D&D for Learning: Take Training from Forgettable to Formative

By Aaron Delgaty

You carefully pick your way through an overgrown forest. Suddenly, your party encounters a small camp of kobolds. They are alerted to your presence. The closest monster turns, raises its club, and snarls:

“How is your solution different from the competitor’s?”

You roll a 3.

You fumble out a list of surface-level feature differences. Nothing tied to the kobold’s specific business needs. No insight. No impact.

The kobold narrows its eyes, disengages, and tosses your carefully prepared scroll deck into the fire.

Your party has failed. The sale is lost.

The unexpected shows up everywhere …

Dungeons & Dragons isn’t just about elves and dice rolls. It’s a masterclass in improvisation, systems thinking, and learning through consequence. It rewards players who suspend disbelief, grasp the rules of the world, and find unconventional solutions to strange situations.

In both the Forgotten Realms and modern enterprise business, survival hinges on one thing: How well you respond when the unexpected hits the table.

This isn’t just a sales thing. It’s a work thing. Because the unexpected shows up everywhere:

• A new manager has to give difficult feedback for the first time, and the employee pushes back, hard.
• A customer success rep has to calm a client mid-escalation, while still holding the line on policy.
• A product manager is challenged in a stakeholder meeting: “Why should we prioritize your feature over everything else on the roadmap?”
• An engineer is asked to explain a tradeoff to a non-technical executive, on the spot.
• A DEI leader is confronted with a microaggression during a town hall, and all eyes turn to them.

Each of these moments is a real-world test of emotional fluency, situational awareness, and decision-making under pressure. And each moment, whether handled well or poorly, can have an indelible impact on employee, customer, and/or your brand.

There’s clear incentive to get it right. How to effectively and efficiently train for these scenarios is less so.

Slide decks with follow-up quizzes are tried and true, but the dialogue often feels stilted and scenarios seem absurd. And the average employee will quickly encounter situations that exceed what they covered in training.

Scenario: Susan is in the break room making coffee.

You enter.

Do you:
a. Ask about Susan’s weekend.
b. Make a wildly inappropriate comment

This is what passes for realism.

Training should mirror, or at least attempt to emulate, the complexity of real life. Scripts should be adaptive. Scenarios should branch. Participants should expect the unexpected. Learners should experience consequence, collaboration, and creativity under pressure. In a word, training should be immersive.

Immersion is the magic of Dungeons & Dragons. And it’s the magic missing from most corporate training.

Immersive learning turns training into something lived. The stakes feel real. The pressure is simulated, but the emotions are not. And just like in a D&D campaign, the lessons stick because the learner doesn’t just study the moment—they survive it.

The case for immersion

Immersion isn’t a gimmick. It’s a proven learning accelerator. Dungeons & Dragons works because it forces players to think inside the world, where decisions have weight and choices reshape the story.

The importance of immersive play to human personal and social development is well-documented in anthropology. Victor Turner (1982) explored how rituals, as a structured form of immersive play, help people rehearse new roles, explore alternative identities, and bond through shared symbolic action (1). Clifford Geertz, observing cockfights in Bali, remarked on the capacity of immersive play—what he called deep play—to reinforce or subvert power dynamics, cultural narratives, and personal meaning (2).

Both scholars recognized that structured play isn’t a diversion—it’s a deep rehearsal of culture, identity, and decision-making.

Immersive learning strategies like simulations are more than just learning tools. They’re rehearsals for real-life ambiguity. When the stakes feel real and identity seems on the line (i.e., deep play), they transform the rote exercise of training into something meaningful, memorable, and transformative.

Done right, immersive training simulations recreate real-world complexity—messy dialogue, emotional nuance, and unpredictable variables. They ask for more than memorization. They demand:

• Judgment
• Empathy
• Adaptability
• Situational fluency

And when designed well, they teach exactly those skills in addition to conveying content knowledge and testing technical expertise.

Why not before? And why now?

If immersive training is so powerful, why isn’t it everywhere?

For one, the cost. The most established form of immersive training on the market is simulations. Until recently, high-fidelity simulations were the purview of either a handful of specialty firms or development specialists with unique skill sets (often from having worked at those specialty firms).

Developing business context, programming spreadsheets, and managing live facilitators is a significant investment over another slide deck. The time and energy needed to coordinate even a modest-sized simulation is staggering, even for a seasoned L&D professional.

This leads to the second barrier: scale. Given the amount of investment needed to pull off a simulation, these learning experiences have traditionally been reserved for one-off events or annual kick-offs for select attendees (i.e., management), and furnished by only the most affluent firms. The average sales or HR professional working at mid-size companies might never experience a simulation in their career.

Simulations at this scale are not typically translated to smaller experiences for branch offices and individual teams. This is neither fiscally nor logistically feasible.

Third, and most misguided, is the idea that simulations and other forms of immersive learning are only applicable to a narrow set of professions or roles.

Sales. Manufacturing. Engineering. Pilots. Sure. But not human resources. Not product managers. Not strategists or data scientists. Maybe a couple of roleplay exercises for customer service folks. Maybe.

But the fact is: If your people make judgment calls, they need practice. If they work with other humans, they need simulation. They need immersive training experiences that give them a safe place to experiment and to fail, so they don’t fail when it really counts.

While traditional training has lagged in immersion, that’s changing. New technologies are making it more feasible, more flexible, and more human than ever before. Yes, cost and scale are still factors, but barriers are dropping fast, thanks to AI, natural language engines, and no-code tools built for learning.

In Part 2 of this article, “D&D for Learning: Tricks of the Trade,” we’ll explore how to design and deliver immersive training with the tools you already have, and a few new ones you might want to try.

References

1. Victor Turner, From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play, 1982.

2. Clifford Geertz, “Deep Play: Notes on a Balinese Cockfight,” in The Interpretation of Cultures, 1973.

Image credit: Wiphop Sathawirawong