Tabletop role-playing games (TTRPGs) are a highly entertaining activity, offering players the opportunity to immerse themselves in imaginary worlds and engage in collaborative storytelling.Beyond their recreational value, they have also emerged as a potentially powerful tool for education.By providing a hands-on, experiential approach to learning, TTRPGs can foster critical thinking, problemsolving, and a deeper understanding of historical events and contexts.This paper explores their potential as a once-off time limited activity for history education, focusing on how historical information can be integrated into gameplay.We conducted a study with 16 adult players across four groups, using a TTRPG adventure prototype set in the Archaic Era of Ancient Greece.The sessions aimed to assess learning outcomes and gather feedback on participants' preferences for the inclusion of historical information and the right balance between facts and fiction.The results reveal implications for the design of in-game mechanics as well as supporting, physical and digital, content, to promote learning objectives, offering insights for both educators and game designers.Understanding players' interaction with historical content in a role-playing context can help create more engaging and effective TTRPG-based educational experiences.

Tabletop role-playing games (TTRPGs) offer a unique and immersive game experience, allowing players to collaborate and be creative while they step into imaginary worlds. TTRPGs are at their core a deeply social endeavor, fostering social connection among players. TTRPG play, however, can also harbor tensions and conflict, resulting in a negative experience and hindering the overall enjoyment of the game. One of the identified causes of conflict are the feelings of unfairness experienced by players. Our study employed a combination of an on-line questionnaire with 57 responses and the analysis of 528 comments from 3 relevant YouTube videos to explore the multifaceted nature of game master unfairness in TTRPGs from the perspective of the players. The study reveals that GM unfairness is pervasive in the game with 73% of the responders reporting at least one incident. Its most common forms include controlling and restricting agency, unequal player treatment, favouritism and unbalanced and discriminatory in-game scenarios. Our findings provide valuable insights into the dynamics of unfairness in TTRPGs, highlighting the need for supporting GMs to promote more equitable and inclusive gaming environments and proposing concrete suggestions to this end.

Tabletop role playing games (TTRPGs) offer players the possibility to create and enact the actions of a character in a fictional storyworld. TTRPG are great for immersing players in the game world with proven potential for transformative learning, as they promote perspective taking and a deeper understanding of the storyworld. In this work we aim to explore TTRPGs as an activity supporting the education of history in secondary education, by recording the view of educators on the benefits and challenges of the game. History teachers play a key role in teaching students how to examine historical phenomena and recognize the importance of history in understanding the societies of today. We interviewed 7 educators to explore how they promote historical empathy in their lessons and their views on the potential of TTRPGs as educational tools. Our results indicate a positive outlook by educators regarding the implementation of TTRPGs in the classroom, also discussing challenges such as the use of violence, historical inaccuracy and anachronism. The findings are hopeful in terms of the potential acceptance of the game genre by the teachers and they can be used as the initial step towards guidelines for a TTRPG game design tailored to the needs of secondary education.

Tabletop role playing games (TRPGs) offer players the possibility to create and enact the actions of a character in a fictional game world, guided by a human “game master” (GM). The GM is the storyteller and facilitator who co-creates dynamically the world with the players. In this sense, creativity is a key aspect of TRPGs, both for the players and the GMs, confirmed by a number of existing studies. In this work we focus on the perspective of the GMs on creativity through a user study with 17 participants. They provide feedback on different aspects of creativity as expressed while preparing or executing a story. Our results, among others, highlight the importance of the creative aspects of the game for the GMs as motivation for assuming this role as well as their view of the game as a dynamic co-creation process where the player group dynamics are also a key factor.

Within the broad range of the various types of chatbots, “bots of conviction” (BoCs) shift the focus from offering information to provoking reflection. In this paper we present the design of a “social” BoC, i.e. one designed to engage not one user but a group of participants in reflective dialogue, with the bot and each other. Our social BoC is designed as a digital experience to support history education for high school students (ages 14-18) and was evaluated with a total of 15 teenagers split into 5 groups. The goal was to assess the efficacy of our approach as a tool to promote historical empathy through dialogue. Our findings highlight the BoC's role in engaging the students in constructive dialogue with each other; and the ways in which it guided perspective taking and collective reflection about the past, while at the same time foregrounding connections to the present.