What is your backstory?  Who are you, and what kind of cool stuff do you do? 

Well, I’m John Bultena.  I’m from Merced, CA where I currently teach at University of California Merced and have since 2012. Also, I am the Game Master and producer of Abraxas’ Precipice: The Expanse Roleplaying Game Actual Play and proprietor of Cauldron & Tower, my line of fantasy minded shirts

I went to Merced College for three years, starting off as a computer science major.  I was primarily doing stuff with Cisco; they had an academy here, so I was doing advanced networking, router programming… This was like the late 90s/early 2000’s. 

I kind of stopped doing that because I got bored with it – I realized that computers were my hobby, and I didn’t really have a hobby if I was doing it for a job.  So, then I got into philosophy. 

I took philosophy classes at the community college, and I did really well with them, so, when I transferred to CSU Stanislaus for my undergraduate, I did a Philosophy degree, which was a really good experience.  I stuck around to do a Masters in Philosophy and Literature there.  

Then I went back to teach at community college for four years, then got a Masters degree in Library and Information Sciences at UCLA.  Since graduating from there in 2012, I’ve been working at UC Merced here in town where I now teach nothing but classes on tabletop roleplaying games, which is bizarre!

So, Merced, I grew up here, went to high school here, started community college here, went to other places for school, and then came back.  It’s a rural town; we had an Air Force base up here until the mid 90s, and that was a big driving part of our culture.   I’m not part of a big military family myself, but all my friends were, and this ties directly into how I got into tabletop roleplaying games. 

How did you get into TTRPGs?  Do you have some core memories you can share about that? 

The local base was called Castle Air Force Base, and it hosted B-52’s, so we had like… you know… nuclear weapons within seven miles of our house and were a primary target for the Russians during the Cold War.  I grew up around that kind of stuff.  There were a lot of WWII vets from around here, and one of the vets was this guy named Chuck Winter.  He was a son of a b, but a nice and fun guy.  He used to call me “Animal” when I was a little kid.  

He owned a store in town, just down the street from my house and the air base, called Hobby Castle, named for the base. It was a hobby store.  When I say hobby store, I don’t think a lot of people understand what I mean by “hobby store”.  Chuck had one side of the store he personally operated, and then another side of the store that had other folks working.  One side was where my mom used to go a lot; it was floral stuff, yarn, crafting materials, popsicle sticks, whatever kind of glue you wanted to get, a bit of fabric… crafting stuff like that. 

And then the other part was Chuck’s section.  Chuck was really into remote control airplanes and cars, and then that overlaps into models, then miniatures, then games, then stuff like Dungeons & Dragons.  

So, I would go to the store with my mom and we’d buy craft stuff, and I would see models.  My parents bought me some models of airplanes, and then I eventually started seeing these little figurines… and they were really cool.  Lots of fantasy stuff; monsters and knights and all kinds of different stuff, including some Star Wars ones.  Most of these, as I know now, were Ral Partha miniatures. 

My mom got me some when I was like seven or eight, and I wanted to paint them, and I found out that there’s a game that can go with them.  I wanted to get into that game, Dungeons & Dragons, but my parents didn’t get it for me because it was a little too complicated; I was still pretty young.  

But my buddy got it!  He got the red box books and started playing when I was nine.  It was cool, but it was hard to get together to play because we were trying to coordinate in 4th grade, so we ended up jumping into Milton Bradley/Games Workshop’s HeroQuest. 

Then, I got my first computer when I was 10, and while visiting my mom’s friend, her husband gave me the first Eye of the Beholder by SSI.  I played it and beat it.  Are you familiar with that game? 

No, not really, what was it? 

Are you familiar with Xanathar?  At the end of Eye of the Beholder, you kill the original Xanathar, and it’s a pretty grotesque death animation actually.  It also had one of the best mechanisms for adding characters to your party.  You find corpses, and you can choose to resurrect them.  So, you’ll find a bag of bones, and can resurrect them to see who they are.  It’s funny because some of them are like… they died in the sewers beneath Waterdeep, so they may have actively been doing bad things in the sewers.  You probably shouldn’t just resurrect random bones that you find in a sewer. 

It was a fun game, and it really taught me how the system of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 2nd Edition worked by playing that computer game.  I got that game from my mom’s best friend’s husband down in San Diego. He too was in the Air Force. He had a ton of old D&D stuff from the 70s, including Dungeon!, which I would play for hours with his daughter who was about my age. He would be the other vector that got me into tabletop gaming, showing me it was not just kids stuff.

