Ludoverse Lab: Jesse Burneko’s “Dungeons and Dilemmas” Weaves a Web of Moral Questions

The Ludoverse Lab completed the summer trilogy with Jesse Burneko and his Kickstarter Zinequest project titled “Dungeons and Dilemmas.” The core idea is to use the appealing format of the classic dungeon delve but to inject it with a hive of ethical puzzles for the characters to grapple with. Jesse gives us the tools to transform some of the bedrock components of fantasy rpg into perils that have an emotional and moral weight. I was impressed by the way that he avoids a heavy-handed approach: His puzzles raise a number of pressing questions, but it is up to the players to reason things through and to formulate a response. At one point, Jesse talks about his approach as an experiment: He provides the volatile materials and components, but it is the players who catalyze things and who decide upon the ultimate outcomes. 

I’ve edited our sessions, which you can watch by clicking the links below. The videos are long, but I provide text headings to give viewers an easy way to skip around.

• Part 1: Our first session, which involves a quick character creation, a review of the streamlined game engine (an rpg called Strain Basic), and the opening of the adventure.

• Part 2: Our second session, which involves confronting a vampiric mother, a demon child, and a ruthless bandit. Editing Note: I had recording problems with the start of this video, so we miss the introduction of the players. Of special note is the fact that Tracy Wazenegger, who teaches chemistry and global studies in Pennsylvania, has joined in.

• Part 3: A debriefing, where Jesse lays out the thought process and techniques driving “Dungeons and Dilemmas.” Note the rich and varied sources that he points to: Ann Radcliffe, Dogs in the Vineyard, and Bluebeard's Bride. That may seem like an unexpected trio of influences, but you definitely see their fingerprints on Jesse's project.

Teachers interested in leveraging roleplaying games in the classroom should especially heed Part 3. Jesse has a wealth of gaming experience behind him, and he has distilled and refined his approach. His explanation of how he pulls off the magic is lucid and organized, and he has a system in place which teachers and scenario designers can quickly leverage for their own purposes. 

One key feature of our Ludoverse Lab adventure that gave it teeth is the fact that the “monsters” were the outcome of tragic histories. Jasna, the vampire mother, for example, became a member of the undead as the result of an abusive marriage, and she is subsequently abused again—this time at the hands of a ruthless bandit who is exploiting her for her vampire children. And Various is a demon child who is now in a codependent relationship with his mother, whom he loves. We didn’t delve into the background of Tristan, the bandit, but it seems likely that his character was impacted from a life of destitution. 

These fraught histories are then tied to a “dungeon”—in our case a boarded-up keep which has been retrofitted to be a prison for the monsters and a hideout for the bandits. As a result, the dungeon is more than a physical place—it is a kind of shell inside of which are nestled layers of previous events. The architecture and layout of the building are intimately related to the histories of the characters and monsters who have resided there. 

Jesse thinks about room locations in terms of narrative nodes. In other words, an entry point into the keep is considered as the identifiable beginning of a sequence of events that will then be connected to subsequent events sparked by the passageways and rooms that radiate out of that entry point. The keep has a number of possible entrances, but in each case, Jesse reflects upon the spaces immediately connected to those entry points, and his dungeons take form through interconnected narrative nodes that will produce new pieces that can build on each other.

Jesse also has some interesting things to say about that old staple of the dungeon delve—the trap. In constructing a trap, Jesse thinks about the character who created it and the use to which it is put. He talks about these devilish devices as instances of foreshadowing. In other words, when the players encounter a trap, they should be confronting a concrete example of the personality that devised it. In the case of our adventure, the demon-child named Various created animated raven sculptures as a trap, and the nature of this obstacle was very different from the spiked pit-trap set by the ruthless bandit named Tristan. In both cases, the traps were reflective of their creators.

One other key to the success of “Dungeons and Dilemmas”: Jesse resists defining a “right solution” to the moral questions that spin out of his scenario. He notes in the debriefing that he is happy to observe different groups thinking through and resolving the moral problems in different ways. He is content to set up his adventures as engrossing experiences and springboards for reflection.

The Ludoverse Lab’s “Fantasy RPG Summer Trilogy” has given me much food for thought, and I’m looking forward to taking some of the ideas from Richard Ruane, Ryan Windeknecht, and Jesse Burneko into the high school classroom and the game club I sponsor. Expect posts in the coming months to provide you with updates. 

As always, I encourage comments and reactions to the Ludoverse Labs.

And what else can you expect from the Ludoverse heading forward? 

The school year has started for me, and I’m giving much thought to what COVID-19 means for those of us engaged in gamification and game-based learning. So I’m considering one or two roundtable discussions with other educators to talk about how we are modifying our approaches to deal with the world of hybrid classrooms, social distancing, and remote learning.

Partly as a result of the events over the summer, I’m also interested in delving into games that focus on the experience of marginalization. I know a number of roleplaying games where the players take on the roles of classes, groups, and fantasy races that are ostracized, demonized, or exploited. That might make for some interesting sessions in the lab.

Finally, I’m still hoping to pull together a summer workshop devoted to games in education. My idea is to create a dialogue between game designers and educators in a way that will provoke an ongoing conversation between these two groups. The world of COVID-19 has set up some obstacles for that project, but I’ll be looking for ways to overcome those hurdles.

Ludoverse Lab: Ryan Windeknecht's World of Professionals Teaches How to Think Ethically

Future Programming Note: The Ludoverse Lab’s summer trilogy will wrap up in August with Jesse Burneko’s Dungeons and Dilemmas. What follows below is a report on the second installment of our foray into fantasy role-playing games that lend themselves to classroom use.

July brought the second part of the Ludoverse Lab’s “Summer Trilogy.” In this case, we had Ryan Windeknecht at the helm. He teaches philosophy at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, and, as he explained to us, he tried an experiment in 2016 when he brought Dungeon World into his classroom. Since then, he has continued to expand, revise, and refine the experiment. That has resulted in what he calls The World of Professionals. This amounts to a rich and workable fantasy rpg framework which he uses to teach students about ethical schools of thought within his professional ethics classes.

I recorded the two sessions we played, and you can access them here:

• World of Professionals, Part 1: The background of the “World of Professionals and character creation
• World of Professionals, Part 2: A dungeon delve and debriefing

The recordings (which are admittedly long, even in their edited form) contain clearly marked headers and footers, so I encourage you to hop around to view the sections that most interest you.
There are so many artful and edifying touches, but here are a few notable highlights:

Classes as embodiments of occupations and ethical schools of thought 
In Ryan’s game, you belong to one of five guilds, and initially they sound like your traditional fantasy tropes: There are Paladins, Merchants, Artificers, Clerics, and Wizards. Pretty standard fare.

But then some spice and sizzle gets added. The classes are subdivided into various occupations. For example, if you are in the merchant guild, you might be a butcher, baker, cheese maker, crofter, or herder. The classes are also presented as allegorical placeholders for contemporary professions. For example, we should think of Paladins as lawyers, Clerics as health care workers, Merchants as business people, Wizards as educators, and Artificers as skilled tradespeople.

The coup de grace is that each class is also tasked with upholding an an ethical outlook:

• Paladins are Kantians (driven by the laws and imperatives);
• Artificers are Utilitarians;
• Merchants are Contractarians;
• Clerics adhere to Care Ethics;
• Wizards subscribe to Virtue ethics.

Dungeon Delving as Gamified Quizzes and Thought Experiments
After creating their characters, building a village, and forming into adventuring groups, the students (who are now players in this game) venture into dungeons to work through ethical thought experiments and to collect badges. Each dungeon begins with a puzzle, which is a gamified quiz based upon a required reading, and then the students engage in various surreal situations where they must demonstrate clear ethical thinking in order to progress.

