Hi Gabriel, thanks so much for chatting today. Why don’t you start by introducing yourself and your background in roleplaying games?
Sure. I’ve loved roleplaying games since I was a kid, maybe ten or twelve years old. My first experience was with a Brazilian system called 3D&T. There were a couple of games like World of Darkness that were available too.
After a break, I eventually got into D&D 5e. I enjoyed it for a while, but I became disillusioned for various reasons. Especially issues with representation. I got involved with communities such as Three Black Halflings. At some point I just realised that D&D was a corporate product that would never actually be any good. It was fundamentally flawed, and couldn’t be fixed, because the people making the money didn’t care.
Then I discovered Wanderhome by Jay Dragon, which uses the Belonging Outside Belonging design approach. That’s a token-based system, that allows for collaborative storytelling without relying on constant dice rolls. Dungeons & Dragons really sets the tone for what many people think roleplaying games can be, but Wanderhome showed me that roleplaying games could be something entirely unique — not just another battle simulator, or game of colonizer make-believe. The community was part of that as well, such as the Wanderhome unofficial Discord (kisses and hugs, if you are reading this!).
So Wanderhome became a way for me to explore more games, and eventually get into game design myself. My first reaction was to go to almost the polar opposite of D&D. Even designing Roots & Flowers, and getting into Solarpunk, was kind of a rebound from D&D. “Let me get this shit out of my system!” Since then I’ve drifted in a few different directions. Now it’s more of a personal, mindful effort to create things I enjoy.
Brilliant, thanks! I want to get into your game design work soon. I enjoyed the recent Game Master Monday actual play of Roots & Flowers. But first, can we talk a bit more about D&D’s issues with representation?
You know, these games often involve stories of venturing into perilous wilderness and grabbing everything you find. It’s a structure that can perpetuate colonialist attitudes. You just take up your weapons, go into someone else’s house, tear shit down, kill everybody, pick up relics and stuff. Then you come back, call everybody you just killed ‘monsters,’ and call it a day. Then the cycle begins again.
Of course Wizards of the Coast will say, “We can improve this, we can fix it.” No, you can’t. It is the core premise of your game. You may be able to make it more and more palatable to certain sensibilities, but it will fundamentally be the same thing. At the end of the day, it’s just about D&D making money, and Hasbro shareholders lining their pockets. It’s for the benefit of a couple white billionaires somewhere. You’ve got to trash it.
You’ve got to trash it, and make something new. You can’t fix it.
I don’t think it’s worth trying to fix it, no! D&D comes with so much baggage. Mainstream roleplaying games started as a hobby for white people. I mean, roleplaying games are ancient — but I’m talking about mainstream, commercial roleplaying games as we know them. That’s how they started, a hobby for white people. Recently we’ve had so many cases of queer people, people of colour, working for Wizards of the Coast, and trying to push for change. And then being pushed to the margins, or shut down, kicked out. So it is just lip service, really. You had cases of them bringing in writers with talk about diversity, and then changing their writing without giving them the final sign-off, and introducing these colonialist tropes.
I saw that recently. Changing a race to being ‘primitive’ and evil for evil’s sake. You also mentioned D&D’s core premise. Do you think that colonialist ideology extends to the very concept of a dungeoncrawl, for example?
Well, I wouldn’t say it’s the dungeoncrawl itself, exactly. Delving into unknown places, sure, that’s something we do as humans. We go into caves, we climb mountains. We explore perilous places to find out what is going on there, what is there, what we can learn, what we can find, or just because we like the thrill of going some place that requires our senses to be sharp. To flirt with death, I don’t know. That is not the issue.
The issue is when you go into places that are homes to other people, to other life as well, and just tear it down, and extract all the gold and silver, and all the relics. “Yeah, I’m going to take stuff here because … pillaging!” The issue is with the fetishization of the dungeon and the foreigners who live there. The poor defenceless townsfolk, and the monsters who come and take what doesn’t belong to us. That is the premise that is unsalvageable. The whole Open Game License 1.1 was another example.
