behind the decision. It was pretty early. And there was never really a moment where we considered recanting on that and making you compete over expanding your actions. But to get a little bit of that excitement of the game,

we did inject a few exceptional mechanics. For example, there's a quest that is recruit a lieutenant. When you recruit the lieutenant, you get an extra action for the rest of the game. But we didn't want that to be a thing that was necessarily in by default. So that card may never come up, right? We also wanted to make sure, like, that was one of the hardest ones to balance. We didn't want this to be a thing that every player was having to consider. So we were like, okay, if it's a quest, we'll do one person is going to take it.

We've got to make sure that the cost going into it is consummate with the reward coming out of it. And then we did things like the embassy where you basically get the ambassador token, which is a one-turn extra action, but we know the cost going into that. So we did inject a little bit of that fighting over actions into the game, but it wasn't something we needed to be core to the game because we were trying to make it so that as a more gateway-oriented game, this was like competition over actions, which can have deep, deep impact on the outcome of the game. We just sort of said like that, we don't think that needs to be an element here. There's enough competition elsewhere. Yeah, that's great. And then, you know, and again, for whether the people that are listening care specifically

about, you know, this style of game or that worker placement or action draft or anything, these principles of, you know, being able to raise the floor of the experience, being able to remove decisions where it's obvious once you know the game that if you don't make, make this decision you're going to lose, right? Like being able to as much as possible take away the non, what are really the non choices and give people more of the, of the sort of fun variety. Of course, play skill mattering and people being,

you know, being able to do better or worse is a key part of games, but getting you into that position, especially for games to take a longer time, removing those opportunities for people to just go completely off the rails at the beginning is a great thing to be thinking about, no matter what kind of game you're working on. And a lot of it comes down to just knowing your audience, right?

Like, we knew that our audience was going to be probably people who were into D&D had maybe never played a Euro-style strategy game before, maybe never played a board game before, right? So, like, we knew our audience was going to be less entrenched in general in, like, traditional worker placement games than if I was designing for, say, myself or for my friends, or if I was going to design, like, a worker placement game, of my own right now, I would probably design something

that was more strategic and had more, had higher highs and lower lows because I could expect that my audience is familiar enough with the genre of game that they would be able to make those decisions, recognize the challenges

and the pitfalls early on, versus like, you know, knowing Lords of Wadip was going to be something that had a less experienced audience. I do think in the end, though, we ended up with a game that is very new player-friendly or very friendly to people new to the Euro game type genres, while still being engaging enough that if you are a deeply invested player,

you don't get bored in the game, right? You don't get it. It doesn't drag for you. There's enough decisions to be made. It's just we picked that one decision, and we said we don't need that decision in our game. Great. So I have two more questions about Lords of Waterdeep specifically,

And then we'll go to some other topics because... Yeah. But I'm just fascinated. So the two decisions I thought were very interesting in the game. One, you know, it's relatively common, as you sort of mentioned, that there's, you know, the number of actions available, spaces available, placements available, increases over the course of play. And the way that you do that is really interesting because it's actually player selection and choices where they build the new locations to create that and expand that space. That was a really interesting space.

I don't think there was a game that really did that before you guys, if I'm not mistaken. And I'm curious what we went into that. There's a little bit of that in Kales, although I hadn't played Kales before we played Lord of Waterty. It was actually interesting. We were essentially at the end of the design process for Lords of Waterty by the time I played Kailis for the first time.

And I was like, oh, I guess great minds think alike or something. But yeah, so there's a little bit of that. I think it was just one of those deals where, you know, a lot of times when I'm starting to develop a new game, what I'm looking at is I'm asking high level questions about like what kinds of strategies do we want players to pursue. And with Lords of Waterdeep, you know, the quest mechanic is dominant, right? Like it is, like there are sub-straties inside the quest, but it is a dominant strategy. But I always like to look for an outlier strategy or like, is there something that we can do that a player who is really experienced or a player who is like me as a player, I will often choose strategies that are quirky or interesting just to see if they work. And I lose a lot of board games because of this. Let's be clear. Like, that is often a terrible idea.

But I like creative sort of strategies, right? And so I'm always looking for an opportunity to inject like an alternative or a different long-term strategy into the game. And when we were doing the first passes on the game, I realized it was like, you know, the quest mechanic is going to be dominant. The only other real strong mechanics that we have in the game are, you know, the addition of new spaces. Because like we had realized early on that variety in what spaces are in the game is going to create huge replay value. So I was like, okay, like, you know, the addition of spaces the game is one, and then playing intrigue cards is another one, right? And latching on to like, okay, a building strategy that can be successful

is actually really good for the game. One, because it gives you sort of an alternative strategy that you can consider outside or even a secondary strategy, outside of the quest mechanic, which is dominant. But the other side of it is by introducing these new spaces, to the game, you are making the next round or the rest of this round more interesting for

every other player at the table. I think that's really a sweet spot that's super hard to hit, admittedly, right? Yeah, yeah. You have a lot that was really, you know, giving points to people for doing, giving them a bonus whenever anybody else plays, because normally making a decision that opens up possibilities for other people is

very bad for you. Exactly. I saw you had to kind of contort yourself a bit to kind of make that incentivized enough, and I thought it worked really well, but was not not an obvious solution. Yeah, and like, it's one of those deals where like, when you hit on something where it's like, this is a valid strategy for you and it makes the game better for everybody else, like, that is the true definition of win-win and game design.

