Dungeons and Dragons in AP Lit – Part 2 – How I Set Up the Unit

How I Tried to Make This Work in the Classroom

[I will write more later about how the individual class days went as things got moving, and also how I tied this more directly into AP Lit in terms of assessments.]

Dungeons and Dragons is notorious for its baroque rules structure.  If the first thing you pictured when I mentioned the game was The Comic Book Store Guy from the Simpsons and a bunch of other Guys that look like him, the second thing you may have pictured was some oddly shaped dice, sprawling books and charts with obscure statistics crammed onto them, also chock full of seemingly intentionally obscure vocabulary… And even if D&D is in fact played in 2025 by a more diverse crowd than it may have been in 1973, in fact, the rules set IS baroque, even byzantine.  That said, here’s how I tried to deal with that.

When I first introduced the game to my class, I suggested that it exists on a continuum:

Collaborative storytelling/narration <——————————> complex numerical game

Intuitively, I was thinking, each group of kids will navigate this continuum in their own way, and that will be part of the fun.  It’s also something that has an analogy to both Homer and hip-hop.  There are passages within both Homeric epics where metrical precision and beauty seems to be the point.  They seem to be set-piece digressions that have little to do with the main plot action, but were likely there as excuses for virtuoso performances (or more accurately, crystallized evidence of hundreds of years of virtuoso performances).  Take, for example, the Odyssey passage describing the Phaeacians’ gardens, deliberately divided into four parts with all sorts of lush descriptions of foliage, etc.  Or the Iliad’s ecphrasis of the shield of Achilles.  Neither add to the action and both are pretty tough to translate without a whole bunch of vocabulary aids (at least for me).  

And obviously in hip-hop, there is always a continuum between lyrical virtuosity and immersive storytelling.  Consider, again, Mos Def and Talib Kweli’s final track on Black Star – “Twice Inna Lifetime.”  It’s 5 different rappers’ verses that are mostly focused on fast paced jokes, punch-lines, puns, etc.  Very little “narrative content” is there, but it also serves to punctuate the album effectively.  Compare that to “Brown-Skinned Lady,” a love song ode to Black and Brown women and an interrogation of European beauty standards, done in a slower tempo with less ornate bars.  

But how to navigate this with D&D in my classroom?

Before we started, I asked 5 people in class who had previous experience and/or were really outgoing and/or I already knew and felt like I could persuade them to be part of a fishbowl experience.  The premade adventure I used had a little “Introduction” module that was available for free on the internet.  It involved 4-5 characters on a boat, who had never met before, travelling to somewhere called “Stormwreck Isle.” On the journey, they are accosted by a scary sea-monster.  They have some options but most people end up fighting it.  I showed them how to dungeon-master by simple narration and prompts like “what does your character want to do?”  It took about 20 minutes.

On the next day, the core thing I did was divide students into 5 groups of 5.  Since this seems to involve some risk-taking and a lot of unfamiliarity for most of them, I let the pick their groups (though I encouraged them to think about gender and racial diversity).  I told each group there would be 5 roles:

1. Dungeon Master – DM 
2. Fighter
3. Thief
4. Cleric
5. Wizard

I explained that the DM would probably feel more like the center of attention, and likely need to do a little more preparation outside of class.  I did my best to identify anyone who might have some previous D&D experience.  One class had 5 people who said they did (though only 4 of them wanted to DM).  One class had only 3, so I leaned on students I knew from last year, encouraged them to take risks, explained they wouldn’t be graded on any of this, etc.  I got to 5 in both classes that way.

I gave them all some papers.  The DM got copies of handouts that have been created and are sold at Target (fair use?  I’m not sure).  I actually used the digital version sold on dndbeyond.com.  The adventure is called “Dragons of Stormwreck Isle” and is designed for beginners.  The instructions contained are very specific, and there are long passages that are written out verbatim that they can read to the players.  The adventure is divided into 4 chapters, and I encouraged them to do their best to make each chapter happen during one class day.  I set aside a total of 5 85-minute days – 1 to learn and 4 for them to really play (of course me being a teacher I over planned and they ended up with less time than that the first day.  I told them to read ahead, and they could decide how much they wanted to stick to the script and how much they wanted to improvise.  All told the DM’s got about 100 pages of handouts.

Each non-DM player got TWO pages – a lot less than the DM’s – basically a character sheet, front and back.  Each sheet describes a character’s backstory, motivations, and statistically models the character’s physical and mental abilities. 

Making all those handouts took up a lot of time, but that’s just English teacher stuff, really. I’ll describe day by day lesson plans in a future post. I’m wanting to actually teach it first!