The conception of the game is brilliant, and the mechanics are also solid. Ryan has replaced dice rolling with a token economy which effectively puts added emphasis on the arguments and thought processes of the players as opposed to the reliance on random fortune.

As I note in the debriefing, one of the great payoffs of the gamifying engine is that students collaborate in resolving the ethical thought experiments. Moreover, since the party involves characters thinking things through with different ethical frameworks, they can see how the different systems see the world and approach situations.

Debriefing Brainstorm: Students as GMs and the Village
In the debriefing, we consider some different lines of approach and points of emphasis. I was curious as to how you would deal with game play in a class of 20+ students, and Ryan notes that this can get challenging. The idea that you might be able to pull students into the GM (or assistant GM) role would be an interesting solution to the problem of dealing with numerous adventuring parties playing simultaneously.

We were also interested in expanding the role of the village. I’m a bit hesitant to go too far in that direction. For all their artificiality and railroadiness, the dungeon delves offer a tightly structured scaffolding that would be hard to beat. Some of us were thinking of pushing towards village adventures, and this would be worth exploring. However, I fear that the more open ended and organic nature of the village context might prove impractical in the classroom without some system of managing the play. If the dungeon delves are working (which they seem to be) then I wouldn’t be too eager to abandon the format.

In part one, you will see the list of moves and agendas that drive the game. Those familiar with Powered-by-the-Apocalypse games will note the ancestry of this engine. As a teacher, I appreciate the way that this organization breaks things down for the students into small, manageable units. You will note that the moves are legion, and at first blush, this might seem intimidating. But if you put this into the context of a semester-long course, it is not as daunting as it might first appear. If a student can work towards gaining competence with the moves, it is clear that they will have developed some formidable skills of communication and critical thinking.

One last item of note: Midway through part 1, Ryan fields questions about whether the game agendas are to be conceived as player-facing or character-facing, and he responds that they exist on both levels. This highlights another great strength of the World of Dungeons: When learning the moves and resources available to the characters, the players are also learning the procedures and skills that they can carry with them from the gaming table . . . into the classroom . . . and then beyond.

Concluding Thought: The Call to AdventureRyan’s approach has much to offer educators, regardless of their discipline. I’m excited to hear reactions of other teachers and to see how we might adapt this type of educational game play to different classrooms and disciplines

Ludoverse Lab: Barrow Keep and Nurturing Volatility

Preliminary Note:

This is a report on the second and final session playing Richard Ruane's Barrow Keep.

You can find links to the Barrow Keep playsets discussed in this post here and here.

On Saturday, Richard Ruane finished giving us a tour of Barrow Keep. As usual, I have edited a recording and you can watch it here.

I’m struck by the variety of scenes we covered during play. We begin with some interrogation, move into a banquet with less-than-pious pilgrims, experience a heist that turns south, and then end up with a meeting with a goblin ambassador (which Richard gives a distinctly feline appearance). The session ends with our group talking about Richard’s approach to role-playing games, and there are a number of observations in the post-game debrief that are worth considering.

Barrow Keep aims to put characters into volatile situations and then leaves the players free to determine how they want to deal with the dilemmas, which inevitably have social and cultural implications. In retrospect, I’m struck by the nuanced style of play that this encourages.

To give you the spoiler first: It turns out that a band of goblins is interested in taking back a relic which the pilgrims (temporarily residing at the Keep) are carrying with them. Back in my role-playing youth, the set-up, approach, and outcome of this scenario would have been much simpler and would inevitably have resulted in some type of grand fight with the goblins, no doubt leading to more physical confrontations. In our case, the machinery of the game was more complex. To begin, none of our characters were wedded to the Archon in command of the Keep, and we each had slightly different political angles that we were working.

To add spice to the stew, Richard gave the goblins a unique look and a set of mysterious motivations tied to an ancient history that we were only vaguely aware of. I would mention in passing that fantasy games are swiftly moving to give groups like goblins a more weighty, meaningful culture that is enriching the games. Such groups might still be treacherous, even villainous, but if so, their antagonism is given a background and meaningful momentum. Even if the cogs of their mental life are not fully revealed, you nonetheless sense that they are planning, thinking, and reacting in ways that are open to analysis. This, in turn, gives the players around the table more to consider and more possible courses of action, each with their own moral and cultural valence.

I enjoyed the climactic closing scene with the goblin ambassador. Richard didn’t feel like he had to reveal or explain all the pieces of the puzzle he had laid out. We never discover what exactly the relic is that we are carrying to the ambassador. There is a sense that there are weighty further chapters that will develop the continuing relationship between Barrow Keep and the goblins. And there were some curious NPCs in the Keep who were involved in their own missions which we never fully figured out. These freely floating strands (and Richard’s restraint as a GM) added to the weight of our game play and contributed to the sense that we were characters acting within a living world.

I recommend listening to some of Richard’s closing remarks. He has some incisive comments to make about his approach to role-playing. For example, his philosophy that a role-playing game should provide "the foundation of a story to be told" is advice that will improve the character and quality of gaming at your table. His point is that GMs and players are often shackled by the idea that characters are either living out a story or creating a story. The result is that the group forecloses the surprises and unexpected curves that can open up a more layered, vibrant, and organic form of play.

It might be useful to talk about Richard's form of role-playing in terms of Roger Caillois’ idea of ilinx, which is the term he uses for the kind of play that creates an experience of vertigo. Ilinx is what happens when there is a kind of shock or genuine surprise injected in the midst of play. To be sure, role-playing games rely on mechanics and expectations which order and direct the conversation and events, but games can also allow for those spaces for ilinx to be created. Now, if you are playing with the idea that you are creating a story--as opposed to laying the foundation for a story to be told--you will tend not to leave space for the creation of ilinx because stories inevitably impose a narrative ordering on events.

Richard and his Barrow Keep offer a bounty of instruction for GMs, players, and designers. I appreciate the way in which he inhabits his NPCs and makes them come to life through some simple tricks with body language and phrasing.

And his concept that games should create volatile situations for characters to resolve is another golden nugget of wisdom. Note that much of the catalyzing agents are waiting there in the characters themselves. Character playbooks, for example, push every player to think of a couple key NPCs who are friends, rivals, or acquaintances of their character, and these elements then get fed into the scenario pack which serves as a kind of alchemical alembic to get those volatile reactions moving. It is a rich and dynamic approach to roleplaying, and you can see the payoff by watching a few parts of our session.

The Road Ahead:
Next month, we will venture into The World of Professionals, a Dungeon World hack created by Ryan Windeknecht. That game will delve into issues of virtue and professional ethics through the medium of another fantasy role-playing game.

Ludoverse Lab: Excavating the Ur-History of RPGs in Barrow Keep by Richard Ruane (Part 1)

Preliminary Notes:
You can find links to the Barrow Keep playsets discussed in this post here and here.

I would also note that Richard and a bounty of other innovative game designers are participating in itch.io’s megabundle to raise funds for racial and social equality. Please move quickly to take advantage of that deal which is set to expire on June 15, 2020. 


An isolated castle. A new king with an ambitious heir apparent. Ghostly apparitions. Mysterious surveillance. A band of itinerant travelers.

Such elements sound like the makings of a juicy Shakespearen tragedy, but Richard Ruane turns them the cogs driving a role-playing game project he calls Barrow Keep. His brainchild was successfully Kickstarted and is now into serious development with playtest documents already available on itch.io and DriveThru RPG. This month, he has graciously agreed to provide me and fellow educators with an experiential tour in the Ludoverse Lab.

What is Barrow Keep?

Richard takes basic fantasy role-playing rulesets to drive scenarios filled with political mystery and social tension. He is specifically designing sheets and statistics to match the systems of  Diogo Nogueira’s Sharp Swords and Sinister Spells and Gavin Norman’s Old-School Essentials (Necrotic Gnome) . . . which means that they will be easily translated into any “old school” style fantasy rpg.