Yeah, yeah, that's fantastic. Okay, and then the last thing I wanted to talk about, which is something that I've actually been resting with with my own design, is like when you're building out this, the quest mechanic, which is, as you mentioned, sort of the heart of the game and scoring system and the main thing that drives the action. And figuring out how to sort of apportion the many variety of resource costs that those things all take and building that structure feels pretty intimidating.

It's like, all right, you have five different resources, and each one could be doled out in any given different percentages. It sounded like that was kind of established very early on, now actually thinking about it as a gig, you know, as a musicians forming a band, it actually makes a lot more sense to me. It's funny. but what was the logic that went into that kind of decision tree? How did you balance it out?

You have, you know, some of the workers or the resources were more rare. They're tiered in how hard they are to get. You know, that feels like a pretty complicated mathematical equation. And how did you guys approach that? It's actually way simpler than it probably seems at first. And I have to give 100% credit for this to Pete. Peter Lee built all the math behind the. game, like, I understand it. I know how it works, and I've used the method in my other games,

but, like, he got it from moment one. And in fact, it was him figuring out, oh, here's how the math behind our game is going to work that took this from, like, a bunch of random words I had in a word file to, like, oh, this is a game we can play. But it really boils down to the value of an action. And we basically said, like, okay, we are going to say that taking an action is going to have an average or base value of, I think it was four points. I can't remember exactly what it was. Four points, right? And so then we looked at our basic spaces and we're saying like, okay, well, if this

gives you two fighters, then that implies that a fighter is worth two points because you're getting four points out of your action. And so, like, we can basically look at our basic resources and say, like, taking, like, the base action is just like, this will get me four points. Therefore, like, you know, each of this resource is worth X points, right? And so that's why fighters and rogues are worth two points a piece, Wizards and Clerics are four points a piece, and gold is one point apiece, right?

So that's our base. We looked at that from the perspective of like, okay, part of it was just thematic, right? Like, yeah, like fighters and rog should be more common than Wizards and clerics or whatever. But then part of it was just like we wanted different resource costs, right? Then once we had that, a lot of the time, it was like whenever we'd build a quest or a building or an interest,

card, a lot of it was starting from that perspective of like, okay, if an action is worth four points, right, it's going to take me, like a building, here's a good example, right? It's going to take me an action just to buy this, right? So like, it's got to be worth at least four points to me, right? But it's also going to take gold to buy this. So that's going to tell me how many other, how many other points it should be worth to me, right? And then we sort of would base it around like a, let's say on average, any given building is purchased on round four, which, you know, obviously some will be purchased before so you get more value out of it. Some will be purchased after so you get less value out of it.

And so we're saying like, okay, like, you know, the action to purchase it plus the gold cost needs to output to the player who purchases it that, like an average of about that much value, right? And we would establish that value based on like the reward that you get when someone else takes the action, right? But we can also establish it on like, but what if you're. I'm the one taking the action, so that was sort of a knob we can turn. And so, like, that's the super precise math behind any given quest or any given building or

card or whatever, right? But then the modifier to that is, like, hey, like, if we, if we had published exactly that, it would have been the, it would have been a game that plays itself that, like, there are no interesting decisions. There's no creative decisions to make there because, like, any choice is equally valid at that point. So then once we had that established, we started. looking at things like, okay, which of these quests are more likely to be completed late

in the game versus early in the game? Which of these quests are more likely to be blocked by someone else? And so whenever we would encounter one of those things like, hey, this quest is going to take you six actions just to get the resources that you need to complete it, right? So we got to take all that stuff into account, but then we also have to take into account things like being blocked by a mandatory quest or being blocked by someone else grabbing the resources that you need to do it. Or if it was like a plot quest that was going to have an ongoing effect, like it might be late in the game by the time you get it. And so we had modifiers to our base formula that would sort of take those things into account

and inflate or deflate the point values based on those factors as well. So like everything basically gets tilted off kilter. And then there was a third pass we did on top of that that was like, hey, what is awesome? And what is super fun? And we want to see it happen in the game a lot, right? And so we'd be like, well, this quest here, you know, the Magister's Orb, right?

Like it lets you basically take actions that other people have already taken. And that opens up a huge possibility space. It's fun. So like maybe we tune down the requirements on it so that it's a quest that you want to see get into the game, right? Or buildings that were like, this building just makes the game more interesting. So we're going to tune it up and make it so that it is actually better than balanced. And in a lot of ways, that's recognizing those things that are a better value than you think they are

is the core of what like the core of the skill portion of Lords of Waterdeep, right? Right. And, you know, everything up to that point, like, it's just a math formula, right? But then the design that gets applied to it is looking at like practical situations, practical outcomes, and then just saying like what's fun, what do we want to be more rare? What do we want to be hard to pull off, but really exciting when you do? Right. So like that would be a case where like, okay, this is going to, this is going to be hard to fulfill. So we're going to crank up the reward for it so that like if you can actually pull it off, you get something really exciting.

