Teaching Ethics with Dungeons & Dragons

When I first started playing Dungeons and Dragons about five years ago, I immediately began dreaming of how I could use the game to teach philosophy. This past semester, I finally tried it out. Here’s what happened.

A brief overview of D&D

First, for the uninitiated, here’s a brief overview of the game. D&D is a tabletop roleplaying game (RPG) that is played by a Dungeon Master (DM) and a group of players, typically numbering between three to five. Each player other than the DM is responsible for creating a character with particular skills, traits, goals, a personal history, a moral alignment, etc. The characters typically have a “race,” such as human, elf, dwarf, or gnome, which gives them certain traits and tendencies, and a “class” such as wizard, fighter, ranger, or bard, which defines their role in life and gives them additional skills and abilities.

Once created, the characters interact within a world and situation created by the DM. For example, the DM might set up a scenario in which an evil sorcerer is threatening a kingdom by spreading a plague throughout the realm, and the players’ are tasked by the queen with stopping him. Or perhaps the players find themselves in a city overtaken by a brutal ruling class of mine owners who are exploiting the population, and the townspeople ask the players for help overthrowing them. Or perhaps the players each have a dream in which an ancient deity tells them of a long lost city filled with unimaginable treasures that they decide to seek out. The DM can make up their own campaign or can draw from campaigns written and published by others.

The game itself involves creative and collaborative storytelling in which the players make decisions for their characters within the scenarios set up by the DM. The best players make the decisions that their characters would make even when those decisions might get them into trouble. For example, if a character is a particularly reckless thief who cannot resist swiping a precious heirloom from the house of a noble, the player may choose to have the character attempt to steal the item, even if the likelihood of getting caught is high. The players can try to do anything with the items and abilities that they have. For example, if players have rope and cooking equipment, they could make a trap over a door so that they will be alerted if anyone attempts to enter their house. The only limits are those that the DM decides to impose.

When characters make decisions, they typically have to roll dice to determine if they are successful in their aims. In the hypothetical theft scenario above, for example, the player would have to roll a “sleight of hand” check to see if they are successful or not. Depending on how skilled the character is at a particular action and how difficult the task is, the outcome is more or less likely. For example, if a character has high dexterity and is very strong, and they want to climb over a wall, the odds of their success will be pretty high. But if a character with low charisma tries to persuade a guard to betray her king and give up secret information, the odds of rolling high enough to succeed will be very low. Ultimately the DM determines the difficulty of a given task and serves as the interpreter of the rules of the game.

Why teach with D&D?

When I first began playing D&D, I was immediately struck by the similarity between the DM and a teacher and between the players and students. In a classroom, both teacher and students are essential in creating the learning environment and community, but the roles played by the teacher and the students are importantly different. The teacher, like the DM is the stage-setter, or as Anthony Weston puts it in his recent book, Teaching as the Art of Staging, the teacher is the “impresario with a scenario.” The teacher is responsible for setting up the context in which learning happens. They write the initial syllabus, prepare the activities, and make adjustments to ensure that the course is successful. The teacher, therefore, has a heightened responsibility for how and whether learning happens as they have the most power in initially creating the learning conditions.

But while the teacher has a greater responsibility in setting up the learning environment, a good teacher must be responsive to the particular skills and interests of the students who show up in the classroom, just as a good DM must be responsive to player characters and choices. As any DM knows, you can never anticipate precisely how players will respond to a given scenario. The DM may expect the players to work together to defeat the evil sorcerer but the players may end up joining him instead or ignoring him altogether to pursue a completely different storyline inspired by a brief interaction that the DM had imagined would be a minor encounter. A good DM, like a good improviser learns to say “Yes, and…” to player decisions and to allow their choices to shape the narrative. Similarly, a good teacher knows when to abandon carefully laid lesson plans when students begin to pursue an unexpected but productive direction in a conversation.

But for a campaign or a course to be successful, the DM and the teacher also have to know when to push the players or students in a given direction. The DM knows things about the world that the players do not and, therefore, has special insight into what narrative directions may prove to be the most fun and rewarding. Similarly, the teacher of a course has disciplinary knowledge and a knowledge of the course as a whole that students lack. This knowledge gives them a better understanding of where a conversation might need to go for the course to be successful and productive. A good DM or a good teacher does not give up their authority entirely, but knows when and how to use that authority to improve the experience for everyone.

In addition to providing an interesting model for thinking about the collaborative dynamics of teaching and learning, the focus on decision-making in D&D also seemed to me to be perfect for teaching ethics. In my own ethics classes, my primary goal is to give students skills for thinking through the decisions that they make in their daily lives. As I often tell students, my goal is, as Aristotle writes in the Ethics, not for students to know the good theoretically but to become good. For this reason, treating D&D as a kind of ethical simulation seemed to me to be a perfect way for students to practice thinking through and facing the consequences of their decisions in a fun and safe way.

And finally, the fun is also important. While I think teachers should be wary of inserting “gimmicks” into their teaching without connecting them to the goals of the course, inserting joy, laughter, and creativity into the space of the classroom can be incredibly important for supporting learning. And bringing creativity into the classroom is, in my view, one especially effective way of making classrooms more inclusive. And so, while the fun isn’t the point, per se, the fun is actually really important. Students often have a deeply ingrained sense that school is boring drudgery that one must get through, rather than something we can participate in fully and excitedly. Bringing D&D into the classroom can help to break through the sedimented view that learning has to be a drag.