To begin, players choose from character sheets. These outline a role in Barrow Keep (hostage, ward, revenant, spy, etc.), and an archetype (beast bound, seer, rogue, magic-user, etc.). They also provide sequence of character questions, the answers to which modify character attributes. The responses also fill in character backgrounds and generate a motley crew of rivals and allies.

With character sketches in hand, the players direct their attention to Barrow Keep itself—its political situation, current internal antagonisms, the archon’s ambitions and fears. All this material then becomes fodder for one of the playsets that Richard has designed. Essentially, the playset gives the GM a scaffold for a wicked network of schemes and machinations bubbling about in the keep. While a Barrow Keep adventure might involve travelling to a mysterious cemetery  or investigating an abandoned tower, the key action occurs within the keep itself, which is filled with all sorts of colorful NPCs—courtesy of the character and setting creation work accomplished by the players in the opening minutes of the session.

Much of Richard’s playset approach derives from Beyond the Wall (Flatland Games), but whereas that game is steeped in the young adult fantasy of writers like Ursula K. LeGuin, Susan Cooper, and Lloyd Alexander, Richard is more influenced by more recent writers like George R. R. Martin, Ellen Kushner, N.K. Jemisin, V.E. Schwab, Lois McMaster Bujold, Tamora Pierce, and Mercedes Lackey.

We are playing Barrow Keep (with Richard at the helm) across two sessions, and you can find the first of these recordings by clicking here.

The game strikes a neat balance between character and setting complexity. The initial player-facing questions provide everyone around the table with juicy ideas and NPCs to work with, and the playsets allow a GM to develop an intrigue-rich setting in a 15-minute planning break. There are a number of factors to admire about the design. The character and setting creation process is efficient while still giving the players room to invent and further develop initial concepts. The elements of the playset provide rich, suggestive catalysts for the GM. Play begins with hard-framed scenes that allow the players to set their characters in motion through the activation of suggestive signs and portents.

You can watch the dynamics of the game in action starting at the 33:45 mark of the recording: In our playset, we have a group of pilgrims who have made a stop at the keep, and there are all sorts of strange events and bumps happening during the night.

One thing I love is that it’s not clear that everything strange or mysterious is related, and the playset doesn’t dictate that the players pursue any specific course of action. For example, there’s an NPC named Sennin who sets off for an evening ride (1:48:00), which seems kind of unusual, except it has also been established that Sennin is involved in a secret affair, so maybe he’s just off for a romantic rendezvous. And there seems to be an intrusion of some strange feline monster in the Keep, but it’s not at all clear that that’s related to the appearance of the foreign pilgrims.

For a bit of RPG history and some sense of Richard’s deep design roots, I suggest you look at the discussion beginning at the 2:11:00 mark. There, Richard mentions David Wesely’s Braunstein, a game concept developed in 1969. Coming out of the miniature wargame tradition, Wesely introduced a variety of roles into the normally martial setting. Many of these roles were explicitly non-military: For example, in a scenario involving a war-ravaged city, someone might play the university chancellor or even the local baker. In addition, Braunstein embraced an “anything can be attempted” mindset that encouraged players to think creatively and to become driving forces of the developing fiction. Though the specific “rules” of Wesely’s game were never published, Richard is aware of the notes that Wesely made, and he is looking to recapture that earlier ur-D&D style of roleplaying.

I’ll leave with one last suggestive note. Going back to the start of this entry, I would be interested in writing some specifically Shakespearean Barrow Keep playsets. In other words, the game would lend itself to a number of specific tropes and conflicts taken from texts like Hamlet, Richard III, 1 Henry IV, etc. Given how streamlined rulesets like Sharp Swords and Sinister Spells are, I can imagine setting students loose to inhabit a Shakespearean setting brimming with paranoia, anxiety, and backstabbing. Barrow Keep would potentially give a classroom an engaging, dynamic insight into the fraught royal courts we find in Shakespeare’s world. I can see similar applications to history classes covering the charged politics of the Middle Ages and Renaissance.

I'll be back in the next post to discuss the outcome of our second session in Barrow Keep.

Ludoverse Lab Summer Line-up: Fantasy Role-Playing in a New Light

For the Summer of 2020, the Ludoverse Lab will feature a fantasy trilogy. Interested educators are invited to be part of the adventure!

We will be taking games like Dungeons & Dragons and its kin into brave new worlds. The goal is to have some fun while exploring how these games can bring serious topics—topics crucial to education—to the front burner.

As an added bonus, sessions will be led by some of the most innovative designers and GMs in the field today.

Here’s the line-up:

• Saturday, June 6 and 13, 11 a.m. - 2 p.m. Eastern:  Richard Ruane, will be running a playset from his Barrow Keep project. He brings political intrigue, romance, and coming-of-age epiphanies into the fantasy rpg framework.
• Saturday, July 11 and 18, 11 a.m. - 2 p.m. Eastern: Ryan Windeknecht will be running World of Professionals, a hack of Dungeon World which he uses to teach students about moral systems and professional ethics.
• Saturday, August 1 and 8, 11 a.m. - 2 p.m. Eastern. Jesse Burneko is running a scenario inspired by his Dungeons and Dilemmas project, and he’s designing elements especially for the Ludoverse Lab. When you enter Jesse’s dungeons, you will be battling deep moral dilemmas along with the monsters. [Content warning: This game will deal with themes of pregnancy and possible harm to children.]

Hearken to the call to adventure. If you are a teacher who is curious or who is looking for innovative ways to bring games into the classroom, please reach out to me (robowist <at> gmail [dot] com) to reserve a seat at the table.
Please note: These are designed as “two-shot” adventures, meaning that you should sign up for both sessions within a given month.

Ludoverse Lab: The Curious Synergies of Our Last Best Hope by Mark Diaz Truman

For this report, the Ludoverse Lab turned its focus to Our Last Best Hope, a game about a serious crisis whose resolution rides—for better or worse—on the shoulders of a small group of intrepid heroes. I was interested in continuing to explore a game which would touch on the current viral state of affairs, so I chose the Zombie Apocalypse playset / scenario which is included in the original book.

An edited version of our recorded session can be found by clicking here.

Our Last Best Hope is a curious mix of a role-playing game and a resource-management strategy game. Moreover, in its default incarnation, it is designed to be played on a large table with 30+ 3x5 cards and sets of white and black dice which you use to keep track of relationships, assets, threats, story points, and other vital stockpiles. Since we were playing the game virtually, I spent a couple hours in advance of our session building these elements on a Google Drawing file. That set-up worked remarkably well, but if you try it, build the cards in advance! I did so, and it facilitated a quick entry into game play. Had I started with a blank Google Drawing, it would have been a laborious start for the group.

The opening of the session involves choosing character types, building connections with other characters, establishing secrets and fears, and developing the setting. I have deleted this section in the video. So, after introductions to the game and to the players, you will see us move right into game play.

Our Last Best Hope alternates between spotlight scenes, which are driven by role-playing, and threats, where you work to build up dice pools in order to win against the game. The mechanics reward your role-playing: You earn story points by incorporating character relationships, painful secrets, and guarded fears into the scenes. For example, on a card, you write down the name of another character who drives your character crazy. If, during a scene, you are able to demonstrate that relationship quality, you can turn in the card for two story points.

Afterward, when dealing with a threat, you can spend story points in order to activate assets or engage the situation. These types of proactive measures earn your group added dice to roll, which increases your odds of dealing with the threat.

The game is set up to make the situation more dire as it progresses. Threats continue to appear, and they become more difficult to overcome in Act 2. Eventually, some of the heroes will have to make the ultimate sacrifice. When a character dies, the remaining members of the group receive a significant boost which makes it more likely that the core mission will be accomplished.

