Academic joke I first heard in East Africa: What’s the dividing line between sociology and anthropology? Sociologists study those who wear pants. In case it’s not clear, the gag is a dig at how scholars themselves are unaware of their own biases, even with regard to the fundamental structures of their own disciplines. At the turn of the last century, I came up in African history–which incorporates a lot of anthropology and in fact a little sociology (postmodern/pants Africa!)--in the period when there finally was recognition about the academy’s role as a handmaid of empire and some of the hegemonic aspects of the modern state. This self-reflection included a reckoning about how subjectivity in data collection and theory had produced bodies of scholarship that were far from objective. You’ve probably learned this in reading about how “the Other” is created. This bit of throat-clearing is to show that I recognize my own position as a very middle-class outsider and author writing about people who–while sharing a lot of American culture–also have had profoundly different life experiences than me, my students. The data presented from the state is not meant to be definitive, but rather a scrap of information meant to help any reader to gain a grasp on the situation. The essay below is not meant to be a curiosity cabinet for bourgeois enjoyment, and especially not “poverty porn,” even though that is what postmodern nonfiction often is.
 |
| Still, our parking lot |
A Dungeons & Dragons club already existed in the inner city high school I started working at during 2022. The students at my workplace consider other parts of Philadelphia to be the “true ‘hood,” not their own area, but it is a Title I school. Officially speaking, roughly three-quarters of the students attending come from low-income families, and some city schools exceed 90% impoverished populations, so the students’ perceptions are more-or-less correct. Prior to my hiring by the school, coincidentally I collected census data in its catchment for more than a month in 2020, enough to get a fairly informed picture of the neighborhood’s access to resources. I had been teaching for some weeks when I went to the first club meeting, to observe how things were done, because I was curious and interested. I also wanted to lend my (some painted) miniatures for use; the club had a few dozen plastic pre-painteds, but mostly used little colored smooth stones to mark PCs and monsters on the battle map.
The session zero was devoted to character creation. The situation was very chaotic, as many of the classrooms were and are in the school, far more chaotic than I was used to, coming from collegiate instruction, my own high school years being in the distant past. Most of the students had no idea how to create a D&D 5E character. Some of the players had substantial learning disabilities, and couldn’t add dice easily; by the terms set by the state of Pennsylvania, only a quarter of our students are proficient readers and 1/16 are proficient in high-school math. According to our main standardized test, the average reading level for the twelfth-grade classes I teach (which is a little below average for the school) is just under a sixth-grade beginner’s benchmarks. This being said, the inner city kids have often solved the same in-game challenges (ones that did not require skilled literacy or arithmetic) pretty much as rapidly as my largely middle class adult players’ circles–people with graduate degrees and bachelors from Duke, Purdue, and MIT, men who work as lawyers, accountants, government bureaucrats, software engineers, math teachers, and IT.
The club had several 5E PHBs (200,000+ words!), so I went around assisting character construction on that first day. It isn’t unusual for even well-educated RPG beginners to have trouble getting started in fifth edition. The head of the club and I gave pointers on which class each player might enjoy after a short verbal quiz that referenced video-game familiar fantasy archetypes and in-game mechanics: “Does smashing a monster in the face with a hammer sound fun?” The players chose the pre-packaged equipment sets, but only a couple wrote their inventory down on the character sheets. At the peak, four teachers would be in the room, one RPG neophyte and three veterans. (Another neophyte would join later.) One of the first things I observed was a student “vet” from the previous year cheating on the ability rolls (4d6k3x7d1, arrange) for her character. She was the only one who took the initiative to create her own character, and no one else cheated on their rolls, and she would later mock the other students for their “inferior” PCs. She was an nerdy, overweight white (non-Hispanic) senior girl (note: swap sex and definition of senior, and you have me), in a school that is less than 10 or 2 percent white, depending on how you count. The students do not conceptualize “white Hispanic” as the United States government does. Most of the other students participating were Hispanic by their own definition.
 |
| I know my 7th-grade rolls weren't exactly honest, but sheesh |
I asked the club sponsor–who had secured school funding for the PHBs, a few hardback WotC adventures, and dice enough for all–how he dealt with downtime and absences and such, as I was already quite familiar with student attendance and communication woes. Essentially, the club ran on the openest of open table policies. “I just put the party at the beginning of the dungeon, and when they’re finished, everyone appears at the entrance to the next dungeon. PCs come and go without any in-world consideration.” Downtime was neither role-played nor proceduralized.
The second meeting saw new students show up, including my most troublesome student from my first period class, a kid (who looked angelic but) who tried to disrupt every single classroom activity. Just that morning he had provoked both of the powderkeg girls in the class (who had been ignoring me, but minding their own business at least), who both outweighed him and one of whom had just returned from a fight suspension. He kept staring, whistling, and smack-talking them, no matter how I tried to redirect him, not even quitting when one promised he would “accidentally” fall down the stairs between classes. His appearance was a huge disappointment that day, as I had hoped the club would be a refuge from my regular students, whose casual viciousness and complete disregard for middle-class social mores wore my psyche down every day. Yes, I know, looking for solace by playing a game about pretend killing pretend people is pretty silly. All the new players had to roll characters, and some of the session zero attenders missed this meeting, so the club waited until the third session to actually start an adventure.
