COM 520 Final project reflection
View link for the reflection, if anyone is interested: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1SVh59_0YsDcvlz3Y5ZXSmWYeQ3lwIM19crCn1sGG86o/edit?usp=sharing
The initial hardest part of this project was narrowing down the focus of it. Our original idea was to take our knowledge of 5th edition Dungeons and Dragons, and turn the Live PD video directly into a 5e module, complete with dice rolling and combat opportunities. There needed to be a focus, though, and I have experience with the psychological side of Game Mastering, as a GM of more than five years and player of more than 7. We turned to the therapeutic side of it, and dove into research that explained dramatic play. Immediately we realized there was an issue- we had already worked in caveats I had outlined in my own notes for my own play: if the outcome is cool, or desired, and the dice aren’t allowing the action, then allow it anyway, because I control the world. The element of chance that dice rolling represents in D&D 5e doesn’t play well or is justified easily in application to the specific demographic we were aiming at working with- this was meant to be a therapeutic intervention. Why were we keeping an uncontrolled element in (literal) play? Thankfully, the basic procedure of Dungeons and Dragons, at least how I run games, can be adjusted very easily to removal of dice. All we needed to do was justify which answers or actions would work, and which wouldn’t, and we could easily continue.
The next challenge was everything else. We broke our intended module into three sections and played to our strengths: Beanie mapped out all three sections while I jumped into my deep dive for the psychotherapeutic basis for dramatic play in small group settings as a personal growth mechanism. I knew from my coursework in undergrad in psychology (mainly developmental psych) that dramatic play among your age group peers was instrumental to social skill development, and not to toot my own horn, but it’s a little hard to ignore as a GM that most (not all, but a slight majority at least) of your friends have been given the opportunity to embody whatever magical bipedal race they want, and pick whatever weapon and backstory they want, and yet still manage to pick direct allegorical character builds that reflect their real-life childhood traumas, or in absence of traumas, their general personal self-image. (They would then work through their traumas or image issues in front of me by playing wizards who could kill everything opposing them with fire, incredibly quickly, and I personally think that the cathartic element to pretending all your enemies are gone plays a huge role in this kind of growth as a ‘win’, but nevertheless, it applies to this module basis a little bit).
After returning with my successful source list, Beanie had already made headway on the entire outline, adding sections on the beginning (the context of the intervention) and the end (the debrief section). They had then started working on the first two minutes of the 5-minute video analysis. I filled in the resulting outline with the knowledge of roleplay that I had from my experience, and the psychotherapeutic conclusions I had fished out of Google Scholar and the URI libraries search engine. I filled in the smaller details of the picture they sketched out, and fleshed out the roleplay description (something I was uniquely suited to, as my main demographic of player that I run D&D for is primarily new players, so I’m used to introducing people to roleplay and walking them through the process). Beanie had taken on the bulk of the debrief section, and then we split the Session section 50/50 (Beanie took the first minutes, I took the second half).
This project was also an interesting experience in attempting to estimate the length of a piece of work neither of us had tried to create before. We’ve both played a large amount of Dungeons and Dragons, but it’s hard to encapsulate how many words are in a D&D Adventure Book (because no one actually ever counted- there’s no information available online as to how long the 5e Player’s Handbook is, for example). We estimated that this module deliverable might come in anywhere from 1500–4000 words. In its completed form, it runs 4097 words, just over the top of our initial estimate.
