What Tabletop Roleplaying Games can teach us about complexity and adaptability
...and then the game master said "What do you do?"
Imagine arriving in a quiet village nestled between ancient trees and crumbling stone. At first glance, it’s peaceful—laughter in the marketplace, glowing lanterns powered by a strange new energy, and crops growing in defiance of the season. But beneath the surface, something’s shifting. The forest grows sickly. The rivers run more slowly. The villagers have uncovered a powerful, long-buried technology, and it’s changing everything. You didn’t come here expecting a dilemma, but now you must decide: do you stop them, help them adapt, or imagine something entirely new? Either way, you have a decision to make.
While this might be a situation your adventuring party faces in a tabletop role-playing game, it’s deceptively similar to conflict and dilemmas we face every day in our rapidly evolving world. Each of us play complex roles in our communities and workplaces. This post is going to cover some of our insights about leading with adaptability in complex realities. We see this as a special power of using tabletop role-playing games for leadership development, which can serve as a playground to practice the capacities we need for the complexity of life today - self-awareness, empathy, collaboration, adaptability, creativity, and decision-making.
TRPGs are based on interactions among players as they react, and initiate events within the game to progress a story forward. Players must consider how their characters feel about the technology - should they stop the village, mitigate the harm, or imagine a new future altogether?
In life and work, we’re constantly navigating how to understand and reconcile new technologies and their environmental and economic consequences. While we may not wield magic like our characters, there are many transferable lessons we can glean from role-playing games that help us navigate complex problems and conflicts.
We’ll explore the benefits of leveraging role-playing games in leadership development covering:
How play can be serious developmental work
Why imagination is a leadership superpower
Insights from TRPGs you can use to help navigate complexity
Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash
Development through play
Great leadership development is messy work that takes time and attention. Many of us have likely read books, taken training or courses, or worked with other people to glean advice for becoming better leaders. Often, these approaches provide good leader learning - i.e., the information that might help us grow our skills as individuals. The reality is that leadership development is often much more complex. Development pushes us to adapt and evolve our mindset, gaining awareness around new types of problems we likely don’t have the answers for, and to guide our teams and communities through the ambiguity of those challenges to experiment with new ways of understanding and being in the world.
TRPGs give us a special opportunity to build this leadership capacity through play. Play involves designing new sets of rules for experimenting with new understandings of the world. There is not just a single script when we play together in a co-created world. Players must assess context, weigh tradeoffs, and make real-time decisions in situations where the outcomes are determined by the roll of the dice and narrative tension. Debriefing adds opportunities to gain metacognitive awareness about that process, which is required for leadership in complex social situations. When we play, we are constantly making decisions about how we react and respond to these elements, giving us a low-risk environment to test new ways of being and permission to explore unfamiliar roles.
Groups, in particular, benefit from TRPGs because the gaming experience is co-created together. Role-playing can evoke new ways of understanding each other within the game, but also as people and the many roles we play. Shared storytelling inherently involves trust and builds psychological safety. As players collaborate, negotiate, and co-create the story together, they build a unique group dynamic empowered by improvisational “yes and” interactions. These group gaming environments are both practice and norming sessions fostering creative healthy dynamics.
Imagination is a leadership superpower
There is a saying sometimes used in adaptive leadership that “what got you here won’t get you there.” At its core, this saying recognizes that we often face new types of challenges where the skills and mindset we developed at one stage sometimes don’t fit or match with the current challenges we may be facing in our work or our communities. Not only that, but the world around us is changing in many new ways, all of which create situations that require new types of thinking and relating as we work with the people around us. This requires imagining new mindsets.
Through TRPGs, we practice the capacity to imagine new narratives and new settings for us, our adventuring parties, and for the in-game world. These narratives are powerful; imagine a character who once started as a downtrodden hero, perhaps finds their footing in an attempt to help someone, giving them a noble purpose and calling to make an impact in the world. This character works diligently to shift the way they’ve thought of themself, eventually taking on the mantle of someone who could make a difference for the people of that town. The experience for that character is transformative, and we, as people, have the opportunity to transform our own experiences too. Playing through and reflecting on these character arcs is an opportunity to explore how we shape and are shaped by narratives so we can practice becoming newly imagined versions of ourselves and how the narratives we create shape our journey.
