An Interview with Bright Bard Games'Jon Boyle
Introduction
I recently conducted an interview with Bright Bard Game's Jon Boyle via e-mail. As much as I would have liked to get this interview and the associated review of Bright Bard's L.G.B.T 2nd edition out the door sooner, both work and life interceded in my plans. For this I apologize. Regardless, you will see that I asked Jon a whole range of questions about the game, from Bright Bard's design process to even how queer allies (such as myself) could play L.G.B.T in a respectful manner. Currently L.G.B.T. can be pre-purchased at Bright Bard's store here.
As with previous interviews, I have edited this interview a tiny little bit for readability: changing the questions and answers from a list into more of a traditional conversation format. I hope you enjoy the interview, and if you have any feedback I would love to hear it - good or bad.
Design and the HAVOC Engine
Eclectic Dragon: Why did you decide to build the game around Rowan, Rook, and Decards HAVOC engine? What other systems, if any, did you consider during the design process?
Jon: It was kind of the summer of Havoc Engine design for me! I had recently played Eat the Reich with Bri and some friends, and we really liked the dice pool mechanics. We're big fans of games that use D6 dice pools in particular since they're a little more accessible to entry-level gamers compared to full polyhedral sets. It's easy to raid a Yahtzee set for some dice if you're playing your first tabletop roleplaying game. I felt that the objective system in the HAVOC engine combined with simple stats and dice pools fit the one-shot TTRPG energy I was going for. The first draft of the game toyed with Lasers and Feelings, but I'd already designed a few one pagers for that system and I wanted to branch out a little!
Eclectic Dragon: What have you learned from playing HAVOC engine games, and how did you apply it to your design choices in LGBT 2E? Why did you make the changes in the underlying engine that you did?
Jon: I think my biggest takeaway about the HAVOC engine was that it was laser-targeted for short-form play. The objective system, while incredibly flexible when you need it to be, also keeps the game's narrative focused on singular short and medium-term goals. It was easy to adapt some of this into Longsword, Glock, Bat, Taser, where the characters are juggling a few different objectives at any given time: Their scene objective, which represents an immediate tension, their character's goal for Pride this year, which informs how they approach objectives through the entire session, and the overarching goal of the whole game: Get to whatever your Pride celebration looks like and have a great time! The joy of the game is whimsical yes-anding your friends, prompted by the dice, the gamemaster, and your character, but there's not a ton of long-term character investment or advancement. I think that style of play is great for a couple hours or a single, high-energy session, but is difficult to maintain longer term. It's a good example of a game I'd want to replay with new characters or themes, rather than run a long-term campaign with the same characters.
Jon: I made a couple changes that ultimately stripped the game down to its core objective and dice pool systems and removed the health/injury mechanics from Eat the Reich, since our theme was a little more whimsical than EtR's—Instead of carving a bloody swathe through occult, Nazi-occupied Paris we're leaving a trail of glitter and pixels at the thrift store snagging outfits for our impromptu drag show later. I also opened up character creation from the playbooks that Eat the Reich uses to a more flexible system, which felt important in the context of making a queer character and trying to determine what their goals for this year are.
Eclectic Dragon: The system that underlies LGBT seems like it could be very easily be ported into other themes and settings with only surface level modifications. Even more so than the original HAVOC engine games of HAVOC Brigade and Eat the Reich. How would you feel about people extracting the underlying mechanics for a completely different type of game?
Jon: I made a couple changes that ultimately stripped the game down to its core objective and dice pool systems and removed the health/injury mechanics from Eat the Reich, since our theme was a little more whimsical than EtR's—Instead of carving a bloody swathe through occult, Nazi-occupied Paris we're leaving a trail of glitter and pixels at the thrift store snagging outfits for our impromptu drag show later. I also opened up character creation from the playbooks that Eat the Reich uses to a more flexible system, which felt important in the context of making a queer character and trying to determine what their goals for this year are.
Eclectic Dragon: The system that underlies LGBT seems like it could be very easily be ported into other themes and settings with only surface level modifications. Even more so than the original HAVOC engine games of HAVOC Brigade and Eat the Reich. How would you feel about people extracting the underlying mechanics for a completely different type of game?
