Wednesday, September 30, 2009

RPGs and Business School

In reading articles regarding attention and productivity, Time becomes one of those finite resources that we have to "cheat" in order to lead a more productive and happy life. So what we usually do is try to hit two birds with one stone.

Working, Studying for school, Writing Gaming, fulfilling social obligations and of course making time for my family is really tricky. So we try to do two to five birds with one stone. In my case, 4 birds (working, studying, writing, and gaming) with one stone.

Right now I'm studying business organization, particularly entrepreneurship- which is basically "adventurer" class among the other business archetypes. My other class is Accounting for Entrepreneurs, which is not really supposed to be real accounting but you need to learn real accounting to understand it... forcing me to learn real accounting.

What am I going to do about it? Well, I can make it fun of course. See how it applies to my game and use the Case Studies in my books and Adventuring Material. Instead of going to my usual haunts for encounters, i just have to pull one of the case studies:

Ex. Maynard Company , case study 2-1 and 3-1. (accounting text and cases: robert n. anthony, david f. hawkins, and Kenneth A. Merchant 11edition).

Take the company, change some of the names, Scan and OCR the text, rewrite the values scaled up in millions. Change the NPCs, and throw in some kind of problem where highly skilled adventurers will be needed.

Brokering, Information Gathering, Recovery, Courier, Espionage, or Protection:

lets go with 1d6 (rolls 3), rolls 3x (5, 2, and 4).
Espionage
Information Gathering
and Courier

Arrange in proper context, develope a time line of events, and write up story bench marks (so that you can pace the adventure to fit the amount of time you are running it)... and Viola! I converted a case study I find mind-numbing boring into an interesting 1 session senario for players who don't know they're going to learn a bit of the lessons I just learned (as a way to reinforce my own learning and to provide added value to the game session).

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