The past couple of weeks have been very productive in my Iberian History and Culture class. Students have now worked in groups of time period, race, class, and now religion. It has been very exciting to see them move in the liminal space between research and imagination to create some really great stuff.
Today was a really important day, and I believe that at the end of the semester when I look back and decide if this class was a success or a failure, I will be able to point to this day as a crucial turning point.
I have been stressing for the past several weeks about the game-play aspect of this class. We are getting fairly close to winding down the game creation part, but I’ve had a hard time envisioning what the game play part would look like. On the first day of class I asked how many students were familiar with Dungeons & Dragons and nobody raised their hand. Then the other day in class I realized that while many of my students are not D&D players, there are several who are gamers and are familiar with other RPGs.
So today I explained to them a little bit of the background that I have created, based largely on ideas presented in the excellent short story “El día que hicimos la transición” by Ricard de la Casa and Pedro Jorge Romero.
I told students that in some distant future humans would discover the secrets of time travel. They would also discover the ability to create a “Time Bubble” that exists outside of time but can look out and observe the flow of time. These people are called Time Defenders and their job is to maintain the timeline of history. There are others called Time Terrorists who are motivated only by a spirit of chaos. They want to create havoc by tampering with the timeline in order to create the greatest historical impact possible. Because we are working with four different time periods, I want to have the terrorists focus on those four different years and have my students try to stop them. (Does any of this make sense?)
When one Time Defender dies, the other members of their crew simply goes back along the timeline to another point and gets a person that they feel best replaces the one who was lost.
So in class I proposed my dilemma to the students: how are we supposed to run an RPG with 30 students in the class and make sure everyone participates. How am I supposed to come up with four different fleshed-out scenarios when I’m not really familiar with RPGs as it is?
I told the students that I know that some of them are capable of helping me to create these missions/scenarios, but that I really can’t see what it is going to look like. Then one student raised his hand and said: What if you had a different student in charge of each mission, you put four or five students on a team and they went through one mission and then teams rotated around to different scenarios?
The students who had any idea of what we were talking about immediately latched onto the idea and I could tell they were excited about it. So that is what we are going to do.
Eight students immediately volunteered to be “Dungeon Masters” or Leaders of Time Terrorist cells. These are students who are very familiar with RPGs. They are divided into teams of two and each team is in charge of creating the Terrorist Scenario or Mission (depending on how you look at it) for each of the four periods on which we are focusing in class. I pulled these eight into the hallway and stressed to them the importance of what they had volunteered to do. They will be doing a ton of research over the next couple of weeks to create not just scenarios, but to create a simple set of rules to govern gameplay based on the core rulebook we have been developing. When we start the gameplay these students will be running four different scenarios at the same time in class. I will be wandering around the room observing, answering questions, etc.
I think the idea is genius. I’m so proud of my students for coming up with it, but I have to admit that part of me is terrified at the idea because I have given up a HUGE amount of control over the class. This is a big risk, but I think it will pay off.
After I left my 8 Cell Leaders to discuss their strategy, I went back into the classroom to make sure that everyone else was OK. I told them that it is totally normal for them to feel overwhelmed at this point and that for now they just need to keep reading and developing their characters. The rest will make sense as we go along. I said. “I need to reach into the freak-out zone where you now are and pull you back into the learning zone. Everything is going to be OK.”
They looked convinced.
So that’s where things stand right now. It’s going to be a crazy next few weeks.