How Dungeons and Dragons Teaches Better Teamwork (Larry Cummings from Off The Map Games)
Larry Cummings of Off The Map Games joins the show to talk about system design, small teams, Dungeons & Dragons, and why games can teach us so much about collaboration, creativity, and how people work together.
Key Takeaways
Small teams work because people need shared context, trust, and different perspectives to create something meaningful.
Constraints do not kill creativity. They often give creators the boundaries they need to make stronger choices.
Games are not just entertainment. They can reveal how people collaborate, solve problems, take risks, and tell stories together.
Feedback, surprise, and things going wrong are often where the most interesting creative breakthroughs happen.
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Transcript:
Michael: Hey, Larry. How’s it going?
Larry Cummings: Real good, Mike. How have you been?
Michael: Doing good. Thanks so much for asking.
I do this sometimes with my guests before we even get started, which is talking about how we know each other. We’ve known each other for quite some time now. We are fellow CO+HOOTS members, so I want to do a quick shout-out to CO+HOOTS, a coworking space in Phoenix, Arizona, and Mesa too. Yes, correct, and Mesa too.
I want to do a quick shout-out to them. CO+HOOTS was one of the best decisions I have ever made in my career. I met so many incredible people that I now have the great honor of calling friends, including yourself. It’s a wonderful organization now run by Jaime, so shout-out to Jaime as well, who’s doing a fantastic job keeping that space going.
I also want to do a quick shout-out to Tanya. Tanya, thank you so much for putting this together. Tanya has also been on the podcast before, so you should definitely take a listen to that episode.
That’s how we all came together, Larry. We’ve known each other for such a long time, and then Tanya mentioned that you were creating something new, which we’re definitely going to get into in a second.
But I do want to start off by asking you about design, because something I’ve noticed throughout your entire career is your focus on design in all types of forms and fashions. So when it comes to designing something, it could literally be anything, what’s the first thing that usually comes to mind when you decide you’re going to be designing something?
Larry Cummings: I think the most important thing is that I really enjoy systems. I’m not a designer that is good at art. I can draw diagrams, but I’m not a visual designer. I’m a designer of systems. That’s what I learned about my skill very early in my life.
In that context, the first thing I think of is: do we need this system? Is there another way to do it without using a system? And then if we do need it, how can we design the system so it treats everyone who is contributing to the value of the system fairly?
That is a very healthy and informed way to start to design a system, because systems emerge. You don’t declare all aspects of a system and then shove them into existence. You have an idea and a vision, and systems are bigger than even individual organizations usually. They gather inputs and ideas from lots of other organizations and individuals, and then the system starts to emerge.
As soon as the system starts to emerge, the design moves into an even more aggressive state. The initial design is just to get everybody to participate. It’s actually in my signature in my email: “What if everybody could help?”
If we design the system so that everybody can contribute and benefit, what would it look like then? That’s a very different question than a lot of the questions I used to get from software teams or stakeholders. They would say, “Hey, we need help with this,” or, “We need help with that.” I’m like, “Okay, but how is it helping everybody contribute?”
If we’re not doing that correctly, are we effectively spinning our wheels fixing things that are not valued by the other partner to begin with?
Anyway, that’s not really a short answer, but too long, didn’t read: the first thing I think of is, if we must build a system, how can we do it fairly?
Michael: I really admire that, and that’s always something I’ve admired about you in general. You’ve always been a person who sees how everyone can help each other out and how it can be mutually beneficial.
I also really appreciate that you mentioned determining if the system needs to exist to begin with. I think that’s also very important to realize. Oftentimes we get in our own way because we think, “Oh, this would be a great system to do,” and it becomes a system upon a system upon a system. Just because it can exist doesn’t necessarily mean it should.
Sometimes you end up overcomplicating something that doesn’t need to be overcomplicated to begin with.
Larry Cummings: One of the ways I like to surface this to people when they ask me how that works is: let’s take technology out of it.
Any problem we have, we’re going to have to abstract reality, talk about that abstraction and the assumptions we put into it, and then come up with a way to solve it. That abstraction is a map. The reality of the situation is the territory.
When we’re building a new system, we have to make sure we tie the benefits and the value of the new system to the territory, to reality. If we’re just doing another map and mapping to another map, we can build on top of assumptions that just aren’t real anymore because we don’t go all the way down to, “How is it benefiting us in the real world?”
It becomes abstraction on abstraction on abstraction. After a while, it just gets soft and fuzzy, and nobody remembers why we were doing it anymore.
That’s why I like to ask that question. Are we building this system because there’s another broken system we can’t fix? Why can’t we fix the broken system? That kind of thing comes up a lot.
Building systems is a pretty major time commitment. It takes a lot of energy and effort. It’s not always profitable, and I’m not talking monetarily either, just from a what-you-learned-versus-what-you-achieved perspective. But it’s good work. I like it. It’s fun.
Michael: Yeah, I can imagine, because you’ve been building systems and processes for a very long time. You’ve been in technology, but even outside of technology, you’ve been doing this.
Larry Cummings: I prefer doing it outside of technology. Technology is actually a very predictable place to do it. Not that it’s easier, but it’s all about systems.
When people are like, “Oh yeah, this technology you did worked great. Can you do this for us?” I’ll go talk to them and I’ll find where the system could exist. It’s actually more fun when it’s not the technology that’s the challenge. Maybe I’m just a little bored with the tech, though.
