Episode: 2127
Title: HPR2127: Tabletop Gaming
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2127/hpr2127.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 14:39:03

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This is HPR episode 2,127 entitled Tabletop Gaming.
It is hosted by Klaatu and is about 34 minutes long.
The summary is Klaatu Pandana Log Programming and Tabletop Gaming.
This episode of HPR is brought to you by an honesthost.com.
Get 15% discount on all shared hosting with the offer code HPR15.
That's HPR15.
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I started talking about Tabletop Gaming.
I did an episode recently on Dark Colts, which is an old 1980s game
that I kind of discovered online and so far as you can discover something that exists online already.
But I found it and I revived it and been really enjoying it.
That's just been one aspect of Tabletop Gaming that I've been enjoying lately.
Truth is, I've gotten a lot more into Tabletop Gaming than ever before lately
because I've got a reliable partner now to play a game with.
I've been actually being able to play games, two player games,
reliably four player games on special occasions.
Sometimes even more people, it just depends on what the occasion is.
Tabletop Gaming has been something that I've been able to enjoy lately
and I'm really happy to have sort of found it.
I wanted to talk about what appeals to me about it
so that if you're not someone who plays a lot of analog games
then maybe this will get you to check it out
or give you the courage to check it out if you've been curious about it
and if you're a resident to get involved.
If you're anything like me, maybe you're not,
but if you're anything like me, you probably grew up with the usual assortment of board games
that everyone sort of gets, you know, whenever I guess people have a kid,
I guess they just get standard issue board games along with everything else
and those board games that kind of get put into the closet
and they're kind of like the board games that you grow up with
and they're all the standard issue family-friendly,
really usually pretty basic rules that easy to play.
It's just kind of, they're good solid games.
I'm not saying that they're like not real games or anything.
I'm just saying that that's kind of like we all know the ones that I'm talking about.
There's that short list of board games that everyone in America anyway owns.
And that's fine.
But there's that other side of tabletop gaming that you hear about
and certainly I started hearing about a long time ago.
You just, you just done the periphery, you know, it's just right out there
and you don't really think about it, but you hear about it and you hear murmurings
and it's like this member's only super secret world of really cool board games,
like really cool ones.
And they're kind of like this, this amalgamation of hardcore RPG
with traditional coffee table pastimes, you know,
it's all the best parts of everything.
And I move slowly so between childhood cautions against, you know,
the gateway to the occult to that was Dungeons and Dragons
and just kind of flat out unfamiliar, unfamiliarity with modern gaming.
I didn't really know where to begin in exploring the tabletop gaming thing.
I just didn't know how to sort of find that entry point.
But I did, I eventually did find that entry point.
For me, it was with cards against humanity, which you've probably played
or you've heard of, possibly you don't like it, possibly you love it.
Either way, whatever you think about it, it's kind of an easy, mad lib-style wacky game
that has no barrier to entry other than a really horrible sense of humor.
But apparently it's a ripoff, anyway, of a game called Apples to Apples,
which I'd also vaguely heard of and I'd actually seen in play once at a Linux conference.
Actually, I think I can tell you exactly which Linux conference it was
because someone was just talking about it the other month online.
But anyway, I didn't join in on that game because I didn't know anything about it.
I just knew it was like Apples to Apples.
I don't know what that is, but it's a card game.
I don't know how to get into a card game.
So I'm not going to approach that and ask to join in, which was stupid.
So, like, to a large degree, my hazardation, the barrier to entry in the table top gaming
was my own sort of unadventurelessness.
But anyway, I ended up with this copy of cards against humanity as a gift.
Somebody had given it to me because it was a creative commons game.
So it was a creative commons game.
So it encouraged, I mean, that's how every person thought,
well, he'll like this because he's always going on about creative commons.
This says creative commons.
So I'll give it to him.
That's how I ended up with it.
And as a result, I started playing cards against humanity.
And cards against humanity, again, no matter what you really think about it,
is that it does encourage people to not necessarily purchase the game.
You can print it out at home.
And that alone was a huge revelation to me.
Like, the idea that there was this thing that you could just print out at home
and not purchase anything, but still be able to play a game,
that was a novel idea to me.
And even if you did buy the game, you could then add to the game,
which is a whole other dimension of things, which I guess I'll get to.