For context, that was the leaked draft which was supposed to cover third party materials. There were concerns that it was an attempt to deauthorise the original OGL. The original OGL was always a bit strange, it gave creators permission to do things they were legally already allowed to do. So there’s a connection in your mind between colonialist extraction, and the use of Intellectual Property law to profit from the labour of individual and smaller creators?
Yes, absolutely. Look, my partner says a thing. She says that there are places that we are supposed to reclaim, to change, to improve, and take in different directions. But then there are places where you just have to walk away! I think D&D is the latter.
At this point, as a community, I can’t believe that anyone is really ignorant of what D&D represents. “Oh look, we have marginalized people doing this stuff for us. We can’t be bad, right?” We’re looking at this, and we’re saying, “Ah, it’s cool, that they’re doing the work. You know they’re trying, they’re improving.” We know, deep down, this is bullshit, this is not what’s happening.
Now I’m not going to judge individual creators for working with D&D. A lot of us are gig workers, essentially. We’ve got to do shit to survive. There is rent to pay, and it’s a paycheck. But we know what Wizards of the Coast are up to as well. They are trying to save face in neoliberal modern capitalism.
Yes, for sure. Let’s forget about D&D for now then, and focus on your stuff. Maybe let’s start with your work as a facilitator, and then we can move onto game design? And maybe an appropriate place to start is, of course, safety tools! I know they’re an important piece of your practice. What do safety tools mean to you? Do you see different safety tools as doing different things?
Recently I’ve been thinking of safety tools more as ways to amend problems when they happen, than to prevent those problems. If I’m walking the wire, and there’s a safety net under me, if I fall, I still fall. But at least I’m not going to get splattered.
Safety tools can also be tools for exploration, I think. Nowadays, my most important safety tool has become the check-in, funnily enough. It’s just become a habit of mine, at certain moments, to go around the table. “Hey folks, we are doing this. Is this okay?” It is simple, but you can go deep with it.
The check-in is just about as free-form as it gets, I guess.
As an example, we were playing Masks, and there was a character doing something that didn’t feel right. But I couldn’t put a name on it, I couldn’t describe exactly what I was feeling. So I stepped back, I said, “Hey, let me check in here. I don’t know, I think this is what you’re doing, maybe?” As we talked, I figured out what my issue was, and then I was able to communicate, “Look, all right, I just want to make sure that this is a conscious choice. If you do this, you might cause this relationship change with another character. Is this what you’re going for?” “Yes, this is what I’m going for.” “Hey, other player, is this okay with you? Are you happy to engage with this?” “Oh, yeah, sure, absolutely.” And then we went with it.
Right.
So the check-in is always in my back pocket. But I also think it’s fun and interesting to have other more codified safety tools. There’s the X-Card, Lines and Veils, the Script Change.
Script Change is when you have Rewind, Pause and Fast Forward, right?
Yes, I really like the Script Change, to be honest. It’s very efficient. I also like the Journeying Tools in Wanderhome. “Let’s do this instead.” “Do we want to?” “Where to next?” and so on. I put a version of the Journeying Tools in Roots & Flowers. They’re very close to natural language, like just having a conversation about what’s happening.
I prefer something that is a little more natural, that is still codified, but that we can engage with as a conversation, rather than a procedure. It is a procedure, obviously, but it is still approached as talk, as human speech. Some people do prefer the more codified tools like the X-Card.
It feels like sometimes the strength of the more codified safety tools is that it allows people to express themselves, when they might not otherwise be able to? Or to express themselves in a very controlled fashion, or they don’t have to disclose everything. Script Change and the Journeying Tools still seem to have those properties.
