Roleplaying Games in the Classroom Trenches, Part Two: The Experiment

If you are just now coming to this article, you might want to glance at Part One, where I detail the challenges that roleplaying games face when they enter the classroom arena. In that article, I also summarize a specific game and design concept I created to face those challenges. What follows here is an assessment of where my efforts succeeded and where I have more work to accomplish.

I start with the good news. Here are some of the most salient positive outcomes I observed:

• The tribal organization of Becoming Beowulf meant that students worked within smaller groups, and this increased the participation and engagement level. The average size of a tribe was around six students. Yes, in any given class, there were a few students who did not get into the mix, but the vast majority were enthusiastically involved in the activity.
• The competitive format of the game provided motivation for the students. This was amplified when the Grendelkin faction was created due to players being eliminated from their tribes. The Grendelkin can target other tribes and derail their efforts, and this adds a dynamic antagonistic component to the game which sparked excitement.
• The resolution mechanic provided a climactic build-up, and the result of the dice roll for each tribe was avidly watched by the class. The mechanics are quickly grasped by the students (though they don’t necessarily think about those mechanics in strategic terms).
• The splitting of the game into rounds meant that the play could be easily halted at the end of one class period and then resumed on the next day with little difficulty. Each tribe had a playsheet that allowed for easy accounting and record keeping, and this allowed tribes to easily pick up where they left off. I was successful in making the game flexible for use within class periods of varying length.
• Students were creative and varied in their plans. I was especially excited when the tribes were adopting very different solutions to the same problem. For example, the game involves a situation when a foundling child washes ashore on a boat filled with treasure (similar to the way that Beowulf begins). In one class, I had one tribe that abandoned the child while taking the treasure, another that gave the child to its enslaved minority, and a third which adopted the child as one of their own. That type of diversity of responses was common.
• The crisis situations prompted immediate, focused discussion within the tribes. Students were quick to consider various options, and there was some vigorous, thoughtful debate as they worked towards their solutions.

But the game in its current form is not an unequivocal success. What follows are some of the areas where the game requires further revision or development:

• Roleplaying: When the tribes are presented with a challenge, they face two tasks: (1) they must decide upon what trait points to allocate to the crisis, and (2) they must frame a scene which dramatizes some aspect of the tribe’s response. Both of these tasks can result in adding dice to the pool (and thus increasing the chances of a positive outcome). But the second task, which involves roleplaying, was typically weak. The students usually presented a simple, barebones “skit” with minimal dialogue and action. This happened even after multiple attempts at prompting, advising, directing, and cajoling students. In the next iteration of the game, I’m going to suggest that Wyrd (the gamemaster) intervene in those scenes, possibly by taking on the role of a tribe member who will ask questions, object, or otherwise create friction for the other players.
• Strategizing: Despite some thoughtful discussions, tribes were typically conservative and cautious in spending trait points to build up their pools. When I asked the class about the game, most students thought that the resolutions were largely a result of chance. Even when I pointed out that they could substantially increase their odds of success by expending more points and by leaning into their roleplaying, they usually failed to take advantage of their opportunities.
• Resolution mechanics: The game has many variables. It doesn’t railroad the players into any set solution to a challenge, and there is considerable room for creativity both in terms of the framing of the scenes and the tribe’s strategic responses. Given this open-ended nature, I was often left scrambling as the gamemaster to come up with resolution outcomes that seemed fair and that made sense to the players. I sometimes wished that I had a more rigorous, programmatic resolution mechanic that I could draw upon—something which would make my final decisions seem more defined and less arbitrary. I certainly would like to have instructions in place which will give more direction to other teachers who might choose to give the game a try.
• Maintaining interest and motivation: The novelty of the game and its competitive nature gave it considerable initial spark, but as the days progressed, this impetus lost its edge. I reacted by offering some bonus points for tribes and players who distinguished themselves in their play and their decisions, and this had a temporary positive impact. The game as I ran it involved five 45-minute class periods: This involved taking part of the first day to explain the rules and then to work through about eight different scenarios or rounds during the remainder of that class and the subsequent classes of the week. There was still energy working in the final session, but I didn’t want to press my luck beyond that. 
• Writing the saga: In the classroom, a game cannot be an end in itself, and I need to consider ways of leveraging the play experience into further experiences for growth and education. In retrospect I wish that I had accompanied the game with a creative writing activity that would allow the students to process their experience and to memorialize their tribe’s triumphs and tragedies. I migh also have them include reflections on whose decisions seemed the most useful, intriguing, dramatic, and/or provocative. .Next year, I’m thinking of attaching the game to an assignment in which the students will recount their tribes’ sagas, modelling their writing on Old English literary models.

