Sincerely Yours

Adam Davis, co-founder of the Dungeons & Dragons therapy group Wheelhouse Workshop, thinks kids with social issues aren’t being asked the right questions.  In a dreary school counselor’s office, it can be hard to engage with “Why aren’t you doing your homework?” and “Have you tried joining clubs?”  For Davis, more fruitful lines of inquiry start with “Who has the axe?  Is it two-handed?  What specialty of wizard to you want to be?”

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 don’t 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&D’s Forgotten Realms world, the kids’ 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.

“The character he chose was a dwarf barbarian,” Davis recalled.  “He was really loud and bumbling and unapologetic.  It was a really obvious opportunity for this kid to play with qualities other than his.”  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 RPGs’ therapeutic potential.  Therapists have long used role-play to help their patients, inviting patients to role-play personal scenarios from friends’ or parents’ perspectives.  But buying in can feel pretty lame without a good hook, or a fictional world’s 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, they’ll 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.  “For someone who never leaves their house except for school, to have a peer say, ‘I need your help picking a lock’ makes a huge difference,” Johns told me.

Out of Ephrata, Pennsylvania, Jack Berkenstock runs the Bodhana Group, a nonprofit that uses role-playing games’ inherent social and educational value for therapy.  He’s a Master’s 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.  “How many times can you really watch Snow Dogs?” he laughed, referring to a laughably bad movie about sled dogs.

Immediately, Berkenstock said, the social benefits were clear.  “We started to see kids who had issues from their families bringing that into the game,” Berkenstock told me.  “It’s called ‘bleed’: how much does your personal identity impact the character you’re playing?  And how much does your character impact you as a player?”

What makes running a therapeutic D&D group different from any old ramshackle D&D party is “intentionality.”  Berkenstock is careful to design games where players’ actions have consequences, so, for example, he wouldn’t protect an over-impulsive player from running into a dragon’s lair.  If their character is severely hurt, that’s the natural repercussion.  When his players raid an orc village, he makes sure to show how that affects child orcs or their mothers.  “I believe you can explore consequence in an environment where nobody gets hurt physically,” Berkenstock said.

Wheelhouse Workshop’s 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.  “I had them sit down at our table as their characters would,” Johns said.  For the party, Johns had provided mugs of soup to mimic the in-game meal.  “[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.”

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 what’s right.  D&D forces players to consider others’ strategies for avoiding sleeping orcs or rely on other players’ high charisma score to negotiate with enemies.  “He’s actually told me he disagreed sometimes with what his fellow adventurers have decided,” she told me, “and that later sometimes he’s come around and agreed that the decision turned out okay.”  She added that “this is a startling increase in flexibility for him.”

D&D isn’t about to become the next inkblot test or “and how does that make you feel?”  But there is a strong continuity between players’ internal lives and escapist fantasies.  Leveraging those fantasies in the service of therapy isn’t a big leap, in part, because it’s not entirely intuitive.  D&D was never, and will never, be marketed as a tool for therapists.  It’s just a game.  That’s also why it might catch on with kids who need help.

Seriously. 4 years ago, I’m cashiering at a whacky mart on a register that holds all the smokes and alcohol. It’s 10pm and these two young men (early 20s) come up to the counter. They have three random novelty items (I don’t remember they were), but it was strange and unusual to get odd items this late at night. Maybe it was for some fraternity, I don’t know. It’s a college town so I get weird stuff from frats a lot. I scan the items and tell them their total is $22.xx.

Grinning at each other, they reach into their jackets and slam down two gallon zip-lock bags, full of only pennies. I stare them in the eye, but they didn’t even look back at me. Everyone else in line groan and went to other registers. These two kids knew what they were doing, but they didn’t know what they were in for because I prepared for this; I knew this was going to inevitably happen. I grinned with them, because I was gonna get paid during this. These pranksters are here for recreation. This convo occurs between Me, Ringleader (the other guy was silent and awkward), and a friendly coworker of mine.

Me: Is this $22.xx?

Ringleader: …

Me: Did you count it?

Ringleader: Nope.

Me: Are you going to?