Whereas the other end of the spectrum is the Luxton technique. It’s a difficult one to do but it ties in strongly with the check-in. It’s for when you come across difficult, tricky, uncomfortable content — because that will happen, period. You may set up your Lines and Veils, but things will still come up you don’t expect. The other day, I put in a character that triggered a player’s history with parental abuse, in a way I never could have anticipated.
So a lot of safety tools, like the X-Card and Lines and Veils, take this approach that you can erase anything you want, no questions asked. The Luxton technique is slightly different, right?
It’s different from Lines and Veils, in the sense that Lines and Veils says, “We’re not going to touch this. If we touch it, we’re going to back pedal.” The Luxton technique gives control, it yields, completely, control to this one person to say, “Hey, we will support you with this.”
You turn to the player, to the person who’s having an issue with the narrative, and you just tell them, “You’d like to talk to us about it. Would you like to tell how you feel? Would you like to discuss this?” They can say yes or no, but ultimately, you also ask them, “So what do you want us to do? Do you want to not deal with this at all? Or do you want a specific thing to happen? Do you want this character, who for you represents an abuser, a toxic person, a trauma, to lose absolutely? Do you want them to die? Yeah, sure we can do that.”
It’s not always helpful. It’s not always what players want, either. So one approach is to keep a set of Lines and Veils, but to layer that with this technique.
Tabletop roleplaying can sometimes become a space for doing psychic work, for processing personal things, without necessarily saying what it is that you’re processing. Is that part of your experience, that maybe more therapeutic aspect to play?
I try to avoid the word “therapeutic,”, only for the reason that a lot of people mistake RPGs for therapy. It’s not therapy. But I think roleplaying games can be a therapeutic tool, and that distinction is important.
I remember a podcast recently, where somebody was asked about empathy. They said that roleplaying games can cultivate empathy, but mostly they help you to connect with yourself. I agree with that. When you set up that magic circle, you enter into an agreement which says these characters are not us. But who we really are may inform these characters, and vice-versa.
We can just be having fun too. At the same time we can be reflecting, “What would it be like if this really happened? And then what would happen afterwards?” We can interrogate ourselves, our choices, our desires, our possible ways of being.
So what do you think the relationship is between fun, and that more ‘serious’ reflection?
I run games as a pro GM, as it’s called. So 99% of the time, I form groups with people that I have not met before. While we often end up becoming friends, or developing some sort of interpersonal relationship, I don’t feel it is my place to pick up games, with the goal of using them therapeutically.
Sure, I see.
It’s not that you can’t do that with strangers. You can. It’s just that it’s tricky, and I tend to avoid it. I think when you play with this deeper kind of stuff, you really have to find people who you feel more closer with, or safer with.
I get that.
I also think that it’s important to have relief even in the most serious games. I’m starting a game of Apocalypse Keys. And I don’t know if you read it, but Apocalypse Keys is all trauma, trauma, trauma, trauma, everywhere. And it’s like, “Look, listen folks, we know that this game is about a lot of very hurt people, going about the world and doing shit. But please remember, we have room to be goofy.” We don’t have to always be gloomy edgelords. We can just be goofy sometimes, and that is okay.
And I think fun itself can sometimes be a form of reflection, definitely. So engaging in difficult subjects can be fun, can be cathartic, can be liberating, can allow us to get in touch with feelings that we didn’t know we had. It can allow us also to express things in ways we wouldn’t be able to, or that we don’t want to, in other situations.
What I really want to stress is that fun is not the sole, ultimate goal of roleplaying games. There are lots of reasons for engaging. Fun is important, but it’s not the be all and end all.
OK, so moving on from facilitation, shall we talk a bit more about design? What is the TTRPG design scene like where you are? I mean, I know TTRPG design is also quite global, with all the Discord servers, but …
Well, recently a Global South Discord has started, too, after that whole fucking mess with the military guy getting a prize for his roleplaying game. The Latin American roleplaying game scene is vibrant and filled with talented creators. They produce works that are unique to our region, with diverse themes and aesthetics. I’ll be honest with you, the stuff that we’re making, only we can make. There are many other amazing designers and creators whose work I admire. Federico Sohns, Lucas Roelen, Cezar Capacle, Wendy Yu, there’s just way too many!
Fantastic. Can you tell us about how some of their work has influenced you? You mentioned how when you first started making games you first went for, like, the polar opposite of D&D.
It makes me feel like D&D is my ex? Keeps texting me at two in the morning on the weekends, like, “Hey, you up?”
Messaging you heyyy with three Ys.
“Heyyy!” “Stay away from me!” No, but jokes aside, now I have a more conscious approach to writing things. So I’m experimenting a lot. I’m enjoying playing around with different mechanics. There’s this game that I’ve been trying to write for the longest time, called Lua, which basically uses the mechanic from Concentration or Pairs. That’s the memory game, where you flip the cards, try to match them. Also, it uses the actual phase of the moon and stuff. Cezar Capacle’s Push also has one of my favourite dice mechanics. You know the one, yeah?
It’s a SRD focused on a push-your-luck mechanic, right?
Yeah, it’s a push-your-luck mechanic, but what makes it interesting to me is the choice of words. When you roll the dice to find out what happens next, on a roll of one to four, you get something you want, but maybe with a downside. On a five or six, you get the thing you want, and on a seven or higher, you get something you don’t want. That choice of words makes it golden. The game is not about individual player character capabilities but the direction the narrative should take. You’re not testing if the character can do something; instead, you’re asking, “What’s going to happen once they try?”
One of my favorites recently is Zephyr by Federico Sohns, which breaks away from traditional fantasy tropes. Just because we’re making fantasy, we don’t have to make it all about knights in armor, and bearded white guys sort of flinging spells around. Fantasy is fantasy, and it can be really anything. Anyway, Zephyr has this mechanic of Heroic Violence. When you are hurt by a Hero of the Salt States, you throw tokens on your character sheet. If you’re shot with a rifle, where the tokens fall, you poke a hole with a pencil, and whatever you poke is something you lost and have to deal with. When you are slashed with a sword, you throw two tokens, and then you have to cut your character sheet according to the position of the tokens, and decide which one you keep and which one gets lost. And that’s brutal.
Wow, I like that.
It’s a sensitive approach to violence, both abstracting it and showing the life-changing repercussions it can have.
It’s interesting. Often when we think about the potentially radical aspects of TTRPGs, we focus on the worldbuilding. But maybe the mechanics themselves can kind of harbor these really utopian energies.
Traditional Embodiment is a little masterpiece, too. It’s for MOSAIC Strict. You have stats like Might, Guile, stuff like that. But when you enact violence, you don’t need to roll, you succeed. When you try to trick others, you don’t need to roll, you succeed. You need to roll when you want to avoid violence, or to be honest.
The World, the Flesh and the Devil is also absolutely fantastic. You just get blank dice, and you write W, F, or D, according to how much of World, Flesh, or Devil you want to have in your dice. And that’s your character die, that’s it. It’s your whole character, abstracted in six sides. When something is in question, and you roll the dice, you have to decide according to what falls. And it’s not whether you can do it or not, but how things happen, and what the complications are.
I feel like whenever the resolution mechanic is more than just pass/fail, it tends to shift players toward a sense of collective storytelling? Like, even if there is a GM, it has a bit of that GM-less vibe.
When you give players a choice, more often than not, they will choose the complicated outcome. They will choose problems, they will choose to take their characters out of the frying pan and throw them into the fire.
But in a lot of mainstream games, the mechanics are just pass/fail. Even many games deriving from Apocalypse World, despite the fact that Apocalypse World isn’t a pass/fail system, are like that. But what if the dice weren’t there to give you just one of two outcomes, or just one of three outcomes? For instance, what if the dice didn’t tell you the what, but the how? And then it’s up to you to decide what happens.
