Note: This is the second 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. One of the things I’ve been thinking about a lot in terms of my recent brushes with gaming is the idea of design. I don’t mean game design, because after all in the last two games I’ve tried, Dread (written up here) and Fiasco, we’ve used rule systems designed by someone else. And those rules systems have worked …

So, I got a copy of Bully Pulpit Games’ popular tabletop RPG game Fiasco, which was created by Jason Morningstar, for the university library. After all, I’ve long been interested in how RPG games can be used in language-teaching, and in fact I’ve long had a similar exercise that I use in English conversation courses (which I’ve recently posted here, after Fiasco inspired me to expand the exercise a little). In that exercise, students plan out a heist, con, scam, or other crime of some kind–usually with a set goal and set rules they cannot break in their plan–as an …