right so yeah it it all starts with with one action is worth four points and then it eventually turns into like something much more complicated yeah no that's great so it's you know and again we're getting into the weeds but that's part of the whole point of this podcast which i love uh because i geek out about this stuff but but the funny just because here you think about it again i just you know translate into other projects that i'll work on and and it's very similar right for any given casting cost or for given you know run cost at ascension There's a certain amount of things, the resources I'm willing to give out or certain amount of people are willing to give out. But then, you know, there's things that are going to be a little bit on the fuzzier side where they require you to jump through some more hoops. So maybe they're, you know, they have a trigger that you have to play another card of the same type or they're asking something else of you. And so you want to, when there are more hoops for the player to jump through, you want to give them more rewards. And you want to, what I say is like, when in doubt push the fun, right? With the mechanics that are going to be more fun and more, like,

more exciting, make those better. You know, like, just make those there. And also highlighting the principle that the goal is not for everything to be equal. And in fact, when you make creating equal, it is the most boring game of all time because you don't have that joy of discovery and your decisions don't really matter that much. And so you actually do want a range of power levels where the case is that ideally it's more about the situational awareness and the, you know, the ability to sort of push or lock or jump through these hoops or go down this certain road

that's going to give you these disproportionate rewards and disproportionate outputs that creates those exciting moments and the things where you're really, really hoping to get somewhere and maybe somebody stops you and maybe you get there and you want to play again, just have that experience again or try and do it better next time. So it's a great general principle for trying to develop your game and great to hear the specifics behind this one.

Yeah, the other thing that we did that really helped with the quests specifically was we built out a color pie for our game. game. And I'm sure a lot of your listeners are familiar with the concept of color pie from magic, but essentially we said, like, hey, you know, fighters and warfare quests are going to be about having lots of fighters. And rogues and skilleder requests are going to be about money and things like that. And so that ended up giving us a lot of mechanical diversity that just the pure math behind the game would have missed out on. Right. So I think it's also like when you're talking about like a game with multiple resources, saying like, okay, these kinds of mechanics are the domain

of this resource is a really strong way to build texture into something that would otherwise be sort of like homogenized by the math. Yeah. Yeah, I think that's great. I think that color pie and building sort of cycles and building different ways of things lean makes part of why this feel so, you know, impossible to think about how you build this is because most people just see that surface level and that flavor and that story of like, oh, okay, cool, this is what rogues do, this is what wizards do. Whereas it does a great job of just making it feel right, regardless of what's going on behind the scenes or under the hood.

Yeah. Okay. That was a great extended discussion on a topic of particular interest to me. And I just, I think that you've done, you know, yeah, I think you just did a phenomenal job with the game. Overall, I think it advanced. the genre and made it more accessible to a lot more people. And so that's just, you know, kudos for that design overall.

And thank you. I want to jump to one more thing where I largely just want to give you kudos for it. And then I've got to go back to talk about RPGs because I have a but Tyrants of the Underdark. Oh, I knew you were going to bring that up. As a, you know, someone who has been building, making deck building games for a decade plus, Tyrants of the Under Dark is a really fascinating project that did a lot of things really right. And, you know, there's some really cool innovations in there that I had not seen before.

And, you know, we just finished our Ascension Tactics Kickstarter and building a kind of deck-building, you know, tactical board game. You know, we kind of were originally going to be like, oh, we're like the first ones to do this. And it's like, well, no, we're not really. But, you know, we have a variety of different types. But you guys are, the Tyrus in the Dark, I think was the first one I saw that really integrated tactical control of a board with a deck building game. And, you know, there are several other really cool things that went on with it. But maybe talk a little bit about that project. Yeah.

Man, Tyres and the Dark is one of those games that, like, it stirs strong feelings in me. because I feel like it is one of the better games that I've worked on. Like I think that, so it was me and Peter Lee and Andrew Veen were the three designers. Andrew was a designer on Magic for a while. He actually worked with me at Bungy now. And we designed this game and it was one of those that sort of came out of, you know, I want to do X and someone else wants to do Y. And for me, it was like, I want to build a strategy game.

Like, Lords of Waterdeep is very tactical in a lot of ways. I want to build something more strategic where you pick a long-term strategy on your own. And Peter at the time was like, you know, I really want to do a deck-building game, but I want to do a deck-building game where deck-building isn't the point. It is just the engine, and you need to build the engine so that you can drive your car on the road. And the road is something else, or some other kind of game. And so, like, that was the sort of impetus behind the creation of tyrant or the standard arc. and like I am so proud of how the design of that game turned out.

It was a it was a much more difficult project like a much tougher nut to crack than Lords of Watery, which was blessed from the very beginning. But tyrants took a while and like the first versions of tyrants were nothing like what actually ended up shipping, right? But eventually like we figured out like, oh, it's a territory control game. and here are the different strategies. And Andrew Vien was critical in helping us develop the strategies. Like, you know, coming from magic, he had a deep knowledge of, like, the practical impact of any different strategic choice we were making, right? Yep.

And the problem with tyrants is that, well, A, we basically did the design turner of the game, and then I got hired by Bungee and left Wizards of the Coast. So I did not get to work on it all the way to completion, like we did with Lord's Waterty. But the other side of it is that it was a Wizards of the Coast design, but was manufactured by a different company. And as a result of like that sort of disconnect of like, okay, we had to hand it off to somebody else. The design team didn't get to be as involved in the production site. Like on Lords of Waterdeep,

I was working with, or me and Pete were both working with, you know, producers and art directors and production teams, like literally up to the very last minute. Like when we hit the print button, like, you know, we had been involved up at the end. With a handoff to another company,

you lose out on some of that close connection. And so like a lot of the decisions around like the graphic design and the board were made by people with like a different vision for the game. Right. I think what ended up happening with tyrants was because of that sort of handoff it didn't have the close shepherding that a lot of other games get

and as like you know I actually think the game turned out great and like what I hear all the time from people is you know what? This is a game that I was not interested in until someone forced me to play it and then I played it and I love it right? I think a lot of it just boils down to

the game was pretty expensive it was, you know, I won't say expensive. The game was a higher cost than other things in that genre. Let's put it that way. Because like a lot of deck building games, it's a gazillion cards, right? But like having plastic pieces and everything, like really, it cranks up the, you know, production costs and everything. I think a combination of like that plus the theme being, like, Lores and Waterdeep being very sort of, you know, intrigue and backstabbing themed is one thing. In the Tynast, the Underdark is sort of like, oh, you're all evil.