Becoming Beowulf engaged, challenged, and educated my students, and I have faith that other classrooms could benefit from this type of game. I’m writing and revising the rules of Becoming Beowulf with an eye towards making it accessible for other teachers. Figuring out how to publicize and distribute this type of game, however, is baffling. Educational roleplaying games are almost by definition misfits. Game designers are usually not in-the-trench teachers, and teachers are seldom aware of the current landscape of roleplaying games.

So there are major challenges to getting this type of game into the hands of people who would benefit from it. I will attend teaching and gaming conventions to discuss educational roleplaying games, but my sense is that I have an uphill battle ahead of me. Teachers are likely to be puzzled by what will be, to most of them, a strange classroom activity, while gamers will be uninterested in a game scaled for classroom use. Bringing those two groups into dialogue with each other will have significant payoffs for both groups. But getting that dialogue moving forward will require some heavy lifting.

I invite you to consider any of the challenges I have offered here and to offer ideas and solutions. And stay tuned for Part 3, where I will offer some insights into sponsoring a roleplaying game club in the high school setting.

Roleplaying Games in the Classroom Trenches, Part One: The Challenge

Periodically, I run across blog posts and articles waxing poetic about the educational value of rpgs and about how they should be used in the classroom. While I’m sympathetic to such articles, they’ve typically suffered from being thick on the idealism side of the scale and thin on the practical, “rubber-hits-the-road” side. Gamers can point out a LARP school in Denmark, and we can learn from those experiences, but a 90-student boarding efterskole is a far cry from your bustling high school in the United States.

What follows here is a work-in-progress report from the front lines of teaching in America. Rather than extolling the potential of rpgs in the classroom, I want to zoom in on some actual experiences, take stock of what I’ve learned, and point the way to future prospects. For ease of reading, I’m breaking the report into three separate posts:

• Part 1 The challenge
• Part 2: The experiment
• Part 3: The club

From my vantage point, the classroom provides a vast, unexplored territory for rpgs, which makes it both exciting and daunting from a game design standpoint. It is so very easy to talk about the educational merit of rpgs: They can provide an immersive experience in a way that reading a book or listening to a lecture cannot; they can involve creative problem-solving on a sophisticated level; they can help to develop the players’ powers of imagination; and the list goes on. If we can figure out how to design rpgs that are accessible to teachers and that enrich the classroom experience, we would uncover a new path to reach and educate students, and these games in turn would encounter a largely untapped audience of young minds eager for enriching experiences which few other art forms can rival.

Lest we get carried away, however, it might be best to begin with our feet grounded in reality. Let me play the devil’s advocate and give you just five reasons why your typical roleplaying game is NOT a good fit for the classroom.

• Most roleplaying games are designed for small, intimate groups typically ranging from 3-6 players. The high school classroom is usually much larger. In my school (a private prep school), I’m working with around 18 students on average, and in some high schools the number can easily be 30 or 35 students.
• In the classroom, students are not volunteering to play the game. I teach English, which is a required core subject. My students have not chosen to be in my course; they are in there first and foremost because it is a graduation requirement.
• Roleplaying games involve intrinsic motivation, and the goal of play is typically created by the gamemaster and the players. By contrast, because of the setup of the educational systems, students are motivated above all by grades and assessments.
• The vast majority of students are new to roleplaying games, so the entire experience is one that requires careful guidance, regulation, and advice.
• The typical class lasts somewhere from 45 minutes (on a regular schedule) to 90 minutes (on a “block” schedule). The actual time for play is actually going to be less once you take into account attendance, announcements, and other matters of the daily routine. By contrast, a typical roleplaying game session lasts from three to four hours.

To state the obvious: Most roleplaying games are explicitly NOT created for the classroom environment. In fact, there is much about the usual design of these games that makes them foreign—even antithetical— to that kind of context. Imagine forcing a group of 25 self-conscious adolescents to play Dungeons and Dragons with minimal instruction during a 45-minute session in a class where they are getting a grade. I would need a 10th level barbarian just to maintain order!

So how does one confront this challenge?

