Collaboration is the Name of the Game (w/ Doug Levandowski)

Kenzie Tartaglione:

Hello and welcome back to Press Pause, where I have the absolute pleasure of interviewing creatives in the TTRPG space to talk about what they do and why they do it.

Today, we have a very special guest here for y'all, game designer Doug Levandowski. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast.

Doug Levandowski:

Thanks for having me on, I really appreciate it.

Kenzie:

And we like to start off with some fairly easy intro questions of how did you get into game design? What was your introduction into that?

Doug:

So about 12 years ago now, probably, I started working on a game with a friend of mine just because we were both feeling sort of… stuck is the wrong word, but like we didn't have a creative outlet, right? And we both wanted to have one. And so we started working on a tabletop game and kind of caught the bug from there. It was, I did a few tabletop games and then just sort of gradually and I think kind of naturally drifted over to more TTRPG stuff just because that interested me so much more.

I've always liked stories and not really cared as much about mechanics, which isn't to say that, you know, TTRPGs don't have mechanics, right? But I'm more story focused than mechanics focused, I think even in my tabletop games. So TTRPGs are just sort of a natural progression from there.

Kenzie:

Did you like grow up playing games or was this like a college thing? Cause I know that I personally got into tabletop in - tabletop role playing games in college and I wasn't necessarily a big player of such games grown up.

Doug:

I got into, you know, I played games often growing up. I had a brother who's three years younger than I am and much smarter than me. And so we were about evenly matched until he was about nine, maybe eight. And o we played this sort of like standard stuff, right? We played chess until he started beating me on turn four every time. We played Monopoly, Stratego, all kinds of stuff. And yeah, I've always been interested in games that way. Other stuff… Upwards, we played a lot of Scategories. And so, yeah, I grew up playing games.

And then in sixth grade, I think, somebody who joined the scout troop I was in, or when I joined scouts said like, hey, have you ever played this game called D&D? And I was like, nah, that sounds stupid. And he was like, it is, let's play. And I was like, okay. And yeah, bam, I was hooked.

And I played that through, all through middle school and a bit into high school until like academic pressure took over. Didn't play much in college, but then sort of drifted back into it when a friend of mine said, “You want to play D&D again?" I said, “Nah, it's really, know, it's got like, there's way too much math, like the mechanics need to get out of the way. Like, yeah, yeah, but have you heard the good news of fifth edition? And I had not. And then I played fifth ed and was converted. I saw the light.

Kenzie:

Yeah, its there before you at the end of the tunnel.

Doug:

(Angelic) Ahhhh! Yeah.

Kenzie:

Have you played like, I guess expanded - Of course, know, D&D isn't the end all be all of things. Like do you have in the search of games and in your journey of creating games, have you kind of found that there is a type of game? For example, like you already said that you were like story heavy, but like GM-less games or genre-based games or anything you like gravitate towards.

Doug:

Yeah, I think more and more I'm gravitating towards GM-less games, just because I think… there's a necessary elegance to them that - if we have a GM, right, I run a game of fifth edition for friends and if they have questions about the rules, then either I or another player can answer their questions because we're the experts, right? But if we're sitting down to play the Quiet Year for the first time, right? There's nobody in charge. So there isn't somebody who's expected to know all the rules. And it just sort of takes away that I think because there isn't somebody who's gonna be in charge, there's just this natural expectation that the rules need to be simple enough for somebody to pick up and play. Because it's much more likely that everyone's gonna be playing it for the first time rather like nobody's gonna pick up fifth edition and go, this looks cool, I'll GM it.

Kenzie:

(Laughs) True.

Doug:

Unless you do a lot of reading ahead of time, right? But yeah, I've been gravitating more and more towards GM-less, I think, mostly just because of wanting to have those really simple mechanics and wanting everyone to tell the story rather than what happens, not in every GM’d game, but I think in a lot of GM’d games where like the GM has the story. Then you make your choices that go this way or that way, but you're going in this direction the whole time, as opposed to a GM-less game where you start here and you can veer wildly from what one person had in mind because everybody's thinking different things.

Kenzie:

Yeah, when I play D&D, there's like this idea where, well, I GM it. So like I've created the entire world and that is entirely from my brain. But for instance, when I sat down with some friends to play Monsterhearts in the middle of the game, it's like, okay, well, you tell me what this place looks like. Like this is also your world. So it even goes into the, it's not even sometimes about mechanics so much as it's about. how do we actually do communal storytelling? And that means that even if one person is leading the story in terms of making sure everyone's like on the same page and we're moving the plot forward, that doesn't mean they're the only person who can create within the world.

