TEFL RPGing Aplenty

So, a while back I posted about using an D&D-like role-playing game as part of my teaching with one of our students. (See: Youngmin and the Magic World.) I recounted the story, and promised an update, but I haven’t followed through… Not for want of RPG action, of course. Youngmin has since rhyme-battled a forest ogre the size of a high-rise, teamed up with a goblin and a dragon to beat his nemesis, then teamed up with a mysterious capoerista girl (yes, capoeira has made its way into the game) and the goblin village’s witch to take on the dragon …

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A Serving of Links

A sampling of what I’ve been digging into lately. Books: Remember Choose Your Own Adventure books? Remember how those Fighting Fantasy books by Steve Jackson & Ian Livingstone added die rolls and character information to that paradigm? Now imagine reading one and not having to flip from one page to another. Imagine one that takes advantage of all the possibilities of ebooks. Is this new version of Dave Morris’ classic Heart of Ice what you imagined?  (I haven’t read it yet, but it’s getting rave reviews, and I plan on checking it out.) R.H. Kanakia presents: a Taxonomy of Readers. I’m …

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Dread: Saigon Falls

So, the other night we played through my new scenario for Dread, titled “Saigon Falls,” with my housemates here in Vietnam. It was an interesting experience for a few reasons. For one thing: we were playing imaginary characters living in our real (shared) house. That was odd, because a lot of the story took place inside the house, and the geography of the house played a part in a lot of scenes. It was interesting secondarily because the characters were modeled on the previous occupants of the house we’re staying in, a group of frathouse morons who apparently had huge, …

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With a Side of Kimchi: How the Issues Played Out

This entry is part 5 of 5 in the series With a Side of Kimchi: My First Brush with Fiasco

Note: This is my last post in my series on our first experience with Fiasco, and why I designed a new playset for our first game. It makes sense to start from the beginning of this series of posts, though. That’s here, but you can also see the whole series (in reverse order) on this page.  If you’ve read this far in this series, you have probably come to your own conclusions about how well the playset (and the thinking behind it) fed into the game as we played it. All in all, I think it worked quite well. In …

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