Any homebrew adventure is game design.
This is the TEETH newsletter, a regularly irregular transmission about our adventures in the top secret world of Tabletop Roleplaying-Games. We have published a whole series of our own TTRPGs now! More are coming! And we shall also play many others, and then write about those experiences right here.
This newsletter is written and compiled by fell incantation Jim Rossignol and mystic hymn Marsh Davies.
Hello, you.
Links!
INTERVIEW!
Hello, you
So this week we have an interview with one of our readers, Tom Burmeister, who has been using TTRPGs as part of his work as PlayFrame, which is an educational outreach which aims to use digital and tabletop games to improve the lives and minds of young people. There’s a lot to be said about this aspect of games, and we really get into some of it, below.
Meanwhile, Marsh and I have been making moves to get some more material out there. We’ve got a Teeth-adjacent project in the works now, and a new, original PWYW type thing coming soon. While that will mean you can pick it up for free, we’re also now paying to have this newsletter on a service which doesn’t enrich Nazis (Substack’s position on the subject was unacceptable, so offer we went to this, our new home!) and so when the time comes we would appreciate every penny that people can throw into the old hat!
Also, in case you hadn’t noticed, Bluesky is now open to general sign ups. We are rebuilding things there for social interactions, for obvious reasons. Come and find us!
-Marsh & Jim
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LINKS
Thing of the week is our old comrade in journalism Quintin Smith launching an RPG reviews channel. He’s really good at video and has boundless enthusiasm for tabletop RPGs, so I am very interested indeed to see where this goes. The Wildsea was a game I had pretty much ignored, so it was provocative to have Quinns demanding I pay attention to it in this video. Go take a look!
Darkened Hill & Dale is very much in our ballpark/blighted valley. "Six horror scenarios for tabletop roleplaying games set in the modern British countryside... the launch title for This Blighted Isle—a new series of system-flexible horror scenarios set in and around modern Britain."
Very interested in Dread Nights (clever title, I agree) which is a Mork Borg-compatible tabletop skirmish game with some beautiful presentation.
We kicked off a new Blades In The Dark campaign this week, so it was interesting to see a new urban fantasy heist game materialise on the scene: Swyvers (from Daniel Sell of Troika fame, as well as the wildly talented Luke Gearing) is colourful and provocative pitch that uses the word “Arseholes” in a way I haven’t seen before in an RPG presentation.
Beetle Knight also captured my heart.
Research this week led me to Third Man Factor — “reported situations where an unseen presence, such as a spirit, provides comfort or support during traumatic experiences.” —which led to some thoughts about how this has some weird resonance with how RPGs present different voices.
INTERVIEW
The Trickster: Tom Burmeister on Sneaking Education Into Tabletop RPGs, And Tabletop RPGs Into Education.
Teeth reader Tom Burmeister uses games, both tabletop and digital, as educational tools. In this interview we talked about his work, his goals, how games reach young people, why GMing is game design, and how educational institutions are now aware of what TTRPGs are in a way they were not just a decade ago. Also: why Baldur’s Gate 3 is just too cool for us old men.
After discussing the ins and outs of Microsoft’s Teams platform, the Rock, Paper, Shotgun Rezzed event being a very long time ago, and the Crate & Crowbar podcast being a national treasure, we get to the really important stuff. (This is an edited transcript of a video call!)
JR: Anyway, let’s talk about play used educationally and therapeutically. I’ve been writing about games for nearly twenty-five years now — hell, one of the first articles I wrote was about how games were used for pain management! — and the realisation about how games are integral to teaching and to therapeutic activities is one that keeps appearing in the press. It feels like it’s not new, but it does keep being discovered. In fact, I remember when I was at primary school the teacher ran an RPG which had the staff and pupils running an iron age village. That was forty years ago! It is one of my key memories of that time! And yet this sort of activity never seems to push through into a broader mainstream awareness. It keeps being reinvented whenI feel like it should be some sort of staple activity by now?
