Dungeons & Dragons: An Inspirational, Creative Team-Building Exercise

July 30th, 2013 by Search Influence Alumni

The path before five adventuring comrades follows the dark tunnels of an ancient ruin. With only a torch to share among them, and their wits and reflexes, they must avoid traps, goblins, disease-ridden rats, and other unknown horrors that they would never expect to find. But at the end of this adventure, should they succeed in overcoming their obstacles, is a treasure trove of gold and jewels, and a single item that might protect them in the coming months. Will they succeed? In a campaign of Dungeons and Dragons, that is up to the creativity of the player and the roll of the dice.

Search Influence employees at a weekly DnD game.

Search Influence employees at a weekly DnD game.

Dungeons and Dragons (DnD) is a Tabletop Role-Playing Game (RPG) that allows for a group of people to fall into a largely unknown and dangerous fantasy realm as characters other than themselves.

So why talk about an RPG within a blog for an SEO company? That’s because the game itself is a way to give employees, and their supervisors, a chance to have fun, separate themselves from reality for a little while, and create a level of teamwork and adaptability.

In many ways, this is a great opportunity for like-minded (or open-minded) coworkers to come together and experience a kind of adventure that can span about as long as a career. There are even a few stories of DnD players that have outgrown their characters, but have continued the story with some of their children. The game develops a very strange, but professional and long-lasting, friendship and also supports a creative, and adaptable mindset. It also tends to make people more open with each other. If you can’t trust a friend that you fought side-by-side with against a mountain-horde of Trolls and Orcs, then who can you trust?

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Various dice used for a DnD game

In order for a campaign to be successful, everything and everyone needs to come together to reach an eventual goal, survive, and then move on to the next stage of the adventure. Players team up and start to understand each other’s strengths and weaknesses, and figure out ways to support each other with their ongoing endeavors. The Storyteller, or Dungeon Master (DM), then provides goals in the form of quests, as well as obstacles and ways to reach each goal. Sometimes, very little information is given, and it’s up to the creativity and adaptability of the party to find an answer that perhaps even the DM never thought of.

Of course, Dungeons and Dragons isn’t the only RPG in existence, and it’s better to find a setting and a genre that everyone is interested in following. The important thing is the journey, and the times you work together to keep moving forward.