Dadi, Maghi & Draghi: role-playing games as an educational tool

From role-playing to popular culture

I am Kristian Sensini: a musician, teacher and long-time role-player. I was invited by the IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca to speak about my book Dadi, Maghi & Draghi and, more broadly, about the educational use of role-playing games — a field in which I have been trying to connect two experiences that have accompanied much of my life: being a player and being a teacher.

I have played Dungeons & Dragons for roughly forty years. The cultural position of the game has changed dramatically: what was once treated as an eccentric niche hobby has become a recognisable part of popular culture. Stranger Things has certainly accelerated this visibility, but D&D had already entered the wider imagination decades earlier, as the opening D&D scene in E.T. reminds us.

This cultural familiarity is one of the reasons I use Dungeons & Dragons in school workshops. I do not claim its rules are inherently more educational than those of other games. In fact, the system can be quite complex. Its strength in my context is that many students already recognise its language through films, television and other media. That familiarity provides an immediate doorway into play.

Role-playing itself is not as alien as it may seem. Most of us encountered it in childhood through the simple formula ‘let’s pretend I was…’. Dungeons & Dragons structures that imaginative ability through shared rules, characters and consequences, but the impulse to enter an imagined situation together is already deeply human.

Play first, education second

When I began thinking about the educational possibilities of role-playing, I identified many processes already active during a session: social interaction, empathy, decision-making, strategic planning, imagination, active learning, problem-solving, feedback, motivation, adaptability, self-confidence, concentration, communication and the possibility of confronting moral questions through the consequences of choices.

This is closer to game-based learning than to gamification. My aim is not to decorate a conventional lesson with points or rewards, but to use a real game as an experience of learning while preserving its freedom and its ludic nature. The educational objectives belong to the teacher’s planning; they should not become so explicit that the game turns into a disguised exercise.

For this reason, my basic principle is that play must come before didactics. If we want to use role-playing educationally, we must first allow students to play.

Simplifying Dungeons & Dragons without losing its identity

The main obstacle for teachers who have never played D&D is often the apparent weight of the rules. I therefore developed simplified character sheets that preserve the elements I consider meaningful while reducing those that create unnecessary barriers for beginners.

Simplification should answer a precise need: the goal is not to make the game generically easier, but to make it possible for the narrative experience to begin without excessive technical preparation. I would not even remove the twenty-sided die: its strange form, its unpredictability and its symbolic presence at the table are part of the fascination of D&D.

Another reason to use a recognisable game is that students can continue independently after the workshop. Educational activities are stronger when they can become the beginning of a self-directed interest rather than remaining a closed school exercise.

The Dungeon Master and the teacher: you cannot improvise being a professional, but professionals must improvise

A good Dungeon Master must understand group dynamics, read reactions, adapt narrative rhythm and respond to the unexpected without constantly interrupting play. These abilities have striking parallels with classroom management.

Improvisation is often misunderstood in education as lack of preparation. I mean the opposite: we cannot improvise being teachers, surgeons or musicians, but genuine professional competence includes the ability to improvise when reality refuses to follow the script. Jazz offers a useful analogy: improvisation works because a musician possesses a language deeply enough to use it flexibly.

The relationship is therefore reciprocal. Teaching skills can help someone become a better Game Master, while mastering a role-playing table can train a teacher to listen, respond and alter a planned path in relation to what is actually happening.

Railroading, player freedom and educational objectives

In role-playing, railroading describes the situation in which the Game Master insists on a predetermined conclusion regardless of players’ decisions. When control becomes coercive, one of the most interesting qualities of role-playing — genuinely shared narrative construction — is weakened.

At the same time, complete freedom is not automatically the best solution. During the discussion in Lucca, an important point emerged: narrative control and freedom form a continuum. Some educational activities require specific stages or content. The problem is not to choose between absolute freedom and absolute control, but to understand what relationship between structure and participation is appropriate for the experience being designed.

Agency matters because decisions need to have meaning. A teacher or Game Master can orient a group, but if participants discover that every choice was only an illusion, the shared narrative loses much of its educational and ludic value.