Doug:

Yeah, I think questions are a great way to do that. I love questions in RPGs. You know, not how does it feel when this happens to you, but yep, you spring the trap.

What is it? Right? Because in the end, if it's in a game like D&D, it's a numbers game, right? How much damage are you going to take? You can take 13 damage from… a spring trap where you can take 13 damage from a vice or you can take 13 damage from fire. Damage is damage, more or less, right? It's just flavor. And I think letting players pick the flavor is a good way to do it.

But I think when you get even more into like letting them choose the direction of the narrative, that's when the coolest stuff happens, right? Like the story that we are going to tell, I think is always going to be cooler than the story that I have in my head that I thought we were going to tell. And you know, if you want to just tell the story in your head, you can go write a book because you're, you're, cut, you're cutting out the point of playing this game with people, which is the communal aspect of it.

Kenzie:

Right.

Doug:

Yeah.

Kenzie:

You have created a fairly well-known TTRPG game, I would say, along with John Gilmore, and that was Kids on Bikes, and then furthermore, Teens on Space, and now Kids on Brooms. But how did the beginning of Kids on Bikes happen? What was that like?

Doug:

I’m glad that John and I didn't commit to lying about this because I think it started in the most predictable way, right? I was watching Stranger Things the first season, right? Got three episodes in and posted on socials like, hey, so who wants to design a Stranger Things game with me? And John was like, yeah, I'm working on a tabletop Stranger Things game. I was like, oh, that's cool. Can I help? And he was like, no. But we could do - because there was already another co-designer.

And I think the more people you add, the tougher it can be, especially if those people haven't worked together before. But he said, but if you want to do a TTRPG, we could do that. I said, I've done one or two of those. Yeah, let's go. And we worked on it, and we were leaning in the direction of actually trying to see about the license. And that proved to be totally unworkable.

And, yeah, then made some adjustments so that it was more open, which I think is much for the better.

Kenzie:

I was gonna say at the end of the day that seems like maybe a good thing.

Doug:

Yeah, yeah. The initial designs relied really heavily on the idea. This is, I think, something that they kind of moved away from in later seasons, but the first season felt very much like it was about binaries, like the this and the that, right? The real world and the upside down and this, but the not this. And that's in part why the stats shook out the way they did, right?We chose four of the stats are definitely considered as like, dyads, right? Fight and flight, brains and brawn, and charm and grit, sort of contrasting, right? And our initial idea was that whatever you would assign your d20 and then the opposing stat would have a d4. So if you had a… a d20 in Brains, you would have a d4 in Brawn, necessarily. And part of abandoning, you know, seeking the license was abandoning that idea of this, of the binaries, which I think the design is a lot stronger for it.

There's more room for flexibility. I mean, people would have just homebrewed that away instantly anyway.

Kenzie:

Yeah, this is kind of a specifics question, but I'm always curious, like how long the process kind of takes from inception to publishing. And how long was that for Kids on Bikes specifically?

Doug:

For the first Kids on Bikes, it was… Let's see, I wanna say it was two years before the Kickstarter, but I mean, somebody could math me on that. Stranger Things came out summer of, I think 2015.

Kenzie:

Summer of 2016. It sounds like the first episode aired.

Doug:

Huh, quicker than I thought. So that came together in about a little more than a year.

Kenzie:

Wow.

Doug:

The Kickstarter was for it was right before my daughter was born, which was 2017. So yeah, that's right. Because we were doing a bunch of the writing. I remember like a vivid sense memory of like watching the Olympics and writing at the same time.

Kenzie:

Yeah, that is a really quick turnaround though, a year.

Doug:

Yeah, I have summers since my day job is teaching. And before I had a kid, my wife works in the summer. So was just, I could play video games by myself or I could write.

Kenzie:

You had all day.

Doug:

And the summer of 2017, John came out here for a week and we did sort of the finishing touches stuff. So that one was about a year, think, Teens in Space was about a year, because we had the framework already and then we just built onto it. Kids on Brooms was, I think, about year.

Kenzie:

So relatively kind of equal in their creation processes.

Doug:

Kids in Capes took a long time. That we started in 20… 2020, I think, 2021. So yeah, that was about four years, yeah.

