If there was a university degree in RPGs, what would the course syllabus include as must-read material that every RpgD...

Fuck I meant Runequest.

Hey hey, we're forgetting the most important class of them all.

>Inclusion 101 - How to include blacks and women in your game without ruining it

Oh yeah, I forgot GURPS.

>GURPS - the quintessential universal system with a million expansion books

After gaming 20 plus years as long as the person was born in the US (and not there following someone they lusting over), I never had a problem race/sex of players. Now those Asian kids raised on anime ... LOL

Taking the b&

>Intro to Numerical Encounter Simulation 1 & 2
>Applied Statistics 1 & 2
>Histories 1 (Tactical War Simulation)
>Histories 2 (Post TWS; Chainmail -> D&D, GURPS)
>Histories 3 (Modern RPGs; D3.5-5 SR4 - 5)
>Applied D6
>Applied D20
>Applied Dxx
>Intro to Role Playing
>Intermediate Role Playing
>Game Mastering 1 - 2

for a start

>Taking the b&
Taking the band? Which band?

When I was attending, the University of Western Ontario featured a course on Tabletop Role Playing games as part of its Media, Information and Technoculture faculty.

It started off with game history and influences, then moved into game design principles and game theory, before then covering a lot of philosophical areas associated with gaming such as issues of identity, structure of narrative, gaming as ritual, aspects of player agency, issues of ethics, morality and consequence, game as narrative (and the analysis of game mechanics and stories from a literary point of view), the psychological and sociological effects of tabletop (esp. regarding the developmentally challenged, since that's where all the science has been looking), and probably a bunch of other stuff that I can't remember. It was an essay intensive course that required everyone in it to engage in at least one session per week.

One of the flaws with looking at gaming from a scholastic point of view is that tabletop sessions are rituals which don't produce much in the way of artifacts to study. The recent trend towards game recording and streaming has helped alleviate that somewhat, but its still a slow start to get it out of the gate and there haven't been a lot of people in the scholastic community willing to sponsor students interested in it as an area of study. As the hobby continues to gain momentum in the main stream, scholastic study into it will start to take off, much like it has for video games.

If you're interested in learning more about looking at tabletop as a scholarly thing, you should check out "The Creation of Narrative in Tabletop Role-Playing Games" by Jennifer Grouling Cover, or "The Functions of Role-Playing Games: How Participants Create Community, Solve Problems and Explore Identity" by Sarah Lynne Bowman, just to get you started.

Required reading shouldn't overlap so much with what "everyone" has read. English Lit majors don't spend their whole degree reading best sellers.

Anyway, Eclipse Phase, Technoir, Paranoia, Drama System, Cthulhu One-to-one, Cthulhu Dark, Fiasco, Dogs in the Vineyard, Dread, something using One Roll Engine, Night's Black Agents, Unknown Armies, Shadows of Esteren, The One Ring.

Those should all be required, and that's hardly exhaustive.

And you're not losing anything by not talking about fucking Rifts or Warhammer 40k (for RPGs I mean) Only War or Rogue Trader might be worth discussing.

And you could do a lot by comparing how and WHY similar games differ. Call of Cthulhu vs. Trail of Cthulhu vs. Nemesis vs. Monster of the Week vs. Cthulhu Dark, D&D 3.5 vs. D&D 4e vs. D&D 5e vs. 13th Age, AD&D vs. Lamentations of the Flame Princess vs. Barbarians of Lemuria etc.

Reading the 10 best selling games or whatever isn't a good way to learn about game design.

>enroll in university
>get accepted into math program
>all we do is adding
>like, nothing but adding
>only time we do subtraction is in the context of adding negative numbers
>no trig
>no calc
>not even division
>just adding

Glad I'm not the only one laughing at OP.

>Ethics - Fatal and your magical realm

All this cultural theory is fine but I was more interested in which actual RPGs would form the core of a curriculum.

Did you read actual RPGs in this course or just commentary on RPGs?

Should also include My Life with Master, Maid, and Exalted.

>which actual RPGs would form the core of a curriculum.

It would be a mistake to only focus on RPGs as the core. Campaigns and scenarios should be required reading too, probably even more important actually.

Masks of Nyarlothotep would be a big one, but just a wide sample of well-written scenarios would be important too.

And a lot of shorter indie games instead of all big giant rulebook ones. You need a few of those, but you can discuss a wider variety of mechanics by looking at shorter, simpler games.

>not Warhammer 40k

Understanding why a thing is popular and fun for millions of people is a requirement for understanding that thing.

And what exactly is Warhammer 40k teaching you about RPG design that you aren't learning from D&D?

>Understanding why arguing about Team Jacob and Team Edward was fun for millions of people is a requirement for my film degree.