Jon: That was pretty much the goal! When I wrote the initial draft of this game, I was knee-deep in drafting Trash to Treasure, which takes the HAVOC Engine in the other direction, towards more explicit mechanical complexity. I wanted Longword, Glock, Bat, Taser, and its sister zine Axolotl with a Gun (which was also in development concurrently with LGBT) to be lighter fare. Given my early work in systems like Lasers and Feelings, I liked the idea of a system that was super flexible, and that people could hack or riff on! I would LOVE to see hacks of our HAVOC Engine riffs. D6 dice pools are a really rich design space, and people never cease to impress me with creative ways to use such a humble die.
Eclectic Dragon: How had developing games over time changed for Bright Bard? I ask as you have an extensive back catalog of games. I am curious as to your team’s game development journey and how it has brought you to the point of creating LGBT 2E.
Eclectic Dragon: How had developing games over time changed for Bright Bard? I ask as you have an extensive back catalog of games. I am curious as to your team’s game development journey and how it has brought you to the point of creating LGBT 2E.
Jon: I think the core of our game development process has a few constants, grounded in Bri and I's desire to make art that will surprise and delight each other. We make our games and art for each other first, so it shouldn't be surprising that quite a few titles in our catalog were born out of friendship and creative collaboration! Axolotl with a Gun, Trash to Treasure, Mushie Missions, and even early titles like Create and Chaos all exist because Bri made some really awesome, evocative art, and I took one look and said "There's a game there". Similarly, games in our catalog like Terminus or Bonds Between were written because of our shared interest in tarot and collage. Our development process is very much a creative conversation between artist and writer.
Jon: For Longsword, Glock, Bat, Taser, a member of our community tagged us in a social media post referencing an old Tumblr joke (which the game is titled for) and asked if we knew of an RPG based on it. To our knowledge, one didn't exist at the time and there was a zine-shaped hole in our production schedule, so a few manic weeks of writing, art, and laying the first printing of the game out in Microsoft Word later, we were selling it at Gen Con 2024 and people were deeply enchanted by it. That's a pretty good snapshot of our early development process, if I'm being honest, but these days we tend to measure our publication plans in months or years. It's exciting (and daunting at times) to have a road map of games we want to make for years to come, but I think we've retained that core of making games and art that we think the other will love. We still try to leave room for a little whimsical zine in our publication schedule these days :]
L.G.B.T 2nd Edition and Allies
Eclectic Dragon: I am a hetero-cis man, as are most of my friends that I game with. How would you recommend someone like me approach LGBT 2E in a sensitive manner? Especially given that my lived experience has generally not even been adjacent to queer experience.
Jon: This is actually a pretty common question, and one we often get from parents asking advice on running the game for their kids! Mechanically, speaking, there's nothing stopping you from choosing a weapon that starts with A for "Ally" and centering your roleplaying game story on being a kickass wingman during Pride month. The stats, while based in tropes about queer identities, aren't so much "roll Longsword to be a Lesbian" as they are "Roll Longsword to respond to a situation with creativity, versatility, and loyalty." We did that intentionally, so that people didn't feel pressured to only use the stat that aligned with their/their character's identity, and I think that design choice is helpful in this instance.
Jon: From a roleplay perspective, your character is a fictional person, but like a real person, your character has a rich tapestry of personality traits, of which one part is their queer identity. Like playing a character whose gender identity you do not share (as you probably do when you play or gamemaster other games!), it's really about looking at the lived experiences of real people who share those identities and representing them as people whose fundamental desires are actually pretty universal! If you're playing with queer friends or players, listening to them during the session and having safety tools and/or conversation calibration tools in place is good practice. Reading or watching media made by, for, and/or about queer people is a great place to start learning! Odds are you already are.
Jon: In short, represent your character(s) like you would any other, and ground your choices in what motivates them. Maybe that's something inherently queer, like pursuing a same-sex relationship, or maybe its something informed by more facets of their identity, like exploring a new style, or exhibiting art at Pride. Listen to queer people, represent queer experiences from a place of good will and respect, and listen to other players if something feels off. There's also no shame in just recommending the game to queer friends or helping organize someone else's session! That's also peak ally behavior.