Kenzie:

When it comes to Kids on Bikes, I feel like the, we've mentioned this a little bit about like collaborative storytelling and everything, which I think one of the big things about that is like creating the town or creating the setting that you're gonna play in before you kind of create your characters or the story. And so we know why now, and maybe this is the same answer, but like we're both drawn towards like collaborative games and that sort of thing. Is that the same reason that like at the time that was thought up that that was at the forefront?

Doug:

Same thing. Yeah, if you want GMs to not come in with a story set, I think one of the best ways to do that is to not let them start with the setting. If they can come in with, OK, well, it's going to take place in a… in a coastal town and so then there's gonna be stuff going on in the ocean and there’s gonna be this monster and then there's gonna be, oh, the mayor's gonna be corrupt. They can come in with all of that if they're able to say, hey, here's where it's taking place. Yeah, I guess fine, tell me what stories you wanna tell, but we know, and we're gonna do this. Making them create the setting on the spot and the rumors and all of that stuff, I think, forces people into that more improv-y slash collaborative space. So yeah, that was deliberate on our part for sure.

Kenzie:

I feel like there's a thing where in the creation of games, it's like… there's a struggle between like putting something in there and then also saying or you can do this however you want to do it and it's like just leave that part out like make the game how you want it to be played and then people are going to do what they're going to do with it but i think it's good like you created a game that didn't actually in the rules give you an option not to do that - of course you know people are going to do whatever they're going to do - but i don't know i think that's good because i feel like i've read more recently in TTRPGs where people write the rule structure, but then they're like, but you you can play around and if you don't like this and don't do it.

And it's like, you know, like it's good to like make a game and then let people do what they're gonna do by themselves, I think.

Doug:

Yeah, I totally agree with that. When I first started designing, I was more inclined to say, like, here's an optional rule, here's an optional rule, here's an optional rule. But then you're just creating a framework rather than a game.

And there are games that have done really cool things with modularity and stuff like that. But I think if you have a thing that you want people to do, make the rules, make them do that thing, right? Have it deliver the experience that you want them to have when they're playing the game. And I think every version of the kids' games has an optional rule in there somewhere because old habits, right?

But mostly we've been able to… John's been able to keep me too. You know, just stuff that might take a little bit longer and if you want to hurry into something, you know, like the second edition has an optional map building thing where you roll dice onto a map and that's where these things are and you help create your town that way.

But if we're doing a one-shot at a convention, we're not going to spend half an hour drawing a map of our town. Cool, we have 15 minutes. There's some vampires over there. You go fight them. Town’s safe.

Kenzie:

Are there any mechanics that you guys made that didn't make it into the final cut of the game?

Doug:

Yes. Especially when we were thinking about it as a Stranger Things game. I was like, you know what would be a great idea? You know what everyone loved about old D&D?It was THACO. People loved having to consult a chart. And then do like weird counterintuitive math to figure out what happened. That was a really good way to not take people out of the story. How about if we do that? And John was like, absolutely not.

Kenzie:

(Laughs)

Doug:

So I had a whole thing written up about that and that didn't, I think I was like, no, no, no, let's test it. And we did like five minutes of it. I was like, yeah, this is garbage. Good Lord. So yeah, there's stuff like that. Most of the stuff that didn't survive is stuff that was… It's still in there. It's just a much better, more streamlined version of it. The magic system in Kids on Brooms is a streamlined version of what we had initially. You know, initially it was, there are six things that you need to think about and it was more granular and then we just condensed it down to no, it's these four things. We streamlined a bunch of stuff from first edition to second edition.

The powered character rules are totally redone for second edition. Because the first time I listened to an actual play of it, I said, no, they're doing the powered character all wrong.Like what’s... Do they just not get it? That's weird. Okay, yeah, way to go, guys. You blew that. And then listen to another one, I was like, yeah, they also, yeah, they have it, yeah, they have that wrong too in a different way. So I guess they don't get it either. And then… I think the third one I was like, yeah, they also got it wrong. So that's, that's an us problem. So those got streamlined, you know, stuff like that.

But especially in the later, certainly with second edition, we knew what we were going for. And it was a smoothing the rough edges project that turned into kind of reshaping it a little bit. But then for the spin-offs, we had a pretty clear sense of what we want to do was just this mechanic won't do that thing we want to do as smoothly as this other one will.

You know, the combat system in Capes went through a couple different iterations until we found one that we were like, yeah, this actually works really well, as opposed to, this is taking people out of like the moment to calculate this thing that will then determine how they tell the story. it's like what would happen to - after a play test that was fine, but like wasn't the thing we wanted. John and I were at dinner uh and you talking about the math. He said like kids, if a kid gets in a fight they don't think about stuff during a fight, right? Like they're not going to be, the calculation thing is something that a kid would never do in a fist fight. What would they do?

