dNoPE: 1x01 - Introducing dNo

Welcome to dNoPe. The podcast expansion of the dNo Universe. In our first episode Olivia is joined by our Creative Director, Ste Curran. In addition to being one of the co-founders of dNo, Ste also hosts “One Life Left,” the world's longest running radio show about video games. 

Listen to Ste and Oliva as they discuss the genesis of dNumber (aka dNo) and what initially brought them both to the company. From early conversations between the founders about creating a new digital hobby to how Ste sees that universe evolving, this episode is a great way to get to know what we’re working on. Olivia also puts forward key questions to Ste in the first ever airing of our (soon-to- be) regular feature, “Yes or (d)Nope” questions.

Thanks for listening to dNoPE! To learn more about who we are and what we're doing, join our Discord and follow our social media by using the links below. Have questions, comments, or ideas? Shoot us an email!

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Email us at: social@magicave.io

Transcript

Olivia Serio

Hi everyone and welcome to dNoPE, the podcast expansion of the dNo Universe. I’m Olivia, the community manager, and host of the show. Here we talk about the world of TTRPGs, what’s going on in the world, especially what’s going on in the world of dNo. 

What is dNo?

Well, I’m joined here today by Ste Curran, our Creative Director, who is going to tell you exactly that.

Olivia Serio

Hi Ste.

Ste Curran

Hi Olivia. It’s really good to be here. 

Olivia Serio

Really happy to have you here. Especially like, in a little bit more formal setting than our usual conversations. 

Ste Curran

So is this your first time hosting a podcast?

Olivia Serio

Yes, 100%

Ste Curran

Ok, how do you feel it’s going so far?

Olivia Serio

I feel like I’m probably talking a little fast, but I feel like I’m going to settle into it.

Ste Curran

I wouldn’t worry about that. People tend to listen to these things on one and a half speed. So you’re probably talking at the right speed and maybe that means you’re a natural. I don’t know.

Olivia Serio

Well you would know. You’ve been doing a radio show for... how long has it been now?

Ste Curran

It’s a radio show. I think it’s 17 years. I think, it’s 17 years. I think it’s 17 years, and you would expect me to know that. Since I say it every week on the radio show, but I think I started in around March 2005. Something like that, so very soon it’s 18 years. Very soon it will be a grown adult radio show, which is something I’ve aspired to, well I guess for 17 years. 

Olivia Serio

Well that, I mean, it sounds fun. I’ve listened to, I don’t listen every week because–

Ste Curran

No one does.

Olivia Serio

But I have listened, and it’s always really fun whenever I tune in to One Life Left.

Ste Curran

Very good. Available at www.onelifeleft.com or on a Monday evening on Resonance 104.4FM. The greatest radio station in the world.

Olivia Serio

That sounds very practiced

Ste Curran

I’ve done it before. But we’re not here to talk about One Life Left or to talk about that kind of thing. 

Olivia Serio

We’re here to talk about dNo.

Ste Curran

dNo or dNumber?

Olivia Serio

Yeah. See I think when we first started talking about the name, I was like as soon as people are going to, it’s dNumber but as soon as people see it, it’s quickly going to become dNo.

Ste Curran

That’s the technical answer. I think legally we are dNumber but everyone calls it dNo, cos dNo is a bit snappier, isn’t it? 

Olivia Serio

And a bit more fun to say.

Ste Curran

But we don’t mind, we’ll see what people, our community, end up calling this, and we will roll with that.

Olivia Serio

Yeah, I mean as a community manager I’m right on that pulse point.

Ste Curran

I said "roll with that"

Olivia Serio

Oh...

Ste Curran

Roll

Olivia Serio

Oh.

Ste Curran

You know if you flip on to the – not to teach you how to host a podcast or anything –  but if you go to the sidebar you can play laughter sound effects or applause, which you might find useful at those moments.

Olivia Serio

I did know that.

Ste Curran

I’m just saying.

