Dungeon Theory

Imagine a scenario wherein your players uncover a long-lost series of spells. Currently known only to the adventuring party, these spells deal with medical and healing capabilities long-forgotten. How will they spread these discoveries?  Should they, even?   Similar to the ideas covered in social network theory, where information is theorized to flow from opinion leaders into their social networks, knowledge of these newly discovered spells will likely spread beyond the confines of the adventuring party. How and why new technologies, information, strategies, techniques, and other innovations diffuse from their source into the general public was the concern of Everett Rogers , who is primarily responsible for developing this theory. For Rogers, both interpersonal connections and media were responsible for spreading innovations through a social system. Perhaps the party’s cleric begins to use the new healing spells first on party members, then on friendly NPCs he comes acro...

  Roleplay gaming is a web of connections. Friends, family members, coworkers, and neighbors gather together to play a fantasy game at an individual’s dining room table. Perhaps in the basement, strangers who met on a social networking site gather online to play another collaborative game. The networks that hold us together societally, socially, and personally have been studied by at least three different academic traditions. First, scholars employed mathematical graph theory methods. Next, anthropological traditions examined the structure of groups, communities, towns and villages. Thirdly, the interpersonal tradition explored the relationships among individuals. So, while a host of scholars contributed to our current understanding of interpersonal networks, it was the efforts of Linton Freeman who proposed a trio of measures that help us to better understand network organization and centrality (the degree to which you are central to your network).  A network within this f...

  Like me, you may be part of a gaming group, but that’s not all you are. You’re part of a whole host of co-cultures. You’re part of a group of people who share a gender identity, an ethnic identity, perhaps a religious or spiritual identity. Crucially for understanding Social Identity Theory are the positive and negative feelings you have about those group memberships. Frequently, our social groups are great sources of our pride and self-esteem. They provide a sense of belonging and place in the larger social world. According to Henri Tajfel , most people have an inherent desire to identify as part of some group (e.g., an adventuring party, a sports team fan, a citizen of Borovia, a woman) and to distinguish oneself from other groups.  According to Social Identity Theory, I’m likely to think a few things about my adventuring party are true: 1) since we’re part of the same group, we’re all pretty similar.  2) other groups are fairly different from us. This makes our a...

  “This week, we have to move to roll20 .” Recently, due to an influx of Covid in my regular gaming group, this quotation made its way into our regular group chat. It brought to mind the months of 2020 and 2021 where vaccines were still far on the horizon, state and national dashboards of infected, hospitalized, and dying were seemingly omnipresent, and the only way to safely play RPGs was online, in my basement, alone.  Although, were we actually alone?  Social Presence Theory , first developed by Short, Williams, and Christie examines exactly how we come to use some social media and telecommunications technologies to experience a sense of being with one another while physically separated. The space between the persons and the computer interactions, as well as its implications for interpersonal communication, intimacy, and relationship formation, development, and dissolution are integral to understanding our (oftentimes) tech-connected communication. From the beginning...

If you were to describe your adventuring party’s members by name, lineage, backstory and class how likely is it that there would exist an identical party to yours? I contend that the distribution of party characteristics is more than likely unique to your party alone.  And while there might be some common archetypes the characters fall into: Tank, Sneak, Face, Caster, Healer, Skirmisher, thankfully parties often come out resembling that Rifleman's Creed from Full Metal Jacket : “This is my adventuring party. There are many like it, but this one is mine.” In trying to understand how groups function, the theory of Adaptive Structuration tries to address precisely how groups, like adventuring parties and rifles are the same and how they differ. Prior to Scott Poole ’s work adapting societal structuration to groups, many researchers operated under the paradigm that small groups followed a near-universal pattern for decision-making. This, so-called, single-sequence model asserted th...