I was like, what they would do is like have a broken arm and not realize it until the fight was over. He was like, right. What if they don't realize what's going on until the fight's over? And I was like, yeah, hell yeah. Unless they get like knocked out cold. So it became just you take stress and if you hit a certain threshold, you're out. And there are small changes as your stress gets higher, but it wasn't, so it affects this, but then this, but not that. It was a lot smoother.

Kenzie:

On the other side of that question, is there a favorite mechanic of yours that isn’t within the games?

Doug:

I really like the stress system in Capes. I think that does some fun things and it is mostly on the GM to keep track of some of the effects so it's not player focused. But it has, I think it's sanded pretty smooth. And it has impact on your ability to keep your secret identity, which is always something that with like… superhero fiction, especially like young superhero fiction, I'm like, nah, I call BS. Like my kid comes home with like a broken jaw. I'm like, you good kid? You were out all night and then you came home and someone who was about your height was on the news getting clocked right in the jaw. Nah. And so that, yeah, I think the stress and the way that the stress impacts your ability to keep this life secret from other people and keep it from interfering is probably my favorite in that.

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Kenzie:

Did Kids on Bikes lead directly into Teens on Space? Did you guys like always have this thought to make kind of like different genre versions of the game?

Doug:

No, I mean, we set out to do the one and we thought. We were planning to do the Kickstarter ourselves and thought, boy, it would be cool if we make enough to be able to actually print it. Otherwise, everybody's just getting the PDF. So maybe, maybe like 200 of our friends will like throw some support our way. Like, yeah, like John's well known we could, we'll probably fund. And then John ran into Ivan Van Norman from Hunters at GenCon the summer, I think it was summer of 2017. And he was like, hey, we should talk about this. And yeah, so no, we had just expected it to be a one-off and cool. I actually have the note that I slid to John at one point about Teens in Space. And I'm actually looking at it right now. And it says, had an idea while walking over an in-depth module called Kids in Space. Yeah, I mean that for me was like the space stuff is like my nostalgia, right? I grew up watching, I mean I grew up wearing out the VHS tapes of Star Wars, right? When there were three Star Wars things that you could watch. And I loved Star Trek too growing up. And space just always sort of captured my imagination. And so as I was thinking about like, You know, John had mentioned at one point that like, it's super nostalgic for him because he grew up watching Goonies and E.T. and I don't think I watched either of those until I was in my at least late teens, probably early 20s. Well, E.T., I think I watched younger, but like it never hooked me.

Kenzie:

I was a Goonies kid, I was a Goonies kid.

Doug:

Yeah.

Kenzie:

(Laughs)

Doug:

And I was thinking like if I was gonna make a game based on like my nostalgia would be it would be space stuff. Oh. Oh, okay. Yeah and then had a had a title I wish we had kept for that one uh Looking back. I think Kids in Space would have been a lot better than Teens in Space.

Kenzie:

It feels like every game should have been like a different like Teens in Space and then Pre-teens on brooms or, you know.

Doug:

Yeah, right. It was one of our friends, Banana Chan, wrote a game called Dads on Mowers, an adventure called Dads on Mowers for Kids on Bikes as a sort of like joke on the Teens in Space thing.

Kenzie:

And then Kids on Brooms, was that like, just like the next obvious link in the chain? I mean, I know for that one, you brought Spencer Starke on. So like, how did that all culminate?

Doug:

So that one was we were having a conversation with Renegade and Hunters. We were on a Zoom call with them. And Scott from Renegade, we were almost done with Teens in Space, said, so where are we with this? And we were telling him, we need to do a round of editing before we do a couple play tests. But we feel pretty good about it. He's like, what's next? We’re like, we don't know. And we were kind of like, will there be, like, we never wanted to do something because there was, we wanted to do something because we wanted to do it, right? And we were like, yeah, we don't know. We haven't picked anything yet. He said, yeah, I mean, that's cool. You're still working on this. And like, it's just such, like, it's such an evocative… the names are so evocative that like, you just say the name and you like sort of have the game in your head already, right?