We found the game stimulating, and if you move to the end of the recording, you will catch some of our initial reactions in the debrief. The idea of sacrifice is at the core of the game, and the mechanics are set up to incentivize the players to consider taking one for the team as they zero in on their goal. The game also incentives role-playing in the opening scenes: You are looking at opportunities to play your story cards as you interact with the other characters. The threat resolution system is suitably strategic and dramatic.

We encountered problems with the time estimate. The book suggests 2-3 hours for game play, and even with the virtual table and cards set up in advance, we only made it about ⅔ of the way through the opening act in our committed 3-hour session . Part of this was a result of the way we leaned into the role-playing, but we also were quite efficient at working through the opening threats. If I had to play the game again, I would plan for two 3-hour sessions.

We ran into a similar time problem with Ben Robbins' Follow. In both cases, there may be a fundamental design problem at issue. On the one hand, there is something very appealing about a one-shot game which can be pulled out and played in a short session with minimal preparation. At the same time, the designer wants to deliver an experience that has a level of richness and complexity. These two goals, however, start to work at cross purposes. I’m beginning to come to the conclusion that there are games which should be considered two-shots or three-shots. I realize that billing them as such would not work from a marketing perspective. In my experience, games that most comfortably fit the one-shot mold—The Quiet Year, The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen, Microscope—are ones that do not require a high degree of individual character engagement or relationship mapping.

Our Last Best Hope is game with many moving parts. It is smartly designed, but you have to be on top of the game to remember and keep track of all the rules and triggering effects. As an experience, it has much to offer both in terms of its interwoven mechanics and in terms of its core messaging. But this is a game that would require careful thought and planning if you were inclined to bring it into the classroom.

What especially intrigues me about Our Last Best Hope is that it gives the group a fighting chance for success but only if individual members can find it in themselves to sacrifice their characters. There is actually a death card that you play when your character meets their demise.

Our Last Best Hope is built on the idea of tragedy in its profound, classical sense. I can’t think of another contemporary rpg that is so perfectly designed to deliver the experience of heroic sacrifice to its players. That factor alone makes me as an educator interested in bringing it in front of my students. They often have difficulty seeing how a character like Oedipus is heroic, and are inclined to favor the more shallow triumphant victories of characters like Odysseus. A game like Our Last Best Hope might help to open their eyes to the emotional human core that resides in the tragic heroes—people who give of themselves so that others may flourish. It says something about the selfishness and shallowness of our culture that we don’t encounter those tragic models more often.

Ludoverse Lab: Improvisational Play with The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen by James Wallis and Cheat Your Own Adventure by Shane Mclean, with the Pompey Crew Design Team

For this session of the Ludoverse Lab, we went after more lighthearted fare. Cheat Your Own Adventure and The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen are prep-less and GM-less games which challenge the players to think on their feet. Absurdity and inanity follows.

You can see the video recording of our session by clicking here.

I’ve lightly edited the video with headings used throughout to assist you in seeing how the gameplay develops. The video ends with some brief discussion about the games in education and the possible tweaks we would use to make sure all the students are involved in the mix.

Of special note is the contributions of Mikel Matthews, a drama and English teacher who also has deep experience in the improv acting arena. He gives us some useful instruction at the 59:00 mark as well as towards the end of the session during our debrief. Teachers who are interested in teaching role-playing and improvisational skills would be wise to take a look at what he has to say.

Cheat Your Own Adventure is freely available as a 2-page pdf on the internet. The basic idea is simple: One player starts a narrative about an adventurer using the second person (“you”) and takes the tale to a branch. The other players then propose options for the protagonist, and the narrative then passes to the player whose option is selected. The end result is a collaborative tale, and the players naturally fall into the idea of coming up with options that are attractive either because they are intriguing or because they will lead to hilarity.

It quickly becomes apparent in this game that the destination is less important than the journey. From the get-go, we swerve down paths that have little to do with the sorcerer Zalkir (whose name appeared in the title of our adventure) and more to do with introducing zany side characters and detours. When the narrative branches, the players at the table are challenged to come up with new directions for the tale. There were occasions when a player had come up with a good idea yet found someone introducing their idea before they could put theirs on the table, so we had to keep on our toes. It was also sometimes challenging to keep all the options in mind: You will see me constantly taking notes as an aid.

CYOA is a solid warm-up game that will inevitably lead to a lighthearted good time. It also has great flexibility in terms of the types of stories it can tell. For example, one might use the framework to tell the story of a press secretary who has to handle various gaffes and missteps of a President whom they serve. That would activate a great pun in the abbreviated title of the game—COYA. There are also clear possibilities of taking the narrative to more serious or dramatic destinations.

Baron Munchausen is a more refined game. Players challenge each other to tell tales, with the goal being to make your story more extraordinary than the others. The game really cooks when you use the challenge mechanic, which allows you to interrupt another player’s tale and ask them to explain or justify some detail.

The game has a curious competitive aspect, and one can consider strategy, but the rivalry side of the game is ultimately simply more veneer that exists to generate additional outrageous fiction. For example, if you challenge other players, your purse will surely dwindle, which seems like a bad thing. But in the final round of voting, you are giving your purse to the other player whose story you deem to be the most extraordinary. That means that having a small purse leading up to the end is actually a boon in disguise, since you will ultimately be passing fewer coins to a rival. Wallis has worked out a brilliant betting mechanic that rewards deep study: It valuable lessons into how an apparent strategic-competitive component can encourage the alert player to lean into the tactics and, in so doing, reinforce the underlying goal of the game.

One element that adds to the humor to Baron Munchausen is the atmosphere of false 18th-century propriety that the game encourages. Players are instructed to give themselves bogus honorific titles, and challenges are delivered with an affected politesse. The rule book is a delight to read and puts you in the right spirit. At some point in the future, I’d love to drill into the stylistic approaches of different rpg authors. There is great variety out there. If you wanted two writers worthy of close study who exist at opposite ends of the spectrum, I’d suggest comparing Ben Robbins to James Wallis. I admire both of them immensely, but for opposed reasons: Robbins is a master of clear, cogent precision, while Wallis is capable of delivering lush hilarity.

I’m gearing up to play Our Last Best Hope by Mark Diaz Truman, and I’m then going to set up a few more laboratory experiments for the summer. Announcements about those sessions will appear in the coming weeks, and as always, I’ll be looking for players to join me at the table.

Ludoverse Lab: Follow by Ben Robbins

For our most recent experiment in the Ludoverse Lab, I decided to play with fire.

I had already talked to players who blanched at the notion of bringing viral material into a game. The reasons for their reticence are easily understood. The coronavirus pandemic has touched everyone on multiple levels. The topic goes deep and hits on sensitive nerves. For many, the idea of playing with something so close to home is not what they are after in a tabletop gaming experience. They are understandably looking for games to give them some respite, consolation, and social connection in this bleak time.

I, however, am especially drawn to tabletop roleplaying games that will go hard after vital topics, and it strikes me that this medium has deep resources for probing into very real human situations. As a teacher, I’m interested in how we might use games in education to prompt our students (and ourselves) to reflect on our world, to consider how others might view situations differently, and to explore alternate “real-world” outcomes in a fictional space.

So, I gathered together three other intrepid, like-minded souls, and we played Ben Robbins’ Follow using the playset called “The Cure.” I recorded our session and edited it. You can access it by clicking here. [One note: I took out much of the character creation section to keep the length more reasonable and to cut to the chase.]

The players include a middle school science teacher, a high school math teacher, a college American literature professor, and me (a high school English teacher). It was a special joy for me to have in the mix a former colleague whom I hadn’t seen in years.

