For whatever reason, I have been feeling somewhat historically minded recently (insofar as I’m able to do that; I’ll admit to limitations on my perspective). As such, for the overtly educational portion of this week’s session, I gave a brief gloss of the origins of the tabletop roleplaying game, as attested by Lawrence Schick, Gary Alan Fine, and Daniel Mackay. I know there are other, more recent sources; I have not had the opportunity to review them yet, or even to get hold of copies thereof, although I do have some concerns about some of which I am aware. Publishers have interests in how their products present them, after all, as I’ve discussed. Still, for a few minutes talking to a few middle-school-age children, what I had handy was enough; I can always tack more onto my scholarly somedays at need.

In terms of gameplay, the party continued on from where it had been at the end of the previous session: not far into the dungeon through which the players’ characters are crawling. Player absences told upon the group as they encountered one of the most formidable opponents D&D presents: a locked door. Try as they might, they could not break down the door that confronted them, and after pretty much every player had failed both of the rolls made available to them to have their characters receive the necessary information to proceed, an allied NPC, once asked for aid, opened the door for them to move forward.

I know that it’s not ideal to have the party be rescued in such a way. Normally, I would not have gone with it. But, again, three of the seven regular players were absent, one of whose characters has skills particularly suited to the task of unbolting the door; it was an unusual situation, and all of the players had made several attempts through different skills and approaches. They gave it the traditional college try, so I threw them a line. Of course, doing so also fed into some of their (incorrect) ideas about the allied NPC…and I’ll admit that I didn’t do a lot to discourage that thinking. It will make the revelation of the truth much more entertaining when, at long last, it happens.

But they’ve got to get through the dungeon before that can happen for them.

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Continuing on from last week, at the end of which session the party had reached the doorway to the dungeon through which I meant to have them crawl, the middle-schoolers’ characters proceeded inward. Following the pre-written materials I have been using (with some small emendations to get around some of the metagaming I’d noticed brewing), the party soon found themselves confronting unfamiliar situations, the players trying to figure out how to get their characters to do what needed doing to move ahead in confidence. They were not as successful in that as might have been, rather comically getting in each other’s way out of concern about what lay ahead and a desire to “do something cool.” But it was progress, nonetheless.

One of the things that dungeon-crawls traditionally do is present players and their character with puzzles to solve. This is true in video games, as the various Legend of Zelda games attest. It’s true in Dungeons & Dragons, as well, with many of the titular dungeons being maze-like in their presentation even before traps that must be avoided and doors that require cunning and insight to open are put on offer. Puzzle- and problem-solving such as working against such devices require are themselves often articulated as major educational goals; the TEKS standards for grade 6 make much of such things, for example. Dungeon-crawling, then, is inherently an educational exercise, so I didn’t have to do much to bring in the overtly educational this time…but one thing that I have done, both this session and previously, is start to use more complex and richer vocabulary, sending the players to the dictionary for information about what the words mean. (The game meets in a library. Using its resources suggests itself as another valid educational end.) Between the two, I think I have the explicitly educational covered decently enough.

Honestly, so much echoes my own experience. I might have noted here before, and I have certainly noted elsewhere before, that a good part of what drew me into my formal study was the media to which I had been exposed and in which I was conversant as I moved from high school to college and from undergraduate to graduate study. I took Old English early in my master’s program because I was frustrated at the end of my undergraduate work by being almost able to read and make sense of it, for example, and I had that sense of familiarity in part because I had been the particular type of nerd that I was then. (I’m not quite the same taste, now, but whiskey has a richer flavor twenty-five years after being put into the barrel, so that’s to be expected.) I learned words because I saw them used and did not know what they meant, so I looked them up. (Having the spellings helped; a dictionary’s not as handy when the spelling’s uncertain, something that was long a point of vexation for me with my parents.) I don’t think that any of the kids at my table will be English majors or go out for the professoriate, but I do think they benefit not only from the exposure to new vocabulary, but also from doing the work of finding what it means for themselves.

It’s something that will serve them long after we have parted ways.

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To continue from last week, the group of middle-school-aged kids for whom I’m running a Dungeons & Dragons game at my local library left off between rounds of an ongoing fight, being in the process of rescuing a child about to be sacrificed by cultists for some clearly nefarious end. They seemed initially to have taken the discussion of ponerology to heart, which gratified, and play proceeded from that point to go…sideways. Some of that is to be expected in any TTRPG, of course; things move in ways not expected. Some of it, however, is going to require some redirection and resetting; the group as a whole is aware of it, so when next week’s session begins, I do not think it will be a surprise that things will start as they will have to start.

For the overtly educational portion of the session, I brought in an idea I’ve meant to talk about for a while: the tension between plot- and character-focused narrative. To gloss, in the former, the story is largely about outside events and reactions, while in the latter, the story is largely about internal events and how they shape the outside world. I don’t think any narrative is exclusively one or the other, although each is primarily one or the other; that is, there is always some outside event prompting response, and there is always some internality on display, although there will definitely be an emphasis of one over the other.

Within the setting of a TTRPG, the narrative will actually straddle such line as exists between the two fairly evenly. Because the story being told is a collaborative one, with the audience being the group doing the storytelling, the overall presentation is plot-driven. The collective creating audience will respond to the outside events presented to them. Each collaborator, however, will have access to the internality of the character they portray, so for each audience member, the narrative will be emphatically character driven.

This is, of course, a very surface-level treatment; more has been said about the topic, as I am already aware, Mackay having treated it, as well as Gary Alan Fine, and I know there have been other works about it that I do not have on my shelves from long ago. (One of my regrets from the attempted academic life is that I was not more honest with myself and so did not pursue such ludic concerns; I needed the formal “legit” grounding I got, but I really ought to have leaned more into my “side” interests. That the latter have stuck with me even absent institutional affiliation is telling.) But, while the kids at my table are bright, they’ve got other concerns–and so, admittedly, do I, among which are a great many other scholarly somedays.