The idea of user mods for games is a completely new idea to me,
which is weird because you think about like a poker game,
or any card game that you play with a standard 52 card deck.
You always hear the term house rules.
And all that is is people saying,
OK, well, here's this game, here's this rule set that we all know.
And now we'll tweak them a little bit to make this game more fun for us.
And I kind of, the fact that it's a new idea to me,
that it sort of came as like this great revelation,
I will gladly blame on technology.
Because for most of my life, up until I discovered open source,
it just never really occurred to me that I could take something
and use it in some way other than what the creator of that thing intended,
which is a shame to have to admit,
because especially since as a kid, as kids, we all,
none of us have that built in.
We do anything with anything, right?
We find cardboard boxes or Tupperware in the kitchen cabinet,
and we make cities out of them, or we take pillows,
and we make forts for ourselves.
You know, there's nothing built in to us that says,
well, you can't use this thing for anything but this one purpose.
It's like as kids, we don't, that that never even occurs to us.
But I feel for me, at least in technology,
that was something that was kind of taught to me,
something that I learned, and it's the wrong thing to learn.
But with software, closer software,
you're explicitly forbidden from certainly figuring out how it works.
And you're told exactly how you're allowed to use it.
And if you attempt to abuse it, or you use it in some other way,
then there are either blockades, like it stops working,
or it crashes, or you just find that you hit a wall
because it's software and it's closed source,
and there's not really anything you can do above and beyond what is built into it to do.
Of course, open source doesn't have that drawback.
I mean, there is a inherent limitation, I guess,
to what you can do with software and read only chips and things like that,
or read only media.
But generally speaking with open source software,
there's a little bit more flexibility built in.
And certainly there's the sense that you're supposed to look at it.
You know, there's an invitation there.
Like, you don't have to use this in the way that we tell you to use it.
Here's GIMP, it's a graphic application.
If you want to script it such that you can design something in GIMP
and then pipe that picture out to a sound output
and thereby make music with your graphics, then go for it.
You know, there's never any kind of built-in restriction.
And even if it is built-in because, hey, it's software
and you just can't physically do,
you just can't make it do something that it's totally not meant to do.
It's still open source and there's still different hooks into it
that you can use to try to abuse it in fun and new ways.
And with analog gaming, that definitely is built-in.
You can add to a game, you can modify the rules,
you can share your ideas with other people,
you can invent an entirely new game.
It's just, it's completely an utterly unlike closed technology.
You're buying the assets when you buy that game.
You get to take it home and then once it's yours,
you can do really anything you want with them.
You can't resell it.
I don't think, but in terms of the actual use,
you can use it in any other way that you want.
You don't like the fact that there is a Joker card in your deck,
set it aside.
Or if you want the Joker card to have special powers,
you want it to be Joker's wild, whatever,
then granted that ability.
And you just kind of announce that to the table
and you've just modified the game.
And it's, that's an ancient, you know, age old thing right there
about gaming that just kind of never occurred to me.
I mean, that is what entertainment should be about its creativity.
Yeah, you can sit and enjoy someone else's creativity.
And I often do.
But sometimes you want the opportunity to be creative too.
And any good entertainment system ought to allow for that.
And tabletop gaming does and has forever.
And it's good that it fosters that.
It kind of surprised and appealed to me that tabletop gaming,
as it turns out, has all the same thrill.
And in many cases, the same immersion that a complex video game has.
And sometimes it even does it better than a fancy video game does.
The obvious analogy, I guess, would be that tabletop gaming
is to video games as books are to movies.
You can allow for some overlap there,
but one of them shows you the result of an artist's imagination.
And the other one acts as a catalyst for your own.
So I'm not really a super game.
You know, I don't think of game theory on an everyday basis.
I do the more that I play more tabletop games and even more video games.
I do think about them.
But generally speaking, I will say that I'm a very superficial.
I dare say casual gamer.
It's the fantasy of the game that appeals to me the most.
I don't tend to play a game just because I'm interested in the gaming mechanic
of that particular thing.
That's not how I think about it.
I play a game because for a few hours I get to become a rogue or a necromancer
or a dictator of a fictional country.
Or I get to visit a new country or a new world.
Or there's some intriguing story that I have to uncover or bits of stories
that only get hinted at maybe in the artwork of the cards.
You know, there's there's this kind of discovery process and imaginative experience
that tabletop games encourage the same way that books and radio plays
that don't show you everything that they encourage that kind of imagination
in the same way.