During the final stretch of the fall semester, I ran an original roleplaying game based on the Anglo-Saxon world of Beowulf in my ninth grade English classes (three-sections worth).

I decided quite early that I had to rely upon my own inventiveness and forge my own path. There are some games like Diplomacy and Microscope which can be effectively modified for the classroom, but those games are few and far between. Moreover, I, as a teacher in a core subject, have specific content and curriculum requirements that I must meet, and my classroom activities need to work in conjunction with my educational objectives. I knew that I would be teaching the Old English epic Beowulf sometime in the middle of the year, and I felt that text would offer some rich material for a roleplaying and problem-solving game for my students. Yes, games inspired by Beowulf do exist, but none of those are appropriate for classroom use. So I devoted part of my summer to designing an original game—one that couldnaddress the special demands of the classroom and breathe some new life into the Old English epic.

I’m happy to share the full rules of my work-in-progress, titled Becoming Beowulf, to interested parties (just ask!), but, to keep things short, here is the basic outline of the game:

• Students are divided into Anglo-Saxon tribes, each of which is ruled by a king.
• The tribes have traits (Treasure, Resources, Mead-Hall, Loyalty, Strength, Will) which they can draw upon to deal with various crises. The values of these traits fluctuate during the game.
• The gamemaster (called Wyrd in the game) reads a card detailing a problem which each tribe must deal with. The groups then retreat to their mead-halls to discuss how they will face the situation. This involves allocating trait points to the task and framing up a scene where they will roleplay some aspect of the tribe’s response.
• Based upon their response, their point allocation, and their roleplaying, each tribe builds a dice pool. A dice roll then figures prominently into the outcome of the crisis. Tribes accumulate points of Doom and Fame as a result of these resolutions. In addition, they can lose or gain points to their traits.
• Occasionally, tribe members are eliminated due to battle, hardship, or other nasty events. Those students become members of the monstrous Grendelkin tribe. This tribe can then use the other tribes’ Doom points against them to spoil their efforts to deal with the crises they face.

The game design aims at creating a rhythm: Students spend some intense minutes in their smaller tribes discussing and planning their response to a crisis, and then the entire class comes together to watch the framed scenes and to determine the outcome. It also works to keep students active: No one is ever eliminated from the game, and the small size of the tribes means that everyone can play a vital role.

I initially thought I would use this game alongside our reading of Beowulf or as a fun post-reading activity. The more I thought about the game, however, the more I feared that students would be swayed by the epic and simply replay the responses and events of that narrative. I didn’t want the game to turn into a shallow practice in imitation.

So I zagged: My students played Becoming Beowulf as a preparation to reading the text itself (which will occur in a couple weeks at the start of the second semester). Now, when students encounter the epic, they will read about situations which they previously faced as players in the game. Often, they are going to discover that the characters and tribes in the epic took very different approaches than the solutions tried out in Becoming Beowulf. That should open up some rich discussions about the strategic, cultural, and dramatic situations that factored into those differences.

In a traditional book, the path of the narrative is set by the author and the reader has no choice but to follow along. But the openended nature of the roleplaying game means that the players can explore alternative pathways, and these can give them some valuable alternative perspectives when analyzing narratives. I will be heavily exploiting this resource in the coming weeks. When, for example, we read about Hrothgar offering asylum Beowulf’s outcast father, my students will not see this act of charity as given or inevitable, for they will have already explored different ways in which a tribe might deal with a foreign fugitive seeking help. That, at least, is the idea.

How did Becoming Beowulf fare on the actual field of battle? For that assessment, read on to Part 2: The Experiment.

