12/17/2025
Today we had our first playtest of our new Tabletop role-playing therapy group with our friends from Summit Counseling! Stephan and a couple of his staff came over to try it out. We ran a couple of encounters from a well known D&D adventure, The Lost Mine of Phandelver. The group chose from pre-made characters and brought them to life, discussed why they might accept the mission, and then dealt with a goblin ambush. The role-playing experience was fairly brief, but allowed us to ask some very interesting questions.
Some of the more interesting questions which came up:
1 - why did you give your character a certain personality trait?
2 - what kind of fantasy did you want to play out with your character, and why?
3 - What made you act in a certain way when fighting the enemy?
These seem to be fairly universal questions. What kinds of characters are you drawn to? What fantasies do you like to experience in movies, games, or books?