Olivia Serio

So first of all, what is dNo?

Ste Curran

dNo is a division of Magicave, which is a company I set up a year ago with my co-founders Harry and Ed. And dNo – or dNumber– is a new hobby, I guess. That’s what we are trying to build with our team of brilliant coders and artists. We’re a start-up as well, that’s another way of looking at it. There’s all kinds of things that go into what we are doing. If someone were to ask me on a podcast what dNo is. I would say "It’s the beginning of a hobby, and shortly it will be a collection of dice and some games to go with those dice."

Olivia Serio

The dice is how I got started with it in the first place with you. Little bit of kismet there in the beginning.

Ste Curran

Very true.

Olivia Serio

Meeting at Maraoke, Ron needing to help, to step in with sound, and the two of us not really knowing what to do with ourselves while that was sorted out.

Ste Curran

It was about a year ago. A year ago in December, when you turned up at a party that I was running, holding some dice. And I thought, "that’s suspicious isn’t it?" Given that about then Harry, Ed and I had just started to work on this project. The idea being could we build digital dice that felt more physical than any digital product has ever felt before, using blockchain technology.

Olivia Serio

Yeah, which I was a little wary of at first. Our first conversation we had, really kind of made me rethink how I was approaching it. And I think it was a similar journey for you. If I remember correctly.

Ste Curran

I was a blockchain skeptic, for no reason other than life is short, and you don’t really have time to investigate everything in the world. I’m a curious person. I do like learning and discovering things. But sometimes, like everyone else. I just take the opinions of people who I love and respect. And I take them and embrace them as my own, on the understanding that they will have done the research. Which may be a bit lazy but it is also human nature. 

And so it was maybe 18 months ago, a little bit more. I had no interest in blockchain at all. I would position myself, by default, with the general indie gaming viewpoint. Which is that it’s nonsense and unnecessary and pointless. That a great deal of the people using it are scammers or building pyramid schemes. These things that I didn’t want to be associated with but I went out with– I was talking to a few people. I kept getting approached about getting involved in these kinds of projects, and Harry, my co-founder, had asked me to think about it as well. I went out for dinner with a friend and I said "I’m not sure I really want to do it, as I don’t know a lot about it. From what I understand everything involved in it is a scam." And my friend said “Hmmm, interesting, Have you thought about not doing a scam?”

It sounds dumb right now but it genuinely repositioned it in my head because I do believe technology is neutral, and it’s what people do with the technology that causes it to be bad or good. And at the time I had no idea. It may still be there is nothing useful you can do with Blockchain. You know, I don’t believe that but what sort of Harry set me the challenge of is "what would you do with it? How would you use it in an interesting way?" We got talking and came up with some ideas. And so it was that I decided that if I was presented with the opportunity to do something with this technology maybe I could do something that was interesting. And we will find out if that is the case over the next couple of years.

Olivia Serio

When we started talking I was similarly skeptical. And also went away and talked to some friends who were kind of like talking about "Go into with your eyes wide open" sort of thing. The thing that intrigued me the most from the start was the dice. And that’s something that we talked about too. There wasn’t a lot of people, if any, in the company that had a lot of familiarity with the world of dice. Which was some of my appeal and very quickly, it’s one of those things were the more you look at it, the more shiny pretty math rocks. They’re kind of addictive in their beauty and their utility. And the thing that intrigued me the most was a way to bring these objects in to the digital space, in a way that hadn’t been done before and the ability to combine it with the storytelling aspect.

Ste Curran

I can hear a cat in the background

Olivia Serio

Yeah, I think that’s because the door is closed.

Ste Curran

That happens.

Ste Curran

I, truthfully, knew very little about dice when we started on this path. So when I was talking to Harry and Ed initially, I, well I suppose, we were most interested in the part of blockchain and items on the chain that makes things feel more physical. People will tell you that’s illusory, and it isn’t real, and to a point, they are right, right? An item in a database linking to a picture or a video or whatever it is, is no more real than an item that you have on your hard disk or the Activision store on their servers, it is literally just data on a drive somewhere. 

