Regular players of Roleplaying Games (RPGs) will be familiar with the feeling of satisfaction that comes from having a great game with a group of players you really gel with. However, what even seasoned players might not know is that RPGs can be used for therapeutic purposes as well. Daniel Hand is someone who has made RPGs a big part of his therapeutic practice and has helped countless clients by taking them on an adventure!
I caught up with RPG Therapist Daniel Hand to talk to him about his practice and the therapeutic benefits of RPGs.
Origin Story
Before Daniel became a therapist, he was a big fan of RPGs and creative writing. In fact, he has written stories for anthologies such as and .
His first experiences with RPGs were the play-by-post variety. Here, you create a character, write a few paragraphs from their point of view, and have other people respond by post. His first TTRPG was The One Ring, an expansive roleplaying game set in the world of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth.
As he started his therapy training, it occurred to him that there was something inherently valuable about RPGs that could be used in a therapeutic environment. He got the opportunity to explore this further during his training when he was prompted to talk about a hobby he could use with clients. For him, the answer was obvious.
I was doing things like using games with clients and drawing fantasy maps with clients. I did a whole presentation about fantasy maps because I’ve been drawing fantasy maps ever since I saw Narnia when I was a kid.
Daniel brings his love of RPGs into helping clients.
As his career as a therapist progressed, the author continued to question how he could use games and stories in his practice. However, it was necessity that led to his first use of using TTRPGs in an actual therapeutic session.
He was working with a client who had developed selective mutism and was really struggling to engage with the therapy. Through further sessions, he found out that the client was into it and decided to set up a game for them. The results were incredible!
An NPC walked up to his Dragonborn Sorcerer character, a hobo traveler. How you doing blah, blah, and instantly this kid was talking, no build up, it was just “Hello. Yes, my name is…” and it was like you know, when I managed to pick my jaw up off the floor, that was like, okay, yeah, this is a thing now!
From then on, Daniel has built his therapy career around being the RPG Therapist with his Monomyth Counselling practice.
Benefits of RPG Therapy
Daniel and I spoke a lot about what is is that makes using RPGs in therapy so effective. He had a lot to say about the subject, but one of the most important aspects was breaking down barriers to opening up to your therapist.
Perhaps the biggest stumbling block of entering into therapy and sticking with it, is the fact that you’ve got to get over this awful thing of just talking about yourself and your own emotions. If you give them a sword and say there’s a dragon over there. What are you going to do about it? All of a sudden, the session becomes enjoyable and something to be actively look forward to rather than something to be feared during the week.
As with the case above, Daniel found that engaging in an RPG had people engaging in the characters they’ve created in a way that’s hard to do for yourself.
An RPG adventure can be a great opportunity for self-discovery.
Daniel believes that there’s always a level of projection when you’re creating a character. Even if you try and create one that’s very different from yourself, there will always be a part of yourself in that character. Asking clients questions about their characters can then become a frame for exploring what’s going on with the client.
How do you think they’re feeling about this? How would you feel in this situation? What would you say to this person? etc. And there’s this deep rooted box of the human psyche that just engages with stories and storytelling. Using storytelling, about fictional characters, helps clients just learn a bit more about themselves and their emotions.
Daniel also spoke to the feeling of actively engaging in an adventure that RPGs achieve so effectively. With clients engaged in their characters and the adventure, therapists can use the adventure to explore issues related to the client’s presenting issues.
Researchers demonstrated that actually the way we relate to fictional characters is almost exactly the same as the way we relate to other human beings. And so the great thing about bringing storytelling and RPGs into the therapeutic environment is we can design these characters very specifically to help with various presenting issues.
Tips on Making RPGs Better for Everyone
As you can clearly tell, Daniel is a huge proponent of the values of RPGs for therapeutic benefits. However, he was very clear that this sort of work should only be done by a trained therapist. If you try exploring peoples’ traumas without appropriate training, you run the risk of retraumatizing them.
He did however, have tips for GMs to provide the best RPG experiences for their players without stepping into a role they’re not qualified to fulfill. He mentioned the lines, veils and x card safety features that are becoming more common place in running TTRPGs. In short, these features allow GMs to discover what content players don’t want (lines), what content they don’t want in detail (veils) and give players the ability to stop the game at any time if they’re uncomfortable (x card). For more information on these and other safety tools, check out this article from Dicebreaker on the subject.
A lot of his advice was mostly about being a good friend and not underestimating the value of a good game. If you can tell that someone in your group is struggling, there are ways of helping them out without digging into areas they’re uncomfortable talking about. It can be as simple as asking how they’re doing or just having you or your character show support to them.
Don’t be a dick, I think is the is the overall the overriding sentiment, you know? how can you help the people around you? Just be there if they turn to you. Leave them alone if they say they’d rather be left alone.
Future of RPG Therapy
Despite the value of RPG Therapy, it is still a very small field of therapy in the UK. Daniel attributes this to the ‘satanic panic’ that surrounded Dungeons & Dragons in the 1980s.
Now, there’s a very strong feeling of making up for lost time. Daniel is keen to share the values of using RPGs as a therapy tool. To learn more about this topic, you can check out his Monomyth Counselling website. He has also written extensively on this subject in his book, Role-Playing Games In Psychotherapy: A Practitioner’s Guide.
For much more detail on the use of RPGs in therapy, check out Daniels’ book.
You can find Daniel producing regular content on his YouTube Channel: The RPG Therapist. There, he has many short videos about various aspects of RPGs and therapy. Recently, he has launched an new Actual Play series. In it, he plays Avatar Legends with other therapists, who discuss the potential applications of the game in therapeutic scenarios.
If you think you or someone you know could benefit from RPG Therapy, you can reach out to Daniel through his Monomyth Counselling website or by putting RPG therapists into Google.
