Dungeons and Dragons

Introduction

This expedition is for you if you enjoy tabletop role-playing games (RPGs), and you want to peel back the layers to look at their design underneath. Maybe you’ve wondered how the members of Critical Role and Dimension 20 use RPGs to entertain thousands of fans who are not even playing alongside them. Maybe you fancy yourself a game designer in the making, or you want to elevate your understanding of how games are built to be a better player. If any of these ideas resonate, this will be a fulfilling journey for you!

We will be working together to create and deploy our own original content using the framework of 5th Edition Dungeons and Dragons (DnD 5e). DnD is a game explicitly meant for groups of people to play together, dig into its rules, and add on to the creations of others, making it a perfect educational tool for game design principles. The ideas we will investigate and experiment with are useful for building any fun game, and learning about how people think and make decisions. They also offer an outlet for every type of creative mind. So pick up some dice, sharpen a pencil, and we will see you on the tabletop!

***NOTE: This expedition involves a high amount of creative work, and assumes you have at least a rudimentary knowledge of Dungeons and Dragons rules. If you are seeking strictly a place to learn or play, I highly encourage you to seek out the Sora tabletop club!

Essential Questions

• What collection of elements make for an enjoyable game?

• What elements make a game less enjoyable?

• How do different game design elements affect player behavior?

• How does a designer communicate their intention to a player, and/or give a player an intended experience?

• How do we unify the intention of a game designer with the free expression of a player in a tabletop role-playing game (RPG)?

Learning Objectives

• Identify and explain the use of different elements of game design in tabletop role-playing games (objectives, incentives, play loops, balance, interaction, player agency, etc.)

• Develop original creative content for tabletop role-playing games (encounters, quests, puzzles, traps/challenges, creatures/characters, items, systems, etc.)

• Make intentional creative choices in designing game content based on principles of game design

• Evaluate the effectiveness of created game content and integrate feedback and observation to make intentional changes

• Compare and contrast different game design choices and the effects/experiences that they produce