gametogrow

Davis here. I have lots of favorite sessions! They're not all easy, and they're not all breakthroughs, but it is amazing to be able to play a game I've loved for most of my life and use it to help kids. One of my favorite sessions was one which was the culmination of a plot where a villain was trying to capture ghosts (not unlike ghostbusters) to gain all of their knowledge and power. Of course, the heroes defeated him, but the ghosts were let loose and inhabited a building that had anthropomorphised and was rampaging (once again, not unlike Ghostbusters). The players had to jump from another building into the house, then go from room to room and talk to the ghosts to get them to go to rest. The players spoke to ghosts struggling with regret, betrayal, guilt, etc. and talk to them. It gave the players an opportunity to say things to the ghosts like "Hey, just because you've made mistakes doesn't mean it has to define you." or "It makes sense for you to be so mad! You were hurt, but you're not alone." It was a rich session, and every player had the opportunity to talk to a ghost that needed to hear a message that they themselves needed to hear or needed to say. The final ghost was one who regretted never telling his kids he was proud of them, and I played that ghost as an NPC and told each one of them how proud I was of them and how much I believed in their potential. It was powerful!

Davis here. Great question! We play mostly 5th edition Dungeons and Dragons. We've found that is has enough rules to provide the structure needed for our players to feel safe and secure in the boundaries of the game, while still providing enough openness to be able to modify and ignore the rules when necessary. We've also played other games and incorporated other mechanics, but D&D 5e has been the game we've used the most. We also grew up playing earlier editions, so it's something we've loved for a long time.

Johns here -- You should absolutely get something started with vets! We've been wanting to expand into that same direction, as it is a population that really could benefit from these kinds of services.

I suppose the best advice that I could offer is that, as you're getting started, make sure that the game is more about play and creating a save space than about the therapy. Often just having a place that you can go where there are others with a similar challenge and you feel welcome (and maybe even excited) to go each week serves more than anything else can.

Secondly, as you play, keep in mind that every choice a player make says something about them, but it might not always say what you think it is saying.

Davis again - It depends! Most of the time when we use the battle grid (which we don't always do), we use dice to represent both the players and the enemies. We have a set of d6s we use and number them off. We have MAX five players per group, so we have blue d6s from 1-5 for players, and red d6s to represent enemies. Sometimes larger enemies will have d8s, or sometimes larger dice for huge creatures. Dice are great for tactics on a battle grid, without being so literal that we can't use our imaginations, or add extra stuff if we need to be flexible.

Johns here. I suppose most of those experiences came in the planning phase for groups for me. Adam Davis and I went to our early groups on the east side, in Bellevue, and we would often carpool over early in order to beat traffic. We would then sit in coffee shops (very Seattle of us) and plan out our day.

Those were the moments where we really had the time to sit down and plan a group for several hours (oh how I miss those days now). It gave us a lot of time to think about the challenges of the group members and individuals. I can remember filling up one of my small moleskin notebooks (also very Seattle of me) with puzzles, ideas, NPC names, and therapist mumbo-jumbo.

I suppose the experience that stood out for me the most was the Runic Tattoos story.

In those early days we didn't know what the challenges of our players would be or even how many people we would have. So we designed our first quarter sessions with a very open ended story. In one instance we had 10 players showing up at once, who would be split into two tables after the first day. We had them come into a soup kitchen (there is no alcohol in our games, people just drink soup from mugs) and had to leave their weapons in a magically sealed chest by the front door when they came in. They met the soup chef and got their soup mugs, when suddenly skeletons burst from the walls and flooring and started to attack everyone.

We went around the table and each player stated what they wanted to do to respond to the skeletons. Some were casting spells, some were using tables or chairs to hit skeletons, etc.

We got around to one player who held up his hands in front of him so that he could see the inside of his forearms. He said, "I summon my weapons to myself." He had designed a character with Runic Tattoos on the inside of his arms which he could activate to summon his weapons to his hands. I told him, "They don't come, they are magically sealed in the chest." Then he started to get really angry. His face turned red, his hands clenched into fists, and he started to breath heavily. He said, "If I can't summon my weapons to myself then my character is useless. This was the whole point of my character...." And then Adam Davis turned to him and said, "Yeah, your character is really angry. What does he do next?"

And I visibly saw the anger drain from him. He unclenched his fists and said, "I rip the arms off of the skeleton and beat him to death with his own arms."

And I said, "YES! You do exactly that and wail on the now disarmed skeletons with is own arms."

It was then that we realized that there was a real power to the separation of yourself and your character, and that moving between being your character or being yourself could give tremendous opportunity to lower defenses or let you develop a greater personal insight and highlight your goals or challenges.