List of Role-Playing Games (RPG) Applied to and for Business

Talking about role-playing games in a corporate setting may sound, at first, like a curious oddity.

“We’ve got budgets to close, clients to serve, and you want us to roll twelve-sided dice?”

And yet, from Harvard to Zurich, from Tokyo to Copenhagen, role-playing games are becoming serious tools to tackle equally serious problems: leadership, team building, conflict management.

The Digital Side RPGs: Simulations with a White Collar

Let’s start with the well-groomed cousins, the ones featured in business school catalogues.

Mursion (USA) blends digital avatars with live human actors behind the scenes. It’s used to practice relational skills: giving feedback, handling difficult conversations, conducting interviews. Fortune 500 companies and universities use it extensively.

Kognito, also US-based, offers virtual conversation scenarios on sensitive topics (mental health, diversity & inclusion, conflict management). The value here is unlimited repetition and risk-free practice.

Capsim and SimVenture are full-fledged business simulators: teams of budding managers must make marketing, production and financial decisions, and soon discover that every choice has a price. Capsim is popular in American business schools, SimVenture in the UK.

SimulTrain, developed in Switzerland, is a classic for project management: within a few hours, teams must drive a project under pressure while unpredictable events cascade one after another. Perfect for stress-testing nerves and priorities.

These platforms turn theory into practice and deliver precise metrics. Still, they remain experiences mediated by a screen: sleek, efficient, but somewhat distant.

The Analog Side: TTRPGs - Dice, Cards and Imagination

Then there are the real role-playing games, the tabletop ones. No avatars here: just you, your colleagues, and a facilitator conducting the story.

In the Nordic countries, a tradition of Nordic Larp has been adapted to the corporate world. Researchers and trainers have used live-action scenarios to explore organizational change, inclusion, and conflict management. The principle is straightforward: living a metaphor firsthand helps reveal real-world behaviours.

Some academics have experimented with Dungeons & Dragons in a managerial key: the dragon becomes the market, the dungeon a strategic plan, and the party of adventurers a project team. This is no joke: academic papers have documented how this approach enhances collaboration and decision-making.

Then there are custom serious tabletop RPGs designed by training companies: starship crews, medieval cities in crisis, Arctic expeditions. The rules are light; the goal is to bring out leadership styles, group dynamics, and innovation capacity.

And Here Comes T3 Method, The Team Tale RPG

All the examples above—however interesting—are adaptations: of educational videogames, of university simulations, of D&D or Larp. None were conceived from the outset for business, and for business alone.

The T3 Method, The Team Tale RPG was.

It doesn’t borrow dice or rules from other worlds: it builds a narrative and methodological framework directly on real organizational challenges. Fantasy isn’t a disguise here; it’s a lens that magnifies hidden dynamics—decision-making struggles, tensions between leadership and collaboration, vulnerabilities under stress.

The Uniqueness: Business RPG for Data Generation

And this is where the key difference lies.

Mursion or SimulTrain record performance on predefined metrics.

Corporate Larp provides mainly qualitative impressions.

The T3 Method, The Team Tale RPG, by contrast, produces structured, quantitative data during the session:

• choices made by players,

• reaction times,

• frequency of interventions,

• perceived quality of decisions,

• leadership and collaboration dynamics.

• and much more...

These data are then analyzed post-game to generate concrete reports: strengths, improvement areas, group patterns. In other words, the game is not just an experience, but also a diagnostic system that captures, in real time, how a team actually functions—beyond résumés and official KPIs.

Role Playing Games Really for Buiness

From digital simulators to re-skinned D&D campaigns, the landscape of RPGs applied to business is rich and diverse. All share one merit: turning abstraction into lived experience.

But the T3 Method, The Team Tale RPG stands out for a simple reason: it is not an adaptation, but a project born specifically for business. And above all, it doesn’t just “play to understand”: it records, measures, and delivers objective data.

In an age when companies are drowning in dashboards and spreadsheets, it is paradoxical that the truth about teams might emerge more clearly from rolling dice and playing a character than from filling out yet another survey. But, as Montanelli might have put it, if reality is paradoxical, so much the better: at least it forces us to face it head-on.

References:

Mursion – mursion.com

Kognito – kognito.com

Capsim – capsim.com

SimVenture – simventure.co.uk

SimulTrain (STS) – sts.ch/simultrain

Nordic Larp – see nordiclarp.org

Jørgensen, K. (2019), Role-playing games in management education.