Michael: Interesting. That’s fair. So talk to me about systems in other places besides technology.
Larry Cummings: Actually, we can talk a little bit about what I’m up to lately.
Michael: Yeah, because when I heard about you getting into gaming, I was like, “Wow.”
Larry Cummings: Totally.
When I started working in tech, it was a very different industry. Personal computers didn’t exist yet. We didn’t know if they were actually ever going to. We were still in the mainframe mindset. I’m an older person, so this was a long time ago.
I watched the whole personal computer change occur and change how everybody works. Then I saw the same thing times 100 with mobile, initial mobile and then smartphone mobile. Now I’m seeing it in the AI era.
It’s all been fun and interesting, but as I’ve gotten older, I’ve realized that the tech is interesting, but after a while the tech starts to get so predictable that it’s not as interesting.
Over COVID, I started realizing that probably the next big thing I was going to be working on was not going to be centered in technology teams. It was going to be centered in some other teams. It took me a while to figure out that those were gaming teams.
The reason it happened was actually funny. When I was a young person, a high schooler, my dad was in the Army and we moved around a lot. I always got really good at making friends really fast because we were going to move soon.
In northern Virginia, I started a wargaming club at my high school in ninth or 10th grade. Within probably six months of moving there, I was forming clubs.
I did it because my dad was in the Army, and I was like, “Well, I should at least learn more about how this stuff works.” We went through probably six months worth of war games in the club, and then we started running out of games.
I walked into the game store in Springfield Mall, which is actually a real mall named Springfield, Virginia. Every state has a Springfield, but this was literally that. I asked the guy, “I’ve got all these war games. Have you got anything else?” They had seen me in the store quite a lot.
He pulls out what was called the red box, the basic set, which was the first simplified starter set for Dungeons & Dragons ever made. I think it was published in 1979. I probably picked it up in 1980.
I took that back to the club and we started playing it. My mind was just blown out of the water. It was such an unbelievably different way of playing a game.
I started getting into that, and what I learned from it was that I had this mind for systems. It uncovered a talent for me that helped me in this other part of my life, which was, “How am I going to make a living?”
As I was looking at, “Okay, now it’s 40 years later. Where am I going to go from here?” I looked at a lot of different things. I played around with more philanthropic nonprofit board leadership stuff and things like that, but I always just like getting down in front of teams.
I started running Dungeons & Dragons again, mostly for my family over COVID. When I came out of it, I was like, “I’ve got to really focus more on gaming,” because I was getting so much out of it too. It was a tough time for everybody, and it really helped me a lot.
That was the initial motivation. Sometimes I would have to correct people that I’m not good in system design because I play Dungeons & Dragons. I’m good at Dungeons & Dragons because I’m good at system design, especially being a GM.
Then I started getting into it, and I noticed a lot of things. One of the main things I noticed was that there are a lot of people who have a lot of interest and passion for gaming.
There were sort of two major camps. There was online gaming, and I lump any kind of online remote play in with that. It doesn’t have to be a video game or a console game. Then there was face-to-face gaming.
I prefer face-to-face gaming for many, many reasons, but I also had to learn how to do it online, which is interesting. It’s so much easier now than it ever was before.
That’s why I chose to pivot from having spent 15 or 20 years doing really complex system design, and the last 10 years really focused on team interaction and system design with the Atlassian stack, to the last five or seven years focused on training so I could stay in front of teams more.
It became, “You know what? The tech is not really the gap anymore. I want to just work with teams now.” It doesn’t matter to me as much whether the teams are working on a technology problem. In fact, it’s more fun when the teams are entertaining themselves, and we’re still learning just as much about how teams work. At least I am.
Michael: Yeah. We’re always learning. There’s always something that we’re learning.
One of the things I found really interesting is what you mentioned before. It wasn’t that you were good at systems because of D&D. It was that you were good at D&D because you were good at systems. I really appreciate that.
I also want to make a note of the fact that you were already, from a young age, good at team building because you were starting clubs. It was almost out of necessity when you were moving around. You had to form your own groups. So you also developed that skill set of bringing people together for a common interest.
At a very early age, you knew what your knack was, and in this particular purpose, you found it through technology. But the underlying skill, like you said, was team building and understanding and building systems and processes.
Larry Cummings: Yeah. Loneliness and trauma are a great motivator.
Not in a bad way. I shouldn’t say trauma, but I grew up as an Army dependent, and shout-out to Army dependents across the world, really, not just the U.S. It’s one of the skills you have to develop.
My family was a little larger. I was one of five kids, so we had kind of a little group together. To be totally candid, the whole point of me being extroverted was like, “Okay, I already know you guys. You’re going with me everywhere we move. I want to meet the other people.”
I’ve never been one of those folks in technology who says, “I want to go into a dark room for six months and build an amazing system and go, ‘Ta-da!’” To me, that’s the beginning of the dialogue with everybody who is going to use the system. It’s frankly the least interesting step.
It’s never been easier than it is now to come up with something to get feedback on, but it’s still like, “Okay, now what?” That’s when it really starts.
Michael: Absolutely.
I also want to mention bringing people together for gaming and how impactful that is. For example, when I moved to Arizona, I was about 15 years old and didn’t know anybody here. I was lucky because I was in the music programs, like band, and that helped me find friends. But the common interest wasn’t necessarily music. Music just kind of brought us together.