My calendar is full. I suppose it’s a good thing; I’ve always got something to look forward to doing.

Even on spooky days such as this, I am happy to write to order, and with no AI slop!

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The materials presented to my group of gaming middle-schoolers last week were a response to emergent situations I hoped to redirect and deflect before they could become problems. (I am still somewhat taken aback by one player’s stated expectations of being in opposition to me as the DM; I’m put in mind of comments from The Munchkin’s Guide to Power Gaming, which has long had a spot on my bookshelves.) This week, I returned to more or less the kind of thing that I had intended to discuss with them, one of the central questions that I had included in my pitch for the program back in 2024: what is the nature of evil?

That nature, as might well be thought, has been extensively studied and theorized about. There is, in fact, a whole discipline of inquiry about it: ponerology. (I admit that part of the reason I brought it up under that name to the middle schoolers in the context of being overtly educational is because it’s a fun word to say, especially for my overly online Millennial self recalling pwning n00bs). It can be used as a loose rubric in many kinds of humanistic analysis; while it has most notable factored into theology and political science, it can be applied in a great many other contexts, as well. Dungeons & Dragons addresses such topics fairly explicitly with its alignment system (that has shifted across more than five decades of production and play), so it does invite use as a means of exploring ponerological topics.

The situation in which the players’ characters found themselves at the beginning of the week’s session was something of a blunt presentation of the topic. They began the session where they left off the previous: fighting child-sacrificing cultists. Killing helpless children scans as a Bad Thing for most people (that there are exceptions is unfortunately clear). So is the obvious plot movement that suggests itself: the children being killed are themselves Bad Things. (Indeed, this is something that has been at the core of many Dungeons & Dragons games, that members of particular species are necessarily and inherently evil. While there are species that are representations of philosophical concepts, manifestations of other realities, applying such a rubric to physical beings is…problematic at best. Recent efforts to move the game’s official materials away from such framing have met with resistance from many players and groups. It’s not a happy thing.) I decided not to take that approach, in part because most of those at the table are still new to gaming, and I do think there is some value in presenting tropes straight on for such audiences–again, overt education is a thing in the program. I also have other plans for developing the story further, and it serves my purposes to have a clear framing for my antagonists in enacting those plans.

As I continue on in this program, I find myself reminded of earlier comments I made about how useful TTRPG materials could well be as technical writing course materials. I think I could well do more with such things at this point in my life, even so far removed from the classroom as I have become (and correctly). I perhaps flatter myself that someone might find that kind of thing useful to have me do for them; I’d certainly like to give it a try sometime…among all of the somedays already waiting for me.

If you need game materials–or instructional materials that work with games–let me know; I can help!

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Following on last week’s activites, I returned to my local library to once again preside over a session of Dungeons & Dragons for a group of middle-school-aged children. When the game had left off last week, there was a fight over a fish brewing within the party, which made for an interesting place to break off for the evening; cliffhangers work to prompt ongoing engagement, after all. When actual play resumed, that fight got addressed; afterwards, the narrative resumed pretty much as expected. Gamers are gamers, after all, and kids are kids–and middle schoolers are still very much kids.

Owing to the need to be more explicitly educational, however, I did not resume play immediately on starting the session. Instead, I addressed a narrative and ludological concern: metagaming. That I would need to do so was prompted by one of the players making a comment in the previous session about trying to read my mind…by pulling out a copy of the source text I was (and still am) using for the current narrative arc. It was clear to me from the remark and the action that the player is trying somehow to “win” the game. I’ve been guilty of doing such things, myself, so I can certainly understand the impulse. While there is some sense to some kinds of metagaming (there’s no way not to do it, to some extent; that there is a game going on is always clear within it, and the tension between the real and the game drives some of the humor that invariably creeps into play), I do find myself somewhat concerned to confront it.

As I play, and as I worked to clarify to the players way back at the beginning of the program, TTRPGs should generally be collaborative endeavors. That is, those at the table should work together to tell a story that is about all of them. The kind of metagaming that seemed to me to be brewing moves more towards things being competitive, with one player trying to make the game about their one character rather than about the group. Some of this will happen naturally, of course, dice being what they are, but there seems to me to be a difference between an organic emergence of such a thing and the calculated contrivance towards the same–and the former is, in my mind, better.

I’m glad that the player in question is actually reading. I’m glad, too, that the player in question is trying to think around things. Both of those are good actions to undertake, and I could stand to see more people doing both of them. And it is the case that the player in question, being one of the more experienced at the table (mine was not the first game in which that player participated, as was the case for several others at my library table), will necessarily know more about how the game works as a game and cannot reasonably be expected not to know it. (Indeed, I’m looking at said player as a candidate to run future games, one of the goals towards which I and the program generally are working.) But I am concerned about the player–and, to be fair, others, if for different reasons–making the game about themself rather than about the group…and I admit to concern about being caught out railroading my players, which is not a good thing to do.

What I’m doing, moving forward, is making a few changes to the text I’d originally thought to use; sticky notes are my friend in this. Some of the material was designed to be dice-determined; I rolled for that previously, making notes of results. I have adjusted a few points of narrative, as well, and redone progression through the major puzzle that presents itself in the published text. The player will still have something of a leg up on the others, which is okay, but the ability to simply read ahead and know all of what is coming…that has been removed, now, which should make the playing field just a little bit more level. The others at the table deserve their chances to shine, after all…which is a useful reminder for more people than just them.

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