Dungeons and Dragons is a lot more than just a role-playing game; D&D is a sneak peek into the bigger game of life and business.
Games are regarded by society as a means of relaxation, a fun pastime during those cherished Sunday early evenings with family and friends. And while games are certainly an enjoyable recreation, oftentimes they also teach a lot more about life and business than conventional educational methods do. Take chess for example; a good chess player often turns out to be an excellent strategist in life because they analyze and find the best solutions to multifaceted problems. One particular game that helped me numerous times in both life and business decision making is none other than Dungeons and Dragons. If you've ever played it, you have first hand knowledge of the advantage it gives you in so many aspects of life.
My Childhood Experience
For most kids in the '80s, Dungeons and Dragons (or D&D as we’d call it) was to me what Pokémon and League of Legends is to the current generation youth. I started playing the game back in 4th grade and it went on well into 8th, in which during those 4 years I gained so many important lessons I later used in life. I went to school in Great Neck, NY and most of my friends there were completely obsessed with D&D. It was a recess-time ritual that my friends and I couldn't afford to miss. We would play anywhere at any given opportunity - in the cafeteria during lunch, under a tree on the school front lawn, on the bus, and during free periods. Weekends were the highlight of the week when we would go to each other's basements and play. We never got to the extent of actually dressing up like our characters (which many super-fans do), but it was still one of the most memorable times of my childhood.
A Bit About The Game
Dungeons and Dragons is a fantasy tabletop role-playing game (RPG) and was originally designed in 1974. Its premise is simple yet imaginatively powerful: you and your friends sit at a table and pretend to be heroes going on an epic adventure together.
Every D&D game is anchored by a Dungeon Master (DM) who serves as the main storyteller in the game. The DM creates and describes the adventure the players/heroes go on. The aim of D&D, unlike other games, isn't to kill the other players. There's no defined “winner” in D&D, making it a truly open-ended sandbox-type game. And though it may look as if the players are playing against the Dungeon Master (DM), they are not. The goal is to have a fun fantasy with your friends and get lost in an imaginary world. The objective is to use your imagination, not to win. An outstanding DM is someone who can help conjure up an adventure that is exciting and challenging. The other players (Heroes) then team up to persevere through the escapades the DM created for them.
D&D Compared To Life and Business
Dungeons and Dragons has three distinct steps: Describe, Decide, and Roll. The Dungeon Master, who is essentially playing god, "describes" the scene to the heroes, throwing obstacles and challenges on their path. The heroes then "decide" on how to go about solving the problems set before them. Lastly, each of the players "rolls" a multi-sided die to determine the success rate of their decision or action, with higher rolls giving a better chance to succeed. In the same way, many life and business situations can be described by the exact same three essential steps.
The unique quality D&D has over other games is that the actions you take and the rate of your own progress is also dependent on the other players. No individual player solely controls how the game will unfold and it is up to every player to interpret each session of the game to the best of their understanding. Just like your situations in life are not isolated, and your decisions and the results are influenced by those around you. As the game goes on, the choices you and your teammates make will shape the world you play in, and the game can become easier or more difficult as a result. Your real life and business outcomes are always simply the sum of decisions you choose to make or not to make. The game not only tests your power of imagination but it also gives you freedom to make your own choices, experience their aftermath, and then analyze the results.
Role-playing is also an essential part of our everyday life. We go through our lives playing many different roles for different objectives. Some of those roles are a choice - whether it’s the role we choose to play for our profession, hobbies or in our relationship. Others like our gender, sexual orientation, personality, or race are simply a hand life throws at us that we have no control over. Dungeons and Dragons prepares you for life's uncertainty through endless variations of obstacles and challenges to be overcome, while playing different roles, through an unrestricted decision-making and problem solving process.
