In our most recent episode, we had the pleasure of greeting our FIRST EVER guest on 3WD! My girlfriend, Bonnie, who you may know as Ogin, the human sorcerer/warlock (The Woodstock Wanderers); Wilhelmina Draughall, the half-elf sorcerer/warlock (Storm King’s Thunder); and Little One, the gnome artificer (Curse of Strahd). She joined us to lend her expertise as a counselor in answering a question from our listener Skye regarding how to include players with autism.
Our discussion around inclusivity, sensitivity and awareness of other-abled people at the game table – as well as the utilization of D&D in therapy sessions – got me thinking about why we play TTRPGs and what they teach us about ourselves and each other.
Child’s Play
Play.
As kids, it’s not even questioned. It’s a part of our DNA, as natural as our hearts beating and our lungs breathing. We’re in the flow of things. You never hear kids saying, “Man, that was a really great session of playing, am I right?” They just DO it. They ARE it.
Our earliest education uses this phenomenon. Our nursery school and kindergarten teachers utilize play to teach us things: sharing, team-building, compromise. Hell, most of our progress is measured in those early days by how well we play and interact with others rather than the facts we’re learning (our ABC’s and numbers).
So, what the hell happened?
What happened was our inevitable growth into teenagers and our increasing need to forge our own identity within our tribe. A lot of this growing individuation manifests as competition. Winners and losers. Stronger and weaker. Us versus them. While competition is a necessary and healthy aspect of our development, it can be exaggerated – especially when the culture praises competitive endeavors over communal ones.
It’s easy to see this with the parade of reality competition shows that sprang up over the last twenty-plus years. Shows like Survivor, Project Runway and Top Chef shine a light on the positives and negatives of competition – how the pressure can improve someone’s skills or performance, but also how it can create a sense of doubt and defeat in them as well. We see it in the enormous popularity of professional sports and how these teams and games become an integral part of a person’s sense of identity.
Last, but certainly not least, we see this competitive bias writ large through our careers and the workforce in general.
“Someone wins. Someone loses. Suck it up, buttercup.” -Society
This bias towards competition leads me to the first aspect TTRPGs can help foster to teach us about ourselves and each other.
1. Teamwork Makes the Dream Work
“It helped me make friends and socialize,” he says, because it was a “common point” they all had to get together every week. He explains that to him, the multi-player nature of the game translates into real-world skills because “all the variables are human. You’re anticipating what the other side’s going to do.” Communicating, he says, is the key.
Delani Bartlett
The entire idea of 3 Wise DM’s revolves around honing the seemingly never-ending list of soft skills that are called for when running a game. But this doesn’t just apply to the DM – as DM Thorin has stated many times, everyone at the table is responsible for the fun – there’s a laundry list of skills on display when being a player in a game as well. The first among these, as the above quote references, is communication.
We’ve dived deep into the need for communication at the table. Next to “know your table,” communication might be the most frequent piece of advice we dispense on the show. This shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone, the entire game of D&D is nothing more than communication. Crazy, imaginative, mechanic-driven, silly communication, but communication, nonetheless. And it is this aspect of the game that helps us to begin to reorient that bias away from competition because, as you already know, no one “wins” at D&D except by having fun and crafting a good story.
This need for consistent communication takes about as many forms in game as it does in any other aspect of our lives. The most common being teamwork. Show me any corporate retreat or Sigma Six team building exercise that is going to be as difficult to navigate as figuring out how six players want to infiltrate the giant stronghold or, even worse, approach a closed door! The entire experience of playing D&D is a team-building exercise.
But how much this weekly 4-hour team-building exercise reveals about our personality and inner landscape can be quite… illuminating.
2. Our Ideal Selves
I shared an observation in our RPG Communication Breakdown episode that how we drive our cars reveals more about our state of mind than almost anything else. My point was that how we drive reveals a great deal about how we would react in a consequence-free environment (barring accidents, obviously). By that, I mean how we would comport ourselves if we didn’t have anyone to check us (because we’re already a half-mile down the road). I mean, how many of those people who honk as soon as the light turns green and cut you off in traffic would do the same thing when in line at the grocery store?