In the actual RPG course I took, we had, in order:
>All of D&D, from AD&D to 5E and all the shit like Spelljammer, condensed into 2 lectures and one playtest day
>Savage Worlds
>Deadlands, both original and Savage Worlds
>Vampire: the Masquerade
>Shadowrun
>Intermission: Make a Homebrew Setting
>Mutants and Masterminds
>L5R
>Mouseguard
>Intermission: Apply Homebrew Mechanics to the Homebrew Setting You Made
>Dark Heresy
>Traveller
>LARPs
That took about 3 months. The last chunk of the semester was spent in a massive collaboration with everyone in the class to set up a LARP for the campus. We made a Western with Avatar-style Elemental powers instead of guns (we weren't allowed to have even prop guns on campus) that ended with the last men standing (a collection of art majors, the basketball team, most of a frat, a handful of sorority girls, and a Chemistry professor) in a battle against a horrific monster that had mind controlled the entire state of Utah from within its lair in the Great Salt Lake.

why

Yeah, if you've ever worked on a curriculum committee, the emphasis is on core abilities. There will probably only be one or two classes that actually survey each game, and even then looking at them for comparison/contrast. Usually, the specific examples of games are left to the individual professor.

The other problem is this. What exactly are we studying here? How to play? How to DM? How to be a game developer? How to be a criticism or connoisseur of RPGs? I'm aiming for a general program of study that covers all of this lightly.

Yes, we briefly studied the Dungeons and Dragons corebook as a text and were encouraged to use other rulebooks as objects of study in the course of our essaywork. We were not, however, graded on our understanding or familiarity of the rules, but instead our ability to analyse and interpret those rules in a scholastic manner.

Focusing on just the rule books and systems would be like reading a variety of camera operation manuals and somehow calling that a film education.

A proper PhD in tabletop would involve a ton of theoretical and philosophical work to understand the commonalities and principles underlying the hobby in all of their subtle and impactful ways. You'd be able to read a new ruleset and be able to understand what sort of player-GM behaviors and relations those rules are aiming to promote, how people are going to respond to them, and how they fit in the greater community. Its not knowing a bunch of rule systems -- its about understanding them.

Maybe you could get Uncle Kev to teach a class on how to rip off 1.4 mil....

...is that you, Bill?

Could I get a masters in FATAL theory?

That's pretty metal.

I thought it was him as well.

>A proper PhD in tabletop would involve a ton of theoretical and philosophical work to understand the commonalities and principles underlying the hobby in all of their subtle and impactful ways. You'd be able to read a new ruleset and be able to understand what sort of player-GM behaviors and relations those rules are aiming to promote, how people are going to respond to them, and how they fit in the greater community. Its not knowing a bunch of rule systems -- its about understanding them.

Yeah a doctoral degree is a whole different animal. Even a ttrpg-d (clinical doctorate) would be primarily focused on learning how to study and contribute to the literature about RPGs. You'd be expected to learn individual systems and settings on your own time or as illustration of larger design/setting/theme issues. It's a RESEARCH degree. You're not learning about RPGs, you're learning about how to study them.

In most doctoral programs you'd be expected to pick up the systems on your own time.

Seminars tend to revolve around specific areas in the published literature, and within that specific streams of research/comment within an area. So you might have a seminar on game balance. Then within that each week's topic would be an area of research in the game balance academic literature: stochastic distributions, systemic elaboration (how complete the rules are), mandated advancement (classes/levels), incentive structures, etc. Then another seminar might deal with social implications of gaming, and have sessions on gender, morality, class, race, etc.

I think what OP wants is more like a BA in rpgs. Keep in mind, this is a four year degree. Look what did in one course in one semester.

OK so here's my curriculum. Let's assume that it's a 20 course program. Five courses per semester for four semesters (the other two years are university core curriculum requirements). Plus a couple more that means either a summer, a fifth year, playing with your university electives, or a really busy semester or two. Some of these classes will end up in a core curriculum anyway.

Now, there's a legit question about what someone getting a degree in RPGs would be studying to do. Is he going to be playing? DMing? Will be be a game developer/writer? A critic of games? Each of these is its own area. If I cared enough, the list below would have tracks for each of them. But I don't care THAT much, so the below reflects a focus on world-building. *s indicate a class specifically taught by a professor in the RPG department.

Probability and Statistics
Improvisational Theater
Storytelling and Oral Tradition
* Survey of Roleplaying Games
* Game System Design
Fiction Writing
Digital Publishing
Human Geography
One of (Environmental Science, Intro to Ecology)
Physical Sciences Elective
Integrative Theories of World History
One course from the following: (Intro to Sociology, Intro to Anthropology, Intro to Political Science, Futurism)
Military History
2x history electives
Microeconomics
Macroeconomics
3x fine arts electives (Intro to Linguistics accepted for one)
* Worldbuilding for Fiction
* RPG Setting Design (capstone)

Now, a realistic program of study would have tracks as I said. And probably room for electives in the RPG department (partly to cover specialized areas and interests but also because professors get bored teaching the same preps year after year).