The club director had given a short adventure he’d written to one of the seniors, who had promised to DM. We rolled out the wet-erase map and its markers, and I distributed minis–one teacher had chosen a thri-kreen based on my mini selection and another had rolled a fairy, which I had painted in the meanwhile. Despite the accessories available, the whole session was run by the novice DM as “theater of the mind.” There was no combat, anyway, in the 75 minutes. The DM asked everyone to roll initiative at the very beginning, and then ignored those results for the rest of the day. All the rolling for the session was in the form of checks and a couple saves. Lots of checks. I observed and took notes during play.
 |
| Admit it, you would pick the insect-man, too |
 |
| When the mini is almost as big as the brush |
Three teachers were players, including the guy who had penned the mini-module. If you’ve ever been to a country where people don’t queue, or really, most bars in my experience, that’s what it was like. Every loud person shoved their way into the conversation about the make-believe, and the quieter ones did not gain much access. Two of the teachers were just as boisterous as most of the kids. In all there were eight PCs, seven non-human, which was quite the load for a first-time DM. Almost every time he revealed a new bit of scenery, three or four people shouted “I grab/devour/lick it!” and the free-for-all then moved on whenever the next shiny was described. The one reserved teacher said it reminded him of his own high school years’ sessions, but he’s a generous soul.
The set-up involved a butcher shop with a big, bloody mess, which included an exit the referee forgot to mention until much later. The action mostly revolved around inspecting the sinister scenery and a conversation with a rat (read the "novelization" here). The DM fudged a save for the rat during its interrogation, so that it might not divulge some information, which annoyed the author of the adventure. The final moments of the day were spent arguing over which PC got to possess the found skeleton in the tunnel underneath the building. It was nearly impossible to get the players to deploy their characters as a team, rather than a collection of individuals. This can be difficult in my adult, middle-class parties, too. I blame some of this on general American individualistic culture, but some on the structure of 5E, and its individual initiative. Attempts to work PCs in tandem are often made impossible by the rules-as-written, because someone has to go at each designated slot in the order. The problem could be solved by readied actions (à la the “peasant railgun”), but those can’t include any sort of readied movement.
During the next play session, three new students arrived and some old ones didn’t show. Due to the mayhem of the first true play session, an executive decision was made to divide the adventurers into two tables with more manageable numbers for the DMs. The club sponsor ran the “heroic” table, which usually included two or three teacher PCs, a quiet girl whose faun liked to throw cream pies as a non-injuring weapon, and a second boy from my first period who wanted to run a (fantasy) chivalrous knight (who was pretty foul-mouthed, as nearly all the students are). A sweet, quiet girl with green eyes, who had rolled a druid with a green cloak and green eyes, and should’ve joined that table, never showed up again. Three of the four other teachers DMed at the heroic table over the course of the next six months. When things got rowdy at one table, the other one usually lost focus. I am neither a con person, nor a FLGS player, so I was not used to the extra levels of session noise and distraction. The students who favored harsh make-believe interrogations and harvesting pretend monster trophies became the “Head Collectors, Inc.,” and stayed at the student-DMed table. I mostly observed the Head Collectors. For a few weeks I painted like a fiend in the evenings to have monsters and PCs ready for the table.
 |
| Alas, no pie |
The second play session involved an underground exploration of tunnels filled with traps and creatures that spoke with New York accents (not the DM’s normal one). Every trap was apparently the same, the roll cheater (who always scooped up her dice before they came to a stop, announcing a result of 15+ every time) “disarmed” every trap with an identical explanation of discharging it with her weapon. She seized the one magic sword that was available and threatened the other PCs with it. (Her character class: paladin.) She claimed the wolf pet that the DM offered, even though there was a druid in the party. Another new girl had her character (an aasimar) fight back. The party met a talkative imp (well-run by the DM) and dismembered a lot of lesser monsters, squabbling over the body parts as prizes. One of the treasures found was a book of dad jokes.
 |
| Balance, schmalance |
The original GM missed the third and final session of the mini-adventure. An honor-roll student, the kid who had been quietly playing a red dragonborn barbarian, took over the referee’s chair. He did not even understand the most basic concepts of the game, not even the d20 as attack/save/check. Suffice to say the fights vs. the chain demon and lesser beholder went very raggedly. There were two moments of high hilarity from my perspective. One body search query got this response, “Uh, he just has … another tray of meat and eyeballs.” After the victory over the creatures, the module closed with the heretofore barely described villagers awarding the PCs with statues for solving the butcher/demon problem. The girl who didn’t take any shit from the other asked for a statue spitting on the cheating girl’s monument, but that was the last time she showed up at the club.
Neither of the student DMs were prepared or present for the following play session, but I had come equipped with a module, and ran my first session for the kids. I had spun a short horror-fantasy adventure out of Ash Law’s killer doll scenario in “The Trajectory of Fear – or How to Use Horror Tropes Effectively in Your Game.” By the end of the year, I had run the Head Collectors through twenty sessions comprising four adventures, three (including the first) recycling premises my online groups had run through, and one pre-written, “The Waking of Willowby Hall.” The heroic table dwindled to two players, and then one, and ours finally absorbed the foul-mouthed knight, after he completed his last quest, which aged him substantially. The final session of the school year would force all the PCs to flee a T-Rex through a teleportal, which I hoped would work as an in-world explanation for the students taking their characters to new tables. I gave them their PCs' miniatures as parting gifts. During the final battle, I demanded that the cheater roll a saving throw without touching the die. Of course it came up '20.'
 |
| How to wrap up a campaign when out of time |
 |
| So long Xopa, Sami, Ragnar, and Kyriee' of the Eight Fingers |
No comments:
Post a Comment