And I think evil is a tough theme to sell. This is not something I would blame on, like, the production. Like, we built this game as like, oh, no, you are drow from the very beginning. You're all bad guys to start. Now go fight against each other. Yeah, and that was totally a design decision that we made. And I think in hindsight, with a different theme and, yeah, with a different theme, and without having the sort of disconnect of a handoff between two,

different companies. I think more people end up trying the game than ended up playing it in the wild. But, you know, like every day I get a message on board game, not every day. But like, frequently I get a message on board game from someone that's like, hey, you know, I gave this game a pass when it came out, but I played at a buddy's house this weekend. And I really loved it. You guys killed it. Right. And I feel like it's one of those games that like I am so proud of how it turned out, but just not enough people have gotten to play it. Yeah, I think that there is, you know, and I certainly do recommend that people listening, do give it a shot.

I think it's a little bit on the higher end of complexity for deck building games for several the ones, but there's tons to dig into, and I really enjoyed, obviously having all the tactical board controls, you know, adds so much to it. There were two things that I loved about the design in particular that were just very clever, Like one, that you build the deck that you're playing with before each, the center deck, rather, from, you know, permutations, which increases replayability dramatically. You know, every time you play different center decks, the whole game is different, which, you know, traditionally what we do with expansions and ascension, you kind of already have pre-built there. And the combination permutations is fantastic. We actually called it the smash up method.

Yeah, there you go, exactly. So smashing up that center deck is great. And there was another thing which was subtle. you talk about the problems you had with theme and that choosing a theme where everybody's a villain, you know, has its challenges, especially one that ended up visually and graphically very dark

and very like, you know, when you know, something like Kings of Tokyo where in reality everybody's a monster destroying the city, but it's very playful and light, and so it creates a different theme. So you could see the interplay between theme and graphics and how that's going to appeal. But you had another thematic choice

that you guys made that I loved, which is what we call, in a sense, mention banishing or what was trashing in Dominion where you get a card out of your deck. You guys called it promoting and you gave points for it. And I thought that was really clever because in reality for deck building games, removing cards out of your deck is one of the most powerful things you could do because it just increases your average card quality. But for the new player, it is never, ever, ever what they want to do.

They view it as a drawback. They view it as a negative. They don't want to deal with it. And so many times they get blown away by other players who are. more sophisticated, just banishing cards and they won't ever touch it. And I think the idea of changing it to promoting and giving you points directly for it, I think was a great way to give people an understanding of, oh, that's why I do this, even if I don't know about the probabilistic things.

And it gives you a reason, especially late game, to banish or, you know, whatever, promote, get rid of some of your best cards because they're worth even more points. And so it makes that a more realistic choice as opposed to the only thing you'll ever do is get rid of your starting cards. So I thought that was just such a great, clever, thematic way to address this fundamental challenge of deck building gives us. And I just wanted to sort of acknowledge that as a great way where your storytelling and your gameplay merged together in this great win-win of being able to create more interesting decision

space, make player instincts more likely the correct thing to do, and sort of tell a fun story and give an alternate path to victory. So I just wanted to acknowledge that. Well, thank you. Yeah, that's one of those cases where, like, again, we were looking for alternate strategies, right? I was like, what's the alternate strategy? And we sort of hit on that and it's like, you know,

this is the thing that you want to do anyways, is there a way that we can lean into it so that like, it's good for everybody, but if you want to really lean into it, there are strategic choices you can make that make this a viable path to victory, not just the thing that you should do to make your deck better. Yep. Okay.

I, uh, we're, we're running a lot of time, but I promise I get back to roll. play games. So get back to role play games. So yes is where you started. I'm pretty sure we could talk for like three plus hours. So we'll have to. Yeah, probably. But let's talk. Let's talk about role playing games. So you were excited about role playing games

from very early on. It's kind of what got you started in the space. You worked with, you know, like I said, sort of the biggest brands in the world as far as this is concerned. When you're thinking about designing a role playing game or specifically taking a brand that exists and turning it into a role playing game,

What kinds of things do you think about? And what are the things that players should be people out there that want to work on RPGs, really? How do you approach that? How does it differ? Or is it the same as when you're approaching a tabletop game experience? In a lot of ways, my thoughts on this have changed a lot over the years. I cut my teeth on D20 games, Star Wars, D&D, and stuff like that. But nowadays, when I design a role-playing game, I approach it from a very different standpoint.

And a lot of that just boils down to instead of being a, 20-year-old college student. Now I'm a 40-year-old dad and my time is precious. And so, you know, a lot of it is I'm really focused on getting to the expected experience quickly, right? And getting to the point where players are experiencing the genre that you're aiming at without a lot of start time or setup time or introductory time or complexity. Right. So, you know, In a lot of ways, like I have evolved or maybe not evolved is not the right I would put it, but I have changed my perspective over the years. But I think the most important thing that if I could impress this upon young me that I would that I would sort of hand back to myself is the story of a role playing game isn't what's in the book or what's in your character sheet.