Like, and so whatever it is, if it's like, he said one thing and then, or like, know, Kids on Brooms, like, boom. We're like, yeah, that's our next one. He was like, no, no, no, it doesn't have to be like, just because I run an incredibly successful game company. They're like, I don't have to tell you what, you know, we're like, no, no, no, no, no, no. Kids on Brooms is the next one we just decided like, we're great. And it so happened that Spencer Starke had done a hack of Kids on Bikes for a convention and was talking with Ivan about that hack and like, wouldn't it be cool? But yeah, like a week after we had had that meeting, Spencer was like, hey, Ivan, I did this thing. I think they had, Hunter's was already starting to talk with Spencer about Icarus, which I think was his first game. And yeah, put us in touch.

I mean, as Spencer has gone on to prove he's a hell of a game designer. And yeah, the three of us just jibed almost immediately and yeah, worked really, really well together.

Kenzie:

So there wasn't like any concern with you guys not clicking since you were bringing a new guy on to the team.

Doug:

There was concern at first, especially, I mean, it sounds like so ridiculous to say, given who Spencer actually is, right? But we were both like, yeah, like, designing with people is hard and like… Like some people are super precious with their ideas and some people like can't take no. And it's like, know, John and I aren't like it's our system, but like we know it. And if somebody comes along and it's like, we're like, it does have really good ideas though. And like, this is in line with a lot of what we were thinking already. And like, this is a better idea than we had. And, but like, we like this idea better than this one. So like, what if he's like, no, my ideas. Like I was at first.

Kenzie:

We’re all precious about them.

Doug:

Yeah, exactly. We were nervous about it at first. But I mean, those fears, you know, wound up being like, totally unfounded. Yeah, God Spencer so good.

Kenzie:

Yup. That is true.

Well then, I guess since those games were such quick, those three were like a year in time, what was it about Kids and Capes that took longer? Was it just a bigger like swerve from the original core or?

Doug:

That's a little bit of it though I think the biggest swerve was Teens in Space. Just because we added more stuff to it. Kids on Brooms was, Kids on Bikes, we had already added rules for bikes in a module. And so we just sort of modified those for Brooms. We - And then the magic system is the big change, right? And then the town creation questions become the school creation questions, it's pretty close. But yeah, there was - we were pretty explicit in Kids on Bikes, the first edition, that we wanted combat to not be a thing. And we tried to design around it so that combat wouldn't be a thing by being like, hey, in combat, you might die. Right? Like, just always know that. And then people were complaining like, yeah, so like my character got in a fight like five minutes in and died? We're like, yeah, because on like page 24, it says like, don't get in a fight, you might die. Right? Maybe try to solve your problems without violence because you're squishy in this game. They were like, so this game sucks.

Kenzie:

Shaking my head.

Doug:

Yeah, right. But obviously for a game about kids superheroes, you need to have a combat system, Like kids superheroes don't talk their problems out most of the time. So that was part of it. That was a really big change. The power system we wanted to make sure wasn’t… We wanted to make sure that it was a game about your character becoming the superhero. That was a design decision we made pretty early on. And so there needed to be… Your powers needed to grow in a kind of obvious way, but still with choice, but not with… so much choice that you're consulting a 200 page manual every time you level up or however you do that. And also, how were we going to do leveling up? We didn't want to say, oh, you're a level four superhero now. So balancing choice and open-endedness with analysis paralysis with being too linear was tough.

We started it near the beginning of the pandemic. And so that was an issue as well. I think we really got started designing, well, I guess mid-pandemic. We really got started designing in the summer of 2021. And we were doing, we were designing quasi live, we did a I think it was a bi-weekly live stream for like six sessions of that. Maybe it was weekly. And the six of us who were working on it, you know, were on a recorded thing, walking through it live. And that took... longer than expected because we'd never designed that way before, right?

Kenzie:

Were you getting like live feedback at the same time from people listening to the game design? Or was that -

Doug:

Yeah, so that was another, that was my biggest concern at first. But we were pretty clear at the start of every episode, like, hey, we're glad you're tuning in. Just a heads up, we're designing this. If we want feedback, we'll ask, like, hey, can anybody think of a good term for blank? Cool. But we were really clear that it wasn't going to be, you this is not a design by us and however many viewers we have, it's people getting to watch the design process.

And we were clear from the start that like, people weren't going to get design credit if they threw an idea into the chat that one of us wound up having independently or wound up using. We do try to be careful with like giving people thank yous for stuff in the books, though I mean with design it's hard to get everything. You know in the design community if, well a good example is a friend of mine, Jay Treat, who does a lot of more improv games, gave a ton of feedback on the relationship questions, which are, I think, one of the real strong points of the game. But he's not a co-designer, right?

