Entering the World of Darkness

Had my second RPG experience with experienced GM Helgi Már Friðgeirsson and four enthusiastic colleagues last week. He used the World of Darkness system to set up a situation where we were on a plane, which was then (predictably?) hijaacked and crashed - I actually, more or less successfully, managed to land the plane. This system differs in significant ways from Dungeons and Dragons. The setting for play is usually closer to the so - called 'real' world. The mechanics of the game, the use of dice is much simpler. The characters are more realistic; the basic traits of vampires and werewolves are human and the goal of the game is to try to maintain your humanity.... but the game we played was entirely with purely human characters and (it's not quite finished) as of yet no supernatural elements have emerged. The concept of each character having a 'virtue' and a 'vice' and the fact that indulging your vice can boost your 'willpower' is an extremely interesting one. You also have as a character a scale called 'Morality' or 'Humanity' and this increases or decreases according to actions you take.  Example of a character sheet.

I've been thinking about how to apply this sort of thinking to teaching literature to the uninitiated with maybe not too much time. My latest idea, which would not involve too much effort on my part, would be to teach the idea of the structure of characters in this system, and simply get the students in groups to create sheets for characters in the work we're dealing with, and possibly ideas for how to apply events in the work to a game setting. This could be an interesting and creative approach. I like the idea of quantifying certain character elements, and clearly this is an excellent way to boost emotional and psychological vocabulary.

I'm thinking about developing a new game session for kids in DnD, and my plan is to translate most of the stuff into Icelandic to make it a smoother experience. I also need to consider my equipment - I've got plenty of stories in mind, no problem there.....


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First Dungeon Master experience!

I had a DnD session with my ten year old daughter and her friend club - two boys and one girl, four altogether. I mixed up a few readymade characters I found online and two stories. I had a problem because I mismatched the characters and the monsters, the characters were way to strong for the monsters. I am a firm believer in learning by doing and from experience and didn't spend too much time preparing. Next time I think I'm going to try creating my own story, monsters and characters and then presenting it in Icelandic, and simplify the format.... possibly I'll try buying a readymade adventure in DnD or some other format and sticking to that.

I find the details involved in DnD kind of daunting, but, I find the basic idea immensely fascinating and I am firm in my resolve to apply these methods in my teaching. Later this term I'm teaching To Kill a Mockingbird and I'm going to experiment with a simple RPG in connection with that, I'm not quite sure how but it'll come to me. Furthermore I plan on offering an elective next term devoted to the concept - more on that soon!

DnD with my daughter and friends

Tomorrow I'm premiering as a DM - I've prepared a quick adventure for my daughter's friends' club - printed out characters that look interesting, found some nice monsters, bought a manual, decided to use some plastic and a chessboard and pieces, got my dice ready, and found and changed a little bit a version of the pied piper that I found on one of the many sites devoted to this subject - I'm looking forward to it yet feel a bit anxious.... I'll get back with the results!

Role Playing Games

Well, after a long time of preparation I played my first round of Dungeons and Dragons as an adult, and my first real round ever, to be fair. This is kind of surprising given my nerdy tendencies and affection for fantasy and sf. What I really find interesting about RPG's on a wider pedagogical and experiential level is my amazement as to why this concept has not gained a wider following. It seems to me that this combination of games, drama, creativity and socialization has potential to compete with theatre, art galleries, novel reading, video games and poetry recitings (though I also wonder why those are not more common). Furthermore, it seems that the possibilities that lie in adapting this format to teaching are endless. The popularization of 'gamification' in marketing and such has mostly been linked to adapting the format of video games to online experience (according to my limited research) - but it seems to me that applying RPG mechanics, puzzle solving and dice rolling to the class room setting offers a lot of enticing possibilities....

My next experience will be with another form of RPG (not DnD), but 'story telling' for a horror game....

speaking and interpreting and feelings

Tried something new recently in class as a prep for student presentations. I made them prepare short speeches, one the one hand in English and on the other hand in gibberish. I find that the teaching of gibberish has been neglected, and they were surprisingly, or not, bad at it. It's interesting how hard it is to say something in gibberish without recognisable words. I also asked them to convey emotions as they spoke and they were also complete rubbish at that. One guy was unable to convey the feeling 'anger'... So I'm going to introduce more drama and gibberish to my English classroom.

Creativity & engagement: giving students a choice....

I'm starting up my philosophy elective course this week. I use a textbook that is actually coauthored by me, Heimspeki fyrir þig (Philosophy for you) - I have all sorts of interesting projects that fill the semester, but an innovation I'm going to try this time around is to allow the students to choose the chapters that we'll deal with - the book has 12 and we'll cover 5-6. They then have to scan it and make the case for the chapters they like. I hope this will be interesting and I'll allow you to follow the progress here on the blog! Another project I've got cooking is orangising RPG's for teachers, like Dungeons and Dragons, with an eye to incorporating those kinds of games into my repertoire of teaching tools. I'm developing an idea on teaching as an art and so this kind of activity is like a painter trying a new kind of brush or you know.....