Hail Cezar! Interview with solo RPG designer Cezar Capacle

The Lone Toad - Ribbiting Adventures Issue 7

Welcome to Ribbiting Adventures Issue 7!

In today’s Ribbiting Adventure, we are speaking with Cezar Capacle, a Brazilian tabletop game designer who has been creating games since 2016. He keeps his rules light and his games quirky. He has won a Crit Award, a Tabletop Award, and a bunch of other things.

Cezar has just released two one-page RPGs in the recent One-Page RPG jam. I’ve admired Cezar’s for years, so I had to reach out and chat with him.

Read more about One-page Solo RPGs from the recent game Jam!

Your likes have empowered me to take my full Lich form. But these pesky adventurers have entered my dark cathedral, attempting to slay me! Your likes, comments, and recommendations will give me the power to overwhelm them.

Also can’t get enough of me? I can’t blame you. Follow me on Threads here

All images below are credited to Cezar Capacle. My questions are in bold, and Cezar’s answers are regular. Do I need to explain that? I don’t know, it seems self-explanatory but I feel I need to mention it still.

Interview with Cezar Capacle

Hello Cezar and welcome to The Lone Toad. You've certainly been busy over the last month, releasing two solo RPGs for the One-Page RPG Jam that recently ended. Both Hunk o'Junk and Triple-O are fantastic entries and dominated the charts for several weeks. 

When you are designing a one-page RPG, do you find the restrictions constraining or is it something that feeds your creativity?

I’d say both! They are constraints that breed creativity. It is an exercise in conciseness and straightforwardness. And considering how often my projects tend to suffer from scope creep, being limited to a single page is a blessing! You have to focus on a game that does one thing, and one thing well. 

It is a fine balance, getting to the point where you feel the game has just enough juice, without cramming the page with content just for the sake of it. I can tell you that it is a moment of great satisfaction when you look at the finished work and think, “okay, I pulled it off”. 

It is also a great way to get you out of a creative rut. If you are working on a bigger project, you have the chance to develop and release something in a short time frame, and this sense of accomplishment works like a charm to get you back on track. I definitely recommend that everyone give it a go at least once.

You often participate in Game Jams. What is it about a game jam that inspires creativity in you?

If I were to summarize it, I’d say: extrinsic motivation. I know we should be driven by our own ideas and try to find satisfaction in doing whatever our minds set to do, but unfortunately, that is not always the case. 

When you work for yourself, the feeling of “I can do whatever I want anytime I want” can be overwhelming. Should I work on this or that project? Should I experiment on that genre? Should I release it this month or let it cook some more? 

I usually follow my gut without questioning it too much, but when that doesn’t work… well, a game jam helps. It offers you a theme, a deadline, a set of rules, or, in other words, a general direction. Again, we are talking about constraints. Those externally determined parameters are a great way to keep you focused. You go from “I can do anything, what do I do with this power?” to “What cool thing I can do within these restrictions?” It is liberating.

Now let's take a look at each of your two jam entries. 

On its surface, Hunk O'Junk is a team-based sketching game (with a solo component), but it is really a game about telling stories, that may or may not be true. What was your inspiration for making the game?

I always love to play with the form of TTRPGs. The first time I joined this jam, I wanted to explore a way to make the one page be the game itself, not a set of rules for a game. So I thought, “what if the page were a map you travelled on?”. That became The Land Beyond, up to this day a well-beloved little game.

Look at that cover. Stunning!

Last year, I went the opposite direction and set out a challenge for myself to create a more involved set of rules that could be readable and enjoyable in a single page. The result was Murder at Morsley Manor, and besides the roleplaying element, I think I was able to explain a somewhat complex card game in one-page.

For this year, I wanted a game that asked you to interact with the page, altering it somehow. I thought of origami, the surreal game exquisite corpse, and finally, my mind set out on drawing on the page. When I saw that the optional theme was “transport”, I immediately decided that it would be a game in which you drew a spaceship.

It took some workshopping to get it from a “tell a tale of your spaceship while you draw it” kind of game to the current form. But the very limitations of my mechanics became the fuel I needed to finish it. The rules I devised to randomly draw a spaceship lent to very weirdly shaped vessels. So I decided to embrace that: the game would be about badly sketching spaceships. After a few dead ends, the concept of having to lie and draw mirrored halves of your spaceship sounded too funny not to pursue.

I always say that I like to design games with specific moments in mind, and the moment in which the two players reveal and compare their drawings of each half of the spaceship sounded hilarious in my mind. I knew I had to do it.

Do you think TTRPGS would benefit from bringing in other mediums like drawing? Why? 

