Santa Clara Law students are leveling up with an education in D&D

Earlier this spring, a group of Santa Clara law students gathered in Charney Hall on a Saturday afternoon, hard at work. But they weren’t reviewing case files or outlining motions.

They were rolling dice.

The students were mid-campaign in an abridged version of Dragons of Stormwreck Isle—navigating a rugged, salt-crusted coastline, arguing with dungeon masters (aka DMs), and improvising solutions under pressure. To an outside observer, it might have looked like a very nerdy study break. But to lecturer Chris Ridder, it was legal education.

“Dungeons & Dragons has so many natural parallels to law practice,” says Ridder, a technology attorney who has been playing D&D since the 1980s. “You have to create a narrative with other people. You have to argue with the DM. You have to tell a story that makes sense and is engaging.”

That insight helped inspire “D&D and the Law,” a new, one-of-a-kind simulation course that Ridder designed and taught at Santa Clara Law this spring. The course took place over three two-hour sessions of lecture and discussion, bracketing two hours of gameplay.

Between pop culture cameos in Stranger Things and actual-play shows like Dimension 20 and Critical Role selling out major sports arenas, D&D has seen a mainstream surge over the past decade. That cultural shift showed up in the classroom itself: about half the students arrived as active players, including one cohort of friends that had been running a campaign together. The other half were complete novices, drawn in by curiosity.

One of the biggest lessons Ridder hoped to impart to his students was a different perspective on rules. In D&D, the dungeon master, like a judge, has a certain amount of discretion and is persuadable. Players who master the rules, know their audience, and can argue the rules effectively in real time are in the best position to secure a good outcome.

The tension between advocacy and acceptance, between rules-lawyering and reading the room, is, Ridder argues, precisely what law school should be teaching.

“There are basically three ways of interpreting D&D rules,” explains Zachary Nemirovsky J.D. ’22, one of two experienced DMs Ridder recruited to run the campaign. “Rules as written—that’s textualism. Rules as intended—that’s legislative intent. And rules as fun—that’s basically policy outcomes: what’s going to make for the best game, ultimately. They map on pretty well to how you’re supposed to interpret statutes.”

The course went deeper than doctrine, too. In D&D, every character is defined by a sheet tracking their class, subclass, ability scores, feats, and spells—the mechanical blueprint of who they are and what they can do.

Ridder used that framework as the spine of the course’s most generative and creative assignments. The first: build a character sheet for a Level 1 Lawyer, imagining yourself on the day you pass the bar. What’s your background? What class of lawyer are you? What spells do you have prepared?

Then, the final assignment asked students to flash-forward, envisioning themselves as Level 7 Lawyers—requiring a mid-career character sheet build, with feats chosen, subclasses declared, and some honest reckoning about how they’d want to level up. Self-care, it turns out, might be a castable skill, as one student listed Brew Tea and Call My Family as cantrips.

“Being a lawyer, it’s not just about vanquishing the enemy,” Ridder noted. “It’s about building a team, having colleagues who care about you, having friends and family as part of your support system.”

That might be the course’s most lasting lesson. Legal doctrine can be studied alone, but successful practice of the law, like a questing party, requires teamwork. Figuring out how to combine different abilities, cover each other’s weaknesses, and keep the trust of everyone at the table are key challenges—whether you’re investigating draconic activity along the Sword Coast or starting your first year at a firm.

After a successful first run of the class, Ridder is already thinking about the next campaign, and for the students who rolled this spring, their campaigns are just getting started.