But video games. I’m a video games designer, been a video games designers for 20 years and that means I deal in illusions. None of this is real. I’m trying to make people feel things by manipulating their emotions, using tricks, using smoke and mirrors. And there is something about the process of taking an item that is registered on a server somewhere. And purchasing that item and moving it into your wallet, whatever that means. And then putting that in a game, and then withdrawing it from the game, and putting it back in your wallet and then another game. That kind of transaction that takes place, the theatre that makes an item feel more physical. And I don’t why that is. I can’t explain it, but it’s true, and I quite like that because it’s hard to fight with logic, it’s hard to fight that feeling. Someone can tell you “It’s not real, that’s not how it is. It’s just an item in database” but the only response that matters is “Well, I feel it”. 

And when I’m working with these objects on ‘Chain, I feel that they are more real than other digital objects that I have bought in video games before. Now that matters. I know I’m not alone in feeling like that. There is a huge community of people that currently buy and trade these things in games that I currently don’t think are very good games but also buy these for other reasons. 

And that became the question of like, "OK, if that is true, – and it is true, right? It’s emotionally true. Then how can we use that sense of physicality in a game and how can we build a game around that – what games should we build?" So the place I started, and the reason we ended up with dice, is you start simple, right? What is the simplest object you can build that is playful and that there are game elements that come out of that. And that took us to dice. 

It’s literally a primitive and I knew nothing, almost nothing, about dice at that point. Other than dice are cool, you roll them around and numbers appear or letters, or shapes, or anything. And you can make games around those. You can make billions of different games, I know loads of great dice games, and we could build lots and lots of games for these dice to slot into. So that became the pitch for Magicave and specifically, dNumber. We build these dice, these on-chain dice. People buy the dice and those dice provide access to games and use cases for these dice. So they roll these dice or throw these dice, do whatever they want inside the games we build. And hopefully, they build too. As we also provide them with the SDK and access to play with the dice in whatever way they want to. 

Olivia Serio

That’s the other really cool thing for me about the company, is this focus on community and the way in that we’re trying to build with people as well. We’re not trying to gatekeep it behind some iron curtain. It is very much an integration of the community. 

Ste Curran

That is one of the most interesting things to me. I love games, and I’ve loved games my whole life pretty much, but the games that I love the most are the games that are toys; that provide the player with a set of objects, and those objects interact, and people play with them. And you can cite many, many successful examples of that. Minecraft, obviously as a goal, but the real victory in Minecraft is taking this set of toys and playing around with them. Grand Theft Auto is the same. Sure people play Grand Theft Auto for the plots, and it is incredibly well produced. It’s known for that. But people’s stories aren’t about the plots in Grand Theft Auto. People’s stories are about the way they move through the universe and about how they interact with the toys inside that Grand Theft Auto world. 

Now what I want to build, and what our team is building right now, is a series of toys, beginning with dice. And the thing about toys is that you don’t get to tell anyone how to play with a toy. You can suggest how they play with a toy. “Hey, here are some use cases”, and that’s what we want to do with the games we are building as part dNumber. But really the joy of a toy is that it’s yours, do with it what you want. So take these dice, throw them against the wall. Come up with your own game, design a different way of playing that we haven’t thought of. It belongs to you and any way we can facilitate that makes it more fun, makes the company work I think

Olivia Serio

I remember that first early meeting and bringing my dice bag with me and the sparkle in your eyes matching the sparkle, the stone dice that I got to show you and all of the really cool color palettes and things. And that’s, I think, seeing you get excited about seeing the physical side of things and it translating into this digital space started also getting me excited. And I think that’s the other really fun thing about dNo is the excitement in the company and how infectious it is. 

