Alright, I’m gonna come straight out with it. My name is Sam and I play a tabletop role playing game for fun. Do I have my nerd license yet? Are my credentials in order? Am I still reputable as a writer?
Okay, let’s be serious here—"Dungeons and Dragons" is a pretty niche game for a pretty niche audience. At its core, it’s about envisioning yourself and your group as otherworldly fantasy characters in a world you create together. Everything is basically decided by chance, as to do anything you have to role a die and hope for the best results. Sometimes it can be incredibly fun and other times it can be an exercise in tedium and even frustration. However, after a year or so of playing, I think I’ve come to realize a few things.
This game teaches you about people:
You get to choose how you play, where you come from and what essentially defines your character. However, you are not your character, so you can to do crazy things that you couldn’t normally do in real life if you wanted to. You can steal from people, you can kill people, you can destroy, lie, cheat, basically do anything that would get you into trouble in real life with minimized consequences. Yet most of the time, the people you play with have the best of intentions despite their flaws and actively try to make situations good for everyone. There can be a few outliers in any group but for the most part, everyone tries to get along, which factors into my next point.
This game can be a great team-building exercise:
Sincerely, I think if a group of people are all tasked with getting along and trying to work towards the same goal in real life, there will inevitably be a bit of opposition from everyone. While at a workplace, you are necessitated to get along with others no matter what, camaraderie isn’t built unless everyone sacrifices a bit of themselves to make the relationships work. In "D&D" however, everything is fictional, so you don’t have to think like you normally would in real life. You speak for a fictional avatar that could have different values than you do but because the game is contingent on your cooperation, it only makes sense that would want to get along with everyone and help them. The relationships seem to come naturally after that.
This game can help make good friends:
Most of the time, if you elect to play a tabletop game, you chose to do so with your friends, your close ones anyway. With that in mind, the relationships and rapport are already there, so this point may not make much sense to people playing that way. However, if you don’t know your group members all that well, conquering a make-believe scenario full of magic and danger can actually lower the stakes of getting to know them. You immediately have something to bond over, even if it does seem kind of silly. But the frigidity and tension of new people interacting is ignored when you’re told by a third party that you need to talk and work together. Eventually, you’ll do so without even needing to have that other person telling you to get along, it will just naturally happen. Often times, the most fun you can have in "Dungeons and Dragons" is what happens after the game is done. You reminisce about what happened, you laugh at your mistakes and eventually, you just kind sit around and talk and get to know each other.
I’m not gonna pretend that I’m too cool for "Dungeons and Dragons"; no one is to be frank. The beauty of the game is pretty simple—it’s just some friends in a room with some dice, pens and paper and a whole world of imagination just ready to be plundered. Simply put, I think it’s done wonders for me.
