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!

Teaching Role-Playing Games, Part 1: The Justification

I’ve taken the plunge and have started teaching a unit on tabletop role-playing games (TTRPGs) as part of my AP English Language and Composition class. My initial plan was to do my trial run at the end of the year following the AP exams in May. But due to some shifts in the college counselling calendar, I had to do some reshuffling in my class.

The end result is that my TTRPG unit is now a fully legit unit being taught in the heart of the course. This alteration in my plans is completely fortuitous. It means that the TTRPG is being treated as a fully fledged, artful medium in its own right . . . which is exactly how it should be.

This post and those that follow will give you an overview of my approach, and I’ll provide some updates detailing the actual play experiences of my students.

At the start, shout outs go to a number of designers who are helping in ways large and small. Ron Edwards has been instrumental in shaping my own thoughts about this medium, and some one-on-one consulting sessions have provided some key guidance. Ron has a background as an educator, so he’s ideally suited to help bridge the teacher / game designer divide.

Thanks are also in order for Emily Care Boss, Ben Robbins, Avery Alder, Jared Sorenson, Ron Edwards (again!), Clinton Nixon, Matthew Finch, Joe Williams, Kathleen Williams, and James V. West who have been generous (unwitting or not) in sharing their creations with my students. In the case of games under copyright restrictions, I asked the designers for specific permission to share the rules with my students through a secured server. Other designers have already made their rules available either through Creative Commons licensing or through “pay what you want” offerings. So I’ve been able to give my students this opportunity with the good conscience that I am operating securely within good copyright practice.

The question for today’s post:

Why are you doing this and how do you justify taking up weeks of class (and an AP course, no less!) to play tabletop role-playing games?

In the grand scheme, TTRPGs hit on a number of key educational objectives, and they do so in ways that are uniquely powerful and effective.

• They spark what I would call active creativity, as both players and game masters (GMs) must work hard together to bring a story into being. When you are reading a story or a novel, one is sparked to understand the narrative that has been stitched together by the author, and such literature requires considerable imaginative work. But with TTRPGs, the fiction doesn’t even exist without the committed involvement of players and GMs to bring it into being.
• They involve collaboration and communication. The driving engine of TTRPGs is a complex, nuanced conversation taking place around the table. The medium requires engagement all around, and it demands that the participants carefully listen and respond in order to propel the story further.
• It involves critical thinking of a high order. Each play session worth its salt requires the players to work through problems, puzzles, and dilemmas of various sorts. And in most cases, there are multiple possible solutions. The open-ended nature of the games, encourages players to be inventive and to consider outside-the-box solutions that are both effective and unique.

Even with these flags in place, however, there is the issue of curriculum and content to face. To put this as a question, How do TTRPGs even belong in an English class, which should be devoted to literature and written texts?

To move towards an answer, I started my unit by having the students read “Introduction: Ergodic Literature” by Espen Aarseth. That was a challenging piece for my students to chew on, but I was able to make headway by continually grounding the discussion in specific texts. The basic argument is that there is a type of literature—not a genre per se, but a kind of modality—that requires efforts which go beyond the direct understanding or reading of a text. This is what he means by ergodic literature.

A workbook would be one easily grasped example of an ergodic text: To “read” a math workbook (or at least to do so correctly) you are not simply going scan the pages with your eyes and flip pages from front to back. No—you are going to have out a pencil and start writing in the book or perhaps on a separate sheet of paper. Moreover, I might see you flipping about the book, perhaps to compare your answers to an answer key in another section of the book. Or maybe you are going to flip between a problem you are working out on one page and a relevant explanation that appeared a few pages earlier.

I made a point in class that you can often tell if someone was dealing with an ergodic text by simply watching them. Someone reading a novel—even a challenging one—would likely read the book in a linear fashion. You’d see their eyes moving left to right, top to bottom, and then flipping a page, and this process would repeat until the book was finished. With an ergodic text, however, you would probably see the person working in a different fashion—flipping pages, moving backwards and forwards, perhaps writing or doing other forms of manipulation, etc. In other words, there would be additional activities involved that moved beyond the cerebral effort to understand the text.

The other key concept employed by Aarseth is the cybertext. Cybertexts do not necessarily involve computers, but they do involve some type of machine function as a component of their operation. A great example of a non-digital cybertext would be the I Ching, where one employs some type of random number generation as a component of consulting the text. One goes to the I Ching with a question, and then starts to flip coins or to manipulate yarrow sticks in order to come up with the appropriate section of the text to read. Today, one can use a computer to generate the number, but in all cases, there is some type of random-number-generating machine involved.

