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Wednesday, September 7, 2016

The Skill Centric Role Play manual is here!!!

     At long last the Skill Centric Role Play manual is complete! Tabletop role play is a fantastic tool for the teaching and strengthening of life skills. For people who have played these games whether Dungeons and Dragons, Call of Cthulhu or any of the many other great systems out there, the power of role play as a teaching tool is unquestionable.
     There you are, sitting at a table with your friends telling tales of brave heroes questing for riches and renown in a medieval fantasy setting. Through the story and the lives of your characters, unimaginable possibilities are achieved. You eat some snacks, make a lot of pop culture references (and Arnold Schwarzenegger impressions), have a great time and then go home hopefully itching to return and pick up the story at the last cliff hanger. These are all typical RPG experiences; but what was learned in-game?
     In the pursuit of riches and renown, the characters had to start somewhere. Perhaps they went to ye old tavern and used effective interpersonal skills to question locals for information on the town and the surrounding lands in hopes of learning a rumor that would lead them to forgotten temple or a dragons lair. The characters may have entered a trackless wilderness and had to rely on critical thinking and deductive reasoning to navigate back to civilization after taking a wrong turn. Maybe the characters ran into a hungry troll and were pressed into combat needing to recall from memory the trolls weakness to fire and its ability to shrug of wounds from nearly anything else. Ethan Gilsdorf gives a terrific overview of Dungeons and Dragons during his Tedx Talk, highlighting many skills which that particular tabletop RPG can teach, including how it has impacted him personally.



     The many skills which tabletop RPG's teach are often learned passively.  The Game Master doesn't set out to do so. Players learn just by being at the table among the group collective, taking part in the collaborative story. Whether delving into dungeons in games like D&D, or confronting eldritch horrors in 1920's Boston while playing Call of Cthulhu, tabletop RPG's teach invaluable life skills because they are a simulation of life, choice and consequence. The Skill Centric Role Play manual provides a structure which facilitators can utilize to actively teach predesignated skills to participants through the collaborative story and rule mechanics of Tabletop RPG's. What stories will be told? What skills will be taught? As with the in-game events that teach them, the possibilities are endless.

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