Dr. Friedman, can you tell us a bit about yourself? 

I am an Associate Professor of English at Auburn University.  I come from an educational background that’s a combination of public education until high school, a few years at a private Catholic all-girls school, and a womens’ college, Bryn Mawr.  I did my Masters at University of York at the Center for 18th Century Studies.  My doctoral degree is from the University of Missouri. 

I’m a specialist in 18th century literature as well as book history, which is the study of all parts of book production and the book trade.  We can think of that like the life cycle of a book – how it gets written, edited, published, and disseminated into the world. 

That is how I’ve come to the study of tabletop role-playing games in actual play, which has become my specialty, particularly since the 2020 pandemic shut down.  A lot of the archives that I was using to study never published manuscript fiction, but it has taken off because there’s a real interest by students in this work.

As a gamer, I started in tabletop role-playing games as a teenager during the downturn of Dungeons & Dragons – Dungeons & Dragons was not on my radar at the time. Instead, it was The World of Darkness and Steve Jackson Games because I grew up in Texas. 

In college and graduate school, I was doing different things, so it wasn’t until I came to my position, here in Auburn near the start of the 5th Edition of Dungeons & Dragons release, that I found myself at a table with all historians!  There was a literature historian, a theater historian, and then a bunch of other members of the “actual history” department. 

I also now run several games myself and help with playtests.  As my teaching developed, and I started teaching about tabletop role-playing games, after returning from remote teaching, it was really important that students feel like they could safely not attend class, but… I wasn’t teaching a lecture class!  These are hands-on classes where students are playing games, and sometimes even making games, so I started recording recaps of my class, day-by-day, and making them public on YouTube for reasons that I no longer remember!  

It was really handy because it turned out that my students didn’t need them as much as my fellow teachers, both at the college level and at other levels.  They really found it useful to think about how games could be incorporated into the classroom.  I have then been plugged into communities of practitioners who are thinking about incorporating games in many ways and into communities of designers who are using them as an artistic medium. 

At this point in my career, I’m saying that I’m the senior scholar in tabletop actual play, but I’m actually part of a much larger community of analog game studies where I’m happy to be amongst a large and welcoming community!

That is awesome!!  And what a journey too!  I love this so much.  Going back to your academia game too, I can only imagine that playing a TTRPG with others in the same department as you had to be an absolute blast. 

Well, I have to say, because I’m in an English department, it is really nice that everyone else at my table is not.

Oh!  OK, I get it!

Most of the rest of them are in the history department, in the building right across.  We’re close colleagues and our research often overlaps, but it is nice to “always have friends on the outside”… and outside means lots of different things in your life.  This is definitely one of those!

Out of all the games you’ve played, what is one single moment that is your favorite? 

I’ve been writing lately about some of my experiences with Yazeba’s Bed & Breakfast, but those are holistic.  In terms of moments… I think one of my favorites was when my nephew asked me to come to his Montessori classroom when he was 8 years old to run a game, and he originally asked for Dungeons & Dragons.  I said absolutely not, but then he asked for the “skulls game”, by which he meant The Quiet Year.  I was more than happy to do that. 

So, I ran The Quiet Year for more than a dozen 8 and 9 year olds, all sitting in a circle at a Montessori classroom.  It was a shorter version of the game where you pull a lot of the cards and determine which of these are terms that either I don’t think they’re going to know or that we can’t really explain, and you cut it down for time. 

The Quiet Year is recommended for ages 12 and up, but I would recommend it for younger ages and have played it with my 4 year old niece.  You just have to explain what an omen is… it’s like a rainbow in the sky that says that things might be good!

It’s a beautiful introduction into what story games can do, and you have introduction into maps, and, the best part is, is that no else is supposed to talk when someone else is taking their turn… but you can pull the little skull contempt tokens to show if you disapprove of something that’s happening.  It’s really great, even with a very large group of players.

I remember near the end when all hope seemed kind of lost and the kids had drawn this zombie chicken, and I wasn’t entirely sure how to bring all the narrative threads together at the end, I had this idea that the zombie chicken was going to save the day.  Everyone cheered, and that was a good moment!  

It was a very unusual game of The Quiet Year, but it’s a good reminder that we’re all game designers!  We’re all hacking while we’re playing, and the key is that we’re all having a good time. 

Getting into the TTRPG courses that you’ve taught, can you tell us a bit about how you’ve seen that impact your students? 

The origin point is that, in 2018, before I even started game studies, I was sitting in the crossroads between a lot of different fields.  I was writing experimental articles about digital humanities for book historians, what it means to write about book history for 18th century people, and so on.  

I saw a call for papers about tabletop role-playing  in the digital age, and I’d been watching Critical Role, so I thought… hey… I’m a narratologist, I’m a person who studies the shape of stories, and Critical Role is awfully weird.  It’s super long, and I’m wondering how audiences are managing that.

I wrote a piece about narrative time that came out in 2021 that was immediately adopted in the classroom, including one in Germany with a future collaborator, Adrian Hermann.  

Inspired by that, my colleague, Dr. Craig Bertolet, who was in charge of undergrad studies at the time suggested that we use our technology, literature, and culture credit number to teach a class on games and storytelling. 

It filled in an hour, and, I later discovered, that that course number filled a requirement for English Education, so a lot of my students were teachers as well as students doing our design track in Public and Professional Communication.  