TB: I think the thing is that role-playing games are a very exclusive sort of activity, in terms of the number of adult facilitators-to-children. You might have one adult for six or seven, at a maximum, but ideally three or four, and the challenge in education generally about pushing the envelope broadly of that ratio. What I come up against when I am using RPGs educationally is the question of “how many people do you want me to try and affect? How many kids do you want me to try and reach?” Say I am taking VR into a school, they might say “we want you to get all of Year 7 done in a day”, and if I am guiding that many twelve year olds through something, then it’s at most a three-minute experience. It’s going to be tiny unless I have forty headsets and a huge amount of space. The private sector probably has a rather different experience here, where their class sizes are smaller and where tutors are able to cater to smaller groups, but for most educational purposes it’s going to be extra-curricular or only be able to help small groups.
JR: True of these games more broadly.
TB: Yes, and all that said, the attitude that kids bring to a thing when they’ve signed up to deliberately is often very different. I’ve just gone back to working at a college as a tutor on a videogame design course, and they’re interested in games more broadly and so their attitude is radically different. What I have previously done with PlayFrame was still clearly school, formal education, and it never passed the sniff test of whether we’re trying to teach them something. It’s a shame because I am working with a great indie designer, Paige, and we have a feeling that if we just got kids in school to make games rather than meet the criteria of the assessment of their abilities, then their attitude would be different. And they would probably ship a few small games! Education is very much driven by assessment, by criteria, and so the attitude of kids will often be “have I done enough”, “is this good enough”? Rather than being based on passionate output.
JR: That sounds familiar!
TB: The issue with games and education more broadly is that it’s either framed as gamification, where you try to use the weird impulse loops of games to encourage learning in a way that is really not that much different to awarding gold stars and seeing numbers go up; or it’s this edutainment thing where kids can smell that you are trying to teach them something. Instead, I think, we should look at the games that are out there and study them. Games that are set in periods of history have their problems in terms of what they are representing, but at the same time they can be objects of study and analysis, you don’t need to make a new game that is an educational version. We can talk about existing games and do teaching, talk about what a game gets right and wrong, and learn from that, rather than hoping that the game will do the teaching. And this can work in all kinds of ways: take literacy, I was working with a group of kids with very low reading ages, and I put the Inkle game Sorcery on some ipads, a choose your own adventure with language which was way beyond the language they were engaging with, we could get them to all read a bit, and then make a choice. That single point of interactivity meant that they had to comprehend what they were reading, not just making the sounds and the words, they had to engage with the meaning of it. It wasn’t just saying the sentence to get through the guided reading. That can really help with kids who are otherwise struggling to read. What I am trying to say here is that: I want to use games that are already out there as sources for education. That was my original concept for Playframe: let’s use Rome: Total War to allow us to talk about Roman history. From there I drifted over into tabletop RPGs. And all this is quite local to where we work in Cardiff, in Wales, and I always shrink back from sharing it. I am not very good at talking about why this is a good idea! I don’t tend to share this stuff because I don’t feel like I am good at engaging with the wider games community.
JR: And you should share it because it is a good idea. This is the sort of approach and attitude that should be spreading around how games and education mesh with each other. And on the topic of community, I do understand that reticence about engaging, because it’s both anxiety-inducing and quite a lot of work. But I think there being a rich games and specifically TTRPG community runs deeper than promotion, because there’s just a lot going on! TTRPGs are just on fire right now in terms of exuding possibility, there’s a frenzy of creativity that reveals to everyone that there’s just a lot of ways to work with it.
TB: Oh definitely! But my chief problem is that I am often dealing with twelves or thirteen year olds who may be autistic, are often queer in various ways, and have already become fascinated with D&D, and often that experience has collapsed for them because it’s incredibly complicated, and so they end up with this sort of imagined picture of what they want to get out of it. They often understand that there’s a bunch of other RPGs out there, but have no way to know which ones will be suitable for what they want, and so I am often there trying to explain different games and suggesting what they might try. I am always looking for single session experiences because getting school age youths to come back to continue a campaign is a challenge. I mean scheduling is a classic TTRPG problem for all ages, but I would say it’s a particular problem for the kinds of young people I am often trying to work with. Everything can happen for those kids in a single week at school, and they will be in a different place a week later! Night of The Hogmen I ran almost as soon as it came out, even though you put an 18+ sticker on it! It was totally suitable for—
JR: I think the 18+ was just because Marsh drew a penis on the Hogman and so we censored ourselves.
TB: Ha, that’s just a lesson in anatomy! But the whole thing about a series of weird encounters, and the tone being so clear and well developed, it makes a great example of the kind of game that works. I also use CBR+PNK? I absolutely love that. That physical item! It’s one of the most physically beautiful RPG objects I have ever seen.