What actually made us friends was gaming. I found friends who also played Magic: The Gathering, because I’m a big Magic player. I played a lot of that with my friends back in New York. That brought us together. Then I found out who liked playing video games, who liked playing Super Smash Bros., and those types of games. We were able to find common ground there.
We like to joke because once a week, we lived in Scottsdale, and we were one of the few houses that actually had a basement in Arizona, which is very rare.
Larry Cummings: More common in Mesa, actually.
Michael: Yeah, more common in Mesa, but not in Scottsdale. Very uncommon.
We had a basement, and we would do these hangouts. We called it Mike’s Basement Hangout. We’d just hang out down there and play games. We had the whole setup.
I remember there was a chess club at our high school, and we ended up invading the chess club. It became Mike’s Basement at school. Some people played chess once in a blue moon, but there were two people who loved chess. It is an amazing game, one of the best games ever created. But we would still play Magic: The Gathering. Somebody would bring the GameCube and we’d play video games on the TV.
That helped form a bond between these people and helped form these friendships. But it was more than that too. It was about team building. Even if you’re doing something competitive, it’s still a team effort to a degree. It’s helping each other out and cheering each other on.
Larry Cummings: There’s nothing humans can do that’s not a team. Think about it very practically. If you drop a single individual into a jungle, you’ve fed the animals. If you drop 10 people into the jungle, you’ve started a civilization.
It’s us. We don’t succeed individually like we succeed as teams. We’re just wired that way. Especially small teams. Small teams are always the right size.
The smaller the team, the better is not necessarily the right way to think about it. But when you look across the history of what has worked, smaller teams have always been more effective.
Michael: Is it a gut feeling when a team becomes too large? Or is there a particular number where once you hit 12, it’s too much?
Larry Cummings: It’s throughput. It’s flow. Are they still producing value?
Typically, a lot of people like to talk about the metrics underneath that assumption. Probably in this space, the best answer I’ve ever heard is two large pizzas.
People say, “What?” And I’m like, “If we had to feed everybody on the team during a meeting, we could do it with two large pizzas.” That’s the size you want to shoot for.
But that’s also the size you need to get it started. If that small team makes something that changes the world, they’re going to need help building it bigger and bigger. Collections of small teams are how most management systems work. That’s what they do. They create different structures around collections of small teams.
I find it a healthy way to think about any organizational system. How are the teams structured? Just start there. Everything else is going to be dependent on the context and how that organization needs to work. But the fact that humans need to work in teams will never go away.
Michael: Absolutely. It’s much more efficient and productive, and also the emotional aspect of having that collaboration with others.
Larry Cummings: And the diversity of it. The different ideas. There is a point where you get too much new input, and balancing that is really what small teams are good at.
It’s not just the number of people. It’s also the perspectives. You need different perspectives, even though you have a small team. It really helps to have that diversity of perspective in each of the individuals. Don’t get three of these and two of those and four of these. Just let everybody be who they’re going to be.
Michael: Do you find it’s more efficient when, even with a small team, there’s essentially one decision-maker who ultimately makes the final decision to move on? Or is it better to have something more democratic, where you want the majority on board with an idea or a direction?
Larry Cummings: I think it goes back and forth so much that it’s hard to call it.
Everybody comes to work with their own skills that they’ve developed or just have, and they adjust to the needs of the team.
I think the only thing that really kills a team is when the team starts to disagree on direction at a fundamental level, not little stuff. That’s where leadership is really critical.
If you start out with some of us being more creative, brainstorming, challenging our assumptions, and making innovation front and center, and others being more operational, efficient, predictable, and dependable, then we’re going to find the product in between those two sets of influences.
As soon as that thing starts to create enthusiasm and engagement, it doesn’t even have to get profitable. In fact, sometimes it will get a lot less profitable when you find out how many people are interested in it.
At that point, leadership really needs to be firm. There’s a natural tendency to try to do this, and it happens in gaming all the time: “Let’s pile more and more awesome fun into the game.” After a while, it’s like, “Oh my God, it’s so much I can’t keep track of it anymore. I think I’m going to go over here and play the simple game for a day or two just to remember it.”
It’s interesting because how teams form and how teams dissolve are very similar. It’s not just leadership versus creativity or freedom.
I think one of the reasons teams are so effective is because the misperception that structure defeats creativity is completely debunked by how small teams work. They have incredible amounts of historical creativity and innovation in their record, and yet it’s the constraints and restrictions of the team that tend to magnify creative expression in my experience.
If you have to do it in a much tougher environment, you really have to be great at it. To me, that’s kind of a crucible for creativity. I think it empowers it.
Not that it has to be miserable. There’s this whole idea that you can’t create something if you didn’t suffer for it. I’ve certainly experienced that in my life. I guess I’m now qualified to create things. But I don’t think it’s a requirement.
Michael: I don’t think so either. I agree with you when it comes to creativity. There needs to be, at some point, a certain set of boundaries. It could be something superficial or it could be something practical, but there has to be some type of boundary.
We talk about playing in a sandbox, right? We always use that as an analogy for making something. Well, a sandbox is defined. There is a boundary to a sandbox. You can play within that sandbox and play with the sand, as well as any toys or tools in that sandbox. But the restriction is that’s the area you have to play in.
