D&D&T(herapy), Pt. 2
Grinding for mental health, and some milestone leveling
Last summer, I wrote a piece here about the connections I saw between role-playing games and the practice of therapy. Having recently switched therapists, as I begin on a new project with my current counselor, it seemed like a good time to revisit that line of thinking, muse on games a little more, and share a bit of my latest work.
As a quick “previously on Eric’s Substack” recap, here’s the conclusion of that prior post:
Thinking about talking to a therapist for the first time puts me in a weird headspace. I’m excited, for sure — I actively want to get better, and I feel strongly that I’ve reached the limits of what I can do without professional help. But I’m also trepidatious. I’m a little scared that the experience may be too hard, or uncover too much I’m not ready for, or alter me in some way I won’t like. I think these are all natural feelings, and they’re not going to stop me from doing the thing, but I do feel it’s important to express them.
What’s kind of funny to me, though, is that all those thoughts — even the very metaphor of investigating myself — kind of make me feel like I’m about to go dungeon-diving, you know? Like, I better stock up on supplies and rest in the nearest town, because I’m going to be plumbing some depths, and it might indeed be hard, scary, isolating at times. Good thing a lifetime of gaming has shown me how to equip for that kind of journey, and that with some work and perseverance, the heroes come out victorious on the other side.
I started this post by talking about how D&D can be therapy. I also think that maybe therapy can be D&D. Here’s to leveling up.
When it comes to role-playing games, I’m not much of a grinder. In digital RPGs, like my beloved Final Fantasy, I prefer to not spend a lot of time proactively buffing my party. Rather than potentially over-invest in a part of play that (to me, at least) feels more like work, my modus operandi is usually to feel out what an upcoming situation’s going to call for before I commit to any course of action.
The one exception to this — the bit of consistent grinding I do — is to make sure I can afford whatever improved equipment each new town I visit presents me with. I don’t have any problem with heading out to the wilderness for a little bit to grind gold. The alternative would be to be left behind in the capitalistic-literal arms race, and I don’t want to be the guy who shows up to the next dungeon with gear from two towns ago. Can you imagine the embarrassment?? … is this feeling like a metaphor to anyone else?
Honestly, I sort of feel like, if a game requires me to grind beyond this little bit, it’s probably not well-designed. Why would a creator require me to invest my time in rote, uninspiring activities when there’s a whole exciting world out there to explore?
As I said, I recently switched therapists. That coincided with me moving states, thus leaving behind my last therapist’s licensing area, but it also makes sense from a symbolic perspective.
I’ve talked a little bit on here before about how moving back to Chicago is a sort of refresh for me. Honestly, despite how fraught everything feels right now, I’m feeling pretty great internally. I’m largely fulfilled with who I am, who I spend time with, and what I’m doing. I’m happy most of the time (and yes, I do feel some guilt about that!). Since I likened my first experience with therapy to an RPG, it feels fair to say that I beat the boss and found the treasure at the end of this journey’s first dungeon. It makes sense to me to try something new.
When I first started with therapy last September, one of the three therapists I briefly dated last year (I guess I have a type!) suggested that, with my interest in storytelling, I might want to look into narrative therapy. I’d never heard of it before, and I didn’t want to leave my first therapist so quickly after we kicked things off, but I carried the recommendation with me, and when it came time to find a new guide, I actively included it in my search.
As with many things related to mental health, narrative therapy seems to have a fairly nebulous definition, but I like this one that I found on verywellmind.com (with a name like that, how could this source not be authoritative?!): “Narrative therapy is a style of therapy that helps people become — and embrace being — an expert in their own lives. In narrative therapy, there is an emphasis on the stories that you develop and carry with you throughout your life.”
This felt right up my alley. You know from my work on Mortified that I’ve spent a lot of time working with other people to tell their stories — and you know from reading this Substack that I sometimes help tell the stories of made-up people, too. But outside of this platform, I don’t do a lot with telling my own story. And I think maybe now’s a good time to get better at it.
Adjacent to the issue of level grinding in RPGs, especially the tabletop variety, is the debate of XP vs. milestone leveling. I’ve changed my opinions on this quite a bit in the last few years. When I first started playing D&D, I was 100% XP-based. I firmly believed that the game wouldn’t create its own mathematical subsystem of experience without it being tuned, tested, and meaningful. I didn’t trust myself to determine when characters had acquired sufficient enough experiences to earn a new level. Rather than rely on my uncertain ludic pacing skills, I leaned on our familiar friend the Challenge Rating to guide advancement.