Gaming with Prince Arthur in Greg Stafford’s Pendragon, Conclusion

The final chapters of Pendragon concern matters of social status, faith, and wealth. After the
presentation of the game’s core mechanics, some might want to skip these sections and get down to playing. But in the world of Pendragon, the topics of religion and hierarchies are central. Nothing is peripheral in this game.
Amid his discussion of different levels of knighthood, Stafford presents a curious interconnection between players and characters. This builds to the curious idea that, to play a lord effectively, one must also learn the ropes of gamemastering: “For a player character lord to be effective, the player must acquire a wider view of the realm than a player of a simple adventuring knight. The recommended path to gain this overview is to require that each lord’s player must become a part-time Gamemaster for short-duration events. Thus, the lord must, at some time, sponsor an event and his player must run the required game session.” Once again, Stafford tries to cut off shortcuts: He wants this game to be deep, immersive, and thorough.
The advice about gamemastering is also put forth to afford relief to the gamemaster. Stafford realizes that running a full-on Pendragon campaign (which is perhaps the only way to run Pendragon) is a marathon: “[The Gamemaster] must mastermind the campaign and oversee adventures for a year or more of real time to sustain a King Arthur Pendragon campaign, and he deserves a chance to play characters occasionally without also having the Gamemaster’s responsibilities.”
The religion of Pendragon is a complex, contradictory soup of myth, legend, and fiction (with a sprinkling of history). Two forms of Christianity exist: a British variety and a Roman one. The British strand is steeped in apocryphal accounts and wildly speculative alternative histories. On this account, Jesus rubs elbows with druids and Joseph of Arimathea later travels to spread the good news after Jesus’s death. Joseph carries with him the Holy Grail.
Aside from having to negotiate (or perhaps choose) between these two varieties of Christianity, the group involved in a campaign also has to decide on whether the church will be represented as “good” or “bad.” That is, do you want your church to be an edifying force spreading education, comfort, and healing, or do you want it to be a corrupt institution that takes advantage of the innocent sheep? Varieties of paganism are also available for exploration in the game, and there is also the matter of determining how exactly good and evil will manifest themselves in the world. For example, evil can be quantitatively defined by certain traits (like Vengeful, Cruel, and Selfish), but it might also be present in supernatural demonic forces.
Oh yes . . . and then there is the faerie realm and the influence of druids. As with other dimensions of Pendragon, you start to dive into a topic, and the layers continue to unfold. The operation of magic in the game is mysterious with key aspects left intentionally vague: “The magic of Britain is extremely potent, partially because of its very mystery. Magic is also dangerous because it is hidden and subtle: Your character knows that it is more likely to drive him mad or age him a century in a day than it is to roast him with a bolt of lightning.” So the rules of magic are left rather undefined by the game: The idea is that player characters will not be wizards themselves (at least not in the core game), though they may come into contact with such forces.
The final chapter takes up the matter of wealth: Being a knight is an expensive proposition, and the game deals with the paradox that, while knights have far more wealth than the rest of society, they are in a curious way among the most impoverished because their expenses are so extensive. Stafford says, “Part of the enjoyment of the game, for some, comes from spending money freely and lavishly.” I’m not sure I would be in that party, but I would also see a group of accountants embracing the economic aspect of the game and having a blast.
The core rulebook ends with a number of appendices. The first of these points forward to the most important supplement, The Great Pendragon Campaign and outlines new classes of knights (such as the chivalrous one, the romantic one, and the Knight of the Round Table). More on the passions (especially that of love) is provided. Now catch this: There is a passion called Amor which is passion directed toward a person but which remains chaste. If amor is consummated sexually, then it becomes “Love (Amor).” The terminology is intentionally overlapping and is used to emphasize the era’s own changing view towards love both as a concept and a passion.
The appendix also discusses future changes in armor and technology, and this brings out another curious aspect of the game. A Pendragon campaign will span a number of years of game time, but the technological development that occurs in that span will be accelerated. So running the game will have the effect of some different timelines running along simultaneously at different paces. I might play a character that ages five years, but in that time frame, hundreds of years of technological innovation might occur.
Appendix 3 provides some introductory scenario, and it introduces what is, in my mind, the most glaring flaw in Pendragon: namely that the game seems to suggest a heavily scripted narrative. At least in the opening scenarios, the entire arc of the game play is established from the start. I can’t judge at this point whether this is the natural default of the game, but at least from this appendix, it seems that the game involves the players following along a narrative whose main beats have been predetermined. This type of play might not be inevitable, though the game’s strong grounding in Malory and other Arthurian literature means that it is strongly inclined to follow along with a standard story line.
The appendices wrap up with a consideration of special combat situations: namely, battles and jousts. And then there are some suggestions for further reading.
My final evaluation? Pendragon is like a gothic cathedral: it is ornate and complex, and its architecture appeals to both the intellect and emotions. My reservation with the game is less its elaborate structure than its inability to generate a genuinely original and creative game play experience. The key question is this: does the game have its players live within an Arthurian tale, or does it allow you and your friends to forge and create a tale of your own? It seems like Pendragon is heavily invested in the former, and that would perhaps be entertaining for a while, but I would want to branch away from the standard tale after a spell, and if I did so, would I still be playing Pendragon?