Ste Curran

That was a big moment for me as well. Seeing these objects and seeing how wildly different they are not just to look at but to feel, and finding ones that I care about, and seeing ones that you obviously care about and don’t create the same spark in me. And also seeing how you arrange these dice around characters in your games of DnD. All of that, it made me think that dice weren’t just a good test case for this but were vital to the thing that we’re building. That led to dNumber and the games, the games that we’re trying to build as well. 

Olivia Serio

I also wanted to know – we’re talking a lot about community, and we’re talking a lot about the way that community has been part of the conversation from the beginning. What are other aspects, apart from this playfulness and physicality that you think are intrinsic to what dNumber is?

Ste Curran

I’ve seen a lot of work inside the Blockchain space that are attempts to either take games that already exist and place Blockchain within them. Or take hobbies that already exist and say “great, now we can do this on-chain”. And I think those might be successful, but they’re not interesting to me. What we wanted to do with dNumber is take something that we didn’t believe could happen without some of the technology that we’re building. Trying to create something new out of that. So there are some really, really cool things about dNumber and one of the games that we’re building, Hex-Gen, right now which I think unique. This is not an attempt to take DnD and Blockchain-ify it, right. DnD is fine it doesn’t need extra stuff in, it doesn’t, to my mind, benefit from that because it is a social experience. DnD is an excuse to hang around with friends, and strangers, and tell stories to each other, and all participate in this storytelling world. I’m not yet convinced that Blockchain can make that better, because I’m not yet convinced that it needs to be better. It already is what it is.

Olivia Serio

It is, but it also isn’t. I think there’s one thing that the pandemic really highlighted is the need for digital spaces to be something that feel/mimic that experience. There are going to be people who move, people aren’t able to meet up every week and sit around the table. And something I remember during that kind of time was. One of the things I missed was getting to play with dice, and the sound of them, and every digital roller felt empty. You could maybe pick your color but they didn’t feel or look like real dice. And half the time when we would roll it would be like “Oh is this actually rolling?” You start to question the code behind it, especially when you’re not seeing the dice move physically, and it lacked that kind of beauty. And when you’re talking about that storytelling thing, that’s the interesting thing for me too. About what we are doing is the use the Blockchain, not just as this verification space but also as a way to tell stories. 

Ste Curran

I think there is something too. All of the dice we make will be unique and there will be some dice that are more scarce, or some types of dice rather. Every dice is unique but there will be some types of dice that are more scarce. And some that will be more desirable to you, more desirable to me and that kind of thing. I do believe that scarcity is related to pride of ownership in some loose way. And that doesn’t mean these things have to be expensive, it just means that you have to feel the joy that you’ve got it and it belongs to you. And sure, yeah, rolling that in a roller as part of your DnD game and collecting some dice around your character, maybe that’s a cool feeling. I’m not sure, I don’t know. I’m interested to see how people will use our dice, and maybe that works. But we wanted to do, and the exciting thing for me was, looking at the games we are building, the use cases for these dice and trying to create something new as well as distinct from DnD and that’s were Hex-Gen. Which is the working title and is a terrible, terrible name, and I’m terrified it will stick, as names tend to. That’s where Hex-Gen comes in, which is the big project we’re working on inside the studio at the moment. 

Olivia Serio

Tell me a little bit about Hex-Gen.