If you’re like, “Okay, here, go play in the desert,” and it’s a massive desert, how do you even start? What do you do? There’s just a lot of sand here. There might be something 10 miles away you might be able to use. I’m being silly with the analogy, but that’s the whole point.
Larry Cummings: It’s an apt analogy, though, because I feel like a lot of teams feel that way.
Within the context of forming a new team and hiring people, if it’s more of a corporate thing, you get the team together and you show them what they’ve been formed to do. Then they have to internalize it and make it something they’re going to work on together.
Sometimes they’re like, “What? We’re doing what?” Or the vision is so loosely defined that the first few teams literally have to challenge leadership and say, “Okay, that’s fine. I understand the five-year value target. I get that. I can see that way off on the horizon. That’s why I took the job. I’m very excited about that five-year horizon. That’s awesome. But what are we doing in the next three months? Seriously?”
Because I can go read all this stuff you’ve generated for the last 30 years as an organization, and I can talk to your experts and everything, but we have to start thinking with our hands. We have to start building something new that gets feedback from these same people who are telling us this is the right way to do it, because there is obviously more than one right way to do it.
It never ends. It’s fun.
You’re actually getting into an area that I want to talk about a little bit, which is sandbox-based system design.
Michael: Okay.
Larry Cummings: I find that endlessly fascinating.
It’s actually why I started playing D&D more and more when I was younger, because that system design itch I was scratching was not just based on storytelling.
My early passion for fantasy fiction came from The Lord of the Rings, and that is a book I have probably read an embarrassing number of times. I love it. In fact, I have an adventure that’s set in Middle-earth.
The fun part about worldbuilding, as we tend to call it in role-playing games, is that you have no idea what your players are going to do in your world. You want to make a system that is loose enough that they are going to have creative ideas about what their team and their characters are going to do to change how the world works.
You don’t want it to just be, “You’re going to start here, and you’re going to go there, and you’re going to achieve this, and then you’re going to go here and achieve that.” You want to have somewhere they can have a direct impact on the design of the world, the system itself.
That’s what makes role-playing games so much fun. That, and the rule of cool. It’s an anti-game game. It’s a game where you create new rules to play the game in a different way, pretty much instantaneously.
The sandbox part is fun because it’s such an interesting design space. How do you make it open enough that people latch onto it and try to extend it, but also direct enough and expressive of a unique vision clearly enough that it emotionally resonates very early?
This has led me to become really obsessed with themes. If you think about something more traditional and linear like a movie, you have the movie’s arc. What is the movie about? That might be the theme, but I think the theme is also more of the period. It’s both.
Then you have the plot, which is as far as I think the DM needs to go in worldbuilding. Who are the big bad guys? Who are the big good guys? What are the factions? How are the forces balanced geographically, language-wise, technologically? One might have much better war-making capability, while another has a much better ability to hide.
You figure all those forces out, and then you balance them as close as you can without spending years on it. Then you put it in front of a table and you see what they do with it. It’s fascinating.
Sandbox is such an interesting idea because I think a lot of players value it very highly in the role-playing game area, but they actually aren’t very good at creating the conditions for it.
The enthusiasm for worldbuilding can create an impediment for the story to come from the table, instead of the story being explained to the table.
Michael: I would say that outside of role-playing games, in-person role-playing games, that is true. Most games will always give you the definitive rules. These are the rules you play by. Outside of family rules for Monopoly, for anybody who plays Monopoly, there are always family versions of things.
Larry Cummings: House rules.
Michael: Right, house rules. Sometimes you have that in games, but for the most part, whether it’s video games or in-person games outside of RPGs, you are going by whatever the rules are of the game you’re playing.
With something like Dungeons & Dragons and similar RPGs, there is a set of base rules, but as the GM, the game master, the dungeon master, you have the ability to change some of those things and make decisions as it progresses.
I started playing D&D a few years ago, and that was something I didn’t really understand until I was actually in it. When I started to play, my mindset was, “Okay, I need to learn the strategy. How do I be most effective with my character?”
They were like, “Yeah, don’t worry about that stuff.”
I said, “What do you mean don’t worry about that stuff? I’m a competitive gamer. I want to know what the rules are.”
They were like, “Just fill out this sheet and pick from here.”
I’m like, “Well, what spells should I pick? How do I get started?”
They’re like, “Pick whatever you want. It’ll be fine.”
I’m like, “What do you mean everything will be fine?”
It wasn’t until I actually started getting into it that I realized, “Oh, this is not just about gaming.” Like you said, it’s about the role-playing experience, and you are building this world together.
Once I realized that’s what this was, I went, “Oh, this is far more interesting, and I can see why people appreciate and love this so much.” You are directly impacting the world that you’re in. On top of that, the person at the table is also helping dictate what can and cannot be done.
I’m amazed. Sometimes I’ll ask the DM, “Hey, can I do this?” And they’ll make me do a roll. For anybody who has not played D&D before, you roll a lot of dice to make determinations on things.
Larry Cummings: It’s a lot of math, really.
Michael: It’s a lot of math. Yeah, it’s a lot of math.
Larry Cummings: What you’re describing is called the rule of cool. If a player suggests a change in the direction of the game that’s not accommodated by any of the existing rules, the GM, the game master, can declare that it’s permitted for any reason and come up with a mechanic for it that the table agrees is fair.
Or they can just tell them, “No, I’m not going to make a new mechanical rule. I’m just going to say it worked,” which is what I prefer.