It's what happens at the table. And so because, like, you know, I talked about earlier about tabletop bank games being social, role playing games are intrinsically social, right? Like they are just like social games from the very beginning. It's collaborative storytelling, right? And the most important thing is what's happening at the table. And so like all of your focus, man, not all, but like most of your focus has to be on producing an at-the-table experience that keeps people engaged, keeps people interested.

and then fulfills the promise of the setting or genre or brand or whatever you want to say, right? And it's easy to lose side of, especially when you're dealing with a crunchier game, something like Dungeons and Dragons, for example, right? Like D&D has 40 years of history attached to it that often revolve around the game you play away from the table, like character creation or what have you, right? There's a lot of people that play D&D, not by playing D&D, but by building characters, or reading adventures and imagining the version of D&D that they would play, right? For me, nowadays, I want to focus on, like, at the table.

Yeah, yeah, it's funny. I played, I mean, so I have a similar story to you now, but not a dad, but also 40. And I don't, you know, I used to play in high school and college and even soon after I would play hours and hours of role playing games. We'd have these epic long campaigns. I really enjoy these words. And I spent even more time than that building characters, reading the books, like thinking, imagining what things could happen and crafting these stories independently. And now I have none of that time. But I still love role playing. I still love this storytelling

experience. And so, yeah, finding ways to get that into my life again, even it's something we've been talking about now for years. And as like, how would we, if we wanted to do an Ascension RPG, you know, we fleshed out this whole world. We have a decade of story. We have all these characters. How would we make this thing? And the answer always. does cycle back around to like I for me where I'm at today I can't build one of these games that's going to take three hour sessions and months to play

I need something I can I can bite size chunk around so as you're building this then what are the tools that you're using to kind of get to that quick start get to the genre go go experience yeah lately so since I left Wizards I started my little side publishing

company and I've published a couple RPGs and I've used a board game form factor and and board game style components. Because one of the things that I realized was, you know, part of the reason of why a board game can hit the table and you can be starting to play in, you know, 15, 20 minutes is because all the heavy lifting of the game is carried on the components, whereas with like a traditional role-playing game, you're either creating characters or what have you that requires you to be flipping back and forth between a book or what have you. So for my last couple of games,

I've really focused on using the components to do a lot of the heavy lifting and using the fact that a handful of cards can do the same kinds of things that a table in a book could do. But the difference is I can hand one card to each player or we can pass things around whereas like, you know, oh, okay, we're going to make characters for this other RPG. So everybody's got to have a copy of the book or we have to pass one around and it's so slow. The other thing I've been focusing on is trying to build games.

where the players drive the action. Like, I like some GM-less games, but in general, I like having a game master because I think that it's sort of the competitive advantage of a lot of role-playing games is to have a human that adjudicates things as opposed to just like, you know, the game handling all the mechanics.

I think that lends itself in a unique way to role-playing games because it gives you the sort of flexibility you need to tell interesting stories. but part of the challenge with running a game is that you do all this prep time and when you're running the game there's a lot of pressure to know everything and to plan everything and to keep the game going. So what I've tried to do is find as many ways as possible to shift a lot of the responsibilities of the game master onto the players themselves so that instead of the game master having to be the most creative person at the table and keep everything in their head, that burden of effort gets distributed among all the other. other players. So for example, my heist role-playing game, Dusk City Outlaws, the Game Master does not create any scenes. The players create the scenes. The Game Master introduces the complications

and the challenges they face and sort of adjudicates what happens, right? So as the person running the game, you're never sitting there going like, oh, okay, what's going to happen next? I got to find something interesting to happen. Instead, you're just saying, like, hey, so-and-so, what do you do next? or like, you know, tell me about the next scene. And, you know, it's a very structured game in a lot of ways. But basically shifting the responsibilities of keeping the game interesting and alive off of the person running it and onto the players while still maintaining the game master role. Like that's a formula that I found has worked really well. It also gives players a lot of agency.

And not every player is comfortable with this level of agency. But in a lot of ways, like it reduces. the amount of time I spend trying to make sure my players are engaged because the game itself demands player engagement. Yeah, that's fascinating. So I love that in principle. I think the maybe walk me through it in a little bit more detail, right? So specifically with the heist, with the outlaws, right?

So what does it mean to say that the players are creating the scenes? What's driving that? Yeah. So essentially the way it works is like at the start of a session, you create your characters. There's a very simple character creation of like, pick one of these and one of these smashing together go, right? And then you form a crew of criminals and you'll be given a job. And the job is like, hey, there's a diamond on display in this museum. It's going to be moved in three days or five days or whatever.

