Critical Rolls & Cognitive Load

Let it be known, fellow adventurers: no hobby of mine is safe from instructional design.

You might be asking, "Caitlin, what do Dungeons & Dragons and instructional design have in common?" (You also might not be, but here we are regardless).

And the answer is: quite a lot, if your first instinct in any scenario is to identify friction points and improve the user experience.

I recently helped pull together a new D&D group, and this will be my first time serving as the DM. Which means I am now responsible for campaign planning, worldbuilding, rules interpretation, and guiding five adults through the deeply serious business of creating fictional people who talk to plants and fight monsters and try to earn pretend treasure.

My players are especially excited about character creation, so I committed to running a full campaign rather than a short intro adventure. If people are going to spend hours crafting backstories and writing enough lore for a character who may immediately get attacked by rats (and if you’re in my campaign reading this, no, this is not me leaking encounter details), it seems only fair to let them keep those characters around for more than a few sessions.

Session 0 will be dedicated to character creation and campaign setup. Part of my job as the DM is setting the tone, introducing the world, and giving players enough context to create characters that actually make sense in the setting without giving too much away.

The challenge is that character creation can take a while.

Between five players, two Player’s Handbooks, and a process that requires flipping between multiple sections to piece everything together, it can slow down quickly, especially for players who are newer to the game or who just want to start building.

So naturally, I approached it like an instructional designer.

After getting to know the group, understanding their goals, and reviewing the character creation process, I created a step-by-step character creation guide that pulls together the most relevant information from the Player’s Handbook, condenses it, simplifies the language, and reorganizes it into a format that is easier to follow during the actual task of building a character.

Rather than constantly flipping between handbook sections and piecing together information from multiple chapters, players can work through the process in order and reference the official text only when they need to reference more detailed information. They can focus on the fun parts while also creating characters that will thrive in the world I've built for them.

Could I have made an eLearning module? Yes.

Would that have been a wildly disproportionate response to a casual game night? Also yes.

Is this also a strange way to prep for a casual game night? I'm not sure who really gets to decide that, but I'm going to say this is absolutely and completely normal.

Players do not need a full training module on the theory behind ability scores and class features before Session 0. They need support while making decisions in the moment. So I built a just-in-time performance support tool for character creation.

This kind of thinking carries into pretty much everything I design. Whether it’s workplace learning or a tabletop campaign, I tend to think through the same questions: Who is this for? Where will they get stuck? What do they actually need in the moment? How can I make the experience smoother before frustration ever happens? What kind of mysterious creatures lay lurking in the caves? ... that last one may be more specific to this particular topic.

Here’s a draft of the Character Creation guide I put together for Session 0:

D&D Character Creation.pdf

Download PDF • 149KB

I’ve already started organizing materials for Session 1, because apparently I cannot engage in hobbies without turning them into structured systems.

Structured systems are fun too, right? (I truly cannot be alone in this ... right?)

Whether the stakes are defeating goblins or navigating a new process at work, I genuinely enjoy designing tools and experiences that help people learn what they need, navigate challenges more confidently, and perform at their best. The more I think about it, becoming the DM feels less like a choice and more like a diagnosis.

Something tells me this campaign will provide no shortage of opportunities to apply learning design, facilitation, workflow management, and structured chaos management, so this likely won’t be my last post on the intersection of D&D and instructional design.

Consider yourselves warned, fellow adventurers.