I find the opening of our session intriguing: You will see some anxious body language and nervous hesitations as we consider whether to take a more indirect route through some fictive distancing—by, for example, dealing with an epidemic in a futuristic or historical setting. Ultimately, we left the idea of dealing with a zombie infection or a medieval plague for another day and opted to set our game in the here and now. The coronavirus was directly in the crosshairs, and we played characters living in a small city in upstate New York which was starting to grapple with an outbreak among teachers at the local elementary school.

The idea of Follow is that the players take on roles of characters in a “Fellowship,” a group which is united by a common crisis or mission. It is clear from the playset of “The Cure” that Robbins was initially imagining a hospital, research facility, or laboratory as a setting. Our group expanded this setting so that it encompassed people across a city, and you will note that we had to tweak and mold the playset to fit our conception. Our characters included a prominent local business owner, a member of the city council, a hospital security, a dispirited pharmacy assistant, and others. The result is that we had a varied mix of “takes” on the infection, and we remained true to providing a fiction that focused on ordinary people navigating an unexpected crisis with wide-ranging personal and social impacts. In Follow, each player controls a major character and a minor character, and the major characters are involved in some personal entanglements: The major character sitting to you left has something which your major character wants, but which is being withheld. Given the more broad city setting for our Fellowship, we were able to leverage some of these tensions, while others were relatively unexplored. A more contained, pressure-cooker environment—such as, for example, a single hospital—might have afforded us more opportunities to bring more of those conflicted connections into focus.

As will be the custom with the Ludoverse Lab, the session ends with a roundtable debrief. These comments begin with reflections on our actual play experience and the game, and then we spiral outward to talk about possibilities for the classroom. Many of the points raised merit further exploration. For example, Lali considers whether a middle school setting would require a more indirect, less immediately realistic approach. We were also considering whether the game, which ideally involves 3-5 players, could be played (perhaps with modifications) in a classroom context.

Related to this question is Chana’s curiosity about how to approach role-playing with students, most of whom are new to the activity. I have some advice to offer in the recording. If one has the luxury of time, for example, one can work to build up to role-playing through experiences and assignments given early in the year. I have had 9th grade students play the game Microscope initially without the “Scene” component, but I end the game with a writing assignment which takes students through the nuts and bolts of constructing an effective, dramatic scene between characters. With that assignment under their belts, students are more equipped to step towards more freeform, improvised role-playing situations later in the year.

This consideration has led me to the perhaps obvious realization that the GM-less environment can make things more difficult for less experienced role-players. A GM can ask players questions (such as “What does that look like?” or “What is it about Mr. X that most annoys your character?”) and push them to flesh out role-playing situations. In GM-less games with younger students, I have sometimes adopted a pseudo-GM role to prompt the students to think more deeply about their role-playing.

Ultimately, what I need is to develop a “Role-Playing 101” lesson which would pull together many of the insights and techniques I’ve picked up through my years of role-playing. This is another area where the classroom is manifestly different from the organic hobby group. When my friends and I first took up role-playing games in my high school years, none of us knew what we were doing, so we just worked it out over many months of trial and error. In the classroom, a more targeted and efficient approach is required. I will have to add “Role-Playing 101” to my list of summer projects.

I will end by reiterating my invitation to educators. If you are reading this and want to participate in an upcoming Ludoverse Lab, let me know and I’ll happily reserve a seat at the virtual table.

The Next Experiments in the Ludoverse Lab: Call for Gamers

I’m planning three new sessions of the Ludoverse Lab starting Saturday, April 18. And I’m looking for a few more teacherly types to join me in my journey.

Tentatively, these will run from 11 a.m. - 2 p.m. EDT (UTC -4). The first and last of these Saturday sessions will feature story games where we will take on the roles of characters battling pandemics and striving to find a cure. Sandwiched between is some comic relief with a couple bonkers games about bluffing, boasting, and cheating.

I’m looking for teachers, administrators, and educators interested in participating in these game sessions. The idea is to experience a role-playing game and then to have a conversation about how the game and its mechanics might be leveraged for use within the classroom. If you would like to help out, you can send me a message or an email
( robowist ~at~ gmail *dot*  com )

Here’s the lineup:

Saturday, April 18: Follow by Ben Robbins using the quest playset titled “The Cure”
Saturday, April 25: The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen by James Wallis and Cheat Your Own Adventure
Saturday, May 2: Our Last Best Hope by Mark Diaz Truman

If you have any questions or want to join in the fun, let me know!

Ludoverse Lab: The Pool by James V. West, Part 2

We wrapped up our sessions with The Pool with three returning players and one new addition. To watch the video of our session (with post-game debrief, click here.

We were able to get a taste of how the game’s advancement system works. In brief, after playing a session, the players get an additional 15 words that they can add to their character descriptions (or, if they want, they can bank those words to deploy them later). They also get 9 points in their “pool” which they can use in turn to add points to their bonus traits. As with all matters, the approach is streamlined and elegant.

This week, we were joined by Linnea, who is the creative director of a video game design company living in Sweden. It didn’t take long to get her up and running with the game. The fact that everything is grounded in those character descriptions made it easy for her to get quickly oriented.

This is, to say the least, a group that attacks the game from an array of perspectives. You have a college undergraduate majoring in English and psychology, a college professor specializing in philosophy and ethics, a high school government teacher, and me (a high school English teacher).

I decided this week to “go Memento” on the players by starting things off with the scene that would chronologically END our narrative and then work our way backward in time. The streamlined system of The Pool hummed with this approach. The trick is for the GM to begin by describing a scene that is happening in medias res and to weave in abundant specific details from the previous session and the character descriptions. But the special sauce is to leave things open. You don’t have to explain everything that’s going on: That’s for the game play to determine. You can also allow the players to insert the characters into the scene as they see fit.

I could explain things, but really the better course of action is to direct you to 6:45 of the video. There, you’ll see me framing things up and letting the mayhem rip. Role-playing games are best experienced from the players’ side, but even as an observer, you will quickly pick up on the energy and creativity that The Pool and this kind of hard scene framing generate. With one session under the belt, the players quickly lean into their character traits, and the resolution system works hand-in-hand with the weaving of the narrative tapestry.

As a GM, I felt like my main role was to keep the spotlight moving around. After establishing the crazy setting, my job is quite easy and loads of fun. I add a detail to the scene, ask one character what they are going to do, resolve a conflict, and then move onto another character. The elegant system gives the players just enough to work with, and the swinginess of the dice rolls adds to the fun.

I’d again point out how the failures end up inciting more creativity from both the players and the GM. This week, we see the players sometimes failing and opting to deliver a Monologue of Defeat instead of grabbing another die for their pool. And they are also much more quick and eager to take the reins when they are delivering their Monologues of Victory.

I was also happy to see characters volunteering dice from their pools to help their companions. One stipulation I made is that they had to explain what their character was doing to offer assistance within the fiction, and this became another way of moving the spotlight around and of enhancing the descriptive richness of the narrative.

If you have never tried running a role-playing game in reverse order, I urge you to try it out. The approach will allow your session to take off from the opening moment, and it will also challenge the creative thought process of your players. It also forces the mind to think about narrative organization in a more intense and deliberate manner. When you start to step back in time, everyone at the table has to think about how they are going to get the new scene to END where the previously played scene BEGAN. This gives the players and GM a focused objective to chew on as they consider their decisions since they need the action to move toward a determinate end point (which is also a beginning point).

We end the session with some reflections on the game and our experiences. The Pool remains a vibrant gem in 2020, and I encourage educators to study it. Weighing in at only 4-pages, it is like the superfruit of rpgs. I don’t think you could find a game that provides more bang in such a small package. You will find it readily adaptable to varied classroom contexts, and if you are looking for an easy way to introduce a group to role-playing games, The Pool is a perfect place to dive in.

