Episode: 3963
Title: HPR3963: Storytelling Games
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3963/hpr3963.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 18:01:19

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3963 for Wednesday 11 October 2023.
Today's show is entitled Storytelling Games.
It is part of the series' tabletop gaming.
It is hosted by DNT and is about 19 minutes long.
It carries a clean flag.
The summary is three storytelling-based games and some thoughts on role-playing games.
Hello and welcome to another exciting episode of Hacker Public Radio.
This is your host DNT and today I am talking about some storytelling games.
So these are games that are either card games or dice games I guess or they are in the
same kind of world as role-playing games I suppose in a way but they are a little different.
So the games I am referring to I am going to say the first one I am going to mention is
called Storycumes or also known as Rory's Storycumes.
So these are each game is a set of dice which by the way is the plural of die when we
are talking about those cubes or those objects which are most commonly known in the
most excited form they are known as dice when we are talking about more than one.
So the Storycumes is a set of dice that have different sort of icons on each face of
each die, different icons, totally different icons for each die that comes in a set.
There is like a basic one that you can buy it comes with nine dice and then there are
different sets you can buy that are in different themes so they will have different types
of icons so let's say there is one that is called Actions I think that the icons are
a little more focused on representing actions rather than things and then I don't know
maybe you have like a space one or kind of a fantasy one maybe you have a Harry Potter
one or whatever it is different themes right so that you know you end up buying all these
different ones so and the idea of the game it's not really a game you just grab the dice and
you throw them all at once I guess and then you can combine the the icons that appear at the
top as in that you combine them into a story so the ways I have played this let's say have
been you just grab all nine throw them roll them I guess and then you tell a story using those
icons somehow combine them into some kind of story that you make up on the spot then you
hand it over to the next person the next person does the same thing so there's no winning condition
or anything like that is just something you get together with other people and do there are
games that you can invent of course and there is one game don't remember what it's called but the
company that made the story cubes released one actual game with a board and all that that you
can play using the story cubes somehow I don't have that one and I don't really know very much
about it if you do I invite you to record an episode of Hacker Public Public Radio to share this with
this community so that story cubes kind of interesting was the first storytelling game sort of thing
that I heard about and I've had it for a while I've played it a handful of times only which I think
tends to be the case so then I'll talk about two other games one is called dark cults and that's
an old game that I obtained a copy of a sort of remake that's not available for purchase
I have a tattoo to thank for that and it's a card game it only has cards no board no dice nothing
and this one is kind of a horror vaguely love crafty on I guess game and you when you're
the person the people playing with you they you have cards in your hand and then you play them
you draw new cards and stuff and each card you play has a certain thing on it like maybe a
character or a place or some sort of event or something like that that you must introduce into
the story so you tell a bit of the story and then then you stop then then it's the next person's turn
the next person must play a card and continue telling the same story now each card tells you
what types of cards can follow it right now in this game each player is either playing as death
or as life which just means that one is trying to get the the character that we're following the
protagonist one is trying to get that character killed the other one's trying to get that character
to survive the night and then there are several cards that end the night either with the card with
the character surviving or dying and then if you if you are death you get more points when the
character dies if your life you get more points and the character lives and so you play a
succession of nights like this and then at the end you tell your points and see who won
so this game was pretty interesting we we generate some interesting stories like that
um I think we messed up the rules a little bit and then we ended up making up some pretty
non-sensical stories which which wasn't really a problem it was still entertaining that way
but I think we probably did something wrong there so like with a lot of other games that I like
one of the interesting things about it it was then you kind of do this thing collectively without
really knowing what you're doing um by just following the rules and then at the end
you you can end up with this thing you created together and and you know that can happen with
games like I think there are some railroad games that are that are pretty cool uh used to have
one that was called 1856 it's a very complex game but anyway the one I'm talking about here is
at the end of the game you end up with this map of the region that's covered by the game which
in the case of 1856 was um Canada uh parts of Canada and I think maybe the US as well
and you end up with this collectively built railroad map which I don't know I guess not everybody will
find that intriguing but I I tend to kind of enjoy just sort of staring at this thing that all
of a sudden we've we've got here in front of us that that no one made very intentionally it
just kind of emerged through this device that we um we were going through which was the game
you know this thing that that makes that happen so continuing on this theme of these storytelling
games that are kind of intriguing to me I I went and got this other one called once upon a time
and you know it's strange in some ways that game once upon a time fails to do this thing
that I was just describing where you end up with this collectively uh created story it still does
it but just not quite as much as for example dark cults probably so uh in in once upon a time you
have everybody has cards as well um and I don't think there are requirements like about what cards
can follow what cards uh so you can just play whatever card um you want to pretty sure
there are different types of cards like events places characters things like that um there's one
that's very strange called aspects uh which is I mean there's got to be a better word than that for
this anyway I don't know so they um yeah what's weird about um once upon a time is that in this
game you you so let's say it's my turn I start playing my cards right and my cards um I have as
playing cards I'm telling a story that I'm just coming up with out of my my head and um the
elements that are on the cards that I play have to appear in my story but not everything that
appears in my story has to have a corresponding card that I'm playing right and then the my the
