Role for a change – Manual

If you have already experienced role-playing games, it is likely you already have glimpsed at fragments of their potential: the context of role-playing games, as far as we consider it should always be, gives every player involved a safe space in which it is possible to interact with others with no prejudice or sterile criticism. At the same time, RPGs are a frame for people playing a character, making plans, taking actions and facing consequences, telling stories and most importantly having a good time. During the process, an impressive number of skills and competences can be involved and naturally developed.

Furthermore, all kinds of stories can be told in an RPG session and it’s normally pretty natural and straightforward to engage with this tool. Put all of this together and you will have an impressive educational tool in your hands. That’s mostly why we are here. As educators, trainers and people who work with the youth, we realized all the amazing things RPG as a tool could give to the education field and to the objective we pursued in the non-formal educational field. These are some of the reasons why we as Meta Cooperative, the leader of the project, have a long tradition of using RPG activities in education in our own youth center.

Our experimentations started in 2004 and from that moment on we collected encouraging results and a lot of enthusiasm from the dozens of young people who participated during the process. Even in the last few years, the RPG laboratory was probably the most successful one inside the youth center. RPG was a tool that allowed us to introduce all kinds of activities: arts, craft, active listening, body language, active citizenship, orienteering, study of the voice, recording, creative writing,… The potential was endless.

Later, during Covid 19 lockdown, we have been in the position of either stopping our work or continuing with our experimentations to a level never tried before.

We chose the latter.

RPG laboratories have been completely transformed into digital versions of them, we introduced new ways, platforms, tested dozens of software to choose the best one for our needs and eventually “forged” an experience which could be easily duplicated and adjusted for other facilitators to use. After the “digital success” and after the return to the physical version of the RPG laboratory we realized that we were holding a completely different tool: more tested, more mature, more reliable. That was the moment in which we considered sharing it, to enlarge the scope of it and to put in a European frame. After some time, we wrote a project, gathered partners with experience with RPGs and education and gave birth to the manual you’re reading right now.

This manual’s aim is to promote and raise awareness of the RPG as a possible and efficient methodological framework and tool for educational purposes. It also aims to have a degree of impact on stakeholders in the field of youth work and education.