This paper uncovers and explores the specific instructional approaches that role-playing games (RPGs) use to engage and teach their players. The goal of this research was to go beyond the theoretical understandings of gaming as rhetorical, social, and cultural experience and instead identify a practical, applications-based approach to understanding games as instructional design artifacts. Through in-depth case study research, I ultimately unearthed a set of heuristics that can be used in future studies about games and learning including how to study video games as instructional documentation and how to construct a higher education classroom as a game.