Summary Statement: This concept project in Articulate Storyline 360 helps Dungeon Masters host their first one shot in Dungeons & Dragons–a tabletop roleplaying game with over 50+ million players worldwide.

Audience: First time Dungeon Masters.

Responsibilities: Learning Experience Design (action mapping, storyboarding, prototyping, and full building), visual design, web design, videography, eLearning development.

Tools Used: Articulate Storyline 360, Canva, YouTube, DaVinci Resolve, Epidemic Sound.

The Problem And Solution

Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) is a tabletop roleplaying game which provides a sanctuary of connection, creativity, and fun, amidst the chaos of every day life. At the center of the game sits the Dungeon Master who guides the story for the rest of the players.

The problem is there is a Dungeon Master shortage in the Dungeons & Dragons community.

Rising up to the role of Dungeon Master when there are legendary names like Matt Mercer in the community is... Honestly quite intimidating. This alongside finding players, time, learning the rules of D&D, and engaging players during the session makes sticking to being a player seem like the much better option.

D&D helped me feel community and explore myself during the aftermath of COVID-19. But like many players I was blocked from playing more games because we didn't have a DM. When I stepped up by DMing A Little Bit Of Thievery for my group, I never looked back. Now, I'm DMing a more extended campaign called The Chrono Files to celebrate my senior year at college and loving it.

We need to make DMing more accessible.

This would not only help more people get into D&D but The Wizards Of The Coast—the creators of the game—would like nothing more than to have more DMs to draw players in and buy their things.

I made this learning experience to help increase the DMs in the community.

The experiences helps DMs with finding a one shot to play, players to play it with, the basics of roleplaying as NPCs, describing settings players come across, using music to heighten atmosphere, and applying the rules of D&D while integrating AI. Here's how I built it.

The Process

To bring this project to life, I leaned on the structure of the ADDIE model which builds an experience through analysis, design, development, iteration, and evaluation.

Analysis

After personally talking to five of my D&D friends, reflecting on my own experience, and sifting through Reddit and Discord threads, I put together a action map of the most important actions DMers would need to take to host their first one shot. This is a diagram which shows how you can achieve a goal through actions, rather than just knowledge regurgitation.

The main business goal was to increase the percent of people in the D&D community who report they have DMed by 5%. This would be an incredible win for The Wizards Of The Coast because it would increase the amount of people who could get into D&D, and it would increase the amount of people who might buy DM related material from them.

Design

Using the action map, I storyboarded a course outline:

• Intro Video
• Meet Max
• Finding A One Shot
• Finding Players For The One Shot
• Scheduling A Session 0
• Learning The Basic Rules Of D&D
• Describing, Roleplaying, And Integrating Music Into Your Sessions
• Integrating AI Into Your DMing

I thought it would be interesting to give the course a storytelling element to it. So the course follows Max, a 19 year old Computer Science sophomore who discovered D&D through Critical Role in the Pandemic.

Through watching various videos, and integrating the action items, the learners help Max—and in turn themselves—host their first rocking one shot.

So meta I know.

I storyboarded some scripts for each video in the course, and visually prototyped some slides in Canva.

Development

Entering the development stage, I set up the slides in Articulate Storyline 360 and recorded the videos.

Then I edited them in DaVinci resolve using Epidemic Sound to add awesome music. Finally, I uploaded the Learning Experience to Google Cloud on its own website for anyone to go through!