Michael: Right. Then you could also retcon it later on and say, “Yeah, in this scenario, that’s not going to slide.”
Larry Cummings: There’s a lot of retconning in D&D games.
That speaks to what you were talking about in terms of your initial experience. Teaching players to play role-playing games generally, not just D&D, for the first time is absolutely riveting. I freaking love it. It’s amazing.
That dawning on the player that this is unlike other games because you have agency on really any aspect of your character that you want to have agency on, to the point of distracting the rest of the table, is unbelievably fun to watch.
It’s fun to watch people first realize it, then adjust to it, and then start to use it as a player. If you never use that agency as a player, you’re really missing out on the real fun of D&D. What if I did something different? What if it didn’t go the way everybody expects it to go?
Not necessarily murder hoboing, and not necessarily for the sake of finding out what would happen if we did something, but in a way that enriches the storytelling of the table.
A lot of people overcomplicate this because they have such passion for worldbuilding. I certainly went through that, and I still have that. It’s a little bit of a trap for a game master to become too close to the story you imagine the table will tell.
That is not actually what the game is for. That’s a fun part of worldbuilding, and if you’re really into that, I highly recommend potentially creating short stories, novels, fiction, film, or whatever to do that, because I think it’s really powerful and important.
But you don’t need dice to explain to people how the story will go if you know how the story will go before they sit down with you. You need dice because they’re going to try things that you’re not sure what’s going to happen. So you use the little math rocks to figure out, “Okay, if this is the probability, then I guess this is what happens. So now what?”
Michael: That happens so often. I have friends, and my brother is also a game master, and it’s always fun having conversations with them after a session is done. They’ll say, “Yeah, that’s not how I thought this was going to go, and I had to kibosh my entire plan for the rest of the session and come up with something new on the spot.”
Larry Cummings: The rewriting that happens inside a game master’s head would scare a lot of players away from the game if they really understood it.
I’ve taught people how to GM, and it’s one of the first things I have to really address. I didn’t appreciate this when I started because I learned how to GM in order to get the game to the table. Of course, I was learning the basic set.
There’s an analog to that now called The Starter Set. I’m a huge, passionate guy for starter sets. I love RPG starter sets. The new D&D one is excellent. I also run The One Ring. Theirs is great. I’m very obsessed with the new game I’ve been playing lately called Pirate Borg, which is probably the best starter set I’ve ever seen in my life.
If the starter set does a good job setting people up with the bones of the plot, then the table can tell the story. That’s really the line I encourage new GMs to find: where does the plot become the story?
As soon as the plot starts becoming the story, stop. Let the players fill the story in. You just have to give them the big pieces, although not even big, because you have to get it down to little encounters and stuff.
If you think about it in terms of linear storytelling, plays and movies, you can come up with the whole idea. Maybe we’re trying to keep the bad guys from creating a new network of abuse or whatever, and we’re going to stop that this way because this is their weakness.
You get all that figured out and you let the players know the premise. Then you come up with the first act, which should take about maybe three to six months of biweekly role-playing if it’s a big, big story, or maybe two, three, or four weeks if it’s a smaller story.
Starter kits are somewhere in between. They give you that entire first act and then show you the rest so you can go play. You show them, “Okay, this is as far as I can go.”
Because if you start to tell the story to the table, frankly, it gets frustrating for everybody. The other thing is that it triggers that gamer control response.
I started playing these games before video games were a thing. I was certainly playing early video games a lot, but in terms of the complex systems that video games could become, I remember not really enjoying the third edition of Dungeons & Dragons because I thought they were leaning too hard on what we call the Infinity Engine, or the Gold Box engine before it, which was how they codified the rules of Dungeons & Dragons into computers so they could create computer games like Baldur’s Gate 1 and Baldur’s Gate 2.
That’s great, but the rules you need to run a computer game turned out to be more of an impediment to the storytelling than the original rules, the Advanced D&D rules. Although those had major problems too.
I was very excited when fifth edition grabbed the reins and said, “No, we have to get the Dungeons & Dragons brand back to narrative-first design.” I think they did that very well.
It created some friction with the more mechanical min-max style of play some people really enjoy. I’m not judging that in any way. I totally get it. But when I look at the game and the passions I have for the game, moving the narrative up front is a required assumption.
I find it too hard to play if everybody is worrying about that much silly math. “If I make my level four monk warlock, and then he becomes a level five warlock and a level seven monk, then I can add sorcerer to it.” It’s like, how is this helping the story, guys? I’ll just give you the spells, all right?
Michael: I’m equally guilty of that. But again, that goes to my competitive mindset in playing games. But it’s a little bit of both.
Larry Cummings: I’m not against min-maxing-ish stuff. You should develop your character in a way that makes you feel like your character is powerful in the way you want them to be powerful. That’s important.
But when it starts to become, “What’s the sure way to win?” that’s where it breaks down. If it’s, “What would happen if I made my character like this?” I’m like, “I don’t know. We have to roll dice for that.”
That’s the funny part about it that a lot of people don’t get. Sometimes when it gets to, “Why are we doing it like this?” I’m like, “We have this plot we’re trying to move through. We’re going to try to do things. We’re going to roll these little math rocks, and they’re going to mess us up.”
That’s the most simple way to think about how to play. Then you’re going to react to how that messes up. The messing up is actually where the real story comes out.
