What is Dungeons and Dragons?

Dungeons & Dragons (commonly abbreviated as D&D) is a fantasy tabletop role-playing game (RPG).

D&D is different from traditional board games in that often, there is no board, or players create their own boards which are representations of the fantasy world they are playing in.

Each player creates their own character and these characters embark upon imaginary adventures. A Dungeon Master (DM) serves as the game’s referee and storyteller and also plays the role of the inhabitants of the game world. The characters play as a group and they interact with the setting’s inhabitants and each other.

Together the players solve dilemmas, engage in battles, and gather treasure and knowledge. In the process, the characters earn experience points (XP) in order to rise in levels, and become increasingly powerful over a series of separate gaming sessions.

How does D&D fit in here?

When I was younger I played D&D for a long time with a group of friends and those years are some of my fondest memories from my childhood! It wasn’t uncommon for us to do overnight D&D sessions that went for 12 hours or more. Playing these games forces the use of a variety of brain functions and skills, not to mention many beneficial learning techniques including:

• Improving Attention Span and Focus.
• Dual Coding (processing and representing verbal and non-verbal information).
• Working Memory Capacity (selectively maintaining and manipulating goal-relevant information without getting distracted by irrelevant information).
• Using your memory in a predictive and reconstructive manner.
• Decision Making
• Memory Retrieval (recreating something you’ve learned in the past from your memory).
• Using your imagination.
• Problem Solving
• Collaborating and compromising with other players
• Interleaving (not spending too long on one idea, topic, or type of problem. Instead, changing it up often. This strategy is particularly useful if you’re doing something that involves problem solving. Interleaving can help you choose the correct strategy to solve a problem, and can also help you to see the links, similarities, and differences between ideas).
• Effectively recognising context and being able to take advantage of previous experience
• and the list goes on!

So in light of all that, I think playing D&D is a SUPER fun and INCREDIBLY powerful workout for the brain! Obviously a full blown D&D campaign could be too complicated for some people who are still in the early stages of recovery/therapy/etc. However, some short mini D&D games (with simple language, less complicated problems, structured navigation, and more visual elements) could be a great tool for getting those brain juices flowing!

(reference: https://www.learningscientists.org/blog/2018/8/23-1 )(reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dungeons_%26_Dragons )

So without further Ado, here you go…