In the same way, TTRPGs help us to learn about ourselves in two distinct ways: 1) playing out scenarios in a consequence-free environment and 2) playing out our “ideal selves.”
TTRPGs are an amazing sociological experiment, what we always refer to on the show as “the psychology of D&D.” You have multiple people sitting around a table, making up stories that weave together into one very large story and randomly rolling dice and eating snacks. (I think it would take another article to explain the psychology of snacks at the table, and it would probably revolve around Pavlov’s dog and Skinnerian conditioning …)
What becomes interesting is how our own personalities, issues, likes and dislikes are transmitted through our characters into the game world. This is, undoubtedly, why therapists like Bonnie use D&D in therapy sessions. We get a sneak peak into the inner workings of a person’s mind, whether they realize it or not. With this, we get to play out scenarios in the completely consequence-free environment of the game world, which can be quite powerful and even cathartic.
In a similar vein to this idea is what I call the “Ideal Self.” Generally speaking, in TTRPGs, our first characters (and maybe ALL of our characters!) are idealized versions of ourselves – the brave warrior, the brilliant mage, the wise cleric or the scruffy-looking nerf herder scoundrel of a rogue. They’re a way for us to be all of our perceived best parts. This lets us play out what that might look like in the consequence-free environment that we discussed. One could see how powerful this is by one of Bonnie’s clients, who stated, “With D&D, I’m in control of what happens to me.”
3. Embrace the Chaos
So, here you are, playing your ideal self and building group consensus when the DM asks you to roll a die. This is where the best laid plans of mice and men immediately change into throwing the baby out with the bath water! TTRPGs teach us many things about ourselves, as we have seen, but the thing they teach us most is how we deal with chaos.
Someone need only play one session of any TTRPG (at least one that relies on dice rolls) and realize how easily chaos can explode into the game. You miff the roll to try and persuade the king that there is an assassination attempt on him? Now you’re the prime suspect. You roll poorly on your attempt to scale the building to infiltrate the headquarters where the microfilm is hidden? Asphalt pie.
Rolling dice is one of the most fun aspects of D&D, period. I disagree with the old guard who say that the DM rolling everything was better … it just couldn’t have been! This is the point in any game when your ideal self and your team-building exercise are thrown to chance. We’ve all had hot dice and we’ve all had cold dice, and how we handle the flubs and move on can teach us volumes.
But the dice aren’t the only thing creating chaos within a session. There are the other minds at the table, as well. Whether it’s infiltrating the Fire Giant Citadel or deciding whether to open the door or not, every additional mind at the table adds exponential amounts of chaos to the game.
As Matt Colville has said in his History of D&D series, “this is the game.” His point is that players discussing, debating and arguing how to proceed is not a problem with the design of the game, it IS the game – what separates games like D&D from everything else. Because what can seem like chaos is, in actuality, the way the story moves forward – what was amorphous and unknown becomes solid and known. What’s behind that door? What happens if we entreat the Goblin King? How do you embrace the chaos? Make a decision.
Final Thoughts
TTRPGs are an amazingly fun and engaging past time. As I’ve said on several occasions, there is no end to the improvements one can discover in running a game, or playing a game for that matter. That is the main reason we pursue this hobby: Fun. Yes, fun that can have competitive aspects but without the competition being the sole focus of the endeavor. The main focus remains the same: Telling a good story.
With that said, we are still human beings with all the bumps and bruises, insults and injuries of life rattling around inside of us. It’s naïve to think that all of that will go away just because we’re at the game table. If you’ve had a bad day, these things are going to bleed into that night’s session – they can’t help but to. So what do you do?
Realize that it is still a game, but a game that offers the chance to see things in a different light, to play through scenarios in your head that you might not be able to in the everyday world. But with that realization must come the realization that this is true for every single other player at the table, including the DM.
So have fun, take a breath, settle in, grab your dice and remember Aragorn’s entreaty …
Until next time, heroes… LIVE THE ADVENTURE!