Absolutely. All kinds of media. I love to blur the lines between RPGs, board games, card games, and other styles of play. And the insertion of other media offers new avenues to explore “toys” in game design. Not only can they be a path to develop new and interesting mechanics, but they can expand the tactile, joyful experience of handling components and engaging in storytelling with different aids. 

I love dice, pen and paper, don’t get me wrong. But we have only to gain by importing other modes of interface into tabletop RPGs. I want character creation with Play-Doh. I want spell casting based on shapes drawn on a mini Zen garden. I want combats solved with shadow puppets. Those things excite me. That’s why when I created Midnight Melodies I didn’t want music to be just a setting element, but rather to have the very result of your investigation translated into chords that you actually have to play on a piano. I love those kinds of things. 

I love the concept of this game.

At the end of a game of Hunk O'Junk you'll have a cool story and a wonky-looking spaceship. If someone wants to continue that story, what game could they use? 

Ha, great question! Some great contenders would be Scum & Villainy and Orbital Blues. Or to keep it into minimalist games, I’d suggest Let’s Jam, 2400 Cosmic Highway, Space Bounty Blues, See you, Space Cowboy, and the all-time classic Lasers & Feelings.

Triple-O is an attempt to solve an issue that I've had as a solo player quite often, how to emulate the player side of the equation and not the GM side. As a player emulator, Triple-O (which stands for The Obvious, The Option and The Odd, the core mechanic of the emulator) will allow solo players to finally get to play through all the modules we have stacked up.

Can you tell us why you've decided to tackle Player emulation, where most solo emulators focus on the Game Master side of things?

Two main reasons. Firstly, when I play solo RPGs, I tend to enjoy more the worldbuilding aspects and the discoveries about the story that come out from random rolls and apparently unconnected events. I am more interested in discovering how these things are pieced together than in making decisions as the character. So I naturally gravitate towards assuming the GM side of things, even to the point of letting some character decisions be made by oracle rolls.

Secondly, I was never truly able to enjoy published adventure modules solo. I love the dramatic irony of knowing things my character doesn’t, but even with all the techniques I saw out there for playing those modules solo, there comes a point in which you learn a piece of information or an interesting aspect of the scenario, and you have to ask, “would my character even consider that?”. And then you either make a judgement call, or again, you rely on an oracle roll to decide that.

Since this was a behavior that I instinctively adopted while playing, I thought, “why not create an established procedure to actually take the role of the GM while playing?” I found some attempts online, but they focused more on player behavior rather than character behavior, and these blurry lines between what the emulated character would do or what the emulated player would prefer caused more confusion for me. I didn’t want two layers of decision-making to consider as I GMed. That’s why I landed in the straightforward approach of Triple-O.

I'd love to know what adventure or module you'll be using Triple-O to play through?

That is something that I have honestly missed in my almost 30 years in the hobby. I never really gelled with published modules. My tendency to improvise everything and my struggle in absorbing lore and information kept me away from adventure modules for long enough. I intend to correct that. Honestly, it is such a wide spectrum of the TTRPG space that I feel equal parts excited and overwhelmed. But I’ll be aiming at the shorter ones for now. I’ve seen some cool stuff for Mausritter that might have my attention first.

Now while I have you here, I have to ask the cheeky question. What are you working on now? Any sneak peeks you can give us on future projects?

Well, yes! I shared on my Patreon recently that I am working on a fantasy game, inspired by the fact that my local board game group had a bunch of people that wanted to try tabletop RPGs for the first time (remember extrinsic motivation?). So, I devised a simple system to offer the spirit of what I believe is what they think the experience of playing an RPG is like, without having to parse through 900 pages of rules. 

It was supposed to be just a stand in to introduce RPGs to beginners, but it turns out it was a blast, and we are now ten sessions in. I decided to polish the rules, commission some custom art and publish the thing! I’m deep into production now, writing a lot and finding the exact tone I need for the book. If you don’t mind the shameless plug, my patrons have already seen the cover and the name of the game! So that’s the best place to keep updated on that and future projects  ;)

Go and support Cezar. So much great stuff.

Thank you so much for your time Cezar! I’m looking forward to seeing what you come up with next.

Want to see more of Cezar? Check out his website here.

His Patreon is here.

And his Itch page here.

Next Month

Dungeon diving is core to the RPG scene and next month we are uhh diving into it… We are taking a good look at the upcoming Kickstarter for Marching Order: Curse and Coins edition from Crumbling Keep, as well as other solo dungeon-diving RPGs.

So grab your torches, your 10 foot poles and make sure you check for traps.