Ten things I learned from Dungeons and Dragons
Insane Imaginative Skills
Dungeons and Dragons is technically a board game but you barely actually use the board. The game is played in your mind and is solely based on each player's ability to conjure up the situation based on the description given by the Dungeon Master. It’s a fantasy game that gives the player an opportunity to create mental images and scenarios where they can be someone else; potentially someone with power and control.
My experience, both as a Dungeon Master and as a player of D&D helped me tremendously when I got older and started a business. There were countless times I had to get creative with my skills. The tech business I started required me to innovate technological solutions to particular problems that I saw around me. Because D&D sharpened my imaginative skills, it was easy for me to put myself in the roles of those I provided the software and services for, which led me to create products that tens of thousands of businesses and consumers would need, use and pay for.
HiFi Mental Visualization
Undoubtedly, the best way to solve most problems is to unfold them as a scene being played in your mind. Fully comprehending and understanding the problem at hand is the first step towards solving it. D&D not only presents you with various obstacles but also helps you create a mental visualization of your situation and possible solutions.
Harnessing this skill from the game proved vital to me as a Pre-med student in NYU when I enrolled in courses like Organic Chemistry. Any O-Chem student could attest that 3D mental visualization is critical in comprehending the complex mixture of the carbon-hydrogen-oxygen bonds in organic molecules. While it was deemed as one of the hardest courses in pre-med, I totally believe I aced it because of the visualization skills I honed in while playing D&D. Although the 100’s of hours I spent locked up studying probably had something to do with it too!
Cooperate or Die
D&D is a game carved from the imaginative collaboration of the players, and cooperation is all about understanding the principles of teamwork. Each player's story is dependent on the imagination of others and each player must learn to trust each other and work together to advance in their adventure. None of the different roles and classes in D&D can tackle any of the challenges alone, and utilizing the strengths of each hero is paramount. Conversely, failing to collaborate in the game leads to a failed adventure and sometimes the death of your character.
We all need and depend on the help of others, if we are to succeed in the real-world. It is imperative to develop excellent teamwork skills grounded in understanding and tolerance. The cooperative skills I learned from D&D benefited me tremendously when building life-long friendships and creating successful employee teams for various businesses. And even now in my decade-long marriage, despite my wife believing she’s the one that has taught me how to cooperate well over the years!
Money Matters
A great thing about so many role-playing games and D&D in particular, is that they teach resource management strategies. Often in the game, the DM awards treasures or gifts to the players, and when the time comes to salvage oneself from a precarious situation, these treasures come in handy. At the same time, valuables you’ve gathered can be lost, stolen or wasted, thus establishing a need for careful consideration of how and when to use them.
In business, money and other resources undoubtedly solve problems. Simply put, if you want to make headway in business, you have to figure out how to make money and use it towards achieving your goals. When I started my first business, I applied the same skills that helped me succeed in D&D - to plan, to focus, and to be discrete with the resources I had at hand. These qualities are the cornerstone of creating an environment for high profitability and growth.
Statistics and Probability Rule the World
The probability of success for actions taken by players in D&D is determined by rolling a die. Careful consideration of risk (probability of rolling a winning number on the die) versus reward is crucial in terms of being successful in the game. Weighing your options and finding a good balance of risk vs reward when deciding your actions is incredibly important in the game, just as it is in life.
Playing D&D was my first experience with statistics and probability, and it went a long way to form my path in business. When I got into venture investing, I would continuously weigh my options and determine the probability of a positive outcome, similar to rolling a die. Careful analysis of the facts at hand would help me determine the risks and rewards of each scenario. The bottom line is, the better you are at gauging probabilities and comparing them to rewards, the better you’ll be at making decisions in life, business and investing - and ultimately playing more winning hands than losing ones.
Rules Must Be Broken
Dungeons and Dragons requires its players to think outside the box, all the while complying to the standards of the game. The DM could throw a seemingly impossible task at a player, with a set of do's and don'ts, leaving it up to the player to come up with a creative solution.
