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Throwback: Ben Milton Interview

Creator of Questing Beast, The Glatisant, Maze Rats, Knave, and MORE!

Samuel James

Nov 12

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Conducted this back at the beginning of COVID, March 2020. He’s got some timeless answers here, especially his movie, book, and game recommendations at the bottom!

Without further interruption, Mr. Ben Milton:

How did you get into the hobby? What was your first game?

I started playing consistently almost seven years ago. The first one I actually tried was the Decipher Lord of the Rings system. I was big into the movies so we got that. I’ve been into hobby games in general since I was a kid, so I was peripherally aware of role-playing games. I read it and made my friends try to play one session. We had no idea what we were doing and it just disintegrated immediately. I tried some experiments off and on but then it wasn’t until about seven years ago that a teacher that I was teaching with, Andrew Armstrong from DawnforgedCast invited myself and some other teachers to play Pathfinder with him.

Some of the first games that I actually ran as a DM were Dungeon World and World of Dungeons and Into the Odd. From there I found Matt Finch’s Old-School Primer and moved into the OSR.

Which came first: blog, YouTube channel, or game design?

It was the YouTube channel first. I was really into mapmaking and during a meeting at school I was really bored and I just started drawing a map on the back of a piece of paper. I uploaded it to Reddit and it kind of blew up. People thought it was really cool looking and they wanted to know how I was drawing it. So that was the Questing Beast YouTube channel originally. It was just tutorials on mapmaking for quite a while. Eventually I started doing reviews of some OSR books I had because I realized that there weren’t any reviews of them anywhere on YouTube. That became my more popular content and the reason why people were subscribing so I just kept making those.

When did you start making your own games?

I was running and am still running after-school clubs for role-playing games. I was trying a bunch of different things, like Dungeon World and World of Dungeons, which work really well because they’re so fast and light. But then I asked, “How hard could this be?” I was really enjoying Into the Odd, so I said, “I’ll just make my own.” The first one I really finished was Maze Rats. If you go back to a supplement for Into the Odd called Odditional Materials, at the back of that is the original edition of Maze Rats where it is just a straight-up hack up to Into the Odd. Then I expanded it into more of its own system and put more and more random tables in there. The idea was to create a pamphlet that I could easily print out at school and hand out to all the kids. It would have all the rules they needed plus huge amounts of random tables to make their own dungeons with Dungeon Master advice to be a complete, all-in-one package. That didn’t really exist at the time in terms of something really simple and easy to hand out to kids. I spent a year or two making that and it went through tons of revisions. That was the first thing that I published.

How do you run a tabletop club at your school? Do you involve students, parents, and other faculty members?

Right now it’s me and one other teacher. We have over ten students in the club right now split into two groups to make that work. I run the kids from fourth through sixth grade. That’s a good entry-level age group to get into RPGs and I teach fifth grade so I have a lot of the kids that I teach anyway. The kids that have been there for a while can teach younger kids and eventually start creating their own dungeons and playing their own games. Something I did last year was run one-page dungeons over a couple of hour-long sessions and I’d have the kids draw a map as they went along. Then once they’d beaten the dungeon I would actually give them the one-page dungeon so they could see behind the screen and how simple and easy it is to make these kinds of games or run these kinds of adventures. I would try and be as transparent as possible as to how I was running things and how I was making decisions. I was modeling it for them.

Whenever they were trying to do something outside the rules I would just be really transparent. I would say “Oh, so that’s interesting. I don’t have a rule for that but it seems like your characters are doing this and the situation seems like this, so it seems like it would be about this difficult. What do you think would be a good consequence for failure?” We just kind of talked about it and then we would just roll. This is what goes on in a DM’s head anyway. I would just verbalize it so they could see how you would do it.

Eventually, we had a whole session where I said, “Okay, the session today is gonna be to make your own dungeon.” I gave them all copies of Maze Rats so they had tons of random tables and resources that they could draw from. They got really into it and took it home. It was all done on one piece of paper so it was really easy for them to see the whole picture. Then the next session I just asked for a volunteer and there was a kid who had already finished his. He just started running because he’d seen me do it and they knew how it was done. I would just sort of stand back and coach them a little bit, but you know, I would mostly let them have at it because that’s how you learn.

Are kids violent?

Oh yeah, hyper-violent. It’s all just pure murder hobo all over the place. I don’t try and restrict that at all. What I try to do is enforce logical consequences. “Yeah, you absolutely can decide to try and kill everything in this dungeon but the dungeon is not balanced for you to survive. If you do that things are gonna fight back and there are things that are tougher than you. If you die, it’s not a big deal you can just make another character, but you’re gonna start over now without your XP and have to work your way back up.” Eventually, once you have enough kids that are smart enough to gain a bunch of XP and some levels, they’re really proud of the fact that they’re at level 3 because no one else is. Then that becomes a motivating factor for everyone to start being a little bit more careful.

