Jesse Stommel (@Jessifer): Planning to teach a composition class about Indie RPGs in the Spring quarter at @UofDenver. The class is tentatively called "World-building and Collaborative Storytelling." Here's my course description: [thread]
The first commercially available tabletop role-playing game, Dungeons & Dragons (D&D), was published in 1974. In most role-playing games, players take on the roles of characters and tell a collaborative story, whether fantasy, science fiction, horror, romance, realism, etc.
RPGs range from massively popular commercial projects like D&D, which includes 100s of source books, to much smaller indie projects with a single book as short as a chapbook (or even a single page).
In this class, we’ll play, analyze, write, and release short RPGs. The shape our games take and the stories they tell will be driven by research. We’ll imagine worlds, experiment with game mechanics, and play-test our own creations.
The course will be hybrid, so we’ll meet once each week and then do a good amount of our work together out on the open Web.