Role-playing in school practice: working with large groups

One of the most common questions I receive concerns class size. Role-playing is usually imagined for four or five people, while teachers may face twenty-five or thirty students. I often work with five or six active players at a time and alternate scenes between groups, almost like cinematic editing.

A very simple demonstration requires no materials at all. Give people a few character roles, describe a castle whose drawbridge is mysteriously open, and ask the fundamental Game Master question: ‘What do you do?’ The game has already begun, because every participant has constructed a different mental image and must now act within it.

In summer workshops I have also experimented with what I call a ‘game multiverse’: the same characters are passed from one player to another in timed turns. Everyone must follow the story because the consequences of one participant’s decisions will eventually become somebody else’s problem. A controlled narrative ‘rewind’ can sometimes be used to compare alternative choices without erasing the educational value of error.

In school, the table must remain a protected, non-judgmental environment. We may discuss whether a choice was effective or whether alternatives existed, but criticism of a fictional decision must never become a judgement of the person who made it.

“I choose to trust them”: meaningful experiences

One of the most memorable moments in my workshops came from a student who tended to dominate group decisions. After experiencing the difficulties created by trying to control every situation, he reached an important choice and said: ‘I choose to trust them.’ For me, this was remarkable because he was not merely accepting a suggestion: he was consciously recognising trust as his own decision.

I have also seen students who were very quiet or apparently disengaged in ordinary classroom settings find a more expressive role in a role-playing environment, sometimes even moving toward the position of Dungeon Master. These are observations, not proof that role-playing will produce the same result for every learner. Neurodivergent students, like all students, are highly diverse.

This distinction matters. A role-playing session can exercise collaboration, communication and reflection, but demonstrating stable transfer of those skills to other contexts requires further observation and research. Concepts such as bleed-in and bleed-out also remind us that the relationship between player and character can be emotionally powerful and must be handled carefully, especially with children and adolescents.

Another recurring effect I have observed is increased interest in reading. For some students, the desire to explore imagined worlds at the table becomes an invitation to look for fantasy novels and adventure stories beyond the game.

From classroom experience to scientific research

A crucial point raised during the Lucca discussion concerned scientific measurement. The competencies I describe are potential objectives, while many of the episodes in my book and talks are personal observations. The two should not be confused.

Available research offers promising indications about role-playing and collaboration, communication, participation and socio-emotional skills, but studies are often limited in sample size or context. Participating in an activity that requires a skill does not automatically prove a stable improvement in that skill.

For this reason, I believe educational experimentation should increasingly be accompanied by systematic data collection. One proposal from the discussion was to create a national network of teachers and educators already using role-playing, so that methods and documented experiences can be shared. I would be very happy to contribute to such a network.

Role-playing and theatre: interpreting without performing for an audience

Role-playing can be compared with theatre, but an important difference is that interpretation does not necessarily require public performance. I remember enjoying rehearsals more than final shows when I was young: the collaborative construction of the work mattered to me more than appearing before an audience.

The same question arises in music education, where end-of-year performances are often treated almost as compulsory. Performance can certainly be valuable, but it should not become the sole measure of educational quality. Role-playing offers many theatre-like opportunities — voice, character, improvisation, relationship and perspective-taking — inside a small group that can remain protected and non-judgmental.

Playing a character different from ourselves is already an exercise in decentring perspective. It becomes even richer when we also try to understand why another player interpreted the same situation differently.

School subjects through role-playing

Alongside transversal skills, role-playing can connect directly with curriculum content. History is an obvious example: an adventure set in a specific period can open questions about social organisation, material culture, geography, traditions and relationships between people.

During the Lucca talk I showed settings published by Acheron such as Brancalonia and Inferno, the latter inspired by Dante’s Divine Comedy, as well as Lex Arcana, which imagines an alternative Roman Empire transformed by magic. These settings demonstrate how game mechanics and narrative concepts can interact with literary, historical and symbolic content.