You have to steal it and that's the job, right? And then the players will be given a basic amount of information. And then at that point, there is no correct answer for how to steal it, right? Like, basically the way the adventures are structured is that the game master who's running the game sees, like, here are all the protections around the gym. Here are the people involved. And it's just basically like informational points, right? And the players are not given a ton of information up front. So they basically are tasked with, like, okay, here's what you know and here's your objective.

you must now come up with a plan, investigate that plan, and then execute that plan. And so a lot of it is just like, because there's no right answer, the players can come with whatever the plan they want. And the person running the game is just sort of asking the question, like, okay, what would happen when the players engage with this character or go to this location, et cetera, right? And so, like, having tasked the players with coming up with a plan, then, like, basically you switch to what we call legwork scene. where basically the characters are going out in the city to gather information,

collect resources, or deal with obstacles in advance. So, like, if you know that there's, like, a chief of security that's a real hard-ass, you could, a couple of days before the heist, go and, you know, slip something into his drink so that he's sick and gets replaced by a less competent head of security or something like that, right? Right. And so the players sort of create those sub-objectives for themselves by saying, like,

hey, we need to know more about the location. so I'm going to go case the joint or hey we need to get you know a bunch of dynamite to blow out the back wall so I'm going to go procure the dynamite and then having a goal in mind basically there is a template that all the players have on like their quick reference that is basically like okay when it's your turn to create a scene you're going to tell me first what do you want to get out of this scene is it I want to get this information I want to get some dynamite I want to take this guy out right you tell me like what do you want to get out of the scene where you're going to go to get it how you're going to go about getting it. And is there anyone in particular that you're going to deal with when you get there? And so it's like, you know, very clear template for how the players frame the scene. And so like I might say like, oh, yeah, what I want to get out of the scene is poisoning this guy's drink. I'm going to go to the tavern where he has dinner every night after he shift. And what I'm going to do is dress up as a server and basically serve him a poison drink. Right. And so like that's the framework that the player creates. And then I, as the person running the game, would say, like, okay, like,

here are the complications with that. Turns out that tonight, he's actually having dinner with another captain of the watch, right? Or, like, you know, what have you, right? So, like, basically, I inject the difficulty into that scene. And then once we've established, like, okay, here, here's the setup and then here are the challenges, then you just sort of play it out like you would, a normal scene. And the player either gets what they want or don't, right? So, like, that, in that way, the player has crafted the scene, but I, as the person running it, have just sort of punched it up and made it tense or exciting.

Right. So you have a clear template that is, it sounds very similar, just like a who, what, where, why kind of question. Exactly. And then once they have set that, you have a, as a GM, you have either a preset,

a variety of complications you could throw into the situation or you can make them up on the fly, and then you roll play out that specific scenario, and then whatever happens happens, and then you use that to inform the next scene. Exactly. Great. Really cool. I like that. I like that recipe.

Okay, we are, we're running up against the edge of time. I also wanted to chat about, a chat about working on big digital games too, because that's another, so this will probably be our last meaty topic for this chat. But, you know, when you started working for Bungy and started working on Destiny or I don't know if that's where you started on Destiny or you work. Yeah, yeah. So what, how do you, how do you, how do you, How do you feel about the difference between working on those kinds of games?

What was it like making that transition from RPG or tabletop game design into the digital world? You know, I was really worried at first that I wasn't going to be able to hack it. I felt like, you know, general game design knowledge transcends medium in a lot of ways, right? A lot of what we're doing is trying to evoke feelings, create opportunities, give chances for players to feel clever. And so a lot of what I was doing was going to be doing was going to be the same kinds of things. just a completely different method of doing it. And so the first six months or so, a lot of my adaptation was just like learning the technology,

learning the game engine, learning what tools I have to work with. And then over time, I sort of came to realize, like, yeah, all of my tabletop design experience or role-playing game experience, a lot of that still applies here. But what the thing I lacked was, was the experience of failure.

And so, you know, for 15 years, I'd been designing tabletop games. And like by the time I made the switch to working at Bungy, like if I was working on a board game or whatever, there are tons of mechanics I wouldn't even consider because I know, like, oh, this isn't going to work or this could require a ton of effort to make happen because I had tried it and failed or I had taken a ton of work, right? I didn't have that experience on video games at all, right? I hadn't tried and failed at a lot of different things. And so I spent a lot of time with the first couple of years stepping into pits that all the people around me had already fallen into, you know, years, years ago, right? But over time, you know, I sort of like learned like where those pitfalls were. And then like now, in a lot of ways, it's, you know, I get to focus more on like that high level game design thinking. And then like the medium of the digital game just sort of flows now from my experience of the last.

five years and I've been worked on on destiny. That's just more like this is just the new way that I implement my design ideas versus like a totally different kind of design. And so like now I can consider things like, hey, you know, I need to evoke this feeling in a player. I can use things like sound or camera movements or controller rumble to do those things where before I didn't have those tools to rely on on the tabletop side. similarly on the tabletop side of things

it is unlikely that playing a card will crash the game it turns out I can do that a lot in video games right so you know different challenges different advantages in some ways iteration time is both faster and slower on video games because like if I'm working on a new piece of exotic armor

and destiny I can be working at my desk make a change run a quick import and two minutes later I'm playing with it in a real environment, right? Whereas, like, on a board game, if I make a change or, like, I need to make a big systemic change, I've got to schedule time to play with my friends or, like, you know, it might be two or three days before we can all get together, et cetera. So, like, you know, in some ways it's faster.