As long as the players understand they’re coming together as a team to try to do something to change how the world works in that fake RPG world, then the min-maxing is okay.
If they’re approaching it from “I need my character to be super powerful” from an ego-first perspective, then it breaks down the story. You get less collaboration. You get, “Why is he getting the magic sword?” and whatever.
I think that’s an aspect of computer gaming that has changed the way people play role-playing games. I never used to run into as much of that prior to the more complex open-world sandbox video games, which are fantastic, by the way.
I like Baldur’s Gate 3. I have yet to install it because I’m petrified of what it’ll do to my time.
Michael: I know. I did not do that either for that exact same reason, because they’re invigorating.
Larry Cummings: My brother played Baldur’s Gate 1 or 2, I think it was 1. I had never completely solved it, but I had probably explored it for more than enough hours to solve it.
A few years later, my brother posted on LinkedIn, “If anyone is applying for a job for me and you’ve solved Baldur’s Gate 1 or 2, please list that on your cover letter, because that’s like a PhD level of research that you’ve completed.”
Michael: Do you feel like everyone should play a role-playing game like Dungeons & Dragons, especially a small team?
Larry Cummings: No.
Michael: Interesting.
Larry Cummings: There are two reasons to play games. The first is to have fun. The second is to get to know the people you hang out with in your life in a way that teaches you more about yourself than you otherwise would have learned.
Yourself, not them necessarily, because it’s actually the relationship.
The most important piece of equipment in a game of Dungeons & Dragons is the other players at the table. That’s really it.
If you’re going to play to prove this game is better than that game, which you run into in game stores more than any other place, I’m not sure that’s the right reason. Whenever I sit down and play with people outside of a game store, there’s never a conversation about, “Oh, this version of this game included this game mechanic, and I like that better.” It’s like, okay, that’s fair.
The other reason I don’t think everybody must play RPGs is that you are actually already playing an RPG every time you play every other game.
Chess, what are the names of the pieces? King, queen, knight.
Michael: Pawn, bishop. Yeah.
Larry Cummings: Do they all move the same way? Do they all have the same powers?
Michael: Nope. Yep.
Larry Cummings: If somebody described a chess match in narrative form, it would sound like a palace and a huge conflict. Yet from recognizing the mechanics of the game, it couldn’t look less like a role-playing game. It has incredibly rigorous rules.
I guess when it comes down to it, if you can appreciate that you’re here to tell a story, that sounds appealing to you, and you want to do it in a group, then yeah, everybody should play a role-playing game.
But if you just want to play a fun game, there are lots of different kinds of games. It doesn’t have to be a role-playing game because it is a little bit more demanding in terms of your perspective.
My wife doesn’t like role-playing games, which I find really funny because she’s a storyteller. She’s got a journalism degree. She writes. But she just doesn’t like inserting herself into this other world. I don’t know what it is, and it doesn’t matter what world it is either. I’ve tried lots of other worlds.
She’s actually not bad at playing it. She just never says, “Oh, I can’t wait to go play a role-playing game.” That never happens.
Michael: It’s definitely not necessarily for everyone. Sometimes you have to have a little bit of acting involved to get into the character.
I know for some people, they prefer to have more of a set design of rules they can go for. Or they’re not really comfortable getting into the character they’re playing. They’d rather have more of a passive experience.
Larry Cummings: It’s interesting that you bring up the acting part.
On one side, and there are more than two sides to this, of course, you have people who like to play very complex video games and keep track of a lot of conflicting signals about how the world is changing to figure out the way to win. That draws a lot of people to role-playing games, and it does, and it should.
On the other side, you have more theatrical, creative-expression-focused gameplay folks who like the craftiness, costumes, dialects, language, and all that fun stuff.
I’m not sure you should always be playing RPGs either in that set. It’s literally: can you apply either of those skills to creating a good story together?
You don’t have to be in a drama club to join my table. If you want to pretend to be your character, if you’re the kind of role player who always says, “My character does this,” instead of “I do this,” that can still work. As long as the table is open to that.
That’s really the game master’s job, to set the boundaries for acceptable play.
I also like to play with very new players and experienced players, ideally at the same time. I think that’s a riot. I love that. In order to do that, you have to give people the space to just freaking play.
Quit thinking about what is perfect play or good play. Just bring something to the story from your character’s perspective.
One of the other things that comes up a lot is that your character is inevitably an expression of your values. When you play with the same people a lot and they bring different characters to the table, you can learn a lot about what they’re thinking about and what they’re learning about.
It’s usually nothing serious. It’s usually just like, “Last time I played a fighter who would charge in and see what happened. Now I want to play somebody who is a little more reserved, in the background, and then does a dramatic thing.”
From a GM’s perspective, it’s a little worse because every single one of the NPCs in the game is, to a degree, a reflection of my values too. How do we keep that more fluid so we can explore the story in a way that’s not just all of us pretending to be people other than each other, even though we’re acting exactly like we would act?
Michael: Absolutely.
I do want to talk about your latest project. We kind of dabbled into it earlier, but talk about what you’re doing now. It’s called Off The Map Games.
Larry Cummings: Off The Map Games.
I’ve always done all my work under larry.org, which is where I promote what I do. As I focused more on training and tech team stuff, that got quieter and quieter because it was all very esoteric, and it didn’t really translate to promotion as easily. Although I’m very proud of the site. I think it does what it needs to do.
