Introduction

The introduction to Education and Analog Role-Playing Games: TeachRPG – Tabletop Role-Playing Games in the Classroom positions analog role-playing games (RPGs) as powerful tools for transformative pedagogy rooted in collaboration, improvisation, and meaning-making. Rather than revisiting debates about whether games can educate, this section asks what becomes possible when RPGs are integrated into classrooms with critical intentionality. It frames RPGs as embodiments of ludic pedagogy —a relational, affective, and epistemically expansive approach to learning—and highlights how these games foster co-authorship, dialogic engagement, and ethical reflection. The introduction situates collaborative authorship as both the method and metaphor of RPG-infused classrooms. It argues that when students co-create narratives through play, they do more than absorb content; they shape knowledge together. Instructors, in turn, act not as content deliverers but as facilitators of emergent, student-centered inquiry.