How has running the after-school club affected your games’ designs?

It provides me with a really focused audience. My RPGs are really simple, but they take forever for me to write because I get hung up on mechanical differences that hardly make any difference. So what I’ll do is think “What would best serve a game I have to run for 10 year-olds?” It has to be ready in five minutes and has to be as easy to run as possible. I keep those kids in mind and that helps me stay focused on keeping things practical.

That’s what things like the random tables in Maze Rats are for. Same for the DM advice at the back of the booklet. I just kept pushing myself to make it shorter and clearer and more succinct. It was just a couple of pages because kids aren’t gonna read a whole book on DMing. You need to make it as concise and readable as possible. I’ve discovered that when writing systems for 10-year-olds, you end up writing things that are good for adults too because things are a lot clearer and faster.

How have you developed the brand of Questing Beast?

It started as a YouTube channel and I had a blog from pretty early on. It was just reviews for quite a while and then it branched into making a few products, Maze Rats and Knave, and a couple of adventures. The newsletter is a fairly recent development. I wanted to do that for a couple of reasons, one of which is now that G+ doesn’t exist anymore, it’s really hard for people to keep up with what’s actually going on. Things are really spread out. There are tons of blogs, there are tons of YouTube channels, there’s Twitter accounts and most of these people don’t really follow each other or they just follow each other on that one platform. Because I’m subscribed to most of these I try and keep my finger on the pulse of what’s going on overall. I figured it’d be really useful to have one place where a lot of the interesting stuff is put together, so the newsletter helps with that and keeps people updated about Questing Beast. It’s really good to have a newsletter in general because there are people you can talk to directly instead of having to go through YouTube or through Twitter or all those intermediaries. That’s grown really fast.

In your blog, you’ve used the phrase “tabletop adventure games.” How does that compare to “OSR?”

I like the phrase because of the way it puts the focus on exploring and encountering weird stuff. That’s the kind of game that I like. There’s been quite a number of other RPGs, usually beginner box sets in the past, that go by “adventure game” just because I people who published those games realized that it was a more accessible term. It’s what got put on the Labyrinth RPG. The people over at River Horse who were publishing that agreed with me that “adventure game” just sounds better and puts the emphasis where we wanted it to be. It’s definitely not an OSR game in the sense that it’s a game for kids where there’s really no combat or death, so it’s a very different style of game than OSR. But the people at River Horse did take a lot of inspiration from OSR stuff. They wanted the extremely high production values, plus things like layout where every section of the adventure is on a two-page spread so you never have to flip back and forth. I tried to include a lot of OSR-style problems, like weird situations where it’s not obvious how you would solve it. I tried to use that as our principles to build these situations for the Labyrinth Game and I think that turned out really well. People seem to be really liking it.

How has running this review channel affected how you design games?

It has got me thinking a lot more about layout. For the OSR books I review, most of them are kind of on the same page with how you should layout books but every once in a while you’ll run into stuff from other publishers where it’s just a big long stream of consciousness text that’s not designed to be run at the table. Seeing these books has put that more at the forefront of my mind. I often call it “control panel design” where the spread is like a control panel: everything you need is right there so you don’t have to turn the page. I started doing that all the way back with Maze Rats. I wanted every two-page spread to be like a panel of a DM screen. That way you could just print out each two-page spread and then use that to run the game. I continued that with Knave and with probably the other stuff I’m going to write. Once you start doing that, you can’t really go back because you just can’t imagine having to break up text over multiple pages.

Where does your design process start for a game like Knave, Maze Rats, or Maze Knights?

It really depends on what I’m trying to accomplish with it. Knave existed because I wanted something that was compatible with OSR material that I could run for my students like Tomb of the Serpent Kings. Knave was originally called ‘Apprentice Dungeons and Dragons” and was just a streamlined version of 5th edition. I kept taking more and more stuff out until it was just the six ability scores, which I made to work kind of like the OD&D saving throws. I wanted something similar to Maze Rats but for OSR.

I’m working on Maze Knights slower than I would like, but just because my brain keeps revising and trying to rethink exactly what I want out of it. What I’m leaning towards right now is an evolved form of Maze Rats, so it’s definitely not strictly OSR-compatible, but I wanted to push it in a direction where it’s “zoomed out” a little farther than normal. Instead of controlling one character, you’re controlling a couple. It’s a really interesting design space since there are very few if any “war-band-style” role-playing games. I wanted to see if I could make that work.