Jon: From a roleplay perspective, your character is a fictional person, but like a real person, your character has a rich tapestry of personality traits, of which one part is their queer identity. Like playing a character whose gender identity you do not share (as you probably do when you play or gamemaster other games!), it's really about looking at the lived experiences of real people who share those identities and representing them as people whose fundamental desires are actually pretty universal! If you're playing with queer friends or players, listening to them during the session and having safety tools and/or conversation calibration tools in place is good practice. Reading or watching media made by, for, and/or about queer people is a great place to start learning! Odds are you already are.
Jon: In short, represent your character(s) like you would any other, and ground your choices in what motivates them. Maybe that's something inherently queer, like pursuing a same-sex relationship, or maybe its something informed by more facets of their identity, like exploring a new style, or exhibiting art at Pride. Listen to queer people, represent queer experiences from a place of good will and respect, and listen to other players if something feels off. There's also no shame in just recommending the game to queer friends or helping organize someone else's session! That's also peak ally behavior.
GM Advice and the HAVOC Engine
Eclectic Dragon: Why did you decide to dedicate such a large portion of the zine to HAVOC engine specific GM advice (pgs. 22 – 38)? To be clear I like this and find it to be very good advice for how to run any sort of HAVOC engine style game – it is a good addition to the existing body of advice for how to run a HAVOC engine game. Was it intentional for the for the advice to be applicable to other HAVOC games? Why or why not?
Jon: As a designer, I try to write my rules such that someone who has never played a roleplaying game before could pick the game up and play. That's a tendency born from my professional history as an English teacher, I think. I also try to think of the gamemaster as a player at the table! What game are they playing? How do they play it, and what are the actual procedures for doing so? What things am I doing when I gamemaster that help make the experience fun? It's almost like planning a lesson or a unit at times! I find myself thinking about the core skills someone needs to play the game, and how can I teach those basic skills so that they can combine them in fun and interesting ways to have a good session.
Jon: I think the fact that it's applicable to other Havoc Engine games is kind of a happy accident! Though I wrote that section with LGBT in mind, it was a similar flavor of advice I'd iterated and reiterated in Trash to Treasure and Axolotl with a Gun, 2nd Edition. Especially since we were releasing so many games with similar engines, it was convenient for players who picked up more than one title to be able to translate the skills from one game for another, and it was convenient for me, the writer, to be able to repurpose some advice I'd already written.
Eclectic Dragon: You diverge from the more ‘traditional’ HAVOC engine design methodology, of presenting a game experience explicitly tailored to a specific scenario, in favor of a system of short adventure prompts. What was the driving motivation for this divergence? Do you think this changed your approach to design?
Jon: I mentioned this a bit in an earlier question, but I think it's fair to say it changed my approach to the design of the game! I wanted to keep the one-page RPG/HAVOC Engine trope of an imminent event or problem that creates the inciting incident (Pride is really soon, and you've got a lot to do!), but the playbooks as character creation felt more restrictive than I wanted them to be for a game about queer identity. Do I make a playbook for each queer identity? I don't have a ton of lived experience with those outside my own, and while I think I could represent them well enough, writing a couple dozen playbooks (or contracting writers to write them) felt beyond the scope of our plan for a 24-40 page zine.
Jon: Opening up character creation and letting people fill more of themselves into their character felt like the right choice in that context. And, like queer identity, Pride month celebrations mean a lot of things to a lot of people! We wanted to give people the option to have a more flexible experience with Longsword, Glock, Bat, Taser, so we made adventure prompts across a variety of genres that are easily moddable to suit your desired flavor of queer action.
Eclectic Dragon: Something I was happy to see was the explicit advice (pg 29) talking about adjusting difficulty on the fly for players. Personally, I think this is something that most GMs do at times when running less antagonistic and more narrative games. I know I have done this from time to time in my games. Why did you decide to include this advice?
