Designing the Adventure Part II: Bringing the game to life
Monday, January 6, 2025
Article 2 in the 3-part series Designing the Adventure
Master
“After days wandering in this dense forest, your party has come upon a deep chasm, splitting the forest in two. At the bottom of the chasm flows a dark, swift river. The elf breaks the silence as you gaze at the jagged rocks and roaring white water below. She can hear drum beats—moving in your direction. As the members of the party strain to hear the approaching drums, you spot an old rope and wood plank bridge not far upriver.
From a distance, it looks old and tattered, hardly reliable to bear an individual’s weight, let alone your entire party. The drums are getting louder.
What do you do?…”
Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) is a game of the imagination. A well-facilitated game immerses players in the sights and sounds of the game as well as the feelings and emotions of their characters. The more the game comes to life for players, the more they enjoy it.
Participating in a well-facilitated workshop is not much different. How a workshop is conducted determines how well the participants can access creativity and the solutions upon which their business depends. Whether crafting a vision or identifying new products and services, the more engaged participants are, the better and more rewarding the outcomes.
Active participation is the key to the game. Participation not only contributes to a successful outcome, it can be transformative. As people participate in new and unexpected ways, the experience comes to life. They find themselves deeply engaged. Time passes quickly. They have meaningful conversations and usually accomplish far more than they anticipated. At the end of the day, they might even confess to having had fun.
In either case, workshops and role-playing games provide colleagues or friends with an opportunity to experience something they can’t get anywhere else—working toward a goal in ways that test their limits, hone their skills (individual and collaborative), and form deeper bonds between them.
As a Dungeon Master (DM), I would use every device available to me to bring the game to life for the players. Today, Territory uses those same principles to help our clients get the most out of collaboration.
The willingness to play
While attitudes have changed since role-playing games were vilified in the mainstream, many people are still uncomfortable embracing imagination-based games. The same is true for collaborative and co-creative problem-solving. From the skepticism of unchecked ideation sessions to the active dislike of team-building exercises (think trust falls), a reluctance to participate is a common and natural response to unfamiliar situations. To make matters worse, workshops are experiential, i.e., only by participating do players see the value of participation.
How do we navigate this catch-22? Extolling the virtues of the game is futile, but leveraging the support of those who have played before can be very helpful. Trusted colleagues who vouch for the value of participation are usually enough to persuade skeptics to give it a try. If you don’t have the luxury of trusted advocates, familiarizing participants with “how it will feel” and “what they will be asked to do” can help establish trust. Often, giving participants a sense of what the experience will be like is all that’s needed. As soon as people are in the workshop and engaged in exploring scenarios, sharing ideas, and discussing critical issues in safe settings (i.e., interacting in ways that are not typical of the business experience), they will see the value of participation firsthand.
Where we play
As a kid, the locations available to play D&D were limited to basements or bedrooms. In business, the options are significantly expanded. Depending on the goal of the project and the resources available, the team may opt for space away from daily distractions to better access creativity or have critical conversations.
Choosing a unique physical space also suggests that we are trying something different and provides safety to “comfortably feel uncomfortable.” As teenagers, we felt this acutely. Not being interrupted by parents or nosy younger siblings allowed us to focus on the game, be vulnerable with each other, and learn in a “trusted circle.” Workshops are really no different—though we’re no longer in a friend’s basement, and the lunches are much better.
Bring players into the game
In D&D, I would use storytelling to bring players into the game. I would help them picture the setting, understand the story up to the present time, and provide enough prompts about their current situation to be comfortable shaping a path forward.
One key element of bringing players into the game is providing a reason to care. If players don’t care about the game or the outcome, the experience suffers. In D&D, the reasons for caring range from a pure love of fantasy adventure to the desire to simply keep your character alive. At Territory, we help draw out the reasons participants care. We provide opportunities to share their stories and experiences. As they are shared, participants see that they aren’t alone. They begin to feel connected, and a shared sense of purpose emerges.
As a DM, I would control much of the narrative, dialing the intensity of challenges up or down depending on the players’ skills and tolerance, making steady progress toward the end of their quest. Today, I guide teams toward their goals through carefully crafted exercises but control much less of the narrative. Each team has their own journey. Listening carefully to what they need and helping them address those needs so they can progress toward their goals is my focus.
Progress often goes hand in hand with clarity and alignment. At Territory, we use visuals to help. From its inception, Dungeons & Dragons has used visuals for the exact same purpose. Whether mapping dungeons on graph paper, landscapes on hex paper, showing illustrations of monsters, or moving mini-figures around a table to show where players were located in a scenario, visuals helped create clarity. From highlighting simple physics (“you cannot shoot an arrow at someone standing on the other side of a wall”) to as detailed as, “show me which stone you step on, specifically” to avoid activating a trap, visuals allow a great degree of specificity to drive the game forward while bringing the story to life. It’s no different today. Instead, we’re mapping business processes, clarifying roles & responsibilities, and understanding customer needs and experience.
Creating visuals remains one of my favorite parts of the work we do, and I can trace it all the way back to my days playing D&D. Visuals create understanding, help us understand complex scenarios, and are also a source of fun. A simple marker and blank canvas can convey a treasure trove of knowledge. And artistic talent isn’t a prerequisite. Effective communication can be accomplished with simple symbols, words, and shapes. The point is to enable mutual understanding or spark a critical conversation. The joy of seeing people arrive at a common understanding and begin to address problems from that point is wildly satisfying.
Bring the experience to life
Master
“As the last of the goblins fall under the blows of your swords, silence overtakes the field. The clashing of metal and the deafening war cries have been replaced by an eerie stillness. While you tend to the dwarf’s wounds and examine the fallen goblins, among the stink of their tattered, stained robes, you find a small cylinder carved of human bone and marked with crude runes.
What do you do?”
D&D centers around activities (called “encounters”) that transition from one to the next like an unfolding narrative. The outcomes of each encounter determine what decisions the party faces next. In this case, after completing a battle with a band of goblins, the party must decide whether to examine the item they found or to pursue the goblins while also dealing with an injured player. While workshops usually do not match fantasy games for pure drama, they follow a thoughtful progression of activities in which full participation matters.
Designing experiences that engage your participants is an art form. Territory’s ability to create a shared sense of purpose and provide opportunities to engage can be the difference between success and failure. We focus on maximizing engagement and creating opportunities to participate. The more players participate, the better the outcomes and the more satisfying the experience. Bringing the game to life means highlighting important details that players may be tempted to rush past or pausing to ensure continued shared understanding. It also means sprinkling surprises and fashioning unexpected moments to make players think differently.
The art of facilitation combines your experience leading activities with your ability to listen to and adjust to the participants’ needs, tolerance, and energy levels. However, what works for one team may not work for another. Good facilitation breaks participants out of the normal “way we do it” that can pervade any organization to “meet them where they are at.” As any good DM or facilitator will tell you, there’s always more than one way to get there.
At the end of the day, the game was only as good as the DM. My passion for the game immersed me in every moment, and it naturally extended to caring about the experience and the outcomes for my players. I feel the same way about the work we do at Territory. We believe in the power of human-centered problem-solving supported by visualization and different ways of working. Our passion for it extends to our clients, their experiences as people, and the desire to see them succeed in meaningful ways. Bringing the game to life starts with us. It’s what allows Territory to connect with our clients and care not only about the outcomes but the quality of the journey itself.
Part III: “Managing the game” coming soon