There are no easy answers to the challenges that face our world. Political divide, a changing global climate, and evolving technology all create circumstances where massive collective action is needed to create change. These types of adaptive challenges can feel insurmountable, and yet - imagination gives us the capacity to dream of different solutions none of us would come up with alone and that might move us forward together. TRPGs are an exercise in shared imagination, and many of the larger problems we face could benefit from a re-imagining of the possibilities. Our capacity for collective creativity can help to make sense of these challenges and co-create a different future together.
Three insights from TRPGs that will level up your ability to navigate complexity
Here are a few tips we can all leverage from TRPGs to help us navigate complexity and change in our own lives. We will cover more detailed insights on the model we’ve developed to facilitate leadership development through role-playing games in the future, too.
No one solves complexity alone (collaboration). Most TRPGs aren’t solo endeavors, and we build our adventuring parties to be able to become the heroes the world needs. Diversity of skills and perspectives makes a party stronger, more resilient, and more capable of addressing everything from a tricky negotiation, searching for treasure in a dark cave, or a frightening encounter with a big monster. In each of these cases, becoming the hero isn’t about someone dictating the plan and the outcomes - it’s about collaboration, adaptability, and shared problem-solving.
The same principle is true in personal and professional settings. A new product at a company requires many people with different skill sets - designers, product managers, marketing, finance, and legal, to name a few - to launch something new. A conflict with a child at school requires the support of parents, teachers, and other support systems to determine the best plan of care. We navigate these types of problems every day and can use our approach to playing TRPGs to help us collaborate and respond more impactfully at work.
When you are facing a conflict where things don’t make sense, ask yourself “how do the different motivations of the people (characters) involved shape the ways each of you is acting in this situation?” and “How can you try to utilize multiple different approaches to work together?”
A plan is important - but priorities matter more (strategic problem-solving). Have you ever been involved with an adventuring party that spends hours creating the perfect plan, only to have it foiled by unexpected events in the first two minutes of an encounter? We can never fully know how complex situations will unfold, whether they be in the context of a TRPG or stepping into a meeting at work. Success doesn’t come from rigid planning, but instead from knowing your priorities - what truly matters when everything else is uncertain.
Next time you prepare for a meeting, take two minutes to think through what you want and need from the situation. Which values are the most important even if everything goes awry the minute you open the door? In situations of high ambiguity, sometimes the most we can control is how we show up and relate to others. Knowing our priorities, rather than specific outcomes outside our control, helps us respond in the moment when things don’t go as planned because we know what really matters and can act in those interests each time new information or surprises come up.
Failure is just another plot point (learning). A bad dice roll, failed skill check, or unexpected turn of events never ends a TRPG - it often just creates good stories and new possibilities. Failure is never an end, but feedback to which we can respond. Often in TRPGs, an unexpected failure is just as exciting, hilarious, or meaningful as a critical success.
The same is true in life, though this certainly can be harder to feel in the moment. We can control how we respond when things go awry, even though it is difficult to realize in the moment that hard feelings of failure will not last forever. Take time to breathe, to process your own feelings - and then use the moment as an opportunity to develop the next best action. Who knows - it could become a critical beat in your developing story.
We are big fans of reflection. Next time you get set back or experience some kind of failure, reflect (in a journal, with a trusted friend, or professional) on how the emotions of that experience shape your character arc. Then imagine what new narratives are developing that make sense of the unexpected changes occurring to inform how you respond. In the words of a game master to a character entering the scene“what do you do?”
Whether you’re at the game table or in a work meeting, the stories you shape and the choices you make reveal the leader you’re becoming. Are you ready to step into the next adventure? Because the world needs more reflective, adaptable, and collaborative people working together to face complex challenges.
This post was written by Hannah Mixdorf and edited by Joe Lasley