RPGaDay 2019: 3 Engage

A few years ago, I was doing a part-time gig as a creative arts teacher for a homeschool family. One of the young men I was working with was smart, creative, imaginative, and also pretty shy and quiet. I had worked with him previously doing artwork and also with language arts, and I thought we’d try a little experiment to bring him out of his shell: dungeons and dragons.

This was during the time before the 4^th Cataclysm, when all I owned was The Old Books with their secret knowledge and wisdom. I also had a shit-load of dice. So in the interest of keeping it low impact, I introduced the kid to first edition AD&D, old school, as God intended, and we played through a modified version of The Village of Hommlet, only with werewolves and other stuff, because, you know, that’s just cool.

About the third session in, when the town became convinced that there was a werewolf in their midst, I gave my player a homework assignment: come up with a way to catch the werewolf without killing him so they can unmask him. Now, prior to this, he’d been playing along, cautiously, and every time I asked him a question, he got a panicked look in his eyes, until I outlined a few options for him. It was slow going, but he was tentatively enjoying it, even if he kept comparing it to playing Skyrim.

The next week, when I showed up, we hadn’t even sat down at the table before he was explaining to me the plan to catch the werewolf. He’d been thinking about it all week, working it out, formulating strategy, and so forth. I opened the session with “Okay, so the villagers are looking at you. Rorick asks you, “Do you have any bright ideas?”

Without missing a beat, my student said, “I tell them, ‘I’ve got a plan, but you have to do exactly what I say or more people will die.’”

All of a sudden, he was in the game, and saying things in character (sometimes deliberately, sometimes cautiously, but still!) and it was very cool to see him come out from under his shell and start thinking dynamically. Later, we talked about it, and he told me he loved being able to come up with his own plan, which is something you can’t do in Skyrim. True that.

This hobby is unique. You never know what’s going to hook a person. But when they engage with D&D (or any other RPG), it’s got a transformative effect on people.