This ties in closely with the whole concept of start-ups. A truly successful new company challenges the status quo and provides a solution to a seemingly impossible problem which gives rise to disruption. When I launched Ez Texting most people told me I wouldn't succeed because the wireless carriers would not allow or support it. I did it anyway and decided to do it first and ask forgiveness later. It turned out to be the right move, and the company growth skyrocketed while changing the industry rules along the way.
Win By Combining Your Knowledge
D&D does a great job of integrating various disciplines ranging from chemistry, history, geography and biology to magic. Most times, heroes are required to combine different spells, weapons, potions and actions to overcome an obstacle. On top of that, you need algebraic skills to determine the efficiency of each variable. To succeed in the tasks presented by the DM, I had to understand various subjects such as Math, English and Science.
Years later when I got into business, I had to use a wide set of different skills into building my company. I became a jack of all trades doing everything from sweeping the floors to accounting to human resources - all the while developing and marketing a product that people would love, pay for, and use.
Obsession
To solve any problem in the game, players are required to carefully and attentively weigh all options and find the best of solutions. Most of the time, this could take hours or even days to figure out. As kids, very much in love with the game, we spent hours obsessing over the obstacles presented to us. We would play at school and then again when we got home, on the phone in a three-way conference, go to bed and dream about it, and come back to school the next morning and play some more.
Later in life when I got into the software business, I found myself creating computer programs that would tackle seemingly impossible problems. I employed the lessons learned from D&D to reduce big obstacles into smaller and more manageable milestones. I kept myself focused on what I wanted to create and the problems that would have to be overcome. Most nights I found myself awake obsessing over and studying what I wanted to achieve, reaching out for help from anyone I could find. Determination and perseverance would keep me going for months until I figured out the solution.
Anticipate 10 Steps Ahead
To get through the D&D tasks you must train yourself to see what lies ahead. One moment you could come across a goblin guarding the gate to a treasure. You can decide to draw your sword and fight, or you could trick the goblin. That goblin could have useful information, but you don't know that yet. The chances are that if you kill the goblin, you might lose the clue to solving another puzzle in the future.
As a founder and CEO of a company it's not enough to sell or build something. You have to continually reiterate and figure out what the next 5-10 steps will be. In its simplest form the skill is represented as a SWOT analysis, but it goes much farther, especially when you need to anticipate the actions of possible competitors and get on track before them. When I started Ez Texting, nobody was using texting for business, but I had the foresight to see that many companies will need it in the future. By anticipating that texting would be a good tool for business, we started educating them about it and created a market for ourselves. We created our own product demand just like many other icebreaker companies that are ahead of their time.
Mastering the Art of Research
Dungeons and Dragons is supplemented by a wide set of lore, described in reference books containing information about different magic, potions, monsters, and beasts. At the time there was no Internet, and we relied solely on our ability to find these books and share the knowledge amongst our group. We would have to go to libraries in other towns or specialty bookstores to find the books we needed since there weren’t that many copies readily available.
Fast-forward to when I got diagnosed with pre-diabetes at 40, I was instructed to decrease my carbs, exercise more, and to get on medication. Wanting to have as much information as possible to make a decision that would considerably impact my life, I went on to research everything I could about the subject. That's when I came across an alternative method called masteringdiabetes.org which completely reversed things for me and helped me totally change my life through counter-intuitive diet methods. Diligent and careful research led me to a discovery that helped considerably improve my health. To create awareness about its benefits, I wrote a blog post about it recently. I can thank D&D for giving me the curiosity and skills required to carry out probably the most important piece of research in my life.
In order to stay productive, it’s important to be able to unwind and relax; this is especially true for kids. Board games and Dungeons and Dragons in particular are a great way to do just that, taking you on a fantastic adventure in a world of imagination, magic and teamwork. At the same time, skills learned and experience gained from adventuring in this D&D world have very tangible real-world applications. I don’t think I would be the person I am today without having been shaped by the experiences of playing this game, and both my personal and business life have certainly received tremendous benefits from me being a D&D nerd as a kid.