How it Worked

In my Ethics class in the Fall of 2019, I decided to finally try out using D&D in the classroom. For context, my class is an introductory level course at a community college that most students take to complete general education requirements. The class is capped at thirty students but dwindled over the course of the semester to around twenty-six by the time we played. I reserved the last three weeks of class (five, seventy-five minute class sessions) for the game.

Throughout the semester, we read work from five different philosophers–Aristotle, Mengzi, Mill, Kant, and Beauvoir. Before the first day of the game, students ranked the philosophers from their most to least favorite. I used the students’ rankings to create groups of about five students for each of the five philosophers. Groups were determined by a mix of student preference and creating balance so that each group would have at least one person that I thought would be excited about playing. During each game day, one representative from each group represented their team’s character. I didn’t force anyone to play who didn’t want to, but everyone had a chance to play if they wanted to.

On the first day dedicated to the game, students created characters based on the philosopher their group was assigned. I had students use D&D Beyond, a website that guides character creation through a series of prompts. Creating the characters required the students to review the philosopher that they had been assigned and to think creatively about how to apply the philosophical ideas. For example, in choosing a class, the group who had the Aristotle character chose to make their character a wizard because within D&D, wizards are scholarly types who get their magical ability through study. The Mengzi group chose to make their character a bard because of Mengzi’s use of storytelling, and so on. In addition to picking the class of their characters, students also came up with a backstory. They were asked to think about what kinds of experiences a person might have that would lead them to a particular ethical theory. The students decided that the Beauvoir character, for example, had been brought up in a strict religious family and had run away to carve out her own path in life. Finally, students were also asked to pick the character’s flaws, which encouraged them to review and consider critiques of each philosophers’ views.

The next four class sessions were dedicated to playing the game itself. I used the D&D fifth edition starter campaign, “The Lost Mines of Phandelver.” I decided to use a pre-made campaign because I had little experience as a DM and needed the extra guidance. I also chose it because it is a relatively short campaign, (although it still turned out to be too long for the time I had allotted). For the gameplay itself, one student from each group played while the others in the group watched. Players were encouraged to consult with their groups when making decisions, and I frequently stopped to ask players to explain why their characters made particular decisions. The students who were observing, kept track of the decisions and justifications on an observation sheet that they turned in at the end of class, and everyone completed a reflection that asked them to think about which decisions fit well with the philosophical theories and which could have been improved and why.

Overall, the gameplay was a lot of fun but was, at times, chaotic. One of the biggest challenges was the students’ unfamiliarity with the rules and structure of the game. In encounters that involved combat, students were especially confused about the rules. While I simplified combat within our game, in the future, I either need to teach students the rules earlier or simplify it even further. There were also moments when students (and I!) got distracted by the fun of playing the game, and we lost sight of the philosophical applications for short stretches of time.

Nevertheless, there were moments of unexpected hilarity and brilliance. At one point, the players were attacked by goblins, and the player who was representing Kant discovered that his character spoke Goblin (a serendipitous accident as they had randomly chosen languages during character creation). When he realized he could speak to the goblins, the player knew that, as a Kantian, he had to try to reason with them. In another encounter, the players came upon wolves locked up in cages. They then spent several minutes discussing with their groups what they thought each philosopher’s views would be on non-human animals, something that we had not explicitly discussed in class. The Mengzi player decided that her character would show compassion for the wolves because we had read a passage of Mengzi in which he praises a King for showing compassion to an ox that was to be sacrificed.

What made these moments wonderful was their unexpected quality. I could not have planned in advance exactly which encounters would prompt these reflections, and the spontaneity made the experience more meaningful. The students knew that I didn’t have a particular answer that I was looking for and that the game allowed for all of us–teacher and students–to be surprised. This unexpected, emergent quality of the encounters seemed to allow for a more authentic exploration of ideas. Furthermore, these moments created a sense of community. When the Kant character realized he had to negotiate with the goblins, the entire class erupted in laughter. Our shared knowledge of philosophy had given us a new way of relating to one another by making ‘inside’ jokes. Playing D&D gave us the opportunity to explore this new kind of humor together, which solidified both the students’ knowledge and their sense of community.

Limitations and Challenges

Of course, there are many things that I plan to change as I continue to develop this idea further. As I mentioned above, students’ unfamiliarity with the game took time away from playing and applying the philosophical concepts. In the future, I plan to further simplify the game, perhaps by using a different RPG altogether. This is something that others who have experimented with using role-playing in the classroom have had success with (see Ryan’s Wyndeknecht’s work for one example). I also think that in the future, I will write my own campaign with less combat and more clearly defined moral challenges, rather than using a pre-made campaign.

But although there is much room for improvement, both the students and I got a lot out of the experiment. In their feedback about the course and about the game, student responses were overwhelmingly positive. Almost every student reported that they not only enjoyed the game but that it helped them to think about how to apply the philosophical concepts in a deeper way. And so I hope to continue to work to improve the experience and to report more of my findings as my experiment evolves!

Rebecca Scott

Assistant Professor at Harper College

Rebecca Scott is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Harper College and tabletop game enthusiast. Her research interests lie at the intersections of philosophy and pedagogy.