Sorcerer and Sword: The Sodden Lands of Snia Mer, The Final Session

After eight sessions, we brought an end to our mini-campaign using Ron Edwards’ Sorcerer and Sword supplement.  You can access the video by clicking here. 

I’ve now run two games of Sorcerer, and in both cases it took a full 7-8 sessions to bring the kickers to a satisfactory resolution. The players for this series literally ranged around the globe: I’m in central Florida, Rod is in Texas, and Aybars is in Istanbul. To state the obvious, scheduling was a challenge, and it’s a testament to our commitment that we pulled this off.

I have some more sessions recorded, and we’ll see if I have the time to get those edited. This session, however, provides much food for thought, so rather than wait, I’m releasing it now.

In an earlier post, I mentioned that I tend to run games that operate on a slow burn, and despite the fact that our session builds to a dramatic crescendo, there are signs of that deliberate style in ample evidence here. Some players will balk at my approach, but I like the way all of this developed in our game. In terms of why the slow burn occurs, I can put my finger on a number of sources.

First, I’m not making it easy on the players. I regularly introduce situations or scenes where you will see the players mulling over their options . . .  and I let them linger in their uncertainty. You’ll see a number of examples in this session.

At the start, for instance, the two Sorcerers have to decide whether to drug their friend (Zeki) who is experiencing an intense withdrawal, or to leave him behind to complete the process. You’ll see them working over that question, until Nagimo (played by Rod) opts for a low-dose drug option, only to have Balder (played by Aybars) rescue the situation by creatively coming up with a creative placebo option (aided by a successful roll of the dice).

And, towards the end of the session, you’ll see the duo encountering a number of fraught situations where they are thoughtfully debating what the best course of action might be: Do we sneak into the compound of the necromancer (named The Prime Herald) or do we take a more direct approach and ask for an audience? Do we try to contact the powerful demon named The Chryxen Butterfly, and if so, what should that timing be? Afterward, should Balder risk a binding with that demon, realizing that, by doing so, he will be initiated into the necromantic arts? The dilemmas come streaming down, and one consequence is that the game sometimes veers into anguished debates over tactics and morality instead of pulse-pounding action.

This session features a number of Humanity rolls. I love the way Balder/Aybars comes to a gradual realization that necromancy is nasty business . . . and there’s even a spot where he tries to justify (mostly to himself) dabbling in this very dark and wicked art (see the sequence starting at 1:14:00). Aybars is in fine form as he works through the ethics, and eventually he arrives at that favorite refuge of morally ambiguous decisions (at 1:18:00): “I have no other choice. . . I’m too deep in this!”

Sorcery and accompanying Humanity rolls are firing on all cylinders as things come to a close. At the 48:30 mark, Balder decides to contact the Chryxen Butterfly, and he uses a wonderfully described blood ritual along with some group sorcery to build up a sizable pool of dice to pull off the Contact. This again takes time (about 15 minutes of game play, some of which is edited out), but it builds up to some memorable rolls and some dramatic and satisfying outcomes.

During planning, I had determined that the Chryxen Butterfly was in a rebellious state with respect to his “current” master, The Prime Herald, though this fact was not known to the players. With the successful Contact roll and some nice role-playing on the part of the Sorcerers, the demon breaks free of The Prime Herald, and Balder then attempts to Bind the demon, In the fiction, this involves a gruesome and excruciating moments as the object demon fuses itself onto Balder’s skull. Normally, the sequence goes Contact ⇒ Summon ⇒ Bind. But since this was a case of an unbound, rebellious demon, we rolled the successes from the Contact directly into the Binding roll. There didn't seem to be any need to Summon a demon who was already there.

Balder ends up losing one of his Humanity checks, which was clearly making Aybars nervous. The session then ends with Nagimo and Balder trying to get the Chryxen Butterfly to reverse the soul entrapment afflicting Nagimo’s friend Zeki (start around 1:30:00). Eventually, the demon comes around to the idea, but notes that this type of reversal draws on necromantic forces--meaning, of course, that a human life is required. The two creatively decide to offer up the life of a former nemesis (the giant named Baseer) whom they knew to be at the complex. So the dark designs set in motion just continued to cascade!

The reversal of the soul entrapment was a puzzle for me: On the one hand it required a human sacrifice, which clearly risked a Humanity loss. But at the same time, the effect was one that was beneficent, restoring a human life (Zeki) to wholeness. In the end, I ordered Aybars/Balder to make two Humanity checks: One to see if he lost a point of Humanity for mercilessly sacrificing the giant Baseer; the other to see if he gained a point of Humanity for restoring Zeki’s soul. He succeeded in both rolls, meaning he ultimately gained a point of Humanity.

With that, the kickers were wrapped up. Nagimo had not only found his friend Zeki, but managed to have him healed. And Balder had achieved his drive for power . . . though I wonder how long it will take for him to wither in corruption like the previous Prime Herald.

As you can tell from this account, Balder had the spotlight in this session. Nagimo in fact had contemplated whether he even needed to travel to the Prime Herald to bring things to a satisfactory (or at least liveable) conclusion. Had the two Sorcerers decided on a secretive operation when they landed , then Nagimo’s superior physical abilities would no doubt have come into play. Thinking about the sessions as a whole, I believe Nagimo commanded a number of key spotlight moments throughout. Still, given that we knew this was driving towards a concluding moment, I would have liked to have found some way to give Rod more of a closing aria. It may be some consolation that Nagimo clearly has more potential as an enduring character in an ongoing saga.

We have a short session debrief at the end, which will provide some insights from Rod and Aybars. I invite them or anyone else interested to offer additional commentary here. We decided to set the game aside, though as I noted to them, it still lies ready in the dock, and I look forward to continuing to develop the setting if others are interested in trudging through the sodden lands of Snia Mer.

I’m itching to take another dive into Sorcerer. Given the frightening COVID-19 pandemic, I’m mulling over Jared Sorenson’s Schism (which is aptly subtitled “A Virulent Setting for Sorcerer”) as a timely supplement in these dark days.

Introducing the Ludoverse Lab: The Pool by James V. West

I’m excited to introduce the inaugural “broadcast” of the Ludoverse Lab.

The core purpose of this project is to experiment with innovative role-playing games with an eye towards education. Beneath that general goal are nested a constellation of exciting possibilities:

• I hope this series contributes to the general conversation about gamification and game-based learning in the classroom.
• I’m openly inviting other educators—regardless of prior experience—to join in either as participants or as observer-commentators.
• I’d like to hone my own skills as a “role-playing gamer” and a teacher through these experiments, and I hope those who join me are similarly sharpened. I would argue that much of the rpg skill set is transferable to teaching.
• I want to analyze game systems and actual play from multiple perspectives.
• Finally, I want this experience to be fun and generally enriching for all involved.

A few comments about this opening experiment in the Ludoverse Lab.

We are playing James V. West’s The Pool, which came out in 2001. Though many today are unfamiliar with the title, one would be hard-pressed to find a game that has exerted more influence with such a short set of rules.

And the influence continues. It is now so deeply ingrained in the DNA of today’s role-playing games that I suspect some designers use its ideas without even realizing the progeny. Just last week, I was introduced to Alien: The Role-Playing Game, and the impact of The Pool was there, though unstated.  In under four pages, West managed to crystallize a number of key ideas about character-based narratives, conflict resolution, player-facing authority, intentional dialogue at the table . . . . I could go on, but so much of what I would say has been more masterfully handled by Ron Edwards in his essay “Understanding The Pool.” I highly recommend that you go there for a deep dive into the game from both a historical and an analytical perspective. You can also look at an earlier piece I wrote for Ludoverse last year.