Ste Curran

So Hex-Gen is a, how would I describe it? I describe it as a Rogue-like, if Rogue-like actually meant "like Rogue", which it doesn’t these days. So for those people not aware or familiar with what a Rogue-like is or even what Rogue is. Rogue is a very classic ASCII based video game. One of the earliest dungeon crawlers. You take a ASCII character, an @ sign, you adventure through lots of, well a series of text drawn dungeons, slaying monsters and accruing weapons, drinking potions and that kind of thing. It introduced a lot of things to video gaming, like for example perma-death. When you die in Rogue, there is no restarting the level or anything. That’s it, your character is dead. You restart the whole game, which is kinda brutal, and procedural generation, dungeons are different every time. Loads of cool stuff that games have really, really learnt from. And indeed, it inspired a whole genre of games which are super popular now. Rogue-likes are, they do millions, and millions, and millions and millions of lots of different games every year that fall into that category. However, it’s over the generations since that original game, Rogue-like has come to not mean like Rogue anymore. It’s come to mean, like that game that was like that game that was like that game that was like Rogue. It’s kind of that generational move away from the original and that makes perfect sense. But I was kind of interested in returning to the original Rogue. Like looking at that game and making a Rogue-like, using the things that we’re learnt since then about what a Rogue-like could be from those generations. Folding in all the things we have learnt back into some of the pure dungeoneering in the original. So it’s a Rogue-like like Rogue, and it takes aspects from lots of modern games that I absolutely love, things like Spelunky and things like Noita. Which I’m obsessed with and so are a substantial number of our team are as well. It’s a dungeon exploring game that takes the dice in dNumber and forms a character around your set of dice. It uses your dice to generate a character that will be unique to those set of dice. But if you have two sets of dice, you can mix those sets of dice and create several characters. And if you have three sets of dice, obviously the range of characters you can create is… someone better at maths than me can tell you the number but involves–

Olivia Serio

Didn’t you do your degree in Maths?

Ste Curran

I did, and I wasn’t very good at it. But fortunately we have an insanely good team working on the game right now. And I’m kind of removed from the game because I’m part of the staff looking after the direction of the company and all the other things we’re doing. But we have a dedicated team working on it, it’s being led brilliantly, and they’re responsible for what the heart of this game is, not me. They are responsible for all the cool game design decisions which blow me away every time I see the end of sprint review. The beautiful art that is going into to it as well, like. So it feels, I don’t know. It’s kind of a joy to me to have kickstarted that process but more of a joy to see every week how the game is falling out of it. I guess towards the original idea I had but also in ways that I couldn’t have imagined. You know, far, far beyond my capacity to design a game. 

Olivia Serio

I’m enjoying that process too and sharing all of those kind of key moments of joy and development on our socials. It’s always really difficult to try and figure out what to highlight every week just because there are so many cool things going on which, for those of you who are in our Discord, you get to see more active, regular updates that are not on our socials and kind of input and feedback and are able to see that process, not live but in a much more robust real-time way.

Ste Curran

And I hope that at some point in the not so near but not incredibly distant future we’ll have bits and pieces for people to play as well because the dice don’t exist yet, but they will exist at some point. I don’t like giving dates, so I’m trying to sort of edge around that, but I have a date in mind and the team have a date in mind. 

Olivia Serio

The dice exist in a capacity to be released at some point in the future. 

Ste Curran

The dice are ready to go and the game is not. And part of the purpose of dNumber and bigger pitch for Magicave is when you buy something, you have to be able to use it. So we want to make sure there is a way of you feeling that physicality of the dice in a thing that lets you roll it, sure, but how fun is a roller right? I know you can have some fun with it, but we want to give it some purpose as well. So a small version of the game will drop at the same time, on the same day, as we drop these dice that will be available for purchase. And that will kind of speak to the value I talked about at the start, which is the interesting thing to me is the physicality. Everything you can do to give people the impression that this is a real object, that you can play with, and touch, and have fun with, have to make to a game for that. 

Olivia Serio

That was the immediate utility, and we’re not just putting out really cool pictures for people to buy. We’re actually putting out these digital objects that have purpose and use and a place to be played with.

Ste Curran

They are useable in a game that is not being led by "what is a game that already exists that is popular or what is something that we think people will buy these dice in order to play because they like that game in another format?" It’s led by a game which benefits from the way these dice are distributed. You’ll be able to play the game if you do not buy the dice. There will be a version where you can use a default set of dice and dungeon around the place as a default character. But if you buy your own set then you get a character that’s yours. And it will be quite exciting to see what character is formed from this set of dice. Cool. If you buy more sets of dice, and we don’t want these to be prohibitively expensive, you know they are toys. If you buy more sets of dice then your experience gets wider as well. And then, if you can trade those dice with friends after you’ve had your fun with them. Or your friends got some dice that will fit one of your characters a little better. So you can then play as a wizard with an axe or something like that, and you really want that set of dice, or really want that skill that that set of dice implies. "Well OK, I’ll trade you those." That kind of ecosystem we want to create as well. Regular dice drops, regular expansions to the game and also expansions into other things that you can buy as well as the dice. Which I probably shouldn’t talk about because I don’t know if we’ve talked about those in public before.

