RPG Day 1
Yesterday was our first day of History and Culture of Spain: RPG Style.
I was listening to an episode of Back to Work the other day with Merlin Mann and Dan Benjamin, and they were talking about perfectionists. Merlin made a pretty interesting case for defining perfectionism not as the desire to continue to work on something until it is perfect, but the fear of starting anything because it might not be.
None of my students will ever accuse me of being a perfectionist in this sense of the word.
I started class yesterday by going over the syllabus. This did not take very long considering that the syllabus can be summed up with the following:
1) We will study Iberian history and culture through a game framework.
2) We will spend half of the semester building the game and half the semester playing it.
3) Students' grades will be based on XP, which they will gain by accomplishing missions in a few basic categories:
* Game Construction
* Gameplay
* Attendance and Participation
* Blogs
* Reading and Research
That's it.
After I explained those basic rules to the students, I had them download a dice app like Pip to their mobile devices, and we rolled for characters based on the plan you see here.
I know that I'm not covering all possible combinations of class, religion, and race in the peninsula during the time periods we will be focusing on, but I think I am allowing for enough variation that the students will come to understand the diversity of the peninsula.
So we rolled for characters, and it was really fun. For some reason, I had far more students roll for the 15th and 17th centuries than I did for the 6th and 20th. I decided to not to try to adjust things. We will see how it goes.
I finished class by grouping the students by century and letting them start to plan out how they will build their Core Rules and descriptions.
The one thing that I haven't quite figured out yet (and I really need to) is how to handle all of the document sharing that will take place in this class. I'm sure that Google Docs is the best solution. I'll roll it out slowly and hopefully we won't have too many snags. The possible missions and some rules are in this document.