And so we were, we tried to be clear with everybody in the chat that this wasn't going to be a, hey, you gave us an idea about what to call this one thing. So now your name is on the front of the book thing. And I think being totally blunt and upfront with that helped temper that a little bit. And so that I think took longer because everybody was processing, everybody was, you know, living through their, depending on how old they were, 10th once in a lifetime event. Everybody was sort of trying to keep afloat. And so that slowed things down too. And I think the game is better for having the six of us working on it, but working with six people takes a lot longer than… than not.

And I mean it took so long that one person sort of said like, other stuff is now going on and I have to bow out and so yeah, but we couldn't have done it without her at the start, I don't think.

Kenzie:

Yeah.

Doug:

Yeah, and then getting consensus for everything because we don't want it to, you know, even if John and I are the ones who've designed within the system the most, we didn't want Nick or Austin or Mo to feel like, hey, you're just here to like advise and say, yeah, guys, this looks good. We wanted it to really be the five of us working on it.

Kenzie:

We’re coming to the end here of our time chatting, but a question before you go is what's the next genre?

Doug:

(Laughs) Right now there is no next genre. As I've been telling people, I'm gonna kids on break.

Kenzie:

That’s valid. I mean, you've been working on it, like, straight for almost a decade, so...

Doug:

Almost a decade, yeah. I love the system and I've talked to enough creatives who've spent too long doing something that eventually they hate the thing. And I still love it, but I was starting to feel a bit of the, you know, like, And there was other stuff I wanted to work on too, right? And that was, I think, something that I realized during the pandemic as well, especially having now a seven-year-old, there's a finite amount of time, right? And I'm more interested in being a good dad than a good game designer.

Kenzie:

Yeah!

Doug:

And so… there's choices there, right? Like… But then with some other stuff that I'm working on, like Home with Wet Ink Games, I wanna do some more stuff with that. I think Julian and I made a really cool, simple, elegant system there and I wanna do more in that universe. Julian and I have a, almost definitely have a project coming up that is NDA'd and I’m excited about that.

Kenzie:

Cool, cool.

Doug:

I'm working on another role playing game using Wet Ink System. It's a cool card-based system that they've used for a bunch of their games. So Chad Nolan and Sen-Foong Lim and I are doing a similar but legally distinct game called Fast Cars and Family.

Kenzie:

Yes, I saw this idea out there in the world. That was cool.

Doug:

And I'm also trying to be good about not taking on too many projects at once and like, oh I got to do this. Now there's that. Now there's that. And like spending time with this rather than juggling. So, you know, Fast Cars is almost finished. Home is out there and published and, know, working on a couple little cool things here and there with it. But then this other project that Jules and I hopefully get to do is going to require a lot of attention to. So, yeah, for a bunch of reasons, at least for me, there's not another genre coming up. I really hope there is from somebody else.

Kenzie:

And this is actually my last and final question for you. Can you tell me one of your favorite moments at a table? It can be anything, it can be something happy, something sad, just kind of a memory that you look back on fondly.

Doug:

Yes, John and I were both running games at a convention at nearby tables. And we started like cross pollinating ideas from one group to the other. And it was like, just a really great example of like, collaborative collaboration, right? Like the… These games, oh, it turns out these games are not as independent as we thought, right? So I really love stuff where everybody thinks you're going in this direction and then suddenly, we're over here now.

But yeah, I also love those moments where everything clicks into place. A friend of mine was running a game where we had this hapless, naive, sweet, but unbelievably stupid NPC

Kenzie:

The best ones.

Doug:

-who turned out when we got to the palace of the deposed king. He said, you know, and you're very confused about why there are many, many pictures of this child painted on the walls at various ages and with different facial hair. And we were like, Oh. And then like the moment where like all of these little things click into place, right? The kid, yeah, it was just this great moment of, wow, we've been playing with this character for four years. And he also doesn't know because he's hapless and stupid, right? But we're now our like beloved, we called him the boy, right? The boy is the most wanted person in the kingdom. That’s cool. Yeah, like great surprise moments like that are what I live for in games.

Kenzie:

Well, thank you so much Doug for joining me in chatting game design and Kids on Bikes.

Doug:

Absolutely, thanks for having me on, Kenzie, I appreciate it.

Kenzie:

Of course. And for everyone listening, if you haven't had a chance to sample any of these games that we've talked about today, you can get an example of it by listening to the queeRPG show, Let's Go to the Mall, where we played Kids on Bikes. This TTRPG comes highly recommended from us. But yeah, thank you all for listening and until next time.