Introduction
Image: Magpie Games
Role-playing games, such as the eponymous Dungeons & Dragons, are becoming a popular activity for library and educational programming. This guide provides a critical overview of the field of role-playing games as programming, containing the resources needed to select quality role-playing games, set up a program, and run it successfully. It is not intended to be a scholarly review nor to focus on academic topics.
While this guide is aware of the dominance of Dungeons & Dragons, or D&D, in the role-playing space, it seeks to establish a base of knowledge that does not center around said game. D&D is the largest player in the space, but there are many other games that may serve a program better, some of which are explored in a later section.
This guide seeks to provide quality resources for organizers new to role-playing games, educational or library programming, or both. This is not a comprehensive guide, as the fields of role-playing games and programming are far too large to fit within one resource. Use this guide as a starting point to develop your knowledge, skills, and taste.
Search Strategies
There are no common spellings for many of the terms in this field. Use inclusive operators such as “OR” to search for different spellings of the same term. For example, “tabletop role-playing games” can be shortened to “ttrpg” or “trpg.” Hyphens can be removed or added, such as “table-top / tabletop,” or “roleplaying / role-playing.”
An all inclusive search such as: tabletop role-playing games OR ttrpg OR trpg OR table-top roleplaying games, can cast a wider net.
Many scholarly fields uses these terms, with “tabletop role-playing games” being the standard, but some articles on the wider web may use “Dungeons and Dragons” or “Dungeons & Dragons,” “D&D,” or “DnD” as a shorthand for the field at large. These terms are useful for finding blogs, community posts, or commercial websites.
Unfortunately, the scholarly field of role-playing games is not well developed, and as such articles tend to borrow the language of other fields. As part of my research in this guide, I used keywords and searches such as:
- Pedagogy
- Violen* to stand in for “violence” and “violent”
- Behavior
- Behavior* N6 issues
- Social N4 issues
- Cultur* to stand in for “Culture” and “Cultural”
- Libraries OR Library
- School OR Education OR Educational
Due to the lack of standardization in the field of role-playing games, I found the most success using aggregate search sites such as Google Scholar and Taylor & Francis.
When using Google Scholar, I would advise any user to ignore the main search bar and click on the three horizontal bars at the top left of the webpage, which leads to a menu that contains the advanced search tool. This tool allows for the use of operator searching without needing perfect diction. Google scholar is freely available, and is a good tool to search for books.
Taylor & Francis is the search engine of the publishing group of the same name. It is most useful for this topic because one of its publishers, Routledge, is a broad source for scholarship on games and role-playing topics. Using this engine does require a fair amount of browsing, as its search tools are not always precise. I would suggest combining operator searching and phrase searching. For example, (“role-playing games” AND “libraries”) is a fairly fruitful combination.
For anyone interested in critical research into role-playing games, the The International Journal of Role-playing is a small journal with a narrow topic. With only about 70 articles across 15 issues, the journal does not have a wide range, but it is the perfect source for cutting-edge research that can change one's perspective on the field as a whole. With such a small pool of articles is isn't difficult to find exactly what you're looking for with a simple keyword search, but as every issue is available for free, it's worthwhile to page through each volume and take note of what topics seem intriguing.