As I was looking more into focusing full time on gaming, I realized I needed a different vehicle.
My wife had done a flyer for me. I have the very first flyer she did for me right here. This was for Fan Fusion a few years ago, where it was just, “Hey, there’s my QR code,” and we would hand them out or stick them to the binders or whatever.
She came up with Off The Map. I didn’t even ask her. I don’t even remember noticing it until I got there. I was like, “Oh, Off The Map. That’s fun.” So we kind of named it that way.
In the last year and a half, the amount of time and attention I’ve been spending on gaming has been going higher and higher every quarter. I was like, “Yeah, we need to make this official. Larry.org is doing too much if it’s both my team-focused training, mentorship, and guidance work, and my gaming work.”
It was conflicting because they’re very different contexts. So I needed to start a new site. What am I going to call it? Boom.
I was blown away that offthemap.games was available as a domain, although there is a parked domain for offthemapgames.com, which frankly is just way too much to type.
The idea of Off The Map Games was something I really liked. One of the things about the modern workforce, the modern way teams work, and the social and entertainment aspects of gaming overlapping with all that, is that everything is all figured out, but nothing is working really well.
How can that be? Those are fundamentally conflicting perspectives. So maybe everything isn’t worked out. Maybe the edge of the map is where the game starts, rather than where I turn you back into the plot I had in mind before.
That’s the idea in a nutshell. If gaming is about learning about yourself while you’re having fun with your friends, then the games you play should encourage you to learn as much as possible about yourself and should entertain you in a way that is much more enriching.
That’s why we came up with that name. The focus is really on board games, RPGs, miniatures, and card games.
Although I don’t focus as much on Magic, or now Star Wars Unlimited, which is the other new hotness, as much as I do the storytelling parts.
To be blunt, Magic especially is almost too difficult to cover this way because they have such an incredible ability to bring a fan universe into their game. They just released, although it’s probably passé now, Ninja Turtles was the hot new set a few months ago.
As a child of the ’80s, every now and then there’s a new release of Magic cards under another pop universe where I’m like, “Oh man, maybe this is the set that finally gets me into Magic.” But when Lord of the Rings and Spider-Man both failed to do it, I was like, “I don’t know if anybody’s going to do it.”
I do love collectible card games. It puts me in the mind of Warhammer in that, for gamers who are very into the social experience and having a place to go on a regular basis to play, I think there are better games for those two audiences respectively: Warhammer for miniatures play and Magic: The Gathering for collectible card play.
I worry that they’re too expensive. That’s my biggest problem. The other thing I don’t like is that investment creates commitment to rules that are not necessarily there to make the game more fun. They’re there to protect the value of the investment.
I think that probably happens more in those two games than in any other game. But having said that, they’re also a victim of great success. They’re very well-loved games. I don’t particularly enjoy either one of them because, to be blunt, I just can’t spend that much time in the game store. I have other stuff to do. If I do have that much time in the game store, I want to be playing an RPG.
I got into Lord of the Rings: The Living Card Game, which is pretty much out of print right now, I think. But the cards are still available, and that one is lovely. It’s sort of in between a game that doesn’t have expandable cards coming out all the time and Magic, which is constantly being reflavored.
Lord of the Rings: The Living Card Game is actually how I met a lot of my gamer friends recently because it’s hard to find folks who want to play that game all the time. So it’s like, “Oh my God, we found another one.”
That and Adventurers League. I like to run Adventurers League D&D on Tuesday nights at Funkatronic Rex in North Phoenix. 12th Street and Northern are the cross streets. In fact, I’ll be running that tonight at 5:30. Every Tuesday.
Michael: Nice. Very, very cool.
Larry Cummings: The fun thing about running Adventurers League as a pro GM is that being a pro GM can get a little insulated. I’m really looking for players who want to play the way I like to play. I’m not like, “Everybody play.” I’m like, “This is how I play. If that’s fun, come.”
But when you go into Adventurers League, you don’t know what’s going to happen. It keeps me on my toes.
Michael: Wow, that’s amazing.
All right, so we can start wrapping things up here. I do have a couple of fun questions for you.
We talked a lot about games, but outside of role-playing games, what other game are you playing right now? You can just pick one.
Larry Cummings: One?
Michael: A couple if you want, but what games are you playing right now that are not role-playing games?
Larry Cummings: One of the ones I like is a really wonderful infantry battle game called Memoir ’44. Being men of a certain age, a good question is, “What’s your Roman Empire?” What’s the historical era you’re fascinated with?
People who are fascinated by World War II love this game because it simulates all sorts of major and minor battles.
They came out with a Star Wars battle game based on that same system called Battle of Hoth, which is the big snow battle. The best battle in Star Wars. Maybe you could argue some of the prequels had more dramatic-looking battles, but I just love the Battle of Hoth. That one is really fun. I like that one a lot.
I also like simple card games. There’s a game called Sixes. I think it’s put out by Eagle-Gryphon, which is a local game company. You guess six things. You can learn to play it in seconds. It’s a great game.
Probably the only other one I would shout out is Heat, which is an IndyCar-style racing game. I really like that one a lot.
Michael: Nice.
Larry Cummings: If you want to know which RPG starter set I’m most passionate about, I have a visual aid. In fact, I just did an Off The Map episode about RPGs. It’s our first one about RPGs, and the last 20 minutes we talk about Pirate Borg.
