Getting Started

How This Works

You’ll be playing a character who is part of a digital humanities project. While playing, you pretend to be that character.

The instructor will be the DM (DH Master). The DM acts as storyteller and referee, describing the situation to you and the other players. Imagine how your character would react to the situation, and tell the DM what your character is going to do. Each "round" of the DH RPG represents a month of in-game time, and it's up to you to decide how your character will spend their time that month.

You can allocate your character's time by assigning activity points to different activities. Some activities (like writing or teaching or technical work) require skill to complete successfully. The DM will ask you to roll dice corresponding to your character's skill level for that activity.

Together with the DM and other players, you will get to experience some of what it’s like to do a digital humanities project, without ever turning on a computer.

Timeframe

We’ll play through roughly a year in the life of a DH project. For DLCL 205 during fall quarter 2021, our game will start in March 2020, and we will play through March 2021. The assistant professor and grad student characters will come up with the project idea in March 2020, and will negotiate with the senior professor character for an internal grant from the campus DH center. The DH project team (potentially including all characters) will decide on what the end goal of the project should be by March 2021.

Each character type also has a particular long-term goal that they should be working towards. The state of those long-term goals in March 2021 will affect the game's ending for the individual characters.

Time and Skill

All characters have 24 hours in the day, and all characters get 20 activity points that they can allot to any activity of their choice for the month. 20 activity points assumes that they are sleeping around 6-7 hours per night. Players can negotiate with the DM for additional activity points in exchange for a penalty on their dice rolls, in order to model sleep deprivation. The penalty will get steeper the more times you do this; spending activity points on sleep will reduce the penalty.

Different character types (e.g. faculty, undergrad, staff) have different responsibilities, like teaching or studying. Not allocating activity points to those responsibilities will have short-term (and possibly long-term) consequences for the character. Individual characters will have additional constraints on their use of activity points; e.g. characters who are caregivers (e.g. of children or elderly relatives) will automatically have a certain number of points assigned to care responsibilities, and characters with chronic illnesses will automatically have a certain number of points assigned to managing those illnesses. Depending on how you have created your character, you may have fewer than 20 activity points to allocate in a given month. Over the course of the year, the events of 2020 and 2021 may also have an impact on how many activity points you can allocate to activities of your choosing.

When you allocate activity points to something that requires skill, you will need to roll the dice. How many dice depends on your character's skill level with that activity (consult your character sheet), and the threshold for a "successful" dice roll depends on the activity and character type. (No one is expecting an undergrad to do academic writing like a senior faculty member.) But wait, there's more! Sometimes stuff just happens. Every time you roll dice, (at least) one die is a different color. If you roll a 1 on that different-colored die, regardless of your overall roll, you are no longer in control of the situation. Instead, you'll have to roll a 20-sided randomness die to see what happens to your character. A low roll on the randomness die means your character gets a very bad surprise; a high roll means a good surprise, and rolls in the middle are more ambiguous.

Winning

No one wins the DH RPG. It's not that kind of game. But you can (and should) try to get the best outcome possible for your character, from that character's point of view.

Imagination and Empathy

Imagination and empathy are at the heart of the DH RPG. For the RPG to be a meaningful simulation of a real DH project, you should use your imagination to try to embody the worldview of your character and make decisions that they would make within that worldview. (If you’re a tenure-track faculty member playing an undergrad, your character isn’t going to have the same time-management skills that you personally have.) At the same time, resist the temptation to descend into an exaggerated parody of your character type: you’re playing a person, not a stereotype. (Librarians live more complex lives than ordering books and going home to their cats.)

For purposes of this class, all players must play in good faith: you are actually trying to accomplish your character goals and the project goals, and shouldn’t actively take malicious steps to sabotage the project or others’ goals. At the same time, it may be realistic for your character to struggle with their goals and/or the project at some points in the game. Your character may have to deal with a family crisis (that you may declare as the player, or the DM may initiate as the result of a catastrophic randomness die roll), or stop working on the project for a month to manage the impact of budget cuts on their primary job. In the real world, team members have all kinds of reactions to these sorts of situations, shaped by their own background, experience, and disposition. In the DH RPG as played in this class, empathy will be our lodestar. Players should modulate their characters’ reactions with empathy to the greatest extent possible permitted by that character's worldview. In this way, we play the world of DH not as it is, but as we’d like to see it.