In this Talk To Me Now episode, I speak with Vincent Baker about his "cloud and box" theory and accompanying diagrams explaining his take on the interactions between fiction and real-world materials. There are a series of posts on his blog about this: How RPG Rules Work; 3 Resolution Systems; Scale, Depth, Clouds, Dice; cloud-to-cloud; A Moment of Judgment; Dice and Cloud, Mix and Match; GM fiat put to work for the good; and Dice & Cloud: a Symmetry.

This is a longer TTMN episode than I intend them to be, usually, but I felt there was enough worthwhile stuff here that going long was ok.

This episode is 53.7 MB big and 58:40 long.

01:36: What clouds and boxes are
02:16: Ben Lehman got excited on Vincent's blog
04:02: The purpose of the diagrams
06:12: The problem with traditional games
10:00: Constructing a diagram via theater of the mind
10:26: The problem with "story games" (he's talked about with me, Joshua A. C. Newman, Emily Care Boss, and Ben, about which he expects to get death threats)
15:34: Where Vincent's interests are at now: rightward-pointing arrows (RPA)
17:30: An example of RPA from Vincent's pirate game Poison'd
22:23: My malformed objections
24:08: The high ground example
30:28: Danger or problem in focusing on RPA?
30:51: The GM's attitude toward play
35:41: A false ending
42:35: The GM's role in Dogs in the Vineyard is similar to what he found when running D&D and what he wrote into Storming the Wizard's Tower
45:14: I'd like to see GMless games that employ RPA
45:52: I played in a GMless game called Salt River that uses a version of Otherkind dice
51:25: Wherein I give up
53:25: Apocalypse World is like super-Poison'd

The outgoing song on this episode is Superhero from the album Dilate.

Logo courtesy of Daniel Solis: http://danielsolis.com/