Ringleader: Nope.

Me: Is it at least $22.xx?

Ringleader: Don’t know.

Me: Nice.

Coworker: Hey! You guys can use the self checkout. It can take all of your coins at once.

Me: Oh, don’t worry about it Cowor–

Ringleader: Nope, don’t trust them lady.  (Partner laughs)

Coworker: What? Why!?

Ringleader: Doesn’t count all your change right.

Coworker: I’ve used them before. It really works!

Me: (to Coworker) I got this.

I unpacked the ziplocks and threw all the pennies on the counter. It was a beautiful, massive shitstorm of a mess. And I digged in it. I was Frank in a dumpster in ‘It’s Always Sunny’. The two, still averting my gaze, start chuckling as if they were taking away my dignity. They whisper to each other “Dude oh my God,” “Dude yeah,” “Dude, hilarious.” I counted each penny, one by one. My coworker comes up to me.

Coworker: Guess I’ll help you count this.

Me: Don’t worry about it.

(She looks at me confused. Then she puts on her ‘get down to busy’ look.)

Coworker: I got your back.

Me: Oh…ok.

We worked up a system where we counted ten, put them in a pile, then with ten stacks of ten pennies we separated them, making $1 piles. We made progress slowly but surely. Some customers came to the line, but we advised them to get to another line. Some of them looked at us confused, but when they saw the counter full of pennies they understood. Some decided to wait, but when they realized it wasn’t going to take just a few minutes they took their leave. Another register in the liquor department opened so it wasn’t too bad for other customers. We get to about $12 (about 10min in) until I “knocked” over the piles.

Coworker: Neontonsil!

Me: Oops. Sorry.

(Coworker looks at my grin. I give her a wink and tilt my head, motioning her to leave)

Coworker: You know what, I think I better let you do this.

Me: Ha, alright.

(Coworker leaves. I look at the two guys. They are absolutely stunned at the fallen piles of pennies.)

Me: (To Ringleader) Yeah, I’m going to have to count all of this again.

Ringleader: ….Ok.

I started from zero. I count slower then ever, and made my way back up. The duo is entirely silent. I get to about $7, when suddenly I say:

Me: Drats. I lost count. I better start all over again.

Ringleader: Really?

Me: Oh yeah man.

Ringleader: Why!?

Me: I lost count, sir. I could be in trouble if my register doesn’t have the right amount of cash, and I don’t want to rip you off.

Ringleader: …

It’s about an hour later. My manager walks past, looks at me. I smile at him, and he looks at the counter. He walks away without a word. I eventually count all the change and surprisingly they had only $18!

Me: Hmm, I think that this is $18.

(The duo has been dead silent. They look done for the night.)

Me: I’ll recount it.

I fucking recounted it.

Me: I think this is actually $19.xx.

(Without a word, the Ringleader whips out a $5)

Me: Seriously? You had cash?

Ringleader: Needed to get rid of my change.

Me. No problem. I’ll just recount this again. I want to make perfectly sure that this is $19, since I counted $18 the first time.

Ringleader: Are you kidding me?

(I shake my head no, completely serious)

He takes out a $20 bill straight out of his pocket and throws it at me. My coworker gives the biggest WHAT THE FUCK face. Internally, I die as well, because they were smart enough to have a backup plan. And the fact that he was touching his cash in his pocket the entire time kinda messed with me. I take the cash, do the transaction, give him his change, thanked him and wished him a good night. The two start to put their pennies back in the ziplock bags and I didn’t help them at all. I watched them just as how they watched me. Lots of pennies dropped to the floor, but they didn’t care to pick them up. It looked like their souls were sucked out of them. It was past midnight and I clocked out way past when I was supposed to. A lot of my coworkers gave me a thumbs up or told me good night. Even my manager told me ‘good job,’ the only two words he ever said to me. Went to bed at the dorms after such a great petty penny night and crashed. Strange to say, but I’d love to count pennies again.

My femme wife: [who has also taken 6 hours] Okay babe I love you I’m ready and your highlight is poppin severely but you need to blend that contour in a little bit