This started to change for me, weirdly, when I designed a couple multi-level dungeons. I really liked the idea that, for a game that took place in a discrete dungeon location, each floor of that dungeon would represent its own level, and upon moving to the next floor, characters would progress. This was somewhat inspired by the broad pacing of old-school D&D, in which it was (at least sometimes) roughly assumed that each level of a substantial dungeon should contain enough treasure and trouble to advance a character to the next level if they play well. By linking leveling to dungeon floors, I was merely shortcutting the precise math of a typical dungeon slog. It’s the graphing calculator of experience math!
As I played a couple games like this, I came to realize that I actually liked milestone leveling more than XP. I liked that I didn’t have to track each individual monster kill. I liked that I didn’t need to worry about numbers if players used their characters’ skills or their real-life cleverness to bypass combat encounters entirely. I liked that leveling was tied inextricably to a sort of narrative advancement — by linking story beats to rewards, it felt like the players had more investment in finding out what happened next. Maybe this sounds obvious, and it’s pretty much the whole point of milestone leveling in the first place, but it took me seeing it in action to really understand its benefit.
These days, I will still use an occasional XP schema for leveling — for instance, in Fabula Ultima, a tabletop game inspired by digital JRPGs, XP is the only advancement system in the game. However, the game also builds its mechanics to tie earning XP to narrative and noncombat developments just as much as combat, if not moreso. In most of my other games, though, I’ve become a Milestone Man. I just really appreciate the idea that players get to enjoy a tangible advancement when they do something cool to advance the narrative of their game. It, like, rewards them for telling the story.
In my narrative therapy undertaking, my guide and I are working on helping me write my own story — in a way that, as he poetically says, helps me “find the glimmers” of my own life. I think that’s pretty cool.
But, as my friend Ed likes to say, I’ve got a producer brain — there was no way I could take on a storytelling project without thinking about how it might relate to the rest of my creative ecosystem.
Before I began writing, I actually asked my therapist: “I know you’re going to say something like ‘I can’t answer that; it’s up to you to answer it for yourself’ but would you like this to be something I write just for me and you, or should I be writing a narrative I could actually, like, share?”
“I can’t answer that,” he said. “It’s up to you to answer it for yourself.”
“I knew you were going to say that,” I replied.
So, anyway — after talking to this dude a bit about why I’ve historically had a lot of trepidation about talking about myself too much, I decided that that seemed like a pretty compelling angle for me to approach this next step of my mental health adventure. So, with my therapist’s guidance, I’ve started writing a thing I’m calling Main Character Energy — a personal memoir that looks at the healthy and unhealthy ways I’ve centered (or failed to center) myself in my own life and the communities and world around me during key experiences in my history, with a sub-goal of helping me understand myself and my choices through media that has impacted me.
I’m telling you this because I’m planning on sharing what I’m writing for Main Character Energy on this Substack. It’s almost certainly more personal than what you signed up for, and although I’ll still be talking about games and media and stuff, I’ll also be sharing a lot about myself. So, fair warning if you want to jump ship, or just ignore those posts (they’ll be clearly tagged, and I’ll still be writing other stuff here, too).
Other than my therapist, and those of you who decide to read along, I’ll likely never put this writing anywhere else. But I want to share what I’m working on because, well, it is a lot of work, and because I think it’s important for me to be as real and vulnerable (in a healthy way!) as I ask the people who do Mortified to be. Especially in these times, I firmly believe that vulnerability is strength. So, put a more crude way, I’m going to show my ass, and hopefully none of us feel too weird about it.
I plan on starting to post my entries from Main Character Energy early next week, roughly once a month, although I’ll front-load the posting a bit since I’m already a few installments into this project. Fair warning… my ass is coming.
As I said up top, my first bit of therapy felt like a dungeon dive. It was reactive, it was hard fought, and it required me to attain a key item (metaphorically) at the end to be able to go back out into the world. This second segment… I’ll be damned if it doesn’t feel a little bit like grinding in the overworld. It’s proactive, done with the intent of helping to build me up and prepare me for whatever trials comes next. Except, unlike overworld grinding, I’m not really getting incrementally better with each segment of the project I complete. It’s a more wholistic process, something I’m committing about a year of mental health work to, that ideally gives me an artifact I can point to at the end to help me feel more powerful. It’s like… overworld grinding, with milestone advancement waiting when I decide I’ve done enough. For where I’m at right now, that suits me just fine.
May we all feel prepared for the dungeons that come our way.
~~The Plugs Section~~
Speaking of Mortified, our next Mortified Chicago show is this Friday! I talked about it on here a bit last month, and unfortunately, since then Rekha Shankar has had to drop from the live portion of the show due to being offered a movie (which sounds really cool, tbh). But, Rekha still prepared a piece for the show that is SUPER FUN, and I’m actually going to help her deliver it, so if you only bought tickets because you wanted to see your pal Eric do something with someone from Dropout, you still will! I also want to say, the rest of the show is top freakin notch. Grab your tickets now!!