I’m also trying to experiment with dice and narrative authority. I’ve been exploring various mechanics, like Thomas Manuel’s Co-op Dice Mechanics, where players propose what happens, and others can agree or disagree. If there is disagreement, then dice are collected and rolled to determine the outcome.
COSMIC is a set of tools I created, you can put a game together with it. One of the COSMIC mechanics was, when you roll the dice and get a hit, you ask the GM a question — and they have to answer, ‘Yes.’ Depending on the roll, they might answer, ‘Yes, and’ or ‘Yes, but.’
Anyways, the point is, I’m experimenting. What can we do with choice? What can we do with dice, with cards? Do we always need them — what if we just ask things and get responses?
I love the idea of dividing up how different voices can input into a narrative, and connecting them via a core mechanic die roll.
So I mixed Thomas Manuel’s Co-op Dice Mechanics together with Valery North’s Finding Styles. Basically, in Co-op Dice Mechanics, a player just says, ‘Hey, this is what happens,’ and they take a die. Everyone who agrees just adds a die from their own personal hand. If everyone agrees, you just take all of these dice, and put them in a community pool. If there is disagreement, you roll the dice of those who agree against the dice of those who disagree. Finding Styles is an experiment, as well, with using dice, tokens, and free roleplaying. There are four styles of action, and each one has a different mechanic. Sometimes you give and take tokens, sometimes you’re going to roll dice, sometimes you’re just going to say that something happens.
And I think designers, in general, are pushing the limits both mechanically and in terms of the content. I don’t think I always accomplish it, but I design games with the goal of experimenting with different fantasies. Games that are more detached from the most classical tropes of fantasy. Designers are trying to say, hey, we can do more than just play, I don’t know, silly knights and rogues. Silly knights and rogues are good too! Let’s not underappreciate those. I love to play myself knights and rogues. But they’re not everything.
But it’s like, why not not just take all of these different things, and mix and match and see what happens? I keep saying one of those days, I’m going to play Thirsty Sword Lesbians in the Forgotten Realms. Why not?
It should be the core setting, for sure.
Right? The Forgotten Realms are not that great either, but they’re iconic. I used to love it. I read so many novels. I don’t engage with it anymore nowadays, but I still have fond memories.
You know who did something wonderful? Spire! Oh, the game Spire. When I read the premise of Spire, I was like, “This is definitely someone who is in love with the D&D setting, who took the concept of the Drow, which is extremely flawed and problematic, did something with it that is actually pretty deep.”
It’s like … class war, is that right?
It’s about resistance to colonization! It really puts Wizards of the Coast and D&D into perspective. You can do it. You can confront this history and say, “Okay, I don’t want to engage with this any more, but I can see that there are still good things in there, that can be taken in completely different directions.” You can take a game that is extremely problematic, and just do a 180 degree turn. You just have to have the will to make the actual effort, not just the lip service. I think it’s a good game, Spire.
I think that the part of you, that as a child, was really uncritically invested and really loved something … there remains something uniquely true and good about that. So when you do reimagine it in that way, you’re not just kind of decontaminating it, separating out the bad bits. It’s more complicated. You’re honouring and nourishing those childish instincts.
Also then I don’t have to give money to corporations.
Right, amazing! So that is a game about resisting colonization. As my final question, I also wanted to ask you about games which maybe sort of imagine where the world has been decolonized, where things are substantially better. Solarpunk, hopeful futures, positive futures, wholesome games, whatever we want to call it.
Sometimes there’s this objection to these kinds of settings and games. People will say, “Oh, it’s going to be boring. Because how can you have a game, unless there is conflict and danger and scarcity? How can you possibly tell an interesting story about a hopeful or more just future?” So I just wonder what you think about these sorts of arguments.
I think that first of all, we have to stop playing cops.
Right!
