Crashed on an island

[flammifer]

Pretty basic settings: the characters are their actual selves, crashed on an unknown shore (plane accident, etc.).

What did they do? One looked for ships and wrote a giant SOS on the sand. One tried to start a fire using his glasses as a magnifying glass. One went away in the forst to find something to eat, another ran after him, encountered an alligator, and was eaten. They ended up fairly well set for survival, but we had to stop early, because the class was over  - did I mention this was in a French class I teach in Beijing? :) I'm supposed to make them (between seven and nine university freshmen, the size depends of the group) practice their spoken french, I'd already have them do dialogues where they had roles that left them quite a bit of leeway, but nothing this Role-playing gamesque and open-ended. I had brought a six-sided die for action resolution (Do you find water, a snake, or nothing? Does the snake bite you, or did you see it first?). I wish they'd have co-operated a bit more ("I'm going out in the forest, who's coming?"), but it was interesting nonetheless.

(Yes, yes, this is fairly off topic. But it may be of interest - anybody else tried anything similar?)

[Alan]

Hi Flammifer,

Is this you first Forge post?  If so, welcome!

I realize the primary purpose of the game you describe was to practice a language, rather than develop an RPG, but a bit more detail about how the role-play worked out would interest me.

I assume you weren't using any particular RPG rules.  What sort of rules did you end up using?

Who decided where the players started a scene?  Who decided when a scene (or someone's turn or whatever) was over?

For example, how did you use the die?  Can you describe an example of what built up to a die roll, how you decided when to roll, who decided when to roll, and how you determined what happened as a result of the roll?

How did the participants respond? 

could you add some pressure that would make them more group oriented?  Why do you want more group orientation?