The Pool does not define a setting or a genre, so, as a GM, it is critical to focus the players by providing them with a skeleton setting. Appropriately enough, I opted for a fictitious modern-day educational institution, which I named Palmer Eldritch High School (credits to Philip K Dick) set in the Appalachian foothills of western Virginia. I provided these additional details to let the tone sink in:

• Mascot: The Luna Moths
• Motto: “Dreaming of tomorrow.”
• School Colors: Blood Orange and Reddish Green (the latter being one of the so-called “impossible colors”)

Our players consisted of a university philosophy professor, a high school government teacher, and an undergraduate student interested in education and psychology. So I had a good mix of disciplines and levels of education represented.

I won’t bog you down with details of the game play itself. The video has been edited, and I’m impressed by the tightness and creativity that the group brought to the table. I invite you to watch it by clicking this link.

I did introduce a few twists to the rules, some of which are derived from the so-called anti-Pool variants. Here’s a summary of the changes which I provided to the group in advance:

1. Character creation. Before the first session, write a 50-word character sketch, following the rules of The Pool. The 50 words should detail your characters' talents, profession, quirks, weaknesses, skills, personality traits, special objects, a signature item, relationships, etc.—anything you imagine as being important or interesting to play with in the game. This sketch provides the traits for the player's character sheet, and the 50 word limit is firm--so you have to be efficient!

Give your character a name and a “kicker” or goal. These are for free--they don’t count towards the 50-word limit. The kicker or goal should be something that sets your character in motion: It should be something specific and concrete. Examples of kickers: Your character enters the parking lot and finds that her new car has been sabotaged (tires slashed, sugar water in the gas tank, etc.). Or your character hopes to gain a college scholarship by leading the basketball team to the district championship.

2. Traits and Bonuses. Follow the rules of The Pool. In brief, you pull traits from your character sketch. You may list a trait with no bonus attached (leaving it available for later advancement). You start with 15 points. To assign a Bonus, spend dice from your starting Pool. The cost is the Bonus times itself. Thus, a +2 would cost 4 dice and a +3 would cost 9 dice and so on. It is very important to leave some dice in your Pool--at least 3 or 4.

3. Casting the Dice. Follow the rules of The Pool with these important modifications:
On a successful roll (i.e. at least one of your dice came up a “1”), you LOSE any dice you gambled from your pool, but you GAIN a Monologue of Victory! Rolling multiple 1s will add to the impact of your success.

On a loss (i.e you rolled no 1s) you get your gambled pool dice back, and you get a choice. You may either ADD an additional die to your pool or you may GAIN a Monologue of Defeat [Note: The Monologue of Defeat must stay true to the fact that you failed your dice roll.]
Other players may contribute dice from their pools to your effort if they can explain how their character is contributing to the action in the fiction. The total number of pool dice gambled cannot exceed 9.

4. Success and Failure. These follow the basic rules of The Pool save the reversal regarding the loss and gain of pool dice (see above). Note the stipulation that multiple 1s magnify the degree of success. Note also that the GM may interpret a failure as a short term success but accompanied by nasty side effects. For example, you fail your roll to climb over the fence. The GM might allow your character to make it over, but notes that your character lands hard on the other side and thinks they might have sprained their ankle. Oh . . . and there’s a guard dog that heard them when they crashed to the ground.

5. Continuing the Story. These follow the rules of The Pool, but you may deduct any previous points invested in a trait to raise that trait. In other words, a +3 costs 9 points. But if that trait is currently at a +2, you have already spent 4 points to get the trait to that level. So now it will only cost you 5 additional points to raise it to a +3. Note also the rule that you may add or increase bonuses to traits at any point.

6. At Death’s Door. Should circumstances require it, we will follow the rules of The Pool.

There are many instructive elements of our game that deserve particular note:

After sending them the skeleton setting, I gave the players the 50-word character sketch as a pre-game homework assignment, and this included the requirement providing me with a “kicker” or goal. Some might prefer to accomplish these tasks through a conversation at the table, but my mind likes to chew over what the players are signalling me in advance of the opening session. I’m better able to weave their kickers and traits into the opening scenes when I have the time to reflect. The value of this strategy is apparent in the scenes we work through.

Also deserving of study are the moments of victory and failure that occur throughout the session.

With my variant, when a player achieves success on a roll, they get a Monologue of Victory. You will see the players initially surprised by the narrative power that this gives them, but once they wrap their head around the concept, it sparks tremendous creativity and enthusiasm. They realize that they can, within reasonable limits, dictate where the fiction goes, and they obviously are jazzed that they were able to throw something back at me, the GM, which I would run with.

The moments of failure are also instructive. The players hesitated to use my “Monologue of Defeat” variant in favor of adding a die to their pool. But even so, the failures resulted in some creative and unpredictable swerves in the narrative. As a GM (and as a teacher), it is important to view failures as opportunities to move things forward in creative and exciting ways. This doesn’t mean treating failures as though they are successes. But it does mean considering failures as swerves that might lead the story into new, unplanned paths. In retrospect, sometimes these trails can lead to some of the most memorable and fulfilling moments of the session.

One notable highlight is how the players are quickly leaning into their traits and abilities. This perhaps is not surprising given the fact that all of these elements derive from the character sketches that they players wrote. Designers, GMs, and players should take note of the psychological investment (and improved game play) that this type of character creation element generates.

The video ends with some of our reflections on how The Pool might be put to use in the classroom. I’ll have more to say about this in a later post, and I invite anyone interested to offer their thoughts.

The group was enthusiastic about this inaugural experiment, so we will be moving on to a second session with the game. So expect a second installment of the Ludoverse Lab as we take another dive into The Pool.

And if you want to join in on an upcoming lab, drop me a note. I’m looking forward to taking others on the ride.

Teaching Role-Playing Games, Part 3: The Debrief

I’ve wrapped up my unit on tabletop role-playing games, so I’ve been taking stock and reflecting on our triumphs and our struggles.

For those coming new to this discussion, I’d suggest taking a quick look at Parts 1 and 2. The brief synopsis is that I took a three-week period of my AP English Language and Composition class and segmented it into the following:

1. a few days to introduce tabletop role-playing games as a form of ergodic literature and medium of communication;
2. a few days for students to decide upon a role-playing game, read the rules, create characters, and prepare to play;
3. a full week of class devoted to playing the selected games;
4. a few days to hear presentations and to write actual play analyses.

In each of my four sections, I had 3-4 gaming tables running simultaneously, with each table playing a different game over the course of a week. As previously noted, few students had ever experienced a tabletop role-playing game before. Not surprisingly, even with generous time allotted in the previous week to read rulebooks, discuss mechanics, and generate characters, the students were challenged when they launched into game play. I was circulating constantly during the class period, but, since there was only one of me, that meant groups often had to spend some time figuring things out for themselves while I was running the circuit. 

RPG Rulebooks and Critical Reading

This brings me to one of the many values of the rpg unit: There is a special form of reading entailed in synthesizing a rulebook and implementing it at the table. This type of reading is not one that students have had much exposure to, yet it provides vital training. An rpg rulebook is analogous to a manual or how-to guide, but, for many reasons, the level of complexity is multiplied. The social dynamic at the rpg table is fluid and unpredictable. Apart from understanding the basic mechanics of a game system, one has to interpret results within the fiction. Situations emerge which rules may not have fully anticipated. One could go on.

Many of my students found that their critical reading skills were initially coming up short. They misinterpreted key mechanics; they overlooked a crucial bit of text; they had disagreements as to the meaning of a sentence in the rulebook. One of the great payoffs of the rpg is that I was often not the one pointing out the students’ errant ways. Instead, the game itself made things apparent to the students. A question came up at the table, and it was clear that the rulebook held the answer. Students needed to reread and evaluate sections of the book that they had not adequately synthesized. Some of my time with students inevitably involved closely reading sections of the books with them to puzzle out vital instructions. Students quickly realized that these games were serious about procedures, mechanics, and admonitions. 