Olivia Serio

And play with and do expansions, you know like, podcasts.

Ste Curran

Indeed and building up the dNumber Universe. 

Olivia Serio

Speaking of the dNumber Podcast Expansion. dNoPE has a fun game that we are going to start called "Yes or NoPE questions." 

Ste Curran

That sounds fun.

Olivia Serio

So no explaining or anything like that, just answer "Yes or Nope."

Ste Curran

I can do that. Absolutely I am fully ready.

Olivia Serio

Can dice be cursed?

Ste Curran

Yes

Olivia Serio

Can dice be uncursed?

Ste Curran

Nope.

Olivia Serio

Snacking at the table?

Ste Curran

I’m going to need more information on the question because I don’t…

Olivia Serio

Like playing games at the table, snacking while you are playing games.

Ste Curran

Ohhh that’s difficult. I know I’m not allowed to expand on my thoughts here, but it is a tricky one as I like food, but I don’t like greasy fingers all over my dice. I’m going to say nope.

Olivia Serio

Session zero?

Ste Curran

Literally no idea what that means, so yes

Olivia Serio

Can you have too many dice?

Ste Curran

No. Nope, sorry, Nope.

Olivia Serio

Would you be an Adventurer, like dropped into the world of Adventure, would you be an Adventurer?

Ste Curran

Depends on the world right? Like, if I’m dropped somewhere really comfortable, and I think that the outside is just a bit rainy, then nope. But if I’m dropped in a cell, and I’m like things can’t get much worse, then maybe it’s really nice and comfortable outside, then yep definitely. I think the chances are in these situations that you are very rarely dropped in a situation that doesn’t create some momentum, right. I mean there’s always some kind of panic. So yeah, I’m an Adventurer. 

Olivia Serio

Have you ever played a TTRPG?

Ste Curran

Nope. I mean, yeah I have but not very well or. Sorry, I wasn’t meant to expand, yes is the answer.

Olivia Serio

Would you let other people use your dice?

Ste Curran

Yeah, yeah, yes.

Olivia Serio

Would you use digital dice?

Ste Curran

I mean do you want me to get fired from my own company? Is that what this is turning in to?

Yes. The answer is "I don’t waste my time building things that I don’t believe in, and I know that’s not a yep or nope, but I do think it’s important."

Olivia Serio

Did you have fun today?

Ste Curran

Yes, yes I did. I would recommend this experience of podcast recording to anybody who doesn’t feel that they couldn’t get on a radio show. Obviously quite fiercely fought to appear on the radio. This is a very good second best.

Olivia Serio

Aw, thanks. Thanks so much.

Ste Curran

You are absolutely welcome.

Olivia Serio

It was really fun talking to you today Ste and hearing more about dNo is in kind of the casual conversation environment that I was first introduced to it. It’s definitely evolved a lot over the past year, and it’s been really cool to hear about that and share it with everyone else listening.

Ste Curran

Thank you for very much for the time and I hope to be back soon. 

Olivia Serio (Outro)

Thank you so much for listening to dNope, the podcast expansion for the dNo Universe. If you want to learn more about who we are and what we’re doing. Go follow our social media at @dNoDice. That’s d-n-o d-i-c-e on Twitter, Instagram and TikTok. For the latest updates and to join in on the community we’re building, you can also join our Discord. By going to discord.gg/dNoDice or following the link in our episode description. Thanks again for listening and we hope to see you around soon.