Written by I’ve been reflecting on it for a while as I approach 40 years old, as my kids grow up, as my next generation of mentorees start to become mentors in their own right, where did I started with a lot of my skills, ideas and habits. It had lots to do with playing years of Dungeons and Dragons growing up and the experiences around it. This isn’t a How D&D Taught Me Everything but rather a reflection on how circumstances brought about around a single thing such as D&D shaped my perspective, and how important it is to allow others to have those experiences rather than shield them.
I started playing D&D when I was seven years old with some older kids that I met. Over time the group that I played with changed, the complexity of the game changed, my set of permitted roles changed and summers became about a lot of things, but especially as much D&D as we could play. By the time I was 15 years old things started to change and by the time I was 17 I wasn’t playing much at all, sometimes playing other games off and on but for the most part I’d maxed out my knowledge/experience level and now needed a different type of complexity of play and consequences.
This is part 1, here’s 5 points regarding culture, behaviour and groups. The topics for part 2 and 3 are at the end.
That’s It? Really? vs. Superstition
One of the first lessons was at the time, in the 80s, there was a lot of bad press around Dungeons and Dragons, which I started to learn about shortly after starting to play it. Rather than get caught up in the fear, I just looked at the piles of paper, the sets of dice of various sidedness, and failed to see where the issue was. Whenever someone, like my parents, would replay the fear they had heard elsewhere I just presented the facts, what happens during play, I even invited them to be included to help me understand if there was anything I was missing.
In the professional world very often I’m brought into situations of stress, which has underlying fears, and there are superstitious beliefs about how certain groups are working or about missing deliverables, etc. All too often it’s about bringing everything back down to simple basics, pointing at some things, sometimes dusting off an existing document and pointing out that all it needed to have done is be rephrased or reframed in order to be properly understood. And after going through that, if the person hasn’t been re-centred, then I know that I’m dealing with superstitious fear which cannot be won over with fact, it has to be won over with trust and faith.
Tribes, Misfits and Sense of Self
I learned early on that some people while you may share affinity for something, such as D&D and later software development, that does mean that you have any alignment when it comes to your sense of integrity, your sense of belonging, what’s right and what’s wrong.
At a young age it was usually so easy to make friends “Do you like BALL? I LIKE BALL!” but when it came to D&D, it was a different breed of individual all together. More than that, spanning an age group that went up to about 5-6 years older than me, there were behaviours that just didn’t work for me and it challenged my sense of self. For example, I remember being invited to a game, sitting down, we started playing and some of the older games brought out some pot to smoke. This didn’t fit with my paradigm or my sense of self. They had no issue if I wasn’t going to smoke up, but I had an issue with being there with individuals that were going to. The reason was, and I remember it clearly, that I knew that behaviour is a contagious thing, and peer influence becomes subconscious peer-pressure, and therefore I thanked them for inviting me but I left. They tried to apply pressure for me to stay, but I left. Never went back, never interacted with them again. What I found over time was that my sense of self became a Tribe Definition that some others liked and would gravitate towards. This was the proto-leadership concept for me, and the idea that you do not necessarily have to adapt to others but rather if you are open minded but still well defined in yourself, you can find an interesting medium there.
Professionally I found things to not be all that different, and while we all learn to try and get along, I found that I leveraged that sense of ‘no, this is wrong, I’m heading out this way’ and I would figuratively stake the flag of my tribe and move forward. This would often get some people to rally around it, and that tribe would become stronger and I would be often to suggestions to improve it. This then became my management style, and I learned over time it was about empowerment of others ultimately. It was about not destroying or forcing an end to someone’s sense of who and what they are and requiring them to become part of the collective, but rather about helping them identify what they can bring and setting goals that measure against how they can actually behave and perform.
Your Role is this and Not Something Else
At first when I played D&D I was a player, but quickly I became responsible for running the games (called the Dungeon Master in D&D or the Game Master or the Story teller depending on what other game you have as a frame of reference) for one group of guys. It meant that I had organizational responsibilities for getting people together, defining the purpose, establishing the story, making sure that everyone had a role to play and would enjoy themselves, etc. The thing is, it was a lot of work.
When I wanted to be able to sit and just play, very quickly that particular group would end up rejecting it. The reason being that my accepted role was as not the leader, as they never thought of the DM role as a leader, but they didn’t like me playing because I became the leader or challenged the lack-of-leader-ness of the group.
Over the years this really started to bother me, so new rules go introduced. I was allowed to be a player but I had to be significantly weaker of a character than the others because I simply thought up crazy stuff that worked which made me ‘effectively’ just as powerful if not more so. The lessons learned? You could argue about negotiations and the establishment of leveling guidelines to allow a group that is otherwise comfortable to establish accept a change, but more for me was about what I faced years later.