JR: Right here on my shelf, what a beauty!
TB: But there is some sort of renaissance going on with TTRPGs: there are adults who want to play new and old stuff, and teenagers who want to learn and to play things that are different. I feel the indie culture that we had in the late 90s and early 2000s has been supplanted now by people identifying in particular ways, particularly acknowledging neurodivergent identities, which also happens to have a very close circle overlap with tabletop role-playing, or fascination with card games. And this has been a broad movement, so from my point of view what is interesting about this is that institutions are now beginning to be aware of tabletop roleplaying in a way that it was only individuals before. Culturally it’s just a lot bigger! Stranger Things means people know exactly what it is, or are reminded that it exists, and that has meant that for my space, getting funding to do projects that are about role-playing games is a lot easier. Public good and outreach stuff like we do with Playframe has become more straightforward. I don’t know if ten years ago if I had approached a funding body whether there would have been any interest in a roleplaying project. Yet when more recently I spoke more recently with the Erasmus exchange project’s funding body they were fascinated by it. They understood immediately what it was. Ten years ago you were getting a lot of video games in education because it was seen as a route to get kids using computers educationally, and that’s all still happening and valid, but institutions have realised that stuff like code-clubs or other digital games activities is a particular way of thinking which a lot of kids who are into creativity and playing games find hard to develop. As is making a good board game! Some mathematical rigour can be required! TTRPGs are a much better early stepping stone, because they can be easy to learn. Just teaching a kid to be a GM makes them into a kind of game designer, because every GM adapts a game in some way and does their own thing with it. Any homebrew adventure is game design, and so we can get institutions to understand that this is the easiest way in.
JR: I think one of the things that I loved about Grant Howitt’s one-page RPGs was not just his ludicrous level of creativity but also the fact that people like my own kids felt that the lo-fi nature of them sort of gave them permission to do something similar!
TB: Yes, I agree. And I at the same time I don’t mean to make light of the work involved, when it comes to the Dwellings & Dragons stuff I have been doing a lot of the work but I want to put the kids names on it and make it their work. They’re co-creators and that’s because we are not trying to monetise it. We have this thing up front paid for by an organisation who are happy for it just to exist and have the process to make it exist. That’s the same approach we’ve applied to Trickster’s Net and Biosphere Guardians and now I am working on something with ACE, which is Action In Caerau & Ely, you might remember there was some social disturbance there recently, and the guy I worked with there said “we need to try and reach some of the kids who are at home and who aren’t coming to the youth club” or aren’t engaged with other community efforts, and to get them to engage with their environment. So for that we are doing an urban fantasy thing where they are themselves but they get to turn into animals and then navigate the way across the world in a way that isn’t normal for them, forcing them to talk about their actual experience of the geography of the place they live. They get a lot out of that.
JR: How does this stuff you are doing work?
TB: Trickster’s Net is the big one, or the starting one, because I had been doing board game cafes and team tabletop stuff for a few years, and I was going to be connect up with Barney Dickers who has made a few interesting RPGs, and is now based in Germany but was based in Wales, so we got connected up, and that was during covid where we were part of what was aimed to create an online exchange project so that Welsh teenagers and some German teenagers meet online to create an RPG. At first we run games for them, and then we get then engaged in the process of GMing. It’s about managing young people on a Discord server, which is hard because young people often haven’t learned great skills for managing focus on social content online, so our engagement varies, but that’s one of the challenges of it! We got them to produce artworks, we had some people come in to talk to them, such as Lynne Hardy from Chaosium which gives an opportunity for fourteen year olds an opportunity to talk to these successful professionals in RPGs.
JR: Yeah, I think presenting games as a Thing People Make, and giving people access to the reality of that can be quite transformative. When I was growing up the topic of “what jobs people actually have and how they do it” seemed totally lacking from any advice about my future. There was nothing at all about magazines, publishing, or games as jobs, let alone insight into the media themselves. Not even in media studies! (Which barely existed when I was at school, to be fair.)