But it turns out a AAA video game requires, like, 800 people to ship, right? So it's got a lot more interconnected moving parts. So if I'm like, hey, I need this, I need this engineering change. order to implement my piece of content or whatever, it might be a month before the engineers get to my request because there's so many other things in front of it. So faster and slower in a lot of different ways. Yeah. Yeah. So I want to highlight a few principles from what you just said, right? One is that the design, the principles of game design are universal. It doesn't matter what medium you're on. They still apply. That player experience and emotion is the true metric,

regardless of what you're doing, that that's always the thing to keep a focus on. both critically important principles. And the way you put this is just, I just didn't have my fails yet. I forget that there's just a certain amount of learning that, you know, again, hopefully you can learn from other people's failures as much possible, but a lot of it is just, you know, you've got to fall down a few times and they're like,

oh, that doesn't work, won't make that mistake again, and then learn and do it again and do it again. And that process of iteration is key. So those things are great. and I love specifically highlighting the advantages and disadvantages of each medium because they all do have their strengths and weaknesses. When you sort of are learning those specific first steps,

that's one of the things that I always worry about when you're working on big scale games, even when we were just building our digital TCG for SoulForge, the ability to iterate digitally with something that's a very high-end production and takes a long time to build a new thing, can be very, very high cost and very difficult to get the iteration reps you need. So when you're dealing with something like a first-person shooter,

like with a digital TCG or, you know, I could be like, okay, we could mock this up physically and get most of the way there and learn a lot. But with something like a first-person shooter, that feels near and possible. So what do you do to reduce your iteration costs or make cheap prototypes or be able to learn those failures without, spending 800 people's, you know, 800 manments or whatever to building that out. Yeah. In some cases, this is already a solved problem for me because, like, you know,

Bungy is a storied company that well before I got there had to recognize exactly what you're talking about. And so in a lot of cases, when I'm iterating on like the design of a piece of armor or something like that, I am doing so in a local build on my machine using like the tools that I have at my disposal. And so I run no risk of polluting other people's work because it's all local and I have to like thoroughly test it. And we have like all kinds of best practices for test.

I have a dedicated tester on my team. We, we often refer to our test org as our secret sauce at bungee because we have, our testers are not just like pure quality control. They are an entrenched part of the development process. So like I'm very fortunate. that I can run things past my tester and say, like, hey, do you see anything in here that looks like it's going to be a big problem before I submit it into our version control system

that would then populate out to the rest of the game? Our engineers have also done a great job of creating little pockets of the game where we can experiment without risking, polluting everybody else's time. That having been said, sometimes before you can even start really prototyping something, you're looking at engineering asks. And in those cases, basically the paper design work gets a deeply thorough vetting. And like, you know, there's like it would be dismissive to call it like a bureaucracy overseeing it. But a lot of ways like if I've like, you know, I redesigned the way that armor mechanics worked about two years ago in destiny.

And when I was doing that, I couldn't implement those changes myself. Like it just, I did not have the capability to do it or the technical knowledge. and so I had to have both engineering and UI support in order to make that happen. So my paper design started out as like, here's my design document. And then it evolved into here's my PowerPoint presentation that uses a combination of like animation and things like that to basically display. Here's what the player experience is. Then that evolved into, I got some help from a UI designer to basically create like wireframe versions that we have some software that we can use. like wire frame versions of the UI,

that we could then have players, people in leadership clicking through to see what that experience is. And then I created like an Excel document that was like, okay, let's play pretend with this system and like socket in, you know, the different mods and everything, right? And so like it was a very lengthy process.

It was probably six months of paper design before we got the thumbs up to like, yep, let's do the work to make this happen. So, you know, even in video games, the paper design side of it is huge, especially if it's not something I have the equipment to test locally myself. Yeah, no, that's great. And it is, I mean, you are building these prototypes.

A wireframe click through is a prototype, right? These Excel simulations are prototypes. And so this is just, I really love these kinds of stories because, you know, people just don't believe it, that even when you're working on a AAA, you know, first-person shooter game, that you still have huge value out of these simplified prototypes. to be able to learn and iterate quickly

because especially when you're on these huge projects where the cost of making a mistake when you're working with a full engineering team and implementing can be millions of dollars. It is so critical to find whatever tools you can, to mock things up, to communicate the vision, to really test it and vet the ideas before they get implemented in a very high prestige way.

Yeah. And there's essentially what you're doing is you're trying to prove out your concept before you take a risk. Because even if you think your concept is amazing, there's always the risk that you're wrong, right? That like once you play it in the real game, you could be wrong. Like you don't know that until you've actually played it. So it's about taking calculator risks. I'm also very fortunate that Bungy as a company is dedicated to providing a good design environment where failure is not just accepted but expected.

And so like they build a lot of the structure, like the production structure around giving you plenty of time to, fail fast and fail often so that by the time you hit on something that you're confident in, you have already fallen into a bunch of those pits. And it reduces the risk that the thing that you're attempting to do is going to have unforeseen failure points down the road. Yeah, that's, that is that is gold right there. I, uh, you know, then maybe, maybe let's, let's talk a little bit about culture there because this is something that I really try to emphasize with my team here. But, you know, we're a small, hand, you know, a half dozen people that are working together that, you know, are pretty close.

So being able to build something in a company with hundreds of people working on a project to be able to build a structure that encourages that kind of risk taking, you know, it's sort of the classic cliche of the large corporation that that's not what happens, right? And so what is it about bungee, do you think, or the way that they onboard you or the executive team or something, the culture that creates that environment? You know, I'm very lucky to be at Bungy, and I don't want to sound like I've drank the Kool-Aid too much, but I have definitely drank the Kool-Aid a little bit.

But we're very fortunate that we might be the only fully independent AAA studio in operation right now. We are our own publisher, and we are completely independent. We weren't always this way. We previously had a publishing agreement with Activision, but we are now a fully independent company. But even before that, you know, Bungy was a part of Microsoft and then before that it was independent. The leadership of the company, the founders, the CEO, they've always had this very clear vision that Bungy is going to be a studio that is independent and creatively, like has the creative freedom to do what we think is right.