Yeah, stop playing cops. But what I will say is this. In discussions about storytelling, people will say, “You’ve got to have conflict. You’ve got to have conflict.” That’s Narrative 101, apparently. “Hey! Stories, characters have to have conflict!”
Eventually, someone figured — and I’m talking about both my process, and also me seeing other people talking about it — eventually someone figured, hey, it’s not conflict. What conflict does is to create tension. And tension is more like movement.
So that is better. But it’s not all tension either. And then I saw someone say, no, it’s not conflict, it’s not tension, it’s uncertainty. What makes the story engaging for the players is the uncertainty. Conflict and tension are ways of creating uncertainty, but they’re not the only ways.
The players know what’s going on now. They have an idea of the setting they are in, but they don’t know where they’re going next. And you don’t need violence for uncertainty! Violent conflict is definitely a source of uncertainty. It’s just one of the cheapest. It’s easy, right? But if you needed violence for uncertainty, how could you have, I don’t know, romantic comedies? You wouldn’t have other types of stories if everything was just based on violence.
We can play scenarios, where we’re in fear of being clubbed to death by someone, or getting an arrow in the knee, or starving, or stuff like this. But we can also play stories where that stuff is not the main source of uncertainty, and still have a lot of tension. We can play stories where a community, for example, lives largely in a state of general happiness and enjoyment for people in that community. There’s still going to be drama. There’s still going to be the lovers who are pining for each other, but can’t be together for reasons. There’s still going to be those two people actually fighting about something, because of the different needs people have, the different tools they have access to. There’s still going to be the like, “Oh, here’s a hurricane coming. We got to take care of our homes and supplies, otherwise we’re going to be screwed for winter.” The world is filled with sources of uncertainty.
People get caught up with thinking there are no stakes. Of course, there are stakes. Look, we are going around in our day-to-day lives, and a lot of stuff that we do is full of tension and uncertainty. You can’t tell me that a more-or-less regular, mundane existence is not full of high stakes. Sometimes it might be, “Do I spend money on X or Y? Because if I make a mistake, I might have to eat canned food for the rest of the week.” Sometimes it might be, “What do I say to this person in front of me right now? If I say the wrong thing, I may not be able to see my child again.” We just have to detach our notion of stakes from life or death scenarios. It’s not all about that.
I fully agree.
When we talk about hopeful games, I think it’s important to remember that a lot of games that deal with oppression and resistance are hopeful games. There are stories where hope stems from the fact that the world is against you, and you are just not going to let it destroy you. You are going to do something about it.
And resistance is not the same as violence. There is a difference there. When you are standing up for your existence, when you are defending yourself against external violence, that is not you being violent. That’s you resisting, that’s you persisting, that’s you having hope.
A good critical dystopia can be hopeful, just like a good critical utopia.
Sure, and of course hopeful settings and scenarios don’t have to be about saving the world from apocalypse. There are so many games that people enjoy that are not about that. They’re just about characters being in difficult situations with each other, and we still enjoy them. For example, Roots & Flowers is more like, “Hey, stuff is mostly fine. Our problems nowadays are more logistical, structural, internal. The relationships, the drama.”
On the other hand, there’s games like Wendy Yu’s Here, There, Be Monsters, where the players are the marginalized. That game is like, we are like monsters. We’re seen as monsters, we’re treated as monsters. But hey, we are our own community. We are our own family. And both are forms of hope.
One is that hope that, maybe at some point, our problems will be a lot less about life-or-death situations. While other stories are like, “Hey, maybe we all find the tools to fight against the things that want to place me, and others like me, in life-or-death situations.” And I think there is a very powerful truth in both.
And none of it is about being cops, or pillaging, or being the defenders of the good civilized world against the evil wilderness. It’s about existing, about making our existence seen, heard, kicking up trouble, finding joy, in spite of hate and bigotry. That, I think, is what storytelling filled with hope is like.
Gabriel, thank you so much!
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