TB: Using games as education has a particularly useful aspect with the interactivity of them which allows you to discuss elements and perspectives non-linearly. For example, you can learn the facts of history, but studying the systems which enabled the consequences that we record as facts to happen, then playing with an interactive system allows you to see that. That’s a commonly lost element in education where we tend to teach things as “one damn thing after the other”, instead of looking at things systemically. And a lot of the problems in the world are systems-based ones, where systems are not working as we expected, or that have unexpected consequences. Young people should be taught to think in terms of systems more so that they can solve the problems of the future. Not to push too much weight on future generations, but I think that aspect of games is why they can be great in education and in therapy as well. Our minds and bodies are systems with consequence and if we can engage with them in a safe context of imaginative discussion we can understand them better. What I have mostly worked in is not therapeutic so much as connection, engagement, and outreach, getting young people from backgrounds and worlds to sit down and not talk about themselves, but to talk about fictions they are engaging with and inventing. I like to use this concept I call the “three body solution”, so instead of two people sat facing each other, you are stood side by side facing something else, which is a trick interviewers use. Focusing on any kind of activity where you are sat side by side doing, driving a car or playing a game for example, allows you to connect. The directness of facing another person is removed.
JR: Yes, I definitely agree with that. There’s also an interesting echo there of the challenge of having one GM and one player, rather than having a GM with more players. One on one games are very intense and only really work if both GM and player are feeling relaxed and confident, while if there’s a group ideas emerge spontaneously in discussion and conversation, players with less experience or idea of what they should be doing get carried along. I do have plans, actually, to work on something that would make one-on-one games more approachable, in much the same way that people have produced a tonne of materials for solo play, because, as you mentioned at the start of this discussion TTRPGs are quite exclusive on the basis of manpower, and quite often you don’t have anyone to play with, or only have one other person, and I think that’s worth exploring. There’s also the aspect of what tropes people will gel with, and what genres people feel comfortable exploring. With my regular group we ran the community-adaptation of Dark Heresy in the Genesys system—
TB: Oh, yes, I have seen that. Incredible. This amazing PDF!
JR: Right, really one of the most impressive community-made things I have ever seen, and so I just had to run it, immediately, not to mention I wanted to have a go on the Genesys system. But that group just isn’t that much into Warhammer, so it didn’t really sing.
TB: Ah yes, if Warhammer doesn’t get you when you are young and allow you to have that physiological reaction towards seeing a Terminator or a Genestealer, it’s much harder to connect with later. Is it Necrons nowadays? I don’t know.
JR: Right, the adult man who gets into Warhammer uninitiated is an unusual animal.
TB: I didn’t roleplay as a child! I have only roleplayed as an adult really [short discussion of Burmeister’s history with the Genesys-driven Star Wars game as a gateway RPG, followed by Rossignol talking about how different challenge of getting adults and younger people role-play can be, omitted for rambling] And related to that, I was playing the recent Rogue Trader RPG, the video game, and also tried Baldur’s Gate 3 at the same time and I bounced off BG3 because it was so… cool. All the characters have this sort of modern writing, a modern voice, and it felt so wonderful and cosmopolitan that I didn’t recognise it in the same way. I wanted grittier D&D! When I played the Rogue Trader game I was immediately “oh I get this,” because it’s melodramatic and grim, it’s Shakespeare in space, everyone is super-serious the entire time. It was thematically coherent!
JR: You are not the first person to say more or less this exact sequence of words to me. But I think that’s the genius of what Larian has done, too: just as streamers have moderns D&D with actual play stuff, so they’ve made it vital for a contemporary, youthful audience.
TB: Yes, it’s aesthetic appreciation stuff. And I totally admire that.
JR: I think a lot of what we deal with in RPGs tends towards whether people can make the tropes of a thing their own. Fantasy and sci-fi often come loaded with big blocks of story that are handed down through the generations, and whether we make them our own will decide whether it feels vital or staid. My own son, who is thirteen, plays D&D and he’s barely bothered to learn the rules, but he and his friends are so excited about finding ways to understand warlocks or dwarves, that it belongs to them.
TB: Yes, young people will often bring new ideas, they bring their own tropes. I find that when we are creating games with young people they often bring Anime tropes to the table and I am just not familiar. They’ll say “oh like so and so…” and I have no idea.
JR: No, I am not really versed in the Anime tropes.
TB: Me neither.
JR: Yeah. God.
<both men share a flicker of acknowledgement over the passing of the decades, probably>*
JR: Thanks for your time.
*Exaggerated here for dramatic purposes.
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More soon x