In the professional world I ran into this in a number of ways, and appreciated having a model for it. It’s more the situation where you are asked to serve in a role because potentially that is the only one that they can bring you into, or it is the only hole on the team, or because their thinking doesn’t allow it to be anything other than that. From there I learned how to start expanding or changing what that meant, how to demonstrate my value elsewhere, and all the while being cognizant of the potential need to change the rules of engagement or negotiate with people (either in an implied or explicit means) so that I deliver the value that ultimately that is needed.
Also, it set my expectations for when people just don’t want you out of a certain role because you are too good at it, the D&D lesson was always if you were really clever at being the thief, heaven help you if you wanted to play a fighter or mage at some point, the group collective Think became that of ‘you are the THIEF, ALWAYS’. I learned the fissures it can cause to a group’s ability to move forward unless it has successfully built a progressive, evolutionary or agile mindset.
You Don’t Know This, Wink
There were a lot of “side-bar” conversations during our games, i.e. “Come with me for a minute, let’s chat for a second.” Someone’s character enters a room and sees something and so you need to communicate to them about what only they now see. Sometimes it was a passed note, sometimes a message uttered in a pre-agreed to code in front of everyone else, sometimes it was the “let’s step into another room for a second so we can talk” and often times it takes place outside of regular game time as a “We’ll get to this after the game so we don’t break moment.”
When I would play people (players and the dungeon master) would share information very liberally with me, to the point where I wondered what it was about me that had people volunteering everything under the sun. I was expected to behave during the games as if I didn’t know such information, and the reason was interesting.
While everyone knew that this was an expected and understood part of how things worked, the still seemed to resent when there were secrets that weren’t shared with them. You could truly tell who trusted whom, and if that trust was ever violated at any point over the years, it was remembered regardless of whether or not you were playing different characters, playing different roles, or playing with mostly different people. This was part of the social meta-game around the game itself, and it wasn’t one that most people were consciously aware of so much as just participated in.
In the professional world my tendency to find myself having information shared with me that I shouldn’t really know continued, and I learned that the behaviours of the D&D crowd was very much present. People liked being the one to get secrets or to give secrets, but they really didn’t like having secrets going on. They also liked to have me in the loop, feeling that that created a bound or gave them an edge in some way, but sometimes they would argue with me in a meeting whereby the knowledge they had given me would have allowed me to win the day easily but instead I had to fight with other tools because of what had been given in confidence.
Part of this is also knowing why someone gives you such information, what’s the intended real use of it, etc. Having an awareness of that meta-game has proven to be very valuable
Never Have a Party Without a Cleric and a Thief
I recognize for some people this is the FIRST REAL D&D reference here, but there will be more, don’t worry. Just wait for the rule of the +1 weapon next time 
No matter how you structure a group there are always certain essentials for groups of a certain size, and this starts in the D&D world when you have 4 players. If you do not have a cleric (Priest) who can heal people and you don’t have a thief (Rogue) who can pick locks and find traps, you are seriously handicapping your group. You can do without all kinds of other roles and types of characters, but fundamentally your group always needs a sneaky thinker and a healer. The same goes for any professional team.
I’ve done the personality breakdown tests where they separate you into 4 groups one way or four groups another way, or maybe there is a fifth group added, but ultimately it comes down to you have analytical people (information first), social people (morale and community first), evangelical people (visionary first) and action people (task first). If you do not have a social person when you’re group reaches about 4+ people, you are going to be unable to know how the group is doing and won’t have someone who just intuitively manages the ties that bind. If you don’t have an action person, you won’t be organized to get stuff done but also you usually need someone who can look at the rules or constraints and have a clever/crafty way of still allowing your group to accomplish the goals by bending them (thief thinking).
All too often I find groups who have over-hired for one or two personality traits, like the idea of having an All Star Team of Type A Personalities. Really? Ask them to go into an elevator, throw in some red meat, and don’t let them out for an hour. The one who emerges and their slightly beaten side kick after 40 minutes, covered in the blood of others, will show you how it differs from the 18 social minded people who were singing together and all come out alive but needed to be rescued. You need a mix of different types, and some types are more essential for productivity, performance and cohesiveness than others.
That’s it for now, next time:
- My Time is Worth Something
- Leadership vs. Guy In Front
- Rules vs. The Way Things Work vs. Fun
- Experiment with Attributes and Learn
- Magic Missile x2 is enough to scare anyone done right
and in part 3:
- Exclusion of Outliers
- Over Reward and Under-perform
- Boredom Kills All
- Bastards can’t be fixed
- Rule of the +1 Swords