As I was growing older, I ended up picking up more Dungeons & Dragons, playing more and more into high school. It also parallels my story of disability. I’m dysgraphic among a few other things, resulting from a traumatic brain injury at the age of seven. Always wondered how much getting into D&D at a young age helped me deal with that.

That’s kind of the origin story of where I started – growing up in a small town, these games were a thing to do.  Learning more about the origins of the game in Wisconsin, I appreciate the conditions of its creation.

Can you tell us a little about what you do in your TTRPG classes? 

My official title at UC Merced is a Continuing Lecturer in the Meritt Writing Program.  What I primarily have done for most of my career is teaching intro college writing classes.  This is dealing with freshmen, so Writing 10, a collegiate level class, and a few specialty writing classes. I’ve also taught engineering writing class and other upper division courses.  

We also now have a general education class, called Spark, which is a laser focused class with a purpose of cultivating curiosity in students.  They can approach a topic from any field they want, even if it’s not a field that they’re actively studying, and get exposed to the understanding that we can look at anything in a variety of ways.  Each Spark section has a different theme developed by an instructor, an expert on the respective topic. My friend teaches one on skateboard culture, another is about looking at wildfires.

When they started putting proposals for those in, I had tabletop roleplaying games on my mind, but I decided to go the safe route and did one titled“Social Media and Society” for a year to test the waters.  I stopped doing that one due to a few students witnessing the Christchurch killings live online, and I felt responsible for them finding and watching that because of the class, so I decided to propose the tabletop roleplaying one.  

The proposal went through in 2019, and I first taught it in Spring 2020, and I’ve been teaching that class since then.  Now it’s all I teach. I actually haven’t taught a writing class in over a year with me continuing that route for the foreseeable future.  

The title of the class is “Dungeons & Dragons: Skills IRL?” with the question mark at the end!  And yes, those words do appear on their transcripts; I verified it!

A lot of the TTRPG focused classes I have seen are like, well… we’re going to sit down and play games and use it as a way to develop social skills, wellness, you name it.  That’s great.  I get where you’re going with that.  My thing was like…

How do these games work? 

How are we able to play these games?  

What goes on up here in our heads when we play them? 

How do they actually generate meaning? 

I was more interested in seeing the games and their function and having my students look at the games and the cognitive elements within them, how it works in the brain, and the cultural elements of them.  We’re looking at how they generate meaning.  We even look at the industry, because there’s money to be made: how do you make money off this kind of stuff?  What goes into these games? 

I wanted a more precise picture of them than “let’s just play these things”. 

I get comments from a lot of other professors on campus about “it must be nice to play games all day”.  I’m like… we play one game the entire semester as a demo.  When I start talking to people about what we’re doing, they’re like… oh, wow.   I’ll get talking with people in the industry about the theoretical frameworks, and they’ll say they had no clue just how complicated these games are and wish they had more exposure to that angle of TTRPGs.  

These games work for a reason.

In the first section of the class, our core book is Dangerous Games by Joseph Laycock, which is about the Satanic panic.  He asks what roleplaying games say about the imagined world and religion and how that all interacts together.  

The Satanic panic is really interesting because we get to look at a moral panic about these people playing roleplaying games, but, the thing is, as a Dungeons & Dragons player, you’re not part of a protected class in this country.  You can’t file Title IX because you’re a D&D player.  Whereas a lot of other moral panics are focused on things like gender, race, religion, ethnicity.  This is not that, so we can kind of play with a little bit more in that regard, laugh about it to some degree, especially because some of the stuff that gets said is pretty absurd. 

Seeing that logic of how a moral panic works is really revealing to students.  Then, also, there’s how the history of these games is succinct in the book along with how they generate meaning.  We get a lot of theoretical frameworks, and I think it’s a very complete text.  

Laycock has very a good organization and is a good example of how to put together an argument because the first two thirds of the book are fact, after fact, after what this person said, where they said it, what else they said, and even the things they said that contradict the previous thing they said, or at least what they’re referencing.   The last third is his analysis and what he thinks is really going on.  

That amount of information gathering and a really complete bibliography is really handy.  Plus, the book is published by the University of California Press, so all my students can get it for free, which you can’t beat.  That’s a good move of equity in the class too because we have a very diverse student body. 

Going back to the goal of curiosity in the class, it’s about learning how these games work and how meanings are generated from whatever it may be.  At the back end of the semester, which is where I’m at right now with the class, they have to generate a research question about or using tabletop roleplaying games.  They don’t have to answer the question, they’re freshmen, but having them do the research to articulate and think about it… they learn how to go from a point of curiosity to actually getting the answer.  We are roleplaying researchers in a sense; I don’t tell them that, but that’s kind of what the broader art of the class is. 