A big inspiration for Maze Knights was last Gen Con, I got to play a game called Barbarians of the Ruined Earth. I was controlling four characters at the same time and what I quickly discovered was that when you’re fighting you can do all sorts of fun combo moves. You can have characters work together to do things that one character couldn’t on their own. Of course you could do this with a normal D&D party but then if you have to coordinate with all the other players and figure out who’s going to do what. Then everyone’s arguing over whether that’s the best thing to do. But if you control four characters you can just do it. All sorts of fun things would happen. If you have multiple characters, you can move a character to trip a guy and sit on him while another one rips off his robot arm and then beat him with it. Obviously Dungeon Crawl Classics has funnels, but in all of these games it’s always a one-shot thing, where you do a funnel to figure out who your main character is. What if there was a game where you just did funnels forever, where you had three characters and then develop them together as a team? They could develop their own little name or their own theme. Maybe characters would die off and then you would just replace them. It would be a very different mode of play.

I’m working out how to make characters that they’re really simple but they have one or two cool things. Then you can figure out how you can combo them with other people. I want to have at least 36 characters just because it fits with the Maze Rats theme of rolling 2d6. In my flights of fantasy, I want to have 216 of them (Editor: Maze Knights character jam, anyone?) so that you can actually roll 3d6, just like you would roll for your stats in D&D, but each roll gives you one of 216 possible characters. That way every war band is wildly different from all the other ones.

I want to get at least 36 classes written before I do more playtesting because that’s gonna be the main sticking point. It’s hard making characters from scratch so what I’m doing now is going back to Knave’s hundred spells and think of that spell as the core ability for a character. It’s a good starting point for me to start breaking out of my mold and thinking about weird characters.

(Editor: This is the saddest part of the interview, looking back. I followed the inspirations and design process for this one pretty closely. Heck, look at this Pinterest board and YOU try not to get excited: https://in.pinterest.com/benmilton/maze-knights/

Alas, it has not been so. Perhaps Break!! RPG was too close?)

What role does lethality have in the games you run and design?

Ideally people slow down and think more. A good player is someone who thinks before they act. It doesn’t have to be very long but if you’re thinking at all then I’m happy. That’s hard to find with a lot of players. I have all of these rules about speeding up the game and I want the game to go fast but if at any point during the game I see that the players are talking to each other and they’re planning something then I just stop. I like to let them do that for as long as they want because that’s what I want them to be doing. I feel like that creates really good stories, the types of if you go on Reddit and see greentext stories about. The stories that seem like lot of fun are usually about characters getting creative and thinking outside the box and doing something that no one expected. Having high lethality in your game I think makes that more common. Good players slow down their plans. The more planning the better.

I always tell players at the beginning that the game is lethal. “This game is dangerous, you’re probably going to die at some point, and if you do it’s not a big deal. You’ll be out of the game for five minutes while you make another character” and then they’ll be right back playing again. Other times they’re a little bit sad when they die, but it’s good to be a little bit sad because then maybe you won’t do that again. Dying has never really been a big deal as long as you keep your expectations clear right from the beginning.

How does the community influence your design through hacks, scenarios, and other projects?

I don’t know what it is exactly as I consume so much of it they just sort of bleeds in I suppose. Watching the whole OSR blog scene producing games and content constantly is just helpful as an inspiration because it just it normalizes the design process. “This is just what everyone does and if all these people I don’t know can do it, then I can do it too.” It frees you up mentally to try weird stuff and to experiment and to not really care how good it is as long as you’re making stuff. Then you can worry about polishing it later.

That’s been huge ever since I got into the OSR. I think that was one of the big things that attracted me to it as I would look at a lot of the other D&D scenes out there and it’s very much about trying to figure out how the rules work and manipulating the rules, and min-maxing, or creating builds and there was less of a sense of freedom and imagination. The OSR scene really was the opposite of that so that really pulled me in.

In the OSR, there’s an obsession with system, because everyone is building their own systems but there’s also a very healthy disrespect for those systems. The whole obsession with system is replaced by an obsession with setting because in OSR games it is mostly the setting where you discover the places you go, the people that you talk to, and that’s where all of the interest comes from. That’s why you see so many of these blogs that are about people chronicling their setting in the weird monsters and characters.

Best movie?

Empire Strikes Back.

Best book?

The Hobbit is remarkably good and not enough people talk about how good it is compared to Lord of the Rings as a D&D setting.

What games are you running currently?

The Labyrinth Adventure Game with my fifth-grade group. I’m also in the middle of reading The Hole in the Oak, the new adventure for Old-School Essentials.

Best RPG as a player?

Into the Odd.

Best RPG as a referee?

I’d probably say Old-School Essentials because of how well it’s designed and clean it is. That really appeals to my design nerd sensibilities and my layout obsession.

That’s all! I had a blast doing this. It was neat to get to pick Ben’s brain about teaching, gaming, designing and the relationship between those categories. Be sure to check out Ben’s stuff (channel, blog, newsletter, role-playing game company, or his Patreon.)