It is also possible to begin without large costs: introductory rules, digital starter sets and free materials can support first experiences. If games are treated as educational working tools, it is worth continuing the discussion about how institutions recognise the formative value of ludic materials.

Conflict and combat as narrative experiences

Another question concerned combat. I do not believe that removing conflict from educational role-playing is automatically the best choice. Children have always used symbolic play to explore danger, aggression, rivalry and risk. What matters is distinguishing real danger from simulated conflict and creating a safe context in which consequences can be examined.

In the written version of the talk I added two references. H. G. Wells’s Little Wars (1913) treated miniature battle play in a context that could also invite reflection on the absurdity and destructiveness of real war. A 2018 longitudinal study by Sven Smith, Christopher J. Ferguson and Kevin M. Beaver found no statistically significant association between childhood toy-weapon play and later juvenile crime in the data they analysed. This does not prove that every form of aggressive play is harmless, nor does it directly establish the effects of combat in role-playing games; it simply warns against collapsing imaginary violence and real-world violent behaviour into the same category.

In a role-playing session, if a participant chooses violence, the educational response need not always be prohibition. When age and context allow, the story itself can let choices produce consequences, and reflection can follow. The objective is not to celebrate conflict but to create conditions in which it can be explored safely and responsibly.

The Dungeon Master as a facilitator of narrative

The traditional image of the Dungeon Master as an almost absolute authority deserves reconsideration. I see the Game Master first of all as another player with a different function: facilitating narrative, interpreting the world and contributing to a shared experience.

This becomes particularly meaningful when I play with my own students. In ordinary school life I am the teacher and they are students; around a role-playing table we can construct a different relationship without cancelling my responsibilities as an adult. I am not a babysitter supervising play from outside. I am a participant whose role includes protecting the conditions that make play possible.

This requires a shared social contract, often described through the idea of the magic circle. But a magic circle does not automatically guarantee safety. The adult facilitator must define appropriate boundaries, respect individual limits and intervene when group dynamics become harmful.

From ludic experience to transforming teaching

What interests me most is not simply the possibility of putting Dungeons & Dragons into school, but the change that role-playing can encourage in how we understand teaching. A teacher who experiences the Game Master role may begin to transfer some of its competencies into everyday practice: listening more carefully, adapting a lesson, recognising students’ initiatives and treating the unexpected as something other than a problem to eliminate.

I try to apply this even when teaching music history. Instead of beginning with a chronology, I may ask students to imagine themselves in a city around the year 1000: streets, buildings, clothing, sounds and even smells. Once they have constructed an environment mentally, historical information no longer arrives as a completely abstract sequence of facts.

The same principle can apply to literature. An educational role-playing experience inspired by Dante’s Inferno can precede the formal study of the text, giving students an imaginative relationship with the world before theoretical analysis. Experience can precede formalised knowledge without replacing explanation, study or assessment.

This, ultimately, is the principle I try to develop through Dadi, Maghi & Draghi: not merely making a lesson more pleasant through play, but recognising ludic experience as a way to rethink how students relate to content, to one another and to their own process of learning. I hope the discussion started in Lucca can continue through new experiments, collaboration between schools and research initiatives.

Editorial note and references

This English page is an editorial English version of the written talk. The attached Word document contains the complete Italian text prepared after the Lucca Comics & Games 2026 event. The Italian document is itself an editorial reworking rather than a verbatim transcript: audience questions were condensed for readability, repetitions typical of spoken language were removed, and the H. G. Wells / toy-weapon research references were added after the conference to replace a historically inaccurate provocation without changing the argument’s general meaning.

References cited in the Italian document include Gianni Rodari, Grammatica della fantasia (1973); Tracy Hickman, Dragonlance: The Story and the Game (2014); Sebastian Deterding, Dan Dixon, Rilla Khaled and Lennart Nacke, From Game Design Elements to Gamefulness: Defining Gamification (2011); H. G. Wells, Little Wars (1913); and Sven Smith, Christopher J. Ferguson and Kevin M. Beaver, Learning to blast a way into crime, or just good clean fun? (2018).