Role-playing in the college classroom

[bayonetbrant]

http://www.heraldonline.com/news/local/education/winthrop-news/article75023332.html

ROCK HILL
Krysten Hudson recently picked up the hobby of tabletop fantasy games. This semester, she translated that interest into college credit in Winthrop University's first class on the subject.

Hudson, a 22-year-old psychology major, was one of 16 students who through the class created a 44,000-word document that describes the settings, characters and other details for a role-playing fantasy game.

"I really love the storytelling aspect, and watching the story be played out," said Hudson. "At this point, if I wanted to write my own piece, I would know how to go about it."

The class was taught by English instructor Christina Stiles, who has for two decades been writing and selling tabletop games on a freelance basis. Stiles also attends gaming conventions and leads gaming groups, a hobby she said is still predominantly male.

"I thought it would be an interesting writing class, outside of the normal thing," Stiles said. "And it's a professional writing class; people get paid to do this."

Stiles said students started the class by learning the rules of Pathfinder, a fantasy role-playing game that is an extension and modification of Dungeons and Dragons.

"The story has a lot of pieces to it," Stiles said, "so it can be daunting."

They then began to imagine and describe settings and characters that would be part of the Pathfinder game. The descriptions were written in detail to create a lengthy gaming supplement.

The students created a town, called Ravensburg, populated it with interesting characters, provided four additional locations for exploration, and created four adventures to test the mettle of players.

Stiles said her students were divided into four groups to create the fantasy. The other settings they created, she said, include a cathedral, a prison farm and Blythe Manor, a place outside the town.

Hudson said she and some of the other students drew on their interest in fantasy to create pieces of the game. "It just takes a good imagination," she said.

Hudson, an honor student, also wrote a thesis about gaming. She said the subject was areas of research to determine how gaming could help people with social disorders.

Stiles said gaming is heavily dominated by men, but she said her 16-member class has four female students. Gaming "has been stigmatized as a geek hobby, something that boys get to do," she said.

Another tabletop game enthusiast, 23-year-old December Cuccaro, who also took the class, sees writing games as an opportunity for freelance work "if you can break into the industry."

"It's a lot of group work, which it would be in real life, too," said Cuccaro, an English literature major. "A lot of these games are designed by teams, and you learn to put together conflicting visions. It's a lot of back-and-forth criticism as you put everything together."

During the class, Stiles said author Faith Hunter visited to talk about creating a fantasy, and the students ran their own mini-gaming convention, where they shared the game they'd created at the table.

Stiles, who is planning to teach the class again in the spring of 2017, said she is looking at selling the supplement the students created to a game publisher to benefit the Winthrop English department.

She said some of the students were doubtful their creation was good enough to be sold, but Stiles believes it has potential. "The main purpose of writing it," she said, "is to see it played at the table."