And a lot of what I do in real life does depend on modern conveniences.
And that's another really good thing about tabletop gaming is that it essentially requires
no modern convenience whatsoever.
Tabletop gaming is very, very old.
So unlike closed or open source software for a tabletop gaming,
you don't need electricity.
You don't need microchips or nanotechnology.
It's just none of that applies to this.
I mean, I love the idea of analog computing.
And I wouldn't say that I'm actually as dependent upon computers
as even I sometimes think that I am.
You know, I think a lot of us probably, a lot of us Geeks may
may sell ourselves short in a way.
And we say things like, oh, I wouldn't know what to do without the internet
or I wouldn't know what to do without a computer.
But maybe you would actually, you know, you create of minds
and the hacker personality, I think, tends to be more resourceful
than certainly outsiders give us credit for.
And sometimes even we give ourselves credit for.
Tabletop gaming kind of permits me to set aside
all the modern convenience stuff in a pinch,
whether I'm just out without a computer or out, you know,
in the great outdoors, like on a hiking trip or something,
or maybe the power's gone out or whatever, you know.
I mean, there are occasions where we don't have the modern convenience
that we pretend like we're so dependent upon
and Tabletop gaming is a great way to get outside of that.
But it does, I mean, in addition to being an imaginative experience,
like I said, there is a certain aspect to gaming that is a lot more technical.
And it really is a form of analog programming.
And that's something that I've been interested in
for a very long time and could never quite get a hold of.
I mean, I remember teachers in school insisting to me
that the abacus was actually a calculator, you know.
And I never understood that for as long as I lived,
I could not understand why people kept insisting
that a series of beads was a calculator.
I just, that made no sense to me.
But the idea that the same principles that we enjoy in computing
can be applied to non-electronic things in life is very fascinating.
And I didn't even realize this was a component of Tabletop gaming
until I started playing Tabletop games more frequently.
And I started, it's just not, you know, if you look for it especially,
you just kind of start to see the programming come to the surface,
bubble to the surface out of the Tabletop game.
The way that I think I probably first realized it, again,
was cards against humanity.
I was playing with someone and we were,
it was just me and my girlfriend and there were,
so there was a two-player situation.
We only had two players.
Card against humanity, you can play with two players,
but it doesn't really work because you always know who is answering.
You know, it's, there's only one answer provided,
so that's kind of weird.
I mean, you can also put down your own card,
but then you, again, know who's card that is.
So, I mean, it can be a collaborative thing like, hey,
which one of these two answers do we think is funniest?
But there's a mod in the cards against humanity rulebook
that says you should have three players.
And for the third player, if you don't have a third player,
you can deal a hand to what they call Rando Calarysian,
a fake player.
And he receives cards, a hand, face down.
And he submits random answers on each turn,
so you just take a random card from this ghost third player,
hand, and put it down as an answer.
And amazingly, the results are just as funny,
and sometimes funnier than a real human answer.
And honestly, I've played two player games of cards against humanity
where this random non-player has nearly won the game,
such as randomness.
But as game mods go, that really, really works.
It's very effective, super simple.
I mean, it's not what you would call elegant.
If we were programming here in terms of making an AI,
that's pretty much the lowest you can go.
Just like total randomness just depend on complete and utter
just brute forcing a third player into a two-player situation.
It boils down to, if you need another player,
just play two hands, and possibly play the second hand blind.
Now, that introduced me to the idea that AI essentially
could be programmed into an analog game.
There's a more elegant example in the dark cults game
that I talked about in my previous episode in Tabletop Gaming,
which if you didn't hear that, I won't rehash it,
but it's an old game from the 80s.
You can find out more about it at getlab.com slash not clattu slash dark occult d-a-r-k-o-c-c-u-l-t.
So, when I was doing this, everything completely changed for me
when I discovered the 1985 expansion pack,
which included modified rules for a single-player game.
So, as a player, the scheme is pretty much...
It's so elegant that the game might as well have been meant for a solo game.
I mean, it's just that good.
From a programming standpoint, you can see what it's doing,
and it's just absolutely brilliant.
And it's one of those things.
I mean, I don't know how much source code you've read in your life.
I've read my fair share, and you can kind of...
It's kind of a surfing trip.
