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The Unborne
2015-09-04, 01:24 AM
Quick background: I love/play/study games. My favorite research focuses on games and learning, so why not discuss my favorite genre with my favorite topic?

Anyways, roleplaying games tend to be the go to genre when gamifying a class (example: classes that use XP and levels to calculate grades). Based only on these surface features of RPGs, these games (for better or worse) seem to align with modern models of classrooms and education. But leveling and experience points are only tiny slices of what make tabletop roleplaying games so engaging.

So, my questions for all of you:

When have you found yourself learning in a tabletop RPG? What specific games and mechanics/themes encouraged you to learn something new?

I'll start with a couple of examples:

Tangential Learning (Link (http://extra-credits.net/episodes/tangential-learning/))
The Dresden Files RPG basically has tangential learning built into its game. Players come together to create a city, which encourages them to research places/maps/people/history of the selected location. Even if groups don't want to research cities, I find characters looking up naming conventions for different nationalities and reading fairy tales for inspiration. If nothing else, the game teaches players about the setting of the Dresden Files book series.

Transfer (Linkie (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning#Transfer))
While I think there are many opportunities to transfer the type of work/play that goes on in TRPGs to RL, my best example comes from my own personal experience. Playing D&D 3.5 offers a large amount of options (amazingly large when you start considering splats and homebrew) but provides players a limited number of decision points during character creation (e.g., you have a limit of levels, limit of skill ranks, etc.).

For me, optimizing the levels at which I acquire a new PrC has humorously transferred to getting degrees in college. Deciding which classes to take that fulfill major/minor requirements is second nature to me. I don't need to see an adviser unless I'm arguing for a certain class to count towards my major (a skill also picked up from negotiating with GMs for special exceptions and/or homebrew).

Seriously, I picked up two minors in one semester because I found a bunch of classes that fulfilled multiple requirements in different departments.

So, what about you all?

Kami2awa
2015-09-04, 02:20 AM
I use historical settings a lot, so I've ended up researching the following while preparing games;

- History of the middle East in the early twentieth century, for running a Call of Cthulhu adventure there.
- History of New Mexico for a Wild West game.
- Japanese culture and geography, for a game set in modern Japan.
- History of the French Resistance and occupation in WW2.
- Everything imaginable about the paranormal and unexplained, because it can be used in a game somewhere.

I've never felt the need to keep everything accurate (for instance, I moved the location of various places around in New Mexico because they were otherwise far too far apart to all impact on the plot). Sometimes you find very interesting things, such as that a significant number of the Resistance were drawn from the priesthood or monasteries, which gave some of my PCs an interesting background.

Also, I'm always on the lookout for ideas for games, reading stuff about the paranormal, exotic places, unusual science, etc.

NichG
2015-09-04, 05:39 AM
One of my favorite cases was playing a character who was very intelligent (it was D&D, and the character had high-op, post-epic levels of both Int and Wis), but whom I had decided beforehand would reason in a very different way than I was used to. For the character, I required that they basically favored intuition very strongly over logic, and in addition would be more strongly angled towards snap decision making, which I had to support by priming myself to be ready to make decisions as they came up, even without warning. Furthermore, I interpreted their immunity to Fear as a complete inability to experience emotionally-driven self-doubt - they could weigh the fact that they might be wrong, but they could never hesitate from uneasiness once the information they had suggested that action was better than inaction.

In addition, I generally tried to turn down GM aid in representing the character's abilities, forcing myself to actually try to do it myself. The handicap I allowed myself was to permit myself to try to read the GM's moods and tendencies OOC, interpreting that as a manifestation of the character's supernaturally high mental stats.

So as a result, at first the character had trouble due to the constraints I had put on myself. But eventually, it started to work, and then it even started to work to the extent that the character was figuring out stuff, un-prompted, that the other players were completely missing OOC (such as concluding that a group of sleeping undead would actually be friendly if woken up, because we had been summoned there to help a group of people, and they were the only thing even remotely like 'people' that we had encountered in the place).

It felt like learning to be comfortable with a mode of thinking that I hadn't really relied on directly before, which was really cool. Obviously IRL I can't read the face of the GM, but it maps on to things like trusting and making use of mathematical intuition and recognizing the difference between when intuition is working versus when its getting in the way, and things like that.

In my own campaigns, often I flip around bits of the laws of physics to see if they can figure out that they're in a world where things work differently on a fundamental level (e.g. 'in this world, causality is reversed, and so the past is determined in order to be consistent with the future rather than vice versa'). I'd say there's been some evidence of learning among my players based on these kinds of things - getting better at doing that kind of exploratory research in order to deduce how the world works.

I also tend to center the campaigns around big conceptual problems with real-world analogues, but partially obfuscated, in order to see what kinds of solutions the players come up with when they're disconnected from RL knowledge and biases. So e.g. they might need to solve the question of how to deal with exponential population growth, or how to create lasting alliances between multiple culturally distinct nations, or things like that. I imagine that can lead to some transferable learning as well.

nedz
2015-09-06, 08:27 PM
Apart from lots of more technical stuff my favourite example of this was one of my friends back when we were students.

I was running a sandbox game and he said, after playing for a while, "What I learned was that: If I do nothing then nothing happens". So my game taught him to be pro-active.:smallcool: