Open Educational Resources

For a class of senior psychology undergraduate students, 6 domains of psychology were chosen as session topics: stress, lifespan development, psychopharmacology, industrial/organizational psychology, social psychology, and cognition. Other fields could create sessions relevant to their field, such as:

• Anthropology: focus on different cultures
• Literature: different novels/texts
• History: different time periods
• Biology: different biomes/environments

Sessions happened once every 2 weeks, were prewritten before class time, and conducted during class time. Each session varied in length between 10 minutes and 1 hour. Sessions should be tailored around other learning that needs to occur in class.

A printed character sheet is given to each student. They spend time filling this sheet out. As the instructor, you can assign the traits yourself or lead the students through an exercise to choose their traits (such as spinning a wheel to determine what race a character is, or flipping a coin to determine if a character has 1 or 2 kids). Traits such as gender, sexuality, marital status, living status, education obtained, number of kids, occupation, race, income, debt, poverty status, country of origin, time period, and many more variables could be used to make each character unique.

Each character will also be given a unique array of stats. In traditional roleplaying games, stats are sometimes randomized by rolling dice or are chosen from a set of numbers. I’ve found that providing an array of numbers for students to choose from forces students to prioritize some stats while having to sacrifice performance in other stats. Students choose how to balance their “stats” (or, characteristics), which gives them agency over their characters. For this, traditional D&D stats were used and fitted to be applicable to the subject matter. These stats include strength, quickness (changed from “dexterity”), health, intelligence, wisdom, and charisma. Higher stats give students “bonuses” on their rolls (+1 or +2 to a roll) and lower stats hurt their chances (-1 or -2).

Randomness is important for this activity. Physical dice were used in varying dimensions (20-sided, 10-sided, 8-sided, 6-sided, 4-sided) in addition to “Wheel of Names” and Google’s “Dice Roller.”

Student learning was assessed through reflective writing rather than traditional testing. After each session, students submitted a discussion board writeup in which they predicted how their character would behave in, or react to, the outcome of that session, supporting their reasoning with scholarly journal articles. For psychology students, some chose the option to treat their character as a potential future client, considering the situation from a clinical perspective. In other fields, this same structure could be adapted by having students write from the perspective of historical figures, animal species, or cultural figures instead. At the end of the semester, students synthesized their experience into a brief PowerPoint presentation summarizing their character and their journey across the sessions.

While all resources on this section of the site are freely available for you to adapt and copy (with credit, please!), there are several ways you can design and run a productive session.

Be flexible enough to accommodate all characters. Sessions should be written vaguely enough that any student can see their own character within the scenario. Vague framing works better than specific framing: rather than “Your husband left the house messy before he went to work,” a more flexible prompt would be, “The house is messy, perhaps from kids, roommates, or yourself.” This wording lets every student interpret the scenario through the lens of their own character’s circumstances.

Focus on one or two character stats per session. Situations with outcomes left up to chance are determined by rolling dice tied to a specific stat, or characteristic. It’s easiest for students to track and engage with a session that emphasizes a few relevant stats rather than trying to use all of them at once. Choose stats that make sense for your own field.

Build in several rolling opportunities with varying tiers. Students like chance and find it one of the most fun parts of the activity! Using dice allows for outcomes beyond a simple success/failure binary; the numbers needed for each tier can be set based on how difficult you want the outcome to be, and can even be adjusted mid-activity based on how the class is rolling overall. As an example of how you could split up outcomes (based on rolling a 20-sided die): rolling a 5 or below results in a bad outcome and a -1 penalty to a future roll; 6-8 is a less-than-ideal outcome; 9-12 is an average outcome; 13-16 is a good outcome; and 17 or above is a great outcome plus a +1 bonus to a future roll.

Stick to one overarching theme. A session built around a single theme works better than one that tries to integrate several themes or topics at once.

Create opportunities to interact with other characters. Students should have a few chances to interact with the other “characters” in the class over the course of a session. Students are often more willing to act out a scenario, or voice a thought, when it’s their character doing it rather than themselves.

Create opportunities for one-on-one roleplay with the instructor. Students should be encouraged to interject when it’s true to their character, even when that means departing from the planned script, and to engage in direct roleplay with the instructor. For example, students were told that even if their character had just caught a cold, the character would try to go to work anyway (and potentially perform poorly as a result). One student pointed out that her character had leukemia and would be unlikely to risk going to work with a cold, and would instead go to the doctor’s office; she rolled with Charisma to see whether her character’s boss would grant her the day off. This kind of interaction keeps students actively engaged rather than passively participating.

Practice rolling the dice and calculating the outcome based on the character’s abilities being used during that roll, ahead of time, so the process is smooth during class. Students could also be required to reply to other students’ discussion board post summaries (either in or out of character) to further their immersion in the activity. Randomness, whether during character creation or during sessions, can be increased or decreased to suit the instructor’s goals.

View the scenarios on the side to see a writeup of how sessions can go. These are actually sessions that have been conducted over multiple semesters and have been effective year after year.

Pre- and post-session surveys captured how students experienced the activity. Students appreciated being able to customize their characters, and they liked the randomness associated with both character creation and session outcomes; some students wanted even more room to customize. They looked forward to upcoming sessions and generally felt the activity was good “practice” for their career goals, and reported that it helped them gain knowledge about diverse populations. The most well-liked session was the first one, which also involved the most dice rolling of any session in the sequence.

Students wanted a transcript of the events they could look back on while writing their reflections; it is up to you whether to provide the instructor transcript for them. Students also said the rules were not hard to learn, and that it was exciting to participate in an activity they’d seen represented in popular media.

Several students reported feeling challenged when trying to find literature relevant to their characters; this broadened their view of how certain groups and topics are underrepresented in research. Students also said that realizing their character could be representative of a future client was useful, prompting them to consider that character’s limitations, differing viewpoints, and priorities.

Most students had never played an RPG before; by the end of the campaign, over half of students expressed interest in playing one again.

The activity was also evaluated more formally, using a pre- and post-activity assessment administered at the start and end of the term to measure students’ attitudes about the activity and to look for shifts in empathy over the course of the semester. Two validated instruments were used:

• Toronto Empathy Questionnaire (TEQ): focuses on the emotional reactions of individuals in response to the experiences of others, capturing the affective component of empathy through a series of brief, straightforward items.
• Scale of Ethnocultural Empathy (SEE): measures empathy toward people of racial and ethnic backgrounds different from one’s own.

Across the full sample, there were no statistically significant changes in TEQ or SEE scores between the pre- and post-activity measures. However, splitting the sample by race (non-white students compared to white students) revealed some notable shifts.

By the end of the activity, white students felt less confident than they had at the beginning that it was easy for them to understand what it would feel like to be someone of another race or ethnic background. Non-white students, meanwhile, found it easier by the end of the activity to relate to stories where people talked about daily racial or ethnic discrimination than they had at the start; white students’ scores on this measure were unchanged. Non-white students also related more strongly to feelings of racial or ethnic isolation by the end of the activity than they had at the beginning.

Implications: These patterns suggest the activity may increase cultural awareness and empathy among non-white students, while also highlighting, and over the course of the semester correcting, a degree of overconfidence among white students about how easily they could understand another group’s experience.

Data collection is still ongoing!

The activity doesn’t need to be run exactly as described above; several elements can be scaled up, down, or reworked depending on an instructor’s goals and constraints:

• This can be a “one off” rather than a full-semester campaign.
• Information could be selectively given to some students and not others (envelopes, Clue style).
• You don’t need to have 6 stats; experiment with more or less.
• Several students can work together with the same character rather than everyone having their own character.
• It can be adapted for an asynchronous/online format by writing out the session script beforehand and allowing students to roll for themselves and read the outcomes based on their roll (“choose your own adventure” style). PowerPoints that use “advance to X slide” hyperlinking can also be used, and I successfully used them during an online summer class for these exact sessions.
• For face-to-face courses, absent students can be rolled for and updated later, or provided something similar to what an online student might be provided in an asynchronous modality.

The core structure of character creation, session-based scenarios, and dice-driven outcomes can be adapted to a wide range of fields:

English & Literature

Character creation: Students could create characters who are aspiring writers with different backgrounds, writing styles, or who exist in different time periods. Students could also create characters that fit within the context of the text currently being read (or simply take on one of the characters already in the text).

Session topics: “Changing the Plot” asks how a student’s in-universe character would react if a pivotal point in the text had been different. “Banned Books” has student characters argue for or against banning certain texts from the perspective of different individuals (writers, educators, politicians, people from different time periods, etc.). “Writing in Secret” has student characters represent writers using pseudonyms, exploring what led them to that choice, its pros and cons, whether they were successful, and any backlash they faced.

Biology/Other Sciences

Character creation: Students could create characters who are scientists, medical professionals, other living organisms, or patients.

Session topics: “House Hunters” asks how a student’s created organism would fare in a variety of conditions, and whether it would be able to find food, shelter, and so on. “Medical Results” has student characters who have just received medical results (genetic testing, lab results, etc.), exploring the prognosis and how that individual is likely to handle the situation; this could also bring in ethics and competing motivations, with half the students playing doctors and the other half patients. “Pandemic” explores how different people would be motivated to act and react in a pandemic scenario. “Mars Needs Help!” has students roll to see whether a new Martian colony withstands weather events, a viral outbreak, or a lack of resources, problem-solving either as occupants on Mars or as scientists working remotely from Earth.

History

Character creation: Students could create characters who are figures from relevant time periods, either real-life figures or unnamed people of the era.

Session topics: “What-If” has characters live in a world where a major historical event has been changed, and navigate the consequences. “Time-Travel” has characters from different time periods meet and consult with one another about issues of that era, surfacing how their perspectives differ on technology, morality, ethics, and society.

Anthropology

Character creation: Students could create characters who are members of different populations than their own, current or past.

Session topics: “Fish-Out-of-Water” asks how a character would react in a novel scenario or environment. “Starting Over” asks what kind of new society a student’s character would build, including what social roles, laws, and rituals it would have, and how it would handle conflict. “Migration” has characters face conflict as they migrate their community due to environmental, cultural, or safety challenges, navigating relationships with outside tribes, alliances, or trade difficulties.

Sociology/Political Science

Character creation: Students could create characters who are social workers, everyday people, or policymakers.

Session topics: “Urban Planning” has characters representing different community members work together to design a city policy that satisfies everyone. “Fake News” explores how a spreading false news story would impact the characters, and society more broadly.

Art

Character creation: Students could create characters who are artists, museum curators, art critics, or members of the public.

Session topics: “Censorship” asks how different members of the art world—critics, artists, activists, and public figures—would respond to a modern art installation causing public outrage. “Is It a Fake?” has characters use their skills as art critics to determine whether a piece is authentic; characters with higher charisma might have a better chance of gaining access to a repository of “real” pieces for comparison, while characters with higher intelligence might recognize a material or technique that hadn’t yet been invented at that time.

Students are invested in a character they create. This activity lets them explore scenarios that aren’t typically accessible to them, and through research about the topic, students learn about other people, cultures, organisms, or time periods along the way. Roleplaying as someone or something else turns the activity from passive to more active, and taking on a different perspective leads to increased awareness, self-reflection, and empathy.

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