You kind of wade through some of the tides,
and you're picking up on these important points out on the horizon.
You're kind of...
As you read, you're kind of like...
You're forming a picture,
and then you get to the part where it all kind of comes together,
and it's like you're just writing on this wave,
or like...
I imagine what it would be to write on a wave.
And they're actually surfing.
I'm just making up an analogy here.
You know, there's like all that preparation,
and kind of all that background work,
and then suddenly it eventually pays off,
and suddenly it kind of makes sense,
and it's all very beautiful,
and you understand what the code is working.
That's how the single-player rulebook felt when I...
I was reading it for dark, dark quotes.
You see how the card decks are getting divided up,
and you understand that there are percentages involved,
and you see how the challenges are being mitigated,
and how randomness plays the part of your opponent,
but then you're also dealing the cards that you play,
and you're playing against like this kind of fake AI.
It's amazing.
The way that dark quotes does it is that it programs the card deck
to provide a reliably fairly safe,
entertaining game progression for you
by creating this draw deck,
you know, the deck that you mostly draw from,
and they're just these basic cards,
like location and atmosphere and object cards,
nothing in there that really ever poses a threat to you.
It just progresses the game.
But then what they do is that they mix in a small percentage
of threats of the things that are actually going to trigger
like a watershed moment,
a point where you have to make a decision
or do something, you know,
that's where the action happens.
So they mix a little bit of that in there,
and so you're playing,
and the game is going along pretty smoothly,
and then there's something that forces your hand
to draw something more threatening,
or you just happen to get something threatening
because that's how percentages work,
and it's just something that occurs.
And you have to make all these choices based on what you're drawing.
You know, are you going to let your protagonist continue
through this, through the game,
or are you going to draw the protagonist,
you know, play a safe card
and get your protagonist back to safety?
It's done really, really well,
and in the single player game,
there's like five different decks,
and you draw from each under different conditions.
There's no dice involved or anything.
It's purely based around drawing cards from decks.
It's an amazing little mechanic,
and you should definitely try it.
But what's most amazing to me is that,
seeing how it went from a two-player card game
to something completely the same,
and yet in terms of layout, completely different.
So in other words,
tabletop gaming provides many of the same challenges
as, say, a video game would.
You know, it provides the same exact mechanics,
the same rewards,
and it's not just for the player,
it's also for the designer,
and you can program the situation.
You can set the stage for an imaginary environment.
You can forge the same kinds of obstacles and challenges.
You can set up the same goals.
And it's the exact same process,
but it's complete.
Now, interestingly, I think a lot of us
tend to think that this concept
of a barrier to entry is sort of unique to technology.
We very frequently, as Geeks talk about,
what's keeping different people
from getting involved in this technology?
What's keeping my users away from this thing?
How can I make this more user-friendly blah, blah, blah?
There's always that question of,
what's the dumbest user that I've got,
what's holding them back, and how can I fix that?
And I never really thought of that in terms of analog gaming
until I kind of reflected on my own progress
with tabletop gaming.
And interestingly, there's a barrier to entry
to tabletop gaming.
Maybe, as I said, maybe you just,
maybe you've heard bad things
about the gaming community.
Maybe you've thought, oh, well, these people are way too
into gaming.
I don't want to go down that path.
I don't want to start investing money into this hobby.
I don't want to have to deal with these weirdos,
or whatever, or maybe you're just hesitant.
Maybe you're just shy.
Maybe you just don't know where to start.
And from the programming, I guess, aspect,
maybe you don't want to modify a game.
Maybe you don't want to invent your own game.
Maybe you don't want to learn rules to a new game.
There are lots of little things that can stand in the way
between someone and getting, sort of,
taking their first step into tabletop gaming.
Now, certainly, computer games inherently
do have a fairly, I would say, physical barrier to entry
because, like, for a computer game,
you really do need a certain set of things.
You need a computer,
and usually not always, depending on what you're playing,
but usually you're going to need a respectable graphics card
and a respectable amount of RAM and a respectable CPU,
that sort of thing.
Certainly, to create computer programs is even more complex
because now you have to have all of those things,
plus you have to know the syntax of some programming language,
and you probably need some kind of art applications
to create assets.
And, you know, all these different things,
there's just like this, it's not just a barrier,
it's an array of barriers.
It's a huge barrier to entry.
