![]() He had in mind a pure narrative experience. And I heard him say a couple of times, “Players want to take their characters on adventures! Players want to take their characters on adventures!” They wanted something more. And then Keith and I continued to playtest stuff and meet at local meetups and things in Madison Wisconsin. I think at the previous Protospiel I had made a really small character generation narrative game. JAMES: He had the prototype for Roll Player and it was great. KEITH:I was the guy telling him, “Dude, you gotta play this.” JAMES: So, I knew Keith before he designed Roll Player, and we had tested different designs together at Protospiel. James, where in this process did you plug in? On that note, I’d like to have Roll Player’s lead writer James jump in a bit. We’ve got invented deities and political factions, and all these things came into being as the result of needing an interesting world for characters generated in Roll Player to explore. “We’re going to color in this area over here and figure out how that connects later.” We have a lot of the canvas colored in at this point. Sometimes people will ask me if there’s a grand plan, and it’s very much like the TV show Lost. And then we’re going to Affril, the Plane of Knowledge, in Adventures. So Kulbak Prison became a thing, and now we have lots of details about that. And so I think of it as like a canvas and we’re coloring sections of it in. We went through the process of making games and adding to the world. And to build a world, you have to add a lot of details. Now I want to experience a world with this character. And there was a demand from players, who made these characters from generic building blocks in this Lego kit of character creation: they became attached to them. That was the goal at the time, and obviously that game was popular to some degree. So it’s interesting that you say, “Generic as possible.” That’s a design goal that, I think, really worked for my gaming group at the time. The principle behind Gordon Freeman from Half Life and Jack from Bioshock and all of those silent protagonists that would morph into stuff like Booker de Witt ( Bioshock Infinite), who speaks and has a personality. My previous experience was in video games, and a lot of times the protagonist doesn’t talk, has little detail, so that it’s easier for the player to put their brain into that character.ĩ-Bit Armies: A Bit Too Far resurrects RTS, bit by bit in our hands-on preview So, to accomplish that, to make the pieces interchangeable, the goal was to make it as generic as possible. So, Roll Player came from the perspective of wanting something that players could internalize about the characters they were creating. Did you immediately see more than that in Roll Player or did all of that come later? ![]() At the time groups like mine saw it as a game built around something of an inside joke since Dungeons & Dragons didn’t enjoy nearly the same popularity it does now. So, my first question is about the game which started it all. Today, I’d like to discuss the glue that holds them all together, appreciate the pains you’ve taken with it, and explore what truly makes a game a Roll Player tale. Sometimes, as in Lockup, players are convicts jostling for reputation in a fantasy Alcatraz. Sometimes, as in Dawn of Ulos, players are gods betting on their favorite race. As of the present date, Ulos has been the setting for eight games, four expansions, a wide variety of game mechanisms, and an equally wide variety of perspectives. ![]() First, I want to thank you for setting aside this time to talk about your work, specifically the Roll Player universe and its world, Ulos. Good morning to you in Alaska, James, and good evening to you in Wisconsin, Keith. To discuss that exception and its unique challenges in the world of board games, I reached out to Thunderworks’ founder & CEO, Keith Matejka, and its head writer, James Ryan. Nothing, that is, except a shared fictional universe. They make expansions, but next to nothing carries over between projects. Thunderworks does not (maybe a weak case could be made for the standalone Cartographers: Heroes). Many publishers marshal a sizable chunk of their resources around successful titles and drill down on their mechanisms: Wingspan becomes Wyrmspan Splendor becomes Splendor: Duel Azul has its many children. Thunderworks Games has a catalog with notably little repetition.
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