Roll For Kindness

A few months ago, I was hired on at Behavior Bridges, an autism clinic in Puyallup, Washington, as their Inclusion Director. While the largest part of my work there is running their various geek centric groups (mostly tabletop gaming and D&D), my official title is inclusion director, and

First, apologies for not posting in a while, my PC was down and things were just hard to get done during that time. But- I wanted to share a clip from the talk I did with Dr Amelia Herbst at the American Psychological Association's Annual Conference in Washington DC, where

I recently wrapped up my final session of my D&D autism community building groups for the quarter, and I asked the students for feedback. It was largely positive, but when I framed it as ideas on what other GMs should do, they were able to provide a lot

This last week, I had the opportunity to attend the Screentime and Mental Health Summit, hosted by Bright and Quirky. It was a series of ~45 minute long video interviews from various screentime experts (although some of them I would describe as 'experts') about the impacts of mental health on

Been a while since I posted- I've been very busy, and will write a major update of what's been happening soon, but I wanted to share the UW Autism Story's (think Story Corp) interview of me and my cofacilitator Celia. This is really important, as elevating autistic voices, especially those

D&D is a bit of a clusterf*** right now with the OGL mess. If you've been hiding under a rock, there's new info every day, but here's a pretty good write up on what's going on, with major news outlets starting to post their own takes on it.

Realized I hadn't shared my video of the talk I did for the Southwest Washington Autism Coalition's annual conference on rethinking autistic social skills. Check it out!

I'm on the cover of the UWT's website, both as an article and a podcast! Check it out!

Recently an article came out in Wired about therapeutic gaming, and since then there's been a lot of focus on people using D&D and TTRPGs within therapeutic contexts. While I am absolutely for people using RPGs therapeutically, I feel like focusing exclusively on the therapists using RPGs ignores

By contributor Maryanne Cullinan Recently, I had the privilege of participating in an ILA X Wizards of the Coast panel on using DnD for Writing. More than 900 people signed up for the Zoom broadcast, which shows the increasing interest in using RPGs in the classroom. Teachers and counselors know

Working for a disability advocacy nonprofit, I've been paying a lot of attention to the narratives around disability, especially those around autism and neurodivergence. They range from viewing autism as a cautionary tale about vaccines to a beautiful way of engaging with the world, and everything in between. However, as

The launch of the Caravan Endures has been a failure. I set the payment to a donation system, with the idea that I wanted the game to be affordable for people who were struggling, but it seems like that just became an excuse for people to get it for free,

I was recently asked by someone for some advice on helping their autistic son succeed in an improv group, and what the teacher could do to help make the group better for the youth. I gave them a list of advice on what's worked really well for my autism social

Last week, I wrapped up my final session of Summer Quarter for the group I've been running consecutively for about 8 years, and I have to say that this was easily the best quarter I've ever run. I wasn't planning on running group over the Summer- I was hoping to

As applied and specifically therapeutic RPGs come into vogue, more and more I'm seeing therapists and social skills coaches running 'Autism Social Skills D&D/RPG groups.' On a lot of levels, this makes a lot of sense. It's the most obvious application of RPGs in the therapeutic

I recently started working for a nonprofit that serves the needs of individuals and families of individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities, working in their information and referral department. While a lot of the work I'm doing is systems navigation, I found out about a Dungeons and Dragons summer program,

I've written about choosing the right game for your applied group in the past, but since then the landscape has changed. Initially, the options for applied RPG groups were limited to a handful of mainstream RPGs such as D&D and Pathfinder. Now this has been challenged by new

Here is the VOD for our PAX East panel on using games to talk about difficult topics that I spoke on. Check it out!

The Panel Playing with Knives at Pax EastBeen some time since I've posted, and that by no means indicates I've been inactive. Quite the contrary. For the purposes of this blog, I've hit most of my big applied rpg general education milestones- indicated by the fact that when someone came

By @Culliope Peter makes a great case in the “No Phones” article for why phones should be allowed for neurodivergent players at the TTRPG table. I completely agree! However, I think that his article is the seed for an even bigger conversation to be had about tabletop manners and play.

"No phones at the table!" This is one of the most common rules I see as part of applied RPG groups, specifically ones that look at teaching social skills to autistic individuals. The notion that screentime is a problem, whereas face to face communication is good is very common in

By Culliope We hear a lot about safety tools in RPGS these days. Safety tools are agreements at the table about the content and tone of the story, as well as pre established routines for how to flag a particular bit of content, conversation, storyline, etc. if it moves beyond

I recently watched a talk about RPG safety tools, and I've been thinking about them nonstop since then. It's essential for players to feel safe and welcome at the TTRPG table, but to get the most out of safety tools, it's important to reflect on how they can be used