Making friends can be very difficult when you are autistic. Often autistic people struggle with social situations or find maintaining friendships overwhelming.
Tabletop role-playing games (TTRPGs) have been found to be an effective way to help improve a wide range of social communication skills, as well as intellectual and creative skills in autistic individuals.
A role-playing game (RPG) is a game in which each player or participant assumes the role of a character, generally in a fictional setting, often fantasy or science fiction, that can interact within the game’s imaginary world.
Role-playing and historical re-enactments have been practiced throughout history for millennia, but the more familiar role-playings board games and video games, began in the mid-1970s, with the release of the first commercially available role-playing game, Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) board game in 1974 and the video game version in 1975. More recently video games such as The Witcher, World of Warcraft, and Chrono Trigger have made role-playing games among the most popular game genres in the world.
The benefits of tabletop role-playing games can be life-changing for autistic individuals.
Here are 5 ways tabletop role-playing games like Dungeons and Dragons can benefit autistic individuals by enabling them to practice communication, cooperation, collective story-telling, and social skills in and out of character, whilst exploring interests, making friends and building relationships.
1. It is a social communication game
Role-playing games (RPG) are by definition very hard to play on your own, so from the start you are engaged in social interactions. As you inhabit another character and start interacting with other players, you will experience and explore real-life emotions in fictional worlds. Users can practice different types of communication, from being more assertive through their character’s choices to being more restrained and allowing other users an opportunity to communicate. Feedback plays an integral part in RPGs and this allows players to practice picking up on these social cues in the real world.
2. Making decisions
Making decisions and being decisive can be overwhelming for some autistic individuals, especially as life is often not clear cut and there is often no one right decision. RPGs provide structure to the often arduous task of choosing, providing a limited set actions or outcomes you as a player can take. As the environment is fictional there is also no real-life consequences, so even if there is not a successful outcome of your choice, it isn’t the end of the world.
3. Cooperation
RPGS are at their core collective story-telling and they enable users to practice cooperation amongst a diverse range of characters, mirroring real-life societal cooperation amongst people from different cultures and backgrounds.
Characters like real-life people have diverse sets of traits, goals, and drives, and players get to share in collective success, and grapple with the ramifications of shared failures. Teamwork is critical to success, if players don’t work together, the whole group feel the repercussions.
4. RPGs are rules-based
Most tabletop RPG’s use some form of random generator to increase suspense, which most commonly is a role of a dice. While some games are known as “diceless” such as Fate of the Norns , which uses the Futhark rune set to resolve all game mechanics. Essentially the role of the dice in RPGs are to ensure failure, otherwise players left up to their own imagination, would likely decide to win every encounter. RPG’s enables users to learn and following set rules, but also gives them licence to think originally and creatively.
5. Empathy
By the very nature of RPGs, the process of character building not only drives engagement and enjoyment, but it forces players to consider their characterโs strengths, flaws, goals, and motivations.
Reflecting on these character traits when making decisions in game helps players recognize different ways of looking at the same situation. Players also learn to be more tolerant of their charactersโ companions, forgiving others for โmistakesโ (no one can be blamed for an unlucky roll or for playing their character true to their faults) and finding self-compassion for their own character, flaws, foibles and all.