Geoffrey Sperl is a High school English teacher at Hamtramck High School, teaching 9th grade ELA and 9-12th grade English learners with a focus on critical thinking, analytical writing, and literature appreciation.
The students noticed the Avatar: The Last Airbender map on my classroom wall during our after-school tabletop RPG club. “Did you know there’s an Avatar game?” I asked. “Would you want to play that?” Their enthusiastic response (a rendition of “Secret Tunnel”) led me to contact Demiplane with questions, which turned into a conversation with Roll20 about my use of TTRPGs in education.
During COVID-19, I pivoted from being an IT professional to teaching English. I saw students come back from lockdown, checked out with fractured attention spans and deep skepticism about whether school matters. I needed something different. TTRPGs were the answer.
From “The Most Dangerous Game” to Narrative Crossroads
During my student teaching, I developed a lesson for an honors ELA 9 class studying Richard Connell’s “The Most Dangerous Game.” Instead of the usual character analysis work, I adapted The Last Tea Shop Complete (a solo journaling RPG) into what I called “Character Analysis Roleplaying” (CARP… it’s a terrible acronym). Students rolled a D6 against randomized tables that prompted questions about character motivation, background, and psychology. You can see the original lesson for free on Teachers Pay Teachers.
The magic was in the structure. Dice rolls created genuine surprise – students couldn’t predict what they’d analyze next, which forced them to understand each character as a whole rather than cherry-picking details for a thesis. They transformed their notes into character narratives and recorded them as audio files (you can view and listen to student work samples on my teaching website).
That work led me to develop Narrative Crossroads (far better than “CARP”), which meshes Last Tea Shop‘s journaling mechanics with Chaosium‘s Basic Roleplaying system (both hackable under open licenses). At Hamtramck High School in Hamtramck, Michigan (“The World in Two Square Miles”), I’ve adapted Narrative Crossroads for general ELA 9 students studying Saki’s “The Interlopers” and for English learners working with Cao Wenxuan’s Bronze & Sunflower. Explore some implementations at narrativecrossroads.org.
This does not have to be solitary, either. I created a group scenario based on Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death” that I will run at Chaosium Con 2026 and had my after-school tabletop club playtest it (good thing, too… it was gloriously chaotic; one student spent half the session trying to kick down the welded-shut abbey doors, and the climactic confrontation with the Red Death never happened). The approach is flexible, only limited by the imagination.
Why TTRPGs Work
For my master’s thesis, I researched why this approach works. TTRPGs create what Johan Huizinga called the “magic circle”, a space with its own rules where experimentation carries no real-world consequences. Students take intellectual risks without fear of being “wrong.” Game structures like dice mechanics, prompts, and journal sheets scaffold complex analysis while leaving room for creativity, and also nail Vygotsky’s “Zone of Proximal Development.”
This isn’t just happening in my classroom. At Dungeon Master University this past January, I connected with educators doing similar work and sat down with Monte Cook to discuss bringing TTRPGs into schools. The data backs it up. Kade Wells documented in an Edutopia article how middle schoolers who played TTRPGs on Fridays exceeded projected reading growth post-pandemic. My research found that reading comprehension, vocabulary, writing, and narrative competence all improve when students are immersed in a story structure with a genuine purpose.
Dice Time: Friction, Attention, and Why Putting Down the Phone Matters
There’s another dimension to why TTRPGs work: they get students away from screens (or at least aimless use of them).
Today’s learners spend 6–10 hours daily on digital devices. The pull of smartphones creates what researchers call “hard fascination”, attention that actively depletes mental resources. Attention Restoration Theory distinguishes this from “soft fascination”, engaging stimulation that holds attention without draining it. Garrett Munro, in Adventures in Learning and Teaching with Tabletop RPGs (TabletopEDU, 2025), applies this directly, arguing that TTRPGs function as “restorative play spaces” offering “dice time” as an alternative to screen time.
This connects to friction – a concept from behavioral design. Tech companies eliminate friction to keep users scrolling, but in learning, friction produces a deeper understanding. Psychologist Robert Bjork calls these “desirable difficulties.” Dice mechanics are a perfect example: when a student rolls to determine which aspect of a character they’ll analyze next, the randomness forces them to slow down and engage with parts of the text they might have skipped.
TTRPGs also create what Munro calls “closed signification”. A character sheet isn’t a hyperlink, a dice roll doesn’t lead to a notification, and the game world is self-contained in a way screens seldom are. For educators navigating the post-pandemic attention crisis, TTRPGs aren’t just a clever teaching tool; they’re an antidote to the exact problem we keep trying to solve with more screen time.
Roll20 and Demiplane for Educational Gaming
If screen-free play is restorative, why use digital tools at all? Because what matters are the mechanics: randomization, collaborative storytelling, game rules that scaffold thinking – and those work whether the dice are on the table or on a screen.
Imagine students logging into Roll20 and Demiplane to play Avatar Legends, where digital dice provide randomization, character sheets are graphic organizers, and the students become collaborative storytellers. For schools where hybrid learning is permanent, for students who can’t stay after school, and for classrooms where thirty sets of dice aren’t in the budget, digital platforms bring dice time to students who might not otherwise get it.
How Teachers Can Start
You don’t need extensive TTRPG experience or fancy materials. All my Narrative Crossroads resources are free at narrativecrossroads.org and adaptable for almost any literary text. Check out Tabletop EDU for curriculum-aligned resources or Let’s Quest for help setting up games in your school. There are almost as many classroom possibilities as there are games.
Find my full teaching site at teaching.geoffreysperl.com. Questions? Email me or connect via LinkedIn.
My students proved something important: given the right structure, they’ll choose to think deeply. Sometimes it just takes a handful of dice and permission to play.
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