The first version of that class was in Fall 2021, and people started inviting themselves into my classroom like Aabria Iyengar and Tim Hutchings from 1000 Year Old Vampire.  It became part of my rotation every fall to teach at least one class that focused on games. 

At the end of each class, I do Stars and Wishes to inform feedback for the next class – what should we keep or change or have more of.  Students said very quickly that they didn’t need video games.  They didn’t need screens.  They loved these games because they’re together and for the ability to step away from devices, except for things like Alice is Missing.  Make it a strictly analog and tabletop role-playing game class. 

I’ve taught it in a variety of forms, and when that course number is not available, I teach it as an overload, an honorous seminar, where most of the students are non-humanists.  There’s lots of engineers and scientists, and students are getting course credit for literally helping me with research. 

Every fall, I teach a graduate course, and that is always an 18th century class, and in 2022, it was Playing Austen.  There’s a lot of Jane Austen and Regency inspired games floating around, and this time it was about playing the 18th century.  It wasn’t exclusively tabletop games, but primarily tabletop games. 

I’m a research professor at an R1 university, which means that I have a teaching load of 1-2 courses per term, and I alternate very small classes (like 6 students) with ones that are 12-24 students.  Every spring, I teach a class that is 120 students as an Introduction to Core Literature.  That’s the ebb and flow of my labor as a teacher these days.  

I tell my students that they’re very lucky because they can be closely supervised in a class that is labor-based contact grading, which means that they agree at the start of the semester on the work that they’re going to do and the grade if they complete that work.  They also have a final project that is of their own devising, and I’m their coach to work that out.  And it can be anything, including the very creative!  I’ve had students do splatter painting and other kinds of games… and we do that by having them write a meta-cognative reflection that incorporates why they did what they did and how it was influenced by the different games and readings encountered from across the semester.

That becomes the part that is actually graded, the assessable object. It gets them excited about playing and does not instrumentalize it.  Gamification is not on the table in these classes, although it is very present elsewhere in the university in those types of ways. 

I think that having the separation from the nitty-gritty grading through the semester really helps students focus on creativity.  

One of the things that has been really striking to me, because I am such a visible person, is that, by teaching TTRPGs online, I get a lot of correspondence from my fellow educators.  In the conversation around TTRPGs in the classroom, they ask how they can justify it and turn it into a tool, and I get hives from that conversation!  I’m lucky to not have to do that contortion, and I am very well aware of that.  Part of my role is to say that we don’t have to do that all the time.  

We don’t need to internalize the things that we have to say to administrators.  There are things that we may need to do beyond the space of our classroom to kind of defend what we do, and the challenge for me is when that actually influences what we need to do with students.  As someone who sees TTRPGs as something that can be liberatory in the classroom, I really don’t want it to turn into another set of points and gold stars but with a better lick of paint. 

Do you have any particular bits of advice or recommendations for an educational TTRPG that people should get into if they’re looking to bring this into the classroom?

One of the ways that I can answer this is by talking about the staples of my classroom.  

It’s visible here on the video, but I have multiple copies of For the Queen, which is now published by Darrington Press, formerly by Evil Hat.  I teach it as the very first game in every single class.  It is very quick.  You can play it in 15-20 minutes and still get a feel for it.  It is a really good way to introduce the rhythms, and it’s a game that teaches itself.  The Teach teaches you how to play the game because it is a mechanism of drawing a card, reading it, and doing a thing with it.  It’s always been in my class, regardless of the theme or topic… and you can throw a whole bunch of copies in my bag, and they don’t take up a lot of space!

I mentioned running The Quiet Year for my nephew, but that’s also been another staple in my courses because it takes you to that next step of collaboration and change over time.  It gets into more fiddly elements. 

I’ve also been very excited since getting the box for Yazeba’s Bed & Breakfast, which has the benefit of having stickers and being bookish.  It is a game that is very much about thinking about what it is.  And it’s just a fun delight.  I’m very increasingly likely to have students with prior role-playing game experience from something like Dungeons & Dragons… What’s fun about Yazeba’s is that the total newbie is often more adept at sliding into the game and helping the poor struggling D&D player, which is a wonderful reversal. 

This year, I also added Dialect in the 2023 and 2024 classes.  That’s one where you need to select the scenario with care, specific to your students, but I like it better than Reacting to the Past.  Reacting to the Past is a LARP inspired role-playing system.  The way that they make assessable objects out of that to justify its existence is to have a whole bunch of writing by making speeches.  You’re also playing through a real historical scenario with real historical documents with real historical people… and there are pitfalls to games and history!  I’m thinking about all the ways that my period is weirdly represented in games!

What’s nice about Dialect is that it is inspired by 18th century history, but doesn’t anchor you in those. 

On the most challenging level, my grad students did the “Slave Uprising” scenario because I knew that we had enough under our belt to do that.  It’s very clearly inspired by the Haitian Revolution and other Caribbean-based revolutions of enslaved people, but it’s not asking you to be those people.  It’s asking you to imagine a similar scenario and what it is like to go through some of the contours of that and then be free.  What do you do in that moment of isolation and then freedom, which set us up really well for engaging with historical documents in ways that are stronger than if there had been, and there isn’t, a Haitian Revolution Reacting to the Past game. It took us a whole lot less time too.

Thank you Dr. Friedman for taking time to share your XP with us and for the work you’re doing to teach others about tabletop RPGs!  It’s been great talking to you, and I look forward to hearing more stories and seeing how your students impact their own classes!

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