Collaboration is adventure - role-playing in the workplace

Why role-playing games are great for team building

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So you've built a team. A group of colleagues who will work together for a long time, or a team that will work together through a single project. Anyway. New people are going to work together and team building is needed. So what can be done to get good cooperation within the group?

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You send them on adventures of course!

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What are role-playing games? :

Role-playing is a collective term for games/activities where participants enter into a specific role, a bit like in acting. Role-playing is a form of interactive theatre in which the actors have been given only a conceptual role. They have no lines to be said, no more than a vague future goal to be achieved, and a simple scene description that serves as a starting point. The story further is created by what choices the contestants make, and how the staged world around them reacts to such choices.

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Dungeons & Dragons:

To pull the concept down to something a little more tangible, we continue to talk about a specific role-playing game. The game is called Dungeons & Dragons.dungeons and dragons) and is one of the world's most famous role-playing games. In this game, players are adventurers in an amazing world, such as from The Lord of the Rings. Humans, elves and dwarves. Thieves and jacks and wizards go on adventures to find amazing riches, or protect the world from evil in all colors and shapes. The game establishes rules for important general conflicts, such as whether the wizard manages to conjure bandits to sleep, or whether the elf manages to jump over a ravine. Each player is given the opportunity to create their character, and gets to choose in a selection of different strengths and weaknesses that help define the character.

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One of the contestants gets the role of game master. The game master is the referee, and the one who has the final say in rule conflicts. They are and the director in charge of the world that the players enter... they control friends and enemies and everything in between. They build the world, organize story threads, build motivations, and make sure the rules of the game are followed. They set up the original scene, e.g.: (You are standing in front of a dark and gloomy cave. The tracks lead deep into darkness.), and allows players to react to the scene. (“Olga the Holy Teeth Her Torch.”). The game master describes the consequences of the action (The light from the torch awakens bats that have taken shelter in the cave. Trill dice to see if you avoid the swarm) and so the game goes back and forth, while the story constantly moves forward.

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Why role play? :

Different variations of team building do not work equally well for everyone. This is how it is with role-playing games. But for us at Link Development it has worked quite well and here are some of the main reasons for our success.

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• Low investment: You don't have to rent your own bowling alley. Stationery, paper, rulebook (some varieties are available online), dice, and a good dose of imagination. It is possible to invest in extras such as figures and maps, and I would recommend that game masters run through a pre-written adventure created by a professional first time so that they have the opportunity to learn the rules.
• Creative challenges: Role-playing is a creative unfolding. There are rules, but inside the rules there is a lot of room to unfold. The players are presented with a problem, but how it is solved is very much up to them.
• Collaboration brings good results: Most role-playing games are set up so that no one can do everything. Everyone has their speciality and players are then naturally encouraged to work together with their teammates. For example, it is much easier for the thief to sneak around, if the wizard makes her invisible first.
• Continuation follows: The episode ends at an intriguing and uncertain point, or with a shocking reveal. Anyone who watches television series is familiar with built up moments of tension that should keep viewers coming back next episode. Role-playing games can use the same tension curve to keep people engaged. And as players are active participants, they can have positive and energetic conversations about what has happened and what they should do next.

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By Dani Forstrønen