And the cool thing about tabletop gaming
is that, yes, you have to take that initial step and say,
yeah, I'm going to start playing games.
You know, and you do need, usually,
you do need, like, a second person that usually helps,
although not always, because with tabletop gaming,
like I say, user mods are all over the place,
and you'll be surprised at what kind of resources
are available on the internet in terms of modified rulesets
for single players.
So, tabletop gaming,
a little bit of a barrier to get involved,
not a whole lot,
and not a whole lot to get started programming,
as it were, a game, you know,
like actually coming up with your own, like, rules
or coming up with your own game entirely.
You can do that with basically no resources
other than your head and a deck of cards.
And even the deck of cards is pretty much optional.
You can come up with, you know, it's just that simple.
It's a mental exercise.
And that's really cool, and that's something that you,
honestly, really cannot do with video games.
There are mods out there for video games.
You can come up with things, you know,
you can kind of hack some games to do different things,
or behave differently.
There are some game engines out there
that are super simple to get started with all of those things.
But in terms of just, like, do you want to sit down
and do some analog programming,
tabletop gaming is probably the easiest way
to get started with that kind of thought process.
The final thing that appeals to me about tabletop gaming, I guess,
is that it's a free and open space.
I'm not saying, you know, I'm not fooling myself
and saying that tabletop gaming is like this blissful place
where sharing an intellectual freedom reign supreme.
And even if it is right now, I would think that if tabletop gaming
became a multi-billion dollar industry,
I don't know, it might be right now,
but probably not a multi-billion dollar industry.
If it did become really sort of like the thing,
I think that efforts to enforce copyrights would be,
you know, they would go up a lot.
You know, people would start being sued for games
that are too similar to another or whatever.
Or, you know, they'd like start some kind of campaign
to make sure that if you were over at a friend's house
playing a tabletop game,
and they modified the rules on you,
you could report them to the gaming police or something.
You know, like, I'm not saying that the entire...
I'm not under the illusion that tabletop gaming
just has no rules, and it's an open community
and everything is creative commons,
because yeah, it's definitely not.
But the fact is that tabletop gaming is a dynamic process.
The program is prescribed for you,
but it's kind of just written down in a rulebook,
and it's not really enforceable.
Other players can do whatever they want.
Everyone remains essentially a free agent.
Again, not for reselling or anything,
but in terms of actual gameplay,
you can do whatever you want.
I'm not saying that video games are bad and not enjoyable,
but I am saying that tabletop gaming is kind of a brave new world
that isn't really new at all.
Actually, it's very, very old,
but it's one of those that definitely deserves revisiting
if you've not sat down and played a really good tabletop game.
And that can be anything.
I'm not saying that, you know, that games that you play
with a standard 52 deck are not really good.
I'm just saying, like, if you find a tabletop game that you enjoy
and sit down and play it,
and if you're a programmer, think about its mechanics,
think about why...
Like, what's going on there that is making it enjoyable?
What are the risks?
What are the challenges?
What are the goals that are set up for the players?
How does that...
How does that make the players react to one another?
Does it make them work together?
Does it make them compete with one another?
Like, think about those things, and it's really, really fun.
And try a couple of your own house rules.
Come up with some rule modifications to see what happens if you...
If you change, you know, if you tweak a setting on an analog game,
how does that affect things?
It's a lot of fun.
It's easy to get started with.
You can often find these tabletop games either at a gaming store,
like a dedicated gaming store.
Sometimes they're hidden away in like a hobby shop
or something like that or a bookstore.
Or you can find them sometimes just in...
In, you know, an op shop or a thrift store,
like, you know, just for cheap.
You can just purchase them for, you know, used and give them a go.
So, or you can do a print and play.
Really, like, whether you go to getlab.com,
slash not quite too slash dark or cult,
or whether you go to drive through cards
and check out some of the print and play games there.
I mean, they exist.
They're like, they're out there.
And actually just download people's games
and print them out, cut them into cards
or you could send them away a printer for demand service,
and have them printed just and then start playing.
And it's really cheap and it's really cool.
I mean, it is very much the open-source spirit
cutting out the middleman, cutting out the distributor,
and letting people just kind of have fun
and be creative on their own,
without the mass production of some other thing.
So, whichever avenue you choose to go down,
I highly encourage you to try out a tabletop game.
And if you find a good one, please do let me know
about it. I'm always looking for new ones now.
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