The game of Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) filled my teenage years. While others may have been out trying to win hearts at a party, I was at home, dice in hand, trying to win battles against demons and devils. 

For the uninitiated - and to see if you are initiated, roll a 20-sided dice (if you get that joke, skip to paragraph four) - D&D is a role-play game in which a group of friends sits around a table together and goes on quests to defeat evil, overthrow tyrants and find treasure. 

Unlike other games, this is all done in the imagination: one of the group (the Dungeon Master) tells the rest (the players) what is happening and responds to their suggestions of what they would like to do. 

If you’re still confused, you can watch this Dungeons and Dragons explainer video

Want to charge some monsters? Kick in a door? Explore those forests? Dice are then used to find out if their intentions are successful. 

When I was playing, through the 1990s and into the 2000s, the game seemed to be in decline (the lures of those parties is my guess), at least in the UK, but it now seems to be having something of a resurgence. 

Back in the Dungeon

It was a major feature in the popular Netflix series Stranger Things and it crops up in sitcoms The Big Bang Theory and Community. 

The game is also the topic of a number of highly successful podcasts such as Critical Role, DungeonCast and LoreCast.

It seems that pop-culture references to D&D are everywhere and the game is firmly back on people’s radar. 

Many schools now have a D&D club for pupils and during lockdown and a lot of us teachers are returning to shake the dice once more via Zoom (shout out to my Vandalin campaign group). I think this is an excellent thing for teaching. 

But I already knew this. I would go so far as to say that D&D made me the teacher I am today. Here’s why. 

1. One thing after another 

When you sit down as a Dungeon Master to plan an adventure, you want it to have a beginning, a middle and an end. It needs to tell a story that your players can take part in and help to shape. 

However, you also want it to fit into what happened in the adventure before and set the scene for what comes next. If a character picked up a strange mystical-looking statue last session, it had better have a place in the next one, if they bumped into a gruff innkeeper with body-odour issues, they’ll expect to encounter him again next time they are in the tavern. 

We do a similar thing when planning our sequence of lessons. I am always looking back at what they studied in the past and thinking about how they might encounter the same ideas again in the future. 

They need to see that what they did in one lesson makes a difference in later lessons in the same way a player needs to know that what they did in one adventure has an impact later on. Nothing stands in isolation. 

2. Mind games

Unlike many games, D&D takes place almost entirely in people’s heads. They are never going to see the cavern overrun by goblins or the ancient red dragon rearing up to roast them in its fiery breath. If they arrive at a city, you as Dungeon Master are going to have to paint the scene so that every player has the same impression of it. 

Do monsters stride the streets alongside the humans? Are there spires that seem to defy gravity rising from the college of wizards? These things will affect how each player interacts with the environment and the decisions they take. 

The same is true in the classroom. Learning is invisible. When we are explaining something to a class, we can never know for sure, and certainly not immediately, whether what you are picturing is the same thing that your pupils are picturing. 

I might need them to really understand the same thing that I do about the movement of a tropical storm and have to ensure that all 30 of them have this same understanding. 

Suddenly by Dungeon Master skills come into play as I weave a picture with my words, drawing them into my world. The fantasy city replaced with a geographical phenomenon. 

3. What way do they want to go?

Although the Dungeon Master is in charge of creating or leading a story, it wouldn’t be much fun for anyone if the players were just there to read their lines. They need to be able to make decisions about what they are doing and these need to have consequences. 

You might have planned for them to explore the lost citadel of the lizard people at the heart of Murky Swamp, but what if they say “let’s swing north and see what is in that forest”? 

You might have started dropping rumours of an evil dragon living in the hills close to the town to pique their interest in a later game, but what if they decide they want to go and slay it now or, more likely, die in the attempt?

The same thing happens in the classroom. Things come up to derail the best-planned lesson. 

Someone asks an interesting question about something you know you are going to come on to in a few weeks time or they make a point that you feel needs addressing now before you can move on. How you handle this is a difficult judgement call that gets easier with practice. 

Luckily, I have all those years of dungeoneering under my belt. I can make sure that before they go off to slay the dragon/tackle really complex ideas, they are fully prepared with the knowledge they will need to be successful. 

In the game, a lot of this management also comes down to motivation. They need a reason to explore Murky Swamp and discover that lost citadel. It is also easier in the classroom to bring a class along with you if they have the motivation to learn about something. 

We know that one of the best motivators in learning can be success, but we can also create a need to know, create some intrigue, about the thing they will be studying. It might not be the mystery of how the fishermen of the swamp were transformed into lizard people, but it might be the mystery of how people manage to live in the coldest town on earth. 

4. Getting the bugbears to behave

One of the trickier aspects of D&D is bringing a group of very different people along in the story together. Both in and out of the game. 

What if one player wants to create a rogue character who tries to pick the pockets of the other players? What if one player keeps wanting to check their phone during the game? 

There can be issues with the Dungeon Master as well: they might favour one player over another, allowing them to do things they have told others they cannot or overlooking a bad dice roll. These things are always going to lead to friction. 

In the classroom, and around the gaming table, consistency is key. The Dungeon Master and the teacher need to behave in a way that puts them beyond reproach. 

In both cases, a lot of this comes down to respect and knowing that, whatever your role, you are all on the same team and trying to achieve the same goal. Whether that is an epic quest for magical power or an epic quest for powerful knowledge. 

Years of playing D&D taught me how to bring a group of people together to use their imaginations to explore a world and tell a story. As a teacher, I am still doing much the same. 

Mark Enser has been teaching geography for 17 years but playing D&D for much longer. His latest book Teach Like Nobody’s Watching is out now. He tweets @EnserMark