How D&D Changed My Life
Can D&D change your life? In this blog, one gameHER tells us how she has translated many of the social and emotional skills she has learned in tabletop gaming to her real life.
By Caitlin Drummond
My name is Caitlin Drummond and I am proud to be an autistic woman.
I have always been a nerd from the time I was a child. As someone who has intense autistic obsessions that consume my life you could say I have always been a full nerd, but I would say I truly stepped into full nerdom at the age of nine when I became Pokémon-obsessed. Yes everybody, it was the original 151 including Mewtwo in those days.
Recently I have stepped into the world of tabletop RPGs, mainly Dungeons & Dragons (D&D), and it has changed everything for me. In this article I will take you briefly from my introduction to D&D to current, and then talk a little about how tabletop RPGs can help others on the spectrum.
The world of D&D was first opened up to me October 2018 (remember, I said recently!) when I was a crew member on a conservation crew for American Conservation Experience. My coworker and roommate happened to be a DM, so we started playing one shots as a crew and with members of the other crews. From that first night playing onward I have gone down a deep D&D rabbit hole. I have become a Critter, (a fan of Critical Role), a dice junkie, have created many characters, convinced the head special education teachers at the school I work at that we should start an after school tabletop RPG club, have created a D&D meetup with four campaigns running so far, and have attended my first gaming convention. Dungeons & Dragons has changed everything for me. I am even considering going back to school for a digital media or game design degree.
I have repeated a few times that D&D has helped me, but let me actually explain how it helps me. First off, I have always had a great imagination, so playing D&D has given me a safe space where I can play pretend as an adult. A social fault I have is that if someone asks me to put myself in their shoes, mentally I cannot put myself in anyone else’s shoes. When creating my characters there will always be a part of me in them because of this. Playing role playing games gives me the creative license to put myself into my character, but my character still does things I can’t do and really isn’t me. I can experiment with parts of my personality I can’t appropriately show in actual society. Right now I am going through an early midlife crisis and I’m finding I need to change my career. Dungeons & Dragons and PAX South 2020 have given me ideas of careers I would love that I never would have thought about before. I’m not the only autistic female D&D could help though.
Playing role playing games gives me the creative license to put myself into my character, but my character still does things I can’t do and really isn’t me.
I can experiment with parts of my personality I can’t appropriately show in actual society.
Even though it is the year 2020, when people hear “autism,” a lot of the time they still think of it as affecting only boys. Whereas, yes, there are overall more autistic males than females, there are many autistic females diagnosed and most likely thousands more undiagnosed. Females present some different characteristics in autism than males do. For instance, we tend to internalize our emotions more and are able to mimic social norms with and without realizing, which allows us to better put on a façade of fitting in with our peers. As an adult looking back, I realize I used mimicking my whole childhood. The back-and-forth conversations I can have with others today are learned and not natural for me. A natural conversation for me is talking about my autistic obsessions non-stop and not letting anyone get a word in edgewise. This is where tabletop RPGs can help others with special needs. They can give them a social group to feel safe in, give motivation to improve speech, teach back-and-forth conversation, help improve planning and organizational skills, promote imagination, etc. This is why non-profits such as Game to Grow and their social skills-facilitating RPG game Critical Core are so important. The world needs to be shown how D&D can change the lives of everyone on the autism spectrum and those with other special needs.
About the Author:
Caitlin Drummond is a female nerd and gamer with a passion for tabletop roleplay games. Dungeons and Dragons has changed her life, and she wishes she could find a way to make it a career. Caitlin is happiest making new characters and strategically planning them out for a certain backstory. She got her nerdy start at a young age with the launch of Pokemon. Since then she has become a nerd for so many different things. She is also proudly autistic and loves being an advocate for people with disabilities. A dream of hers would be to teach social skills to kids with special needs using tabletop roleplaying games. Gaming has the ability to help so many people and she want to be part of that work.
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