Another great example of a cybertext is Raymond Queneau’s 100,000 Billion Poems. Queneau writes 10 sonnets, but he does so in such a way that the lines are interchangeable. For example, you can put the first line of the third sonnet together with the second line of the eighth sonnet and then put those lines together with the third line of the first sonnet, and so on. If you want to see how this all looks and operates in hard copy form, go to this youtube video. If you work out the math, you will discover that Queneau’s 10 sonnets end up generating one hundred thousand billion sonnets! This is a poem generating machine that is practically inexhaustible—at least it is inexhaustible for human readers.

Another key aspect of cybertexts is that they involve feedback loops. The reader of a cybertext is also an operator who provides key inputs for the “machine” to process. The machine, in turn provides an output, which the reader must then process. And, in many cases, this reader will take this information and use it to construct a new input which is subsequently fed into the machine.

The argument, then, is this: One productive way of viewing TTRPGs is to see them as examples of ergodic fiction. Moreover, in most cases, they are works that involve cybertextual elements.

Let me break this down and clarify.

The term ergodic is being borrowed from the fields of math and physics, but when Aarseth appropriates the word he is mainly interested in the word because of its Greek roots. Ergon means “work” and “hodos” means path. Thinking about a TTRPG as a “work path” is both appropriate and evocative.

To begin, I like the idea that these are games where a vital part of the fun and importance lies in the work or effort being invested by the players and GM. If someone at the table becomes passive, the game (along with the fiction and the experience) immediately suffers as a result. This is not simply a theoretical idea: When a player disengages with a TTRPG, the effect is immediately palpable at the table.

And TTRPGs provide the players with paths and crossroads to traverse. The trailheads of some of those paths might be given in advance, but it is up to the people around the table to continue with the exploration and at points to blaze their own trails. Aasarth usefully talks about the idea of the labyrinth in terms of ergodic texts and appropriately differentiates between linear labyrinths (such as the meditative paths that one sometimes finds on the floors of gothic churches) and mazes, where the paths fork and which might allow for multiple solutions.

The cybertextual nature of TTRPGs is almost too obvious to need comment. In a typical game of this sort, players are involved in a complex network of feedback loops that connect players with each other and (if there is one) with the GM. Moreover, the games frequently involve additional feedback loops that involve inputs and outputs involving the rulebook, dice rolls, chart consultations, etc.

On the day following our discussion of “Introduction: Ergodic Literature,” I had my students read Ron Edwards’ “System Does Matter.” This led to a discussion about the different types of game objectives, with the useful terms gamist, simulationist, and narrativist being key.  And I also had them consider how a game’s mechanics and system components are crucial in determining whether or not the game is going to be successful in achieving its goal.

Here again, I used concrete examples to aid in the discussion . . . but I was immediately struck by how the students (high school juniors) were often completely unfamiliar with analog games of almost any stripe. I initially started by using chess and backgammon as two games that are communicating very different messages, and that the mechanics are vital to what they are trying to accomplish. Random polling showed that only about half of my students had played chess (though over three quarters had at least an inkling of how the game worked and what it was about), and almost none knew about the game of backgammon! So after my first period, I substituted Monopoly for the backgammon example.

With this discussion of games, I had the students think about how the games’ win conditions, core meaning, and mechanics were intimately connected. Monopoly is a game about rapacious real estate development: You win by building your property empire and bankrupting your opponents. And, while there are some decisions to be made, a large component of the game involves chance through the use of dice. For the most part, in Monopoly, if you are lucky and you follow the urges of greed acquisitiveness, you are going to do fine.

Chess, by contrast, is a game of battle tactics where, apart from the initial assigning of black and white sides, chance plays no role. The world of Chess is gained through strategic positioning and keen wit.

The class has almost no TTRPG experience. I teach 4 sections of the course, and in some of those sections, no student has played a TTRPG, while in others, one or two have a flitting experience with Dungeons & Dragons. Nonetheless, I was able to use “System Does Matter” to introduce them to some basic TTRPG components (character statistics, resolution mechanics, etc.) and to show how, as with chess and monopoly, those systems will reinforce the goals that the games are trying to achieve and the stories they are trying to tell.

That should give you a basic sense of how I got the ship launched. Next time, I will move into the core of the unit which will involve the students dividing into groups, each of which will the play a selected TTRPG over the course of a week in my course.

I feel like I’m heading into largely uncharted waters with this unit. I’m not sure how many high schools teach the TTRPG as an important medium in its own right. So I’m keen for resources and reactions to this endeavor. Should you have any comments or suggestions, please share them.