And like that that starts at the top and then filters all the way down through. And there's just a really nice culture, I think overall that's been. fomented by Bungy leadership that we are going to make best in class games, but in order to do so, we want

to have a healthy design environment, a healthy production environment that makes people want to give their best. Because it'd be very easy to be like, we're going to make the best stuff. And also, we're going to burn out designers or burn out engineers or testers

or whatever. So like a concerted effort is made to basically invest in, like, you know, we're employee owned, so we invest in ourselves, right? We want to get the best out of our teams by hiring great people, by giving them support. You know, to digress just a little bit here, one of the things I love the most about working at Bungy is that I've always felt like my manager and the people in the management chain above me are invested in my success, right? In a lot of ways, the culture at Bungy is that as a manager,

you are not succeeding unless the people you are managing are also succeeding, right? And like, you know, we have a very flat management structure. Like, I have two people that report to me, one of whom is like at my same, like, like same level in the company and everything. So like it's very, you know, and no one, like very few people have more than two or three reports. So like, there's a lot of people that are managers, but basically like there's this philosophy that like your job as a manager is to empower your reports to be successful, right? And I think that's kind of rare because other companies I've worked at as a manager or like the management structure,

it was more like evaluating how your reports are doing and saying like, oh, is this person doing a good enough job? Are they the right fit for this team or whatever? Like all those questions get asked like essentially before the person gets hired. And once we hire somebody, we say, like, yeah, like, we've hired this person. We believe this person can be successful. It is now your job as a manager to make that person successful and to give them the support and resources that they need to be successful. And I think that's the kind of thing that, like, is so rare but so powerful, feeling like

the people in the management chain above me have my back and are willing to go to bat for me and for my ideas and get the support that I need, like just the interpersonal, support is so, so critical to making people feel like they can get the best out of themselves, right? So I think that's a huge part of it. And the other thing is, like, I would say we have a generally very collaborative and relaxed environment company-wide. And what I mean by that is, like, our CEO, Pete, Pete has a desk that sits like, well, in the office. office. His desk was like two rows away from mine. And he just has a normal standing desk. He doesn't have an office at all. Right. None of the executives have offices. In fact, no one has offices at Bungie.

There's only like the desks. Right. And if I want to, I can just walk up to Pete and be like, hey man, like what do you think about blah, blah, blah in our game or whatever. Like he plays the game. He knows how it works and everything. But like that's true from the top on down. Like everybody's very approachable. And it's just so refreshing to be able to walk around and say like, Like, you know what? Anybody that I talked to today, I know that the conversation that we're going to have is them trying to make our game or our company as good as it can be. Like I don't worry about ulterior motives or anything like that because there's just a culture from the top down that we need to be all like collaborating and helping each other succeed. I think that's the only way that a company of our size can be successful without, you know, well, yeah, in a sentence. I will say that a company of any size could be successful, I think is the answer.

That view of collaboration. Obviously, a company at your scale, it's much harder to do. And you gave a lot of the specifics of like it comes from the founder and that attitude of whether you're leading a team of one or 100 or 1,000, that being able to, you know, have that clear. vision, live that message and make people empower the people that are around you to, you know, to execute on this, this collective vision is key. I think the specifics of like the no offices and everybody being approachable and having a very flat system with not that many reports and having people be as a manager, your success is, is entirely dependent upon the success of your reports and the people that you're working for. All that stuff is phenomenal

and really crafts an incredible environment. So it's a, it's a lot of. So it's a lot of it. So it's, It's great. I'm glad you're so happy there. It's wonderful to hear. You're the first person I've talked to inside that company. Not that I'm ever looking to get another job again. But if I do, I'll get in mind. No, I really like it. It's been a great five years.

Fantastic. Okay, well, I had to blitz through some of the last topics, but we didn't cover most of the highlights that I wanted to cover on this talk. But there's so much more to cover. So hopefully we will get to do this again. Yeah. For those that are out there that want to see more of your stuff, pick up some of your games, hear about you, what are the best places for them to get access? Probably the best place to see what I'm working on in the table hot space right now is just to go to my little side publishing company's website.

It's Scratchpad Publishing, and the website address is just Scratchpadpublishing.com. And you can find me on Twitter. My Twitter handle is Antarian Ranger, but if you just... search for Rodney Thompson, Twitter. It'll come up. I'm crap at social media. I'm really not good. So I don't post that often.

And I tend to only post, like, look at this goofy thing that my cat did. But that's how you can catch me there. But yeah, like anything tabletop-related, Scratchpadpublishing.com is the best place to find it. Right. So people know where to go for tabletop games and cat pictures. Exactly.

Some of my favorite things, frankly. So thank you. again, Ronnie. This was such a great conversation. And I, you know, being able to do this when we can't do it face-to-face, but being able to do this deep dive has been a real pleasure. So we hope to do it soon. The pleasure is all mine. Thank you so much for having me. Thank you so much for listening. I hope you enjoyed today's podcast. If you want to support the podcast, please rate, comment, and share on your favorite podcast platform, such as iTunes, Stitcher, or whatever device you're listening on. Listener reviews and shares make a huge difference and help us grow this community and will allow me to bring more

amazing guests and insights to you. I've taken the insights from these interviews, along with my 20 years of experience in the game industry, and compressed it all into a book with the same title as this podcast, Think Like a Game Designer. In it, I give step-by-step instructions on how to apply the lessons from these great designers and bring your own games to life. If you think you might be interested, you can check out the book at think like a game designer.com or wherever find books are sold.