A commonly held theory: TTRPGs = MATH

When I’ve heard others talk about the educational benefits of TTRPGs, one of the first subjects that is typically brought up as an example, aside from social-emotional skills, is math! 

Because many TTRPGs have some kind of numerical mechanic that’s used for randomization, they have a clear connection to practicing basic math skills that doesn’t really require a TON of explination to see… at least at the surface.

As we dig deeper into TTRPGs and how they can be used to teach math skills, we can see that there’s many more opportunities than just practicing basice operations.

TTRPGs create a continuous series of skills practice sessions

In well known TTRPGs, like Dungeons & Dragons or Pathfinder, you roll dice, add them up, and then add or subtract modifiers to get your total.  You then compare it to a target number or subtract it from an opponent’s health pool to see how effective your move was.  

This practices single, double, and, sometimes, triple digit addition and subtraction of multiple numbers, reinforcing foundational math skills.  

In games like Arithmagine by Luck of Legends, you may also run into other math operations, like multiplication and division.  In this game, you draw cards and place math operator symbols between the numbers to try to get as close as you can to a target number.  

This practices addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, and possibly other operations as you’re actively manipulating the cards you’ve drawn. 

In both cases, players are repeatedly practicing their core math skills… but it’s different from learning them in class.  In class, it’s often filling out a worksheet and practicing them through rote repetition to get used to the operations.  

When in a game, these skills are deliberate and applied.  There’s a reason for doing them, and that reason is for fun! 

Story problems become exciting and relevant!

It also shows why math is needed – math is required to play the game.  It instills the idea that math is required in order to do certain activities in life, and it can open up doors to some pretty fun opportunities, at that. 

During TTRPGs, the story that you’re playing out will often require the use of various math concepts, in a very applied “story problem” type setting.

One of the most common ways that this naturally appears in our games, whether we are intending to teach math or not, is shopping or trading.

For young players, this could mean trading in physical tokens based on a menu that you provide to them (kind of like trading in arcade tickets), or it could involve more complex problems where a group of players each have different amounts of coins and need to work together to figure out how they can collectively buy a vial of The Legendary Waters of the Silent River from a totally legit traveling merchant in order to complete some kind of quest from one of the player’s patrons.  

In both cases, players are getting into story problems that are way more interesting than common class examples like “how many apples must Lisa trade to Mike for 3 giant boxes of raisins if the boxes of raisins are worth $3 each and the apples are $1 each”.  Kids don’t particularly care about trading apples and raisins… but they do care about trading magical tokens that they earned from an in-game carnival for the party to get a matching set of rings of giggles at the trade-in counter at the end of the event!

Compounding skills and introducing advanced math to your games

For older kids, you can also start introducing other story related math problems, like calculating interest.  Have a merchant offer the party a deal where they can pay back later, but there’s a 3% per month interest fee applied until they pay off their debt.   

Make your merchant overcharge the party for it, so they have to do the calculation to figure out what’s actually owed.  Again, this practices math AND applied math life skills (that mean a lot more because players have now experienced that impact mid-game).  They’ll remember this later in life as something to look out for… and will know how to check someone else’s work if they ever suspect an error that could negatively impact them.

Expanding from here, you can introduce math concepts in planning and tactics.  If a fleet of rogue AI battleships is approaching the spaceport at known speed and you have a map of where they were last seen… it’s possible to calculate how long you have to prepare for their arrival… with a bit of algebra.  

You can show players the equation or have them work it out so they get more information and see how this could be useful in calculating something like airplane flight times or how GPS’s get part of their arrival estimates. 

Puzzling out solutions to SO MANY in-game challenges

Then there’s dungeon puzzles!  If you’re on a classroom unit about trigonometry or even calculus, have your group investigate a dungeon that was once occupied by a group of people who communicated through that specific type of math!

Let the party solve different equations written on the walls to decode what paths to go down and to get codes for opening various dungeon doors and treasures throughout the adventure… and then make the prizes AWESOME to reward the team for their hard work.

You can also give players bonuses for doing extra math that’s built on existing, non-math, mechanics within the game.  

If a spell says it covers a 10ft radius around the caster, offer players a bonus to their damage if they can calculate the area of the circle based on the radius that was given.  If it specifies a 5ft sphere, a 15ft cone, or a 10ft column, offer a bonus if players can calculate the volume of the impact zone as well.   

4 players > 1 player when it comes to supportive learning

Let players work together with this too – players who are strong in math can teach and support those who need a bit of help, which builds cooperative learning skills and a support system for the whole group. 

For those who are already strong in math, they’ll get stronger by helping others and may find that they have a knack for teaching! When I tutored, it helped me practice my existing math skills on a regular basis while I was helping others who needed the support… and it felt great. Kids can do that here as well, and it fosters a community of collaborative learning as everyone needs to learn these skills to play instead of emphasizing who has the highest marks in class.

There’s an infinite number of paths to take when it comes to TTRPGs and math

And there are so many other routes to go with this!!  You can have a game event that involves trebuchets that need to be adjust to launch properly on the board or ask players to calculate how deep a hole is based on how long it takes to hear the sound of a dropped rock (so they know how much rope is needed… or how much fall damage may be involved) or have a conman try to cheat the characters out of a promised prize by not following order of operations (unless players catch him in it)… and I could keep going on and on. 

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To summarize, TTRPGs, with their given mechanics, can be a great way to practice core math skills AND they can also be a great medium for incorporating other lessons via the freedom that comes with story creation.  

These games take math and show how it can be used for fun and practical life applications without the pressure of encountering some of these concepts for the first time in a graded situation or a real-life event. 

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