way my turn ends is there are two possibilities one is if I use in my story an element
that is reflected on a card that somebody else has so let's say I'm telling my story and then all
of us and there's a zombie in my story and then somebody else another player has the zombie card they
can throw the zombie card before I play another card after I mentioned the zombie they play
on the zombie card and then they took over the story telling you know there's another special
type of card that's called an interrupt card that can be played to interrupt more slightly more
arbitrarily but doesn't matter so and then you go on like that and the objective of the game the
winner this this part I think is really interesting is each player has one ending card that they draw
and the ending card can be really like quite specific the text it's going to be something like
you know and they lived happily ever after something like that but there are lots of really weird
quite specific ones like yeah I'd have to get the cards to tell you but there are some pretty
funny examples that just tickle your brain just by looking at the cards and trying to imagine trying
to fit a story into that so then you see that each player is kind of long long term let's say
they're trying to steer the story so that they get to play their ending card and that's a really
cool idea I think also you can only play the ending card when it is your last card right so you
must get rid of all your other cards first so other things that you can do in this game is like
if somebody is lost or or if they just froze or whatever they can't continue the story or if the
story is just not working out if they're stalling trying to think of it then the other players can
basically just yell the other the story tale out of the the role right they can just say hey this
is you know this is not working out and then if all the other players agree then then okay it's
not their turn anymore handed over to the next person to the person to their right or whatever
so yeah um lots of interesting elements there but um I think it turns out that this game
like a lot of other storytelling games it's the something that makes people struggle with it is
that it takes a lot of energy takes a lot of mental energy you know um so so you know people
tend to not want to put in that much energy they want uh you know I think people prefer games that
that kind of the it's like the game generates its own energy and then we feed off of that energy
and in a way it's like this game is it requires um putting in more energy um that sort of feels
like to me like we we played you know you play it once and you're exhausted at the end you know
you you just can't even consider playing another round because because it just took so much out of
you to even just go through this one um I guess it's like the you know the cognitive effort that it
takes um to do that so so yeah these have been some of my experiences and observations with these
uh storytelling games um I am always really intrigued by games that incorporate storytelling
somehow um and so I've had the story cubes for a while and I like it quite a lot um and then
recently I came across these two other games um that uh uh were pretty interesting and I thought
there was enough to say about it that I could record an episode of Hackabubic Radio um
so so here it is um now I want to add a couple of things here at the end about role playing games
in general um so these games that we were talking about um they involve alternating who is telling
the story you know and this is something that I kind of discovered about role playing games
much much later as an adult right I liked role playing games a lot when I was younger
and um I can't really say that I played a lot of role playing games but I certainly had a lot of
role playing game books and I I certainly had many sessions of getting together with friends
and spending hours and hours just building characters and then oh we got to go home we can't
actually play the game thing so that happened a lot when I was growing up so um but yeah and then
it's like I know there are games that they come they have pre-built characters but I think that
sort of misses the point because people actually want to create characters you know so I think
what games should uh do and maybe some games do it if you know that they do then name them in
the comments section or record your own episode of Hackabubic Radio to tell us all about it um so
uh they should you know we should build the character as we're playing you know what I mean
you should you should start playing this the story the you know if it's an adventure that somebody
else wrote whatever it is start playing it and then as needs arise you build the characters you know
why can't we just do that dude why do we need to prepare the characters ahead of time you know
it can actually even be more fun because then you can invent uh some you know crazy things that
that you never would if you were just just coming up with a character out of thin air let the
characters sort of emerge from the story I think that's an interesting idea and so yeah I learned
that there's this one game that I think it was called ours magica I'm not sure if that's the one
or if it was another one I don't know but I know that there was a some game that was around back in
the 90s or whatever um then that it had this alternating who the game master was you know and that
was pretty cool I think um that that sounds pretty interesting if you have experience doing that
playing that kind of a role-playing game where you alternate who the storyteller is then please
share what that's like put in the comment or record your own episode episode of hack or public radio
about that because I would like to hear about what that's like because I think a lot of what
I sort of missed out on back when when I was uh you know super into role-playing games and read a
lot of role-playing games book game books was um I think I never understood the need to kind of
be generous with your storytelling the the in the concept of the the storytelling being actually
a collective construction with the game master in the players um I always kind of saw
um being the game master as this uh you know hypodermic needle sort of thing where you write the
adventure and the the players played and the game master is just running the show you know that's
that's how I always saw it and I love the idea of being a game master and writing my own adventures
of course um but I never had successful experiences doing that I think probably because I I couldn't
um incorporate that um the players own creativity right how about that so you know that
and goes hand in hand with all um you know lots of things um about um free culture that I think
about um very often nowadays um the need to make free culture that's um more participatory and
you know things like this uh here where um you are very much invited to to um take the microphone
and record the next episode of this thing so um these are some of the things I wanted to share
today uh thank you so much for tuning in and um if you're intrigued by anything I said here or if
I was wrong about anything please put a comment in um or record your own episode of Hacker Public
Radio in Posted I would love to hear from you all right come back tomorrow for another one thank you
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