The students take the class because some are big geeks.  They’re big into D&D stuff.  That’s great.  

Some have no idea and come in because they think we’re going to play games all day.  They want an easy grade. 

I’m like, nope!  They get pretty shocked!  It’s not like there’s a lot of work or the work’s hard, it’s just that there’s a lot to take in and it’s a lot to bring them up to speed on.  I constantly say that students that pass my class know more about how these games function and even the history of these games than a majority of professionals in the field today. 

That makes sense; if you’re sitting down doing an analysis of it instead of just playing the game, you have to more actively think about everything that you’re doing.  

I’ve had students tell me I ruined games for them!

Yeah, it’s kind of like when you hear a beautiful piece of music, once you learn how to play it and look at the theory so much, the magic can sometimes be lost for the one playing. 

I described it as, I’m not going to teach you how to be a good Call of Duty player… I’m going to teach you how Call of Duty handles netcode.  

I try to bring in a few guests, one or two per semester, and the visitors are usually pretty shocked at what the students have to say about it or what questions they ask.  They’re much more advanced questions than you generally get.  Don’t get me wrong; some have geek questions like which iconic character would win in a fight, but they also ask about approaching the sociological framing of RPGs and how do you maintain the illusion of it?  

Students get into the technical language because it throws them off a little bit; it’s kind of fun. 

We also read articles about what’s going on in the industry and about stuff like the Marshall Project, dealingwith  RPGs for people on death row, and we watch videos, most recently the one on wargames from People Make Games.

This semester I’m teaching an Honors section of the class.  They’re putting together a war game right now about public health, and we’re getting ready to execute it here on April 19th.  We’re playtesting on Friday next week.  It’s about nutrition on campus and about supply chain issues; an issue that’s been a bit of a bugger for a while.  

Do you have a final piece of advice, a statement, recommendations, a shout out, etc for the TTRPGkids crowd before we sign off? 

I think, for recommendations, people, TTRPG fans and designers, need to read more of the academic elements of this than they do, but I also think that a lot of the academic stuff that comes out is not doing any real work.  I don’t want to name names, but a lot of it doesn’t really say anything.  This is my problem. I feel like there’s a lack of bravery in it. 

I think the last piece I read that I felt was really brave was Aaron Trammelll’s Privilege of Play.  I have a lot of respect for Aaron’s taking the stab at stuff and throwing out really direct criticisms.  He’s taking a stance where there’s a lot of people that I feel kind of waffle on it and they want to be nice to everybody.  I get that, these fandoms have a notoriety for being jerks to anyone that says anything against them, or especially women and non-binary scholars and such catch a lot of flak for no good reason.  So, I get why people hold back on stuff at the same time.  

Oh, Rascal News! Those folks are super brave in the industry. They are consistently dropping great reporting while also hitting issues that many folks are not always comfortable with. Very brave stuff.

My call is for people to really be taking a stance on it.  I see people testing the waters here and there, trying to throw something out a little bit, a little bit more, a little bit more, but I feel like there needs to be a lot more bravery in it.  

As far as other shoutouts or advice, my attitude is to have a game, man.  Just play the game. 

I know this works. I have friends in that group I’ve been playing with for nearly 30 years and now her son plays with us. It just grounds us in the autotelic nature of fun with friends. 

If I can roleplay an elf wizard, why can’t I roleplay someone that wants to have fun at a table with their friends and eat pizza and drink soda?  

You can see it in an academicway, but you can’t let that stuff overtake you. 

My home games are radically different from what I have on my stream, Abraxas’ Precipice.  I’ve been running that for almost four years now, and it’s all one campaign.  We’ve had a lot of fun with that. 

But that’s a very different game than my home game, which is Dungeon Crawl Classics and D&D and all that good stuff.   

Just try some more games and have that home game that is sacred.  You don’t bring that one out.  You take pictures and stuff like that, but keep that story sacred.  And that’s a big part of what these games are, to be frank, because it attempts to touch the sacred.  

Our Dungeon Crawl Classics home game has been a blast for the last year we’ve been playing.  We’ve played D&D for a long time before that, but we’ve gotten really tired of D&D and it is a flat game as designed.  In Dungeon Crawl Classics, there’s some wacky stuff happening because it’s not balanced at all.  It can go horribly wrong very quickly which is half the fun with friends..  

I’m not sure what more I can offer.

This is all great!  I appreciate you coming to chat and share your XP!  Thank you John!