Once sworn enemies, adventurers and dragons are forming a new alliance based on a mutual love of hoarding shiny things.
Dragon Bagons are made of super cuddly microfleece and stand about 8 to 8 and a half inches tall. Flip back their head to reveal the double drawstring dicebag belly that will hoard up to 100 standard dice.
To any suicidal followers I may have: This is a sign to not kill yourself. You are loved and the world is special because you are in it. Keep holding on.
Reblog this when itâs on your dash. You will save someoneâs life.
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Adam Davis, co-founder of the Dungeons & Dragons therapy group Wheelhouse Workshop, thinks kids with social issues arenât being asked the right questions. In a dreary school counselorâs office, it can be hard to engage with âWhy arenât you doing your homework?â and âHave you tried joining clubs?â For Davis, more fruitful lines of inquiry start with âWho has the axe? Is it two-handed? What specialty of wizard to you want to be?â
Adam Davis, co-founder of the Dungeons & Dragons therapy group Wheelhouse Workshop, thinks kids with social issues arenât being asked the right questions. In a dreary school counselorâs office, it can be hard to engage with âWhy arenât you doing your homework?â and âHave you tried joining clubs?â For Davis, more fruitful lines of inquiry start with âWho has the axe? Is it two-handed? What specialty of wizard to you want to be?â
Davis, who runs Wheelhouse Workshop out of an office in a large, brick arts building in Seattle, is used to seeing sides of kids that donât usually come out in school. He, along with co-founder Adam Johns, designs D&D games that are less like hack-and-slash dungeon-crawls and more like therapy with dragons. In D&Dâs Forgotten Realms world, the kidsâ psyches run amok. Earlier this month, over the phone, Davis told me about Frank (not his real name), a tall, lanky teenager who barely spoke above a whisper. In school, he tended to sit with his feet in front of his face, so no one could really see him. He hated to take up space. After his parents and teachers noticed that his body language seemed a little stand-offish to peers, they enrolled him in Wheelhouse Workshop.
âThe character he chose was a dwarf barbarian,â Davis recalled. âHe was really loud and bumbling and unapologetic. It was a really obvious opportunity for this kid to play with qualities other than his.â Adam had Frank sit like his character, spreading his legs apart and slamming his elbows onto the table. In dwarf-barbarian mode, Frank could experiment with new modes of relating to others.
In March, Davis and Johns, who helped him start Wheelhouse Workshop, gave a presentation at the PAX East convention in Boston. They joked that everybody running D&D therapy groups, themselves included, like to think it was their idea. Not so. There are a half dozen groups across the States tapping into tabletop RPGsâ therapeutic potential. Therapists have long used role-play to help their patients, inviting patients to role-play personal scenarios from friendsâ or parentsâ perspectives. But buying in can feel pretty lame without a good hook, or a fictional worldâs distance from real-life. Because D&D is inherently cooperative and escapist, it urges players to reimagine the ways they interact with peers. And because each player has their own specialty, like communicating with dragons, theyâll have their moment to feel valuable in a group setting.
At worst, kids who are socially isolated can enjoy hacking up some goblins after a crappy school day. âFor someone who never leaves their house except for school, to have a peer say, âI need your help picking a lockâ makes a huge difference,â Johns told me.
Out of Ephrata, Pennsylvania, Jack Berkenstock runs the Bodhana Group, a nonprofit that uses role-playing gamesâ inherent social and educational value for therapy. Heâs a Masterâs level clinician who, for 23 years, counseled inner city kids. Later, for nine years, he provided mental health services to an all-male juvenile treatment facility that included sexual offenders. There, he got the bright idea to start running a D&D game. âHow many times can you really watch Snow Dogs?â he laughed, referring to a laughably bad movie about sled dogs.
Immediately, Berkenstock said, the social benefits were clear. âWe started to see kids who had issues from their families bringing that into the game,â Berkenstock told me. âItâs called âbleedâ: how much does your personal identity impact the character youâre playing? And how much does your character impact you as a player?â
What makes running a therapeutic D&D group different from any old ramshackle D&D party is âintentionality.â Berkenstock is careful to design games where playersâ actions have consequences, so, for example, he wouldnât protect an over-impulsive player from running into a dragonâs lair. If their character is severely hurt, thatâs the natural repercussion. When his players raid an orc village, he makes sure to show how that affects child orcs or their mothers. âI believe you can explore consequence in an environment where nobody gets hurt physically,â Berkenstock said.
Wheelhouse Workshopâs Johns wrote a D&D one-shot that had Frank and his party infiltrate a royal dinner party to find information on a local politician. To get in, the party had to put on royal airs. So, they walked in and told whomever asked that they hailed from some made-up kingdom. âI had them sit down at our table as their characters would,â Johns said. For the party, Johns had provided mugs of soup to mimic the in-game meal. â[Frank] would reach over and grab the bread from the waiter with tongs, knocking the bread out of his hand, slurping his squid ink soup. Everyone else at the [fictional] table thought he was royalty.â
According to parents I interviewed, flexibility is a common issue among kids enrolled in Wheelhouse Workshop. Structure and rules can help kids with autism cope with a disorienting world, but also, make social interaction quite difficult. A parent of a Wheelhouse Workshop attendee told me that, among peers, her son has trouble deviating from his own ideas of whatâs right. D&D forces players to consider othersâ strategies for avoiding sleeping orcs or rely on other playersâ high charisma score to negotiate with enemies. âHeâs actually told me he disagreed sometimes with what his fellow adventurers have decided,â she told me, âand that later sometimes heâs come around and agreed that the decision turned out okay.â She added that âthis is a startling increase in flexibility for him.â
D&D isnât about to become the next inkblot test or âand how does that make you feel?â But there is a strong continuity between playersâ internal lives and escapist fantasies. Leveraging those fantasies in the service of therapy isnât a big leap, in part, because itâs not entirely intuitive. D&D was never, and will never, be marketed as a tool for therapists. Itâs just a game. Thatâs also why it might catch on with kids who need help.
Okay imma be the mediator here. Hey @probablybarpgideas give @probablybardrpgideas better cheap alternatives, bc letâs face it 9 times out of 10 thats why people drink shitty alcohol, cost and/or they havent had good alcohol
Youâre not doin what we agreed upon, goin through the notes and finding the most recent reblog to reblog off of. Friends some of the community will have their comments left out bc most of em will reblog it off of a big blog (i.e. @probablybardrpgideas , @probablygoodrpgideas , @probablyhalfbakedrpgideas , etc.) And then there arent as many following the small blogs (i.e. @probablykoboldrpgideas , @probablysuperherorpgideas ,
@probablydadrpgideas , etc.), who comment and then their comments get left behind bc they arent as well followed, and the community as a whole is cheated bc we dont get to see the amazingness that is rpg ideas
Tl:dr
Community, reblog off of the most recent reblog only so that all the small blogs are heard and known, and every comment is read
Every dollar is appreciated. Hell every penny. My parents donât support LGBT+ and Iâll be moving out within a year to go to college. I could use some assistance! I only have 20$ saved for food, clothes, gas and everything else right now. My parents refuse to pay for anything but my way there so that Iâll get out of their house. Help!
You can also donate directly to my paypal at [email protected], which would help tremendously.
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