Games as Punishing Teachers

And there was another way in which games themselves chided lax players. In more traditional rpgs where there is a risk of player characters encountering harm, imprecise reading or inattention to situations can have deadly results. The most dramatic instance of this lesson occurred with one group playing Legendary Lives. The game ended up in a dramatic Total Party Kill when the characters went up against the boss monster (in this case, a powerful necromancer). When I sat down with the students to assess the game afterwards, I asked them about that tragic final scene. Had their characters tried to use some of their key abilities? Did they consider more strategic approaches? Could they have accomplished their goal without a direct assault? 

As we processed things, lightbulbs were popping. It dawned on the students that there were a host of abilities which had lain fallow because they had not read the rulebook with a sufficiently analytical eye. In addition, they had taken a more simple and blunt approach to the situation at the table instead of opting for more nuanced tactics. When the group delivered its actual play report on the game, they demonstrated a lucid understanding of the mechanics and rich resources, and it was evident that much of their insight was a result of the war wounds inflicted by the game.

The Fun of Self-Imposed Challenges

I was impressed by the students who stepped up to take on the GM roles, and I offered them footholds. In the case of Legendary Lives (a fantasy heartbreaker from the 90’s) and Swords and Wizardry (a reskinned version of the original Dungeons and Dragons), I showed the GMs some prewritten scenarios to help with the preparation. And in the case of the groups running Inspectres (a comic horror game of paranormal investigation) and Sorcerer, I suggested setting the game in Central Florida and using actual locations around town. Finally, in the case of The Princes’ Kingdom, I had the fledgling GM start by adapting the example provided in the rulebook for the first adventure.

Some of the groups opted to play GM-Less games: The Quiet Year, Shooting the Moon, and  Follow. For these groups, one of the major hurdles involved framing scenes and latching onto the role-playing. Some scaffolding work and demonstrations on my part helped them. 

I also stressed to students the fun of making things hard on themselves. A Quiet Year, for example, directs the players to grab contempt tokens in situations where they don’t feel like their opinions are respected or when a decision is made which cuts against what they believe to be the best course. Those groups which consciously worked to employ this mechanic ended up with more dramatic and satisfying narratives. This involved players deciding to start up more edgy, controversial projects, and it involved other players being willing to demonstrate their displeasure.

This lesson was one that carried over to the GM games. Good stories involve conflicts and challenges, and if you are effortlessly successful throughout a game, it won’t take long for the game to become predictably boring. In introducing the unit to the students, I had stressed the elements of emergence and creativity, and for most students, those ideas stuck like super glue. In watching them play and in hearing them speak about their games, an ever-present theme was the thrill of experiencing unexpected turns. Even the GMs were quick to latch onto the idea that it was exciting to let go of any predetermined ideas about where the narratives would take them.

With different games running throughout the day, I was exhausted when the school day ended. I had thought of taking a more focused route and requiring all students to play the same game during the week. This certainly would have made my job easier, and it would have allowed me to work through hurdles more efficiently and smoothly. But that’s not what a 21st century teacher needs to do. Much was gained when students had to deal with glitches and the challenges at the table, and taking stock of their frustrations and mistakes required them to solve most of the puzzles on their own.

Time Management

The games ran at different speeds, and this is one area which I will be more prepared next year. Groups playing The Quiet Year were off and running while those playing Sorcerer and Legendary Lives were immersed in character creation. Generally, those playing GM-less games had finished before the last day of play, so I gave them a choice of either running another round of the same game or taking a look at a new one. Meanwhile, some groups playing the GM games had to find provisional stopping places at the end of the week and were wishing that they had more time to continue. 

I don’t know that there is a tidy solution for those latter groups . . . save to let them know that nothing is stopping them from continuing to play! But next year, I’m going to offer some of the GM-less games in bundled pairs with the idea that those groups will try to complete two games and then compare them.

Going Deep

I was pleased with the depth of play involved. Players encountered situations in the games which required teamwork and self-sacrifice. They became alert to the way that decisions impacted the direction of the narrative and influenced the behavior of other characters. They were making discoveries about the dynamic inner workings of genres and settings. And there were cases where weighty moral decisions were debated.

Special mention goes to Sorcerer. I had mulled over whether to offer the game at all. Ron Edwards specifically categorizes his game as R-rated, “not because there are pictures with nipples on them or taboo vocabulary, but because it can lead to stories that are not nice.” I was intrigued that two groups opted for the game—despite, or maybe because of, my warnings that the game was serious when it titled itself “An Intense Roleplaying Game.” But those groups were committed and ended up playing games that took the game’s core trait of Humanity to heart. 

In their debriefing, one Sorcerer group talked about the value of using the safety mechanic of lines and veils when the GM was trying to stress the true violence suffered by a victim of assault. And I overheard the player of the other Sorcerer group making an agonizing decision of whether to have his character venture out from a safe shelter because he knew that, if he did so, his humanity would be at risk. This confirmed to me that those groups had latched onto the spirit of the game. At the end of the week, those students were bubbling with memories of the fraught bargains they had made with their demons.

Which reminds me . . . safety was directly discussed at the start of the unit, with the concept of lines and veils taking center stage. While most games did not enter danger zones, the Sorcerer games did, and since lines and veils were already on the table, those groups had the resources to play hard because everyone knew that there were tools in place to ensure that the games remained safe.

The Wrap Up

After devoting a full week to actual play, the groups followed up with presentations where they introduced the games to the class. Without prompting, most latched onto the idea that actual demonstrations of mechanics, scene framings, and role-playing would be key. For example, a group playing Legendary Lives set up a situation where characters from the game might be trying to persuade me to change a test day. This, of course, involved rolling the dice, and interpreting that result according to the game’s resolution chart. The group playing The Princes’ Kingdom pulled out one of the conflicts of their game and replayed it in front of class using the “call and raise” dice mechanic.

Groups went on to analyze the games in terms of actual play. They discussed areas of challenge and tension—the ways they struggled with mechanics, the social dynamic of the players, aspects of play that were engaging and those that were less so. 

The final assignment was a targeted individual written report. One stipulation was that the group members had to be sure that they were covering their game without retreading territory. But groups had great leeway in choosing how they wanted to cut up their pie and what topics to explore. Some of the students went into a nuts-and-bolts analysis of “system matters,” some investigated aspects of the social dynamic at their table, and still others talked about how their game fit into the English curriculum. 

To provide a couple examples, here were some of my suggestions for the reports:

RPGs and SEL. Role-playing games are unique in their ability to nurture self-awareness, self-control, interpersonal skills, responsible decision making, and social awareness. These are all qualities that are sometimes grouped under the umbrella of “social and emotional learning” (SEL). Many teachers see SEL as a key (but often overlooked) field of education.  Discuss your game in terms of these qualities. You might consider both the content of your game as well as the experience at the table.

Emergence and Collaboration. To what extent did the game result in a collaborative experience? What were the different roles that the players adopted at the table? To what extent did the fiction emerge organically or spontaneously at the table? Were there moments when you were surprised by a turn of events in the game? If so, what were they? What led to those moments?

Reading the Sitch

There’s no question that I will teach this unit next year, but there will be changes in store. In the midst of the unit, I was exposed to MASKS: A New Generation, for example, which gives me a Powered-by-the-Apocalypse game ideal for the high school setting. And I have a better handle on how I can more effectively advice novice gamers about specific mechanics and strategies. 

I’m eager to hear reactions to this work-in-progress. I feel like I’m venturing into a largely unexplored frontier. With their focus on creating fiction and developing narratives, tabletop role-playing games clearly belong in the realm of English, but it’s a medium that is not being taught, so we are blazing new trails. If anyone wants to contribute or join me in the venture, I invite you to enter into the conversation.