Roll For Kindness

One of the questions I get the most often, as far as running social skills groups is this: How do I get my players to talk to each other (and not me, the DM)? It's a valid question. I've had a lot of students in social skills groups who really

Hi all. I know things are really scary right now with the outbreak, and a lot of us are practicing social distancing either through choice or government orders. This is very important, and we need to all be doing our part to flatten the curve and try to keep the

Not that community. (Image from NBC's Community)I've been meaning to set up D&D social skills groups within the community mental health agency I work at for some time. The agency focuses on high need children and their families within the Pierce County region, and uses a wraparound framework

One question I've gotten a lot is “How do I do what you're doing?” and it's making me realize I should have written a post about this question a long time ago, as I feel that the core of the question is 'How can I use D&D/RPGs for

I posted a request to Twitter asking for Nonviolent D&D encounters suitable for a therapeutic group, and the tweet sort of blew up a bit with people sending in ideas. So, I decided that there was definitely enough demand to come up with a list to be made public

Happy New Years! It's been a while since I've posted, but a lot of that has been because I've been busy with my community mental health job. However, this has given me a lot of time to look at the complex needs of kids in the community mental healthcare system,

Creating character driven plot elements is always a challenge with any game, but when working with a social skills group, it's both important for building engagement but also encouraging interaction at the table. Last night marked my last session for my social skills group, and while it was one of

I haven't posted much lately, because frankly, this quarter has been one of the most difficult quarters I've run. I had three consecutive sessions go poorly, where it felt like the group was just out of control, kids were getting escalated, and I had to implement a lot of behavioral

Just wanted to post to let readers know that I haven't abandoned this blog, even though I haven't posted in a while. My new job in community mental health has left me very busy, and I've been working on a project for assessing student behavioral skills for a TTRPG group.

I'm featured in the trailer for the Lost Odyssey event, which includes a mini-documentary on D&D and autism, here: https://twitter.com/BeadleAndGrimm/status/1183790085017423873 > EARLY BIRD PRICING ENDS TOMORROW for @lostodysseylive [https://twitter.com/lostodysseylive?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw]! Get your tickets at https://t.co/mrIPghmmeG Join@

No post this week- But here's a newly published interview I did with @heyDrWil for the podcast Untenured Tracks: https://untenuredtracks.podbean.com/e/e6-practice-being-someone-who-cares-w-peter-jung/ Would love to hear your thoughts, hit me up on twitter at @rollforkindness!

I never read this book, but I imagine it helps understand roads. (Source: The Road Ahead.)This is going to be a little different than my usual posts about gaming advice, but I think that from time to time, a bit of personal reflection is a good thing- especially as

PAX West 2019 was an absolute blast. I met a lot of amazing people, got to volunteer with Take This, an absolutely amazing org that does mental health advocacy in the gaming community, and sat on not one but TWO panels. Also, my gaming buddy for 20+ years was an

Last post, I discussed murder hobos, one of the most challenging types of players a DM can encounter, and how to frame a game in a way that addresses that play style. In this post, I'm going to talk about another occasionally challenging form of player, the rules lawyer, and

I recently did an interview (will post when it's ready) about the work I do, and the question about problematic players came in, specifically the issue of murder hobos. For those who don't know, a murder hobo refers to a player character who is effectively a sociopathic murderer who serves

There's recently been a lot of discussion about the difference between running a therapeutic game and a non therapeutic game. One of the key pieces that a therapeutic game requires is that the DM is some type of licensed mental health professional, but that has left a lot of other

A typical world building session (Source: It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia)One thing I've been spending a lot more time with over the summer has been working on world building, and realizing the fantastic potential for building engagement and ownership with the world. Furthermore, from the perspective of the Dungeon

Quick post! I'm on two panels at PAX West 2019- Therapeutic Dungeon Master Round Table: https://west.paxsite.com/schedule/panel/roll-for-healing-therapeutic-game-master-roundtable Development and Dungeons and Dragons: https://west.paxsite.com/schedule/panel/roll-for-healing-therapeutic-game-master-roundtable Very, very excited to be on these panels, and hope to meet some amazing people there!

Short post today- I've been busy trying to put together a Spanish language learning group, but in the mean time I've been recently working on building material for the Microlite d20 system- specifically relatively generic NPC, dungeon, and town templates for my own random generation. I'm slowly putting together a

Tired: Playing to kill orcs Wired: Playing to learn SpanishRecently, an article [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-07-08/how-to-be-a-professional-dungeons-dragons-master-hosting-games] came out in Bloomberg about the rise of the professional Dungeon Master, citing one Dungeon Master who pulls in $500 per session. After this came a deluge of DMs advertising

No post this week, but, I did contribute on a discussion on workplace burnout culture in the linux/tech community- check it out, here:

My first real cosplay changed my life.A lot of people in the RPG mental health field do a lot of talking about LARPing, and while I don't have any experience in that, I can attest to the power of cosplay. I cosplayed for about 20 years, but one of

Last Friday marked the final session of my D&D social skills group for this school year. After each year, I try to reflect a bit on what I've learned, how I've expanded my skill set, and what I could be doing better. This year, things got off to a

The Trial Sequence in Chrono Trigger had me restarting the entire game to get everything right. (Source: Chrono Trigger)One of my first console games was Chrono Trigger- a fantastic time spanning RPG that relied heavily on plot and style, and would impact my fantasy worlds for years to come.

My first pride. My parents were supportive. Thank god.Happy Pride Month! Wanted to mention here that this is one of my first Prides out as a bisexual, but there's more to it than that. There's a whole story of knowing for years, and keeping it hidden. I know this