- Hey Grokites!
Today we're going to grok how Dungeons and Dragons
can serve as family therapy.
Dungeons and Dragons, commonly known as D&D,
was created in the early 1970s
by two presumably very bored men
named Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson.
They created a world of heroic fantasy based on battle war
games and the individual exploits of heroes,
but D&D wasn't the first of it's kind.
Before D&D, there was something called Chain Mail,
created by Gary Gygax,
and another one of his bored friend, Jeff Parren.
And before Chain Mail, there was Playing At The World,
created by John Peterson.
Why am I mentioning all these games?
I'm told that if I don't,
everyone who loves D&D will hate me,
so I want to cover all my bases.
All those things existed before D&D.
Okay, here's how Dungeons and Dragons works.
While there are pre made adventures for those of you who
don't want to do the creative heavy lifting,
generally speaking there's something called
a dungeon master, or a DM, and he or she creates an
adventure that you insert yourself into.
The DM might set the stage for the game
by saying something like this, ready?
- You all arrive on the docks of an abandoned city.
- Or...
- Now you wander into a forest, covered in moss.
- Or...
- You all wake up from your nap to find yourselves
handcuffed and being transported through your own town.
- It is an open ended game of communal story telling.
The DM has some rules an guidelines for what you should do
and where things should go, but for the most part it's
literally about you making decisions and the DM,
on the spot, spontaneously deciding
how other characters would react.
Okay, for example, the DM might say;
You find yourselves on a desert island,
and it's to you and your group what you want to do.
Do you wanna look for a boat?
Do you wanna seek shelter?
Do you want to make something to eat?
Whatever you want, it's up to you.
And even though the DM may have an idea of where he or she
wants the story to go, everything is totally spontaneous
and there's no formula, which is awesome.
If you like formulas, you might not think it's awesome,
but if you don't like formulas, it's awesome.
You can use a battle map, but you don't need to,
and there are miniature figures that you can use,
but you don't need to use them either.
So basically, if all you have is your imagination
and a set of D&D dice, you're good to go.
So what's my D&D history?
Well, my brother played in the 70s,
but I was never allowed to join in.
As an adult, I always wanted to play, and I tried to play
once with a group of actors, but I was really intimidated
by their experience, and their skill with improvisation,
and the voices that their characters did.
I just, I didn't feel like I fit in.
I took a few years off,
gazing lovingly at my Dungeons and Dragons dice
from time to time, wondering when I would get a chance
to have an adventure again that didn't intimidate me.
I feared it might be never, but then one day,
a marvelous thing happened,
my children got old enough to play Dungeons and Dragons.
Oh glorious day! Huzzah! Huzzah!
Geek celebration of the highest order!
Who enters the scene? Rob.
Rob is our DM, and I play a campaign,
me, my nine year old, and my almost 12 year old.
What addition do we play?
I know you're all wondering, fifth edition, yo!
We rolled up our characters the old fashion way,
just dice and a piece of paper.
No algorithm, no computers, old school paper and pencil,
character sheet, boom.
We chose names for our characters, and we made quite a bit
of fuss about how awesome we were going to be as a team.
I'm a war cleric, which means I'm like a religious warrior,
and also, I'm a healer.
My older son is an elvin rogue.
He's a dark elf, which means he can't really see in the day.
And in real life, he's a true, good human being.
He's a rules follower,
but he's playing a sharp tongue assassin in our game.
My younger son is a six foot, five inch dragon born,
which means he's half dragon, half human, obviously.
Here are the unbelievably incredible things that happened
when I played Dungeons and Dragons with my children.
Number one, it became like therapy.
Basically, D&D brings out the truth in you,
like who you are, who you wish you could be,
what are your strengths, what are your weaknesses.
Based on how I make decisions about how my character should
behave, and how we should behave as a group,
I have learned that my strengths
are patience, and cautiousness.
And based on how scared I get when confronted by goblins,
and how confused I get when I try to decipher clues
that my DM leaves for me, I've discovered that my weaknesses
are fear and lack of logical thinking.
For my sons, this has become an opportunity to show bravery,
heroic might, and beauty of conquest.
We've had to work together, and solve problems together.
We fell into a river,
and we had to figure out how to get out together.
My foolish first born, elvin rogue assassin son went on this
stupid mission, and he was attacked by zombies and I had to
bring him back from the brink of death,
and we were high fiving and cheering like we just won
big at the races.
We felt togetherness, we felt closeness,
we were doing something amazing together.
We had fun, it was like good therapy.
Number two, we have learned how to manage unpredictability.
This may come as a surprise to you,
I'm not really an open ended person,
and neither of my sons are either.
We like rules, we like structure, we like schedules,
and we like lists.
D&D has forced us out of that way of thinking,
and it has loosened us up, or it's tried to.
A few times,
when the DM would guide us towards a set of choices,
I would get so frustrated that I would start to cry,
like, for real crying at the D&D table.
See, if the DM were to say;
do you want to take the river path,
or do you want to take the mountain path?
Then I would know, I have two choices.
But he doesn't do that, cause that's not how D&D works.
He basically just says; what do you want to do?
And you have to create the options with your mind.
Wow.
Even though I'm a creative person, this is hard for me.
This is a different set of muscles to exercise.
It was good for me and my boys to live in a place
of wonder and possibility,
as we went on this journey together.
Number three, I haven't felt like
the most connected mom lately.
I have been working a lot, I've just felt out of step.
I feel like they're more comfortable with their dad
than they are with me,
and I know that some of that is age appropriate,
but this Dungeons and Dragons campaign has shown me that
there are ways that I can drawer closer to my boys
in ways that we're all comfortable with.
We now have a language that's all our own.
After the session, we talked about how it went,
and what we want to do next time,
and what we could have done different.
It's literally all we can talk about.
It's special, it's ours.
I know not every mom or dad
is gonna be interested in playing D&D.
Not everyone is into war hammers, and dragons, and goblins,
and trolls, and bags that can hold more inside than
it looks like they can hold on the outside, wow.
And I know that not everyone is as enthralled
with a beautiful set of D&D dice as I am,
those people might not have seen my dice.
But for this mom, I have found something I love,
and that love grows every time I roll the dice.