Michael: Yes, that was the Pirate Borg one. We were talking about that earlier. Very cool.
Larry Cummings: Really, really fun game. Probably the best pound-for-pound dollar package in the history of RPG starter sets that I’ve ever seen. Certainly in the last 10 years.
I haven’t played it long enough to know if I can back up my first statement, but man, it’s dynamite. It’s really fun.
Michael: That’s very cool. I definitely have to take a look at it.
Larry Cummings: It’s easy compared to D&D. Not that D&D is that complicated. D&D is pretty easy to play too, but Pirate Borg is very fun. Who doesn’t want to be a pirate?
Michael: Right? Exactly.
Larry Cummings: One of the things I noticed when I started GMing all the time was that with new players, if they’re not sure what their backstory is going to be, the less you help them, the more likely they are to become a pirate.
Michael: Yeah, because it’s so much fun to be a pirate. It’s a little bit mischievous. Everyone likes to be a little bit mischievous.
Larry Cummings: There are lots of ways to be a pirate. There’s a lot of writing about piracy.
Michael: We were talking about music a bunch before we started the interview. I know you mentioned one in particular on vinyl, but in general, is there a particular artist you’re really digging right now?
Larry Cummings: Oh goodness. I should probably go to my Discogs. I probably get a new vinyl record every week or so.
There’s never just one record. One of the ones I mentioned earlier was Lucy Dacus, who’s from Virginia. I really love her. She was in Boygenius, but I’d been following her for a couple years before that.
There’s a new album by Broken Social Scene, and I really like them. I couldn’t believe they had a new album out, actually.
There’s a woman whose name I always forget, but she releases records under the name Waxahatchee. She and her sister used to have a band together, and then they stopped recording together. They recently just started recording together again under the name Snocaps, and that’s a great record.
There were some good Record Store Day releases. The new Courtney Barnett is fun.
There’s a scene in Phoenix at the Dirty Drummer, at 44th Street just south of Thomas. A couple of folks in the Phoenix music space tend to book bands there, and it’s really been getting exciting.
Michael: I’ve been doing a lot of shows there lately. I’ve been to Dirty Drummer a couple times now.
Larry Cummings: Dario’s work in the space, and Lindsay, the former Stinkweeds manager, is very involved in the local music scene and tends to overlap Dario’s space with it.
It’s one of the more interesting venues for, “I never would have heard that band if I hadn’t gone there that night” kind of music.
And then obviously Valley Bar. Phoenix has a really dynamite small music scene. It’s one of its biggest hidden strengths. We’re just so modest about it, but it’s unbelievably good.
Michael: It really does. Very, very grateful for being here for that.
All right, last question for you is: if you were only able to give one piece of advice, what would that be?
Larry Cummings: Say, “I don’t know.” I like that one.
Don’t listen to other people when they tell you what you’re not capable of.
Listen to other people a lot, but nobody gets to define that for you. Especially in the world today, I feel like a lot of people feel like everything’s figured out. I don’t think it has ever been more wide open in my entire life. It’s a little scarier, honestly.
Having an idea of what you can do and what you want to become is so important. If you can listen to other people to help you become that, instead of listening to them tell you why other people can’t, I think you’re in a really great spot.
That’s the one thing I always try to think about.
Michael: I completely agree with you. I think that’s where happiness comes from overall, doing what you want to do and doing what you love.
Thank you so much, Larry, for being on the show. It was great connecting with you again. I really appreciate it. We’ll definitely make sure we have all the information in our show notes about what you’ve got going on right now.
Also, real quick shout-out, I love the figurines in the background. I saw the Y-wing back there and the AT-ST and stuff like that.
Larry Cummings: I used to play a game called X-Wing all the time. I haven’t played it in years, but I still keep the art up because I like the Star Wars art.
There’s something about LEGO and Star Wars. I don’t know what it is.
Michael: I know. That was a magical matching, right? Fun story, that actually saved LEGO. Seriously, it actually saved LEGO.
Larry Cummings: It wouldn’t have been what it is today without that pairing. It would have been a much smaller company, for sure. I don’t think it would have gone away.
Michael: They were about to go bankrupt. This was back in the ’90s when LEGO sets were struggling. It wasn’t until they started pairing with others like Star Wars that it became the company it is today.
Larry Cummings: Marketing partnerships. Okay.
Michael: Yeah, it was a marketing partnership.
Larry Cummings: I have a great passion for LEGO. Saying Star Wars is more important than LEGO just rubs me the wrong way.
Michael: No, they were simpatico. Obviously, they were simpatico in that way, but it’s amazing that pairing happened.
Larry Cummings: I’ve got other ones sitting over here.
Michael: Wow, that’s cool. Nice. That’s awesome. I like the B-wing.
Larry Cummings: And then I’ve got the Slave I over there.
Michael: Oh, you’ve got Slave I too? That’s awesome. Very, very cool.
Larry Cummings: What am I most excited about? They just announced the new Minas Tirith [unclear exact LEGO product name].
Michael: Yes, I saw that too. If you’re talking about what’s going on with LEGO right now, if you’re a fan of pretty much anything, there’s now a LEGO set for it. It’s really cool stuff.
Well, thank you so much again. Thank you so much. I really appreciate it.
Larry Cummings: Thanks for having me, and thanks for having a great podcast.
Michael: Thank you.
Larry Cummings: You’re welcome.