As you can see, you could build this major mostly out of classes already taught in most universities.

This is a good list to work from. It's a wide variety of genres, playstyles, and mechanics. It includes the key players in RPG history. Basically, you want to give people breadth across a field but also depth in the most important games. Certain games are important because they show the range of RPGs as a genre, some are important because they illustrate an important philosophy or concept in gaming, and some are just historically important.

So on that note, I'm not seeing why you'd have Deadlands and Savage Worlds. One or the other, sure, or both in a single lecture. I'd replace that with GURPS (in a lecture that also notes but doesn't make you learn Champions/Hero System).

Similarly, Mouse Guard seems out of place. I'd rather put as my indie game Numenara, and then include No Thank You, Evil in the lecture as the RPG for small children example. It's a different style of game, too, so it covers a lot of ground.

But the list is pretty solid overall. I get the feeling that the professor took a list of must-haves (IMO it's a crime that he didn't include GURPS even if he doesn't like it) and then slipped in a few of his personal favorites. That's pretty much how you do it.

Much less normie shit. Probably an actual survey of the real diversity of games. You dont go to college to learn about memes.

And Shadowrun and WoD.

HERO, for the OG (and best) universal system. Its CHAMPIONS line is also the best for Superhero RPGs

I think thats a pretty solid list. Sounds like a pretty typical liberal arts education actually.

I can see why you'd focus on world building, but I think you're taking too much of a simulationist perspective with it. I'd put a bit more focus the narrativist side of things by swapping in some required english/literature courses and maybe a philosophy course or two. Lots of universities these days also offer courses that deal with video game theory, so if the university in question is lucky enough to have a decent media program, we might be able to steal a few courses from that as well. In fact, the whole program would probably be under the media faculty, so it wouldn't surprise me if there were some special topics in media you could take as electives as well.

I'd actually be really curious to see what kind of electives the RPG department would offer.

Game theory is economics.

What would be the best system to run a Gangs of New York style game?

Game Theory is Game Theory.

Economics may use parts of it.

Well the leading expert on it is an economist so by most people's standards its economics.

By nobodies standards is that an indicator that Game Theory is Economics, all that indicates is that Economics is a game, albeit a game with potentially devastating consequences.

Apart from CharOp, there's not much application for game theory in actual real world RPGs. I'd have it as a single unit within a general class on game balancing and system design, showing a few key insights rather than trying to go down that rabbit hole. And in my experience even academics often misuse it such that their conclusions fall straight through from their premises. I'm all for heavy math, but I'm not going to march a fine arts major all the way through to differential equations to solve a problem that I can just tell them the answer to, or so they can solve a problem that playtesting or a Monte Carlo simulation will answer just as effectively.

Yeah, I agree. This is why I suggested course tracks to let you do that. The problem is that you're asking a young adult to put themselves in debt until they're well into their 30's for the sake of learning your material. Sure, sure, love of knowledge and human enrichment... but really it's about that piece of paper that HR law says is one of the only criteria employers can use to distinguish between applicants.

What I'm getting at is employability. The reason to get a degree in RPGs is to get a job in the industry, or a related field. And that means that setting and game system development are the obvious jobs. Yeah you could get one of the one or two paying jobs writing reviews of games, but that's a long shot. And love of the field will only get you so far.

With that said, yeah I agree that narrativist tracks, and more composition classes would be very important and should probably be their own options as well. You're right that philosophy should at least be an option alongside sociology/anthropology--- in practice there's considerable overlap between those fields, though they'd burst into flame if I said that in front of one of them.

The media classes are a great idea. Probably there'd be a business elective to let someone get a general business class, or something in entrepreneurism or marketing.

As for electives. something on organizing and running a LARP would be fascinating. It's not a performing art because the performers are your customers. Your job is to be a faciliator, moderator, story builder, and of course watch out for trouble makers. National security simulations have been a thing for decades, and they're essentially government-run RPGs writ large. A class in that would be cool. Artificial language development would require that Intro Linguistics elective but be an RPG class.

Mount and blade warband

But user, calculus is just really complicated counting

There are are a few ways about it, because just "a degree in RPGs" is actually pretty vague.

Either it would be a cross-disciplinary degree covering literature, communication, UX design, and optionally a bit of graphical design. Perhaps out-and-out game design to boot.

Or alternatively, it would be purely anthropological and cover the history and cultural relevance of pen and paper RPGs.

You're overthinking it. Check the thread, all you need is 160 40-hour weeks of whining about Deadlands and you'll be a supreme authority.

Ooh, yeah, business and marketing classes would be a must, given the number of people in the industry that are independent publishers.

I wouldn't be surprised if there were a few independent study courses in the upper years, focused on simply developing and completing your own complete RPG, checking in with the prof every so often to make sure your on the right track. That would make for a pretty good hook for the course/program, kinda like how you come out of film school with a reel for your resume.