Ben Robbins's Microscope Game and the Teaching of Writing

Early in the semester during my 9th grade classes, I used Ben Robbins's Microscope to talk about narratives and to set the groundwork for an assignment involving the creation of a scene existing within a larger framework. I posted this earlier on Google+, but given the impending demise of that platform, I thought it might be worthwhile to post it here.

What follows is not a systematic overview, but it will touch on some of my experiences and impressions:

1.  Pacing: I felt that, in order to get the most out of the experience, I needed to give Microscope plenty of breathing room. I am working with students who are new to collaborative storytelling games. In addition I'm dealing with many students who are uncomfortable with their abilities in the English class and others who are anxious about the new school year. Some students had difficulty distinguishing between a "period" and and "event"; some struggled to come to grips with the fractal nature of the game play; some were challenged by the idea of a focus. The game is terrific at breaking things down into discrete steps, and by taking a deliberate, methodical approach, I had all the students humming by Thursday. I could have "crunched" the game, but rushing would have made it much less rewarding and the payoff would have diminished.

2. Scenes: I knew from experience that the scene aspect of the game would be challenging, so, instead of avoiding the challenge, I decided to make it the destination and culmination of our week of play! Initially, I took scenes off the table and had the students work with building a history using periods and events. Mid-week, I moved into the set-up and structure of scenes, and I had the students dictate scenes rather than playing them out. At the end of the classes today, student groups had nicely developed histories, and their weekend homework is to come up with an idea for a new scene which is not currently part of their histories but which could be. Next week, I will work with them on developing those ideas into a writing assignment involving a script of their scene (with descriptive setting, dialogue, use of rising action, etc.).

3.  Collaboration and independence: As the week continued, I could see the students becoming more comfortable not just with the game but with themselves and their interactions in groups. It was transformational for some: I saw students who started the class as awkward, self-doubting students and who were able to take some notable steps in developing their sense of ownership and their voice as the gameplay developed.

4.  Teaching narrative: The game is all about constructing narratives from building blocks. For early high school students, it is effective at giving them a visual map and a way to organize a complex narrative in a way that is accessible and not intimidating. In initially setting up the game, I used our summer reading book (Salman Rushdie's Haroun and the Sea of Stories) as an example, and even that activity was useful for them: It showed them how they could break down a multifaceted narrative into components and how to think of the interrelationship of various strands weaving through the novel.

5.  Time:  I'm fortunate in that I'm teaching a new class at a private school. I have a chair who is confident in my skills and my vision, and he has given me the freedom to devote the necessary time to weave Microscope into the course. By the time all this is wrapped up, Microscope will have occupied nearly two weeks of my class time (if you include the writing assignment springing from the gameplay), and I'm sure there are many administrators or chairs at other schools who would step in to shut this type of activity down or demand that it be greatly shortened in order to speed up the delivery of more content.

The game has been fun, and it has engaged students on multiple levels. One student commented to me today that he was thrilled by the game because it was forcing him to think through the layers of the story he and his peers were developing. It was addictive for the class precisely because it was motivating some deep thinking about both the content of the histories and the structure of them.

The game culminated in a writing assignment where each student had to look at their created history and write a new scene. This allowed me to target some elements of the writing craft while they were working on a piece that they were invested in . . . because they had created the rich story surrounding  the scene. It also proved a nice way to introduce scene-setting, and as I continue to introduce some role-playing activities during the year, I'm hoping to build off of that groundwork.

The chair of my department came in to observe the experiment in action, and I'll leave the final word with him:

Among other things, I like how it gives kids a chance to hone their leadership and collaboration skills. For example, the concept of a player becoming the lens gives him or her the chance to define a focus that will shape the decisions of others and the direction of the gameplay. I like how the other players need to follow the lead of the lens and to think about how their own ideas fit into the greater goal identified by the lens. That the role of the lens shifts each turn is also nice. In short, all students will get the opportunity to lead and to follow as they build a world together. I also enjoyed how the students debated decisions as they created their event cards. When one said, “We should bring in nukes,” another responded, “Nah, that tech would take too long to develop.” Here is another quick discussion I observed: 

Student 1: “Where should he die?”
Student 2; “In a trench.”
Student 1: “But WHERE is the trench?”
Student 3: “Germany?”
Student 4” France?”
Student 2: “Yes, how about near the Eiffel tower.”

In other words, they appeared to be moving from general ideas to precise details nicely and to be comfortable politely challenging each other’s ideas as the group moved to resolve some critical details.