Jon: Like I mentioned above, I try to think of the gamemaster as another player at the table! Their role is often different, and I think the part of their job that goes unwritten in most rules documents is the act of pulling levers and flipping switches behind the GM screen to keep the experience fun for everyone. Since most HAVOC Engine games are power fantasy games to begin with, the gamemaster's job is really about being their player's biggest fan and applying just enough pressure to make thing dramatic. In high-energy one-shot games like this one, I think that skill is REALLY important, so I lavished a few extra pages on more detailed advice. I also think it's important to explicit about some of the options, rather than just handing the gamemaster a chest full of tools and telling them to wing it.
Eclectic Dragon: Something I noticed was that, given the lightweight system underlying LGBT 2E and its modular nature, it is conceivable that the same characters could be carried over from game to game in a sort of episodic format. Was this an intended outcome? How would you implement an episodic based mod to LGBT 2E?
Jon: The notion of LGBT being a yearly one-shot with friends is one that's really charming to me! I think it'd be really fun to check in with characters to see what new adventures, goals, and self-exploration they have in front of them from year to year. Though I'd love to claim that this was intentional, I think it's another instance of a happy accident in the design process!
Jon: My goal was for the system to generate tight, single-session stories, and I think we landed on that pretty well! If I wanted to design some additional elements for episodic or multi-session play with a consistent narrative, I would probably focus a little more on the characters' personal goals, and integrate some of Trash to Treasure's adventure structure, which groups scenes into chapters that represent a single session of play. I'd suggest structuring your game like episodes of a TV show, with each chapter built to achieve a short-term objective while keeping track of longer-term personal goals to complete over the entire "season" of chapters/episodes.
Jon: If you just wanted to bring the same character back to a new adventure a year later, I think a few questions to reconnect with your character during character creation would be the ticket! What was your goal last Pride? Did you achieve it? How did that change or impact your character since last we saw them? Has their identity changed or shifted since last year? A few pull tables based on the goal categories to prompt some story beats that have "advanced" your character, and a few questions to answer during setup would probably be all you need to reuse a character in a different adventure!
Jon: The notion of LGBT being a yearly one-shot with friends is one that's really charming to me! I think it'd be really fun to check in with characters to see what new adventures, goals, and self-exploration they have in front of them from year to year. Though I'd love to claim that this was intentional, I think it's another instance of a happy accident in the design process!
Jon: My goal was for the system to generate tight, single-session stories, and I think we landed on that pretty well! If I wanted to design some additional elements for episodic or multi-session play with a consistent narrative, I would probably focus a little more on the characters' personal goals, and integrate some of Trash to Treasure's adventure structure, which groups scenes into chapters that represent a single session of play. I'd suggest structuring your game like episodes of a TV show, with each chapter built to achieve a short-term objective while keeping track of longer-term personal goals to complete over the entire "season" of chapters/episodes.
Jon: If you just wanted to bring the same character back to a new adventure a year later, I think a few questions to reconnect with your character during character creation would be the ticket! What was your goal last Pride? Did you achieve it? How did that change or impact your character since last we saw them? Has their identity changed or shifted since last year? A few pull tables based on the goal categories to prompt some story beats that have "advanced" your character, and a few questions to answer during setup would probably be all you need to reuse a character in a different adventure!
Business Stuff
Eclectic Dragon: Why did you decide on Backer Kit over Kickstarter for your crowd funding platform of choice?
Jon: This'll be a bit more shop talk than some of my other answers, but this was largely an experiment for us! We wanted to see how we'd fare on a different platform and we wanted to try out some of the tools in their suite. We've long used Kickstarter to crowdfund our campaigns, but BackerKit has always been our pledge manager and they have some really awesome tools, one of which is their email tool, Launch. It's been very successful in helping us bring people to the campaign, and I'm grateful for that.
Jon: The flexibility the platform has in campaign and reward structure can mean its a little tougher to wrangle than Kickstarter during setup, but their staff are also super available, extremely helpful, and very kind. I think the ability to communicate directly with their staff as a smaller creator is something I really appreciate compared to running a campaign on Kickstarter. Kickstarter is pretty opaque in that regard, and if I didn't have a small army of friends with crowdfunding experience whose advice propped me up through our first couple campaigns, I'm not sure we would have been nearly as successful as we were.
