Cabins, dirt, boats, nature walks, and gaga all make camp great.  Kids get to play like people did back in the “good ol’ days”.  So when campers come to Will’s World, sit at a bench, pick up a dice set, and play Dungeons & Dragons, some people wonder what place it has in an active, rambunctious place like camp.

All the fun activities at Liberty Lake have a simple goal: have a positive impact on the lives of children, help them grow up learning 21^st century skills through play.  While not a traditional method, Will’s World fills the same skills that every other activity at Liberty Lake does.  The five star points make an excellent guide post, and many times, campers latch onto moments of growth and play at the same time.  All this happens through a set of dice and a game mat.

Of course, it sounds a little far-fetched at first to think of Dungeons & Dragons as a youth development tool.  It’s essentially an extremely low tech predecessor to many video games.  And many people think of it as escapism.  It’s easy to be the hero when the whole story is made up.  It’s also easy to just play game and never learn anything but how to win.  But the way Will’s World uses it transforms a game into a growth tool.  Here’s a few ways campers learned a bit about each star point while at Will’s World:

Aspiration: 

Camp lets people push for plenty of amazing goals like get to the top of the rock wall, ride the zipline, play in a band, etc.   These goals are certainly admirable, but Will’s World lets campers create whole stories and characters.  It lets them exercise their imagination in a myriad of ways.

One week every year, campers develop their own stories to run at Will’s World, and they need to figure out what problem they want players to solve.  Aaliyah at her first time at Will’s World embraced the challenge and decided to write a unique game.

Before I explain Aaliyah’s game, it’s important to know that Dungeons & Dragons is known for having a ton of combat:  players can often go from one place to another and do nothing but fight terrible monsters.  Many campers make stories like that.

Aaliyah, though, decided to have her players discover the cure to a disease and to have no combat at all in her game.  Her entire game focused around talking with people in the affected town.  Some of them have been sick for awhile, and others have been well the whole time.  She even drew up branches of conversation with important characters.

While her players will need to explore ancient ruins to find the cure, the cure is behind a series of puzzles and traps made to challenge the players’ wit and intelligence.  Some of them get players to use their skills in ways they haven’t thought of before.  While I would love to put in more, Aaliyah’s running her game for the camp next week, and she doesn’t want me to spill her secrets.

Teamwork:

Dungeons and Dragons at its core is a game of teamwork.  If you’ve ever seen any show with a large cast, chances are you’ve seen them work together as a team.  In The Avengers, everyone has their role to play:  Captain America as the leader, Iron Man and Bruce Banner as the scientists, Black Widow as the spy, etc.  Each character has their role to play.  The same happens at Will’s World:  each camper has a role to play in their group.  Some players like to play the warrior, standing between their allies and their enemies as a wall.  Others play the rogue, discovering traps and secret passages all while staying hidden.  And others play the wizard, a person full of knowledge and magical power.  The characters that people play are only limited by each player’s imagination.

Dungeons & Dragons is also a complicated game full of small math problems and rules that take time to learn.  Many people don’t figure out how to play until they’ve played several times.

That’s where some of the campers who come to Will’s World each week help with:  teaching new players how to play the game.  And none has been more helpful than Ian this year.  During one week, Ian sat at a table with mostly new players.  Ian took it upon himself to help out all the new players at the table.  When a player didn’t understand how to roll for a skill or what they could do, Ian came in and pointed out the information on their character sheet or helped them find the die to use.  He could have easily chosen to leave it in the hands of the counselor running his game, but Ian chose instead make sure everyone got some help.

Integrity:

Campers play on their team and want their team to win no matter what.  During baseball, a pitcher throws fast balls against his opponents to make it as hard as he can for them.  During basketball, players pass between teammates to drive the ball forward.  During Dungeons & Dragons, players work together to complete the task.

Sometimes, though, the story changes things.  While in a haunted mansion, one party faced an imp that planted magical suggestions in the players’ minds.  It tried to get the party to fight over a suit of armor in the same room.  After falling under the imp’s spell, Joey and Peyton knew that the person who claimed the armor didn’t deserve it and would turn on them once they had it.

Joey and Peyton started plotting on how to keep the armor out of the hands of everyone else, and it started with Peyton putting the armor on himself.  Joey kept everyone else from coming near, and the party almost came to blows over the armor.  Their suspicion kept them from trusting the rest of the part who would’ve turned on them.

While this may not sound like integrity, Joey and Peyton had to play the effect.  They act well and play like they mistrusted their fellow party members:  an entirely counter-intuitive act.  Both Joey and Peyton could have easily ignored the suggestion and played as if nothing happened, but that would erase the challenge presented by the imp.  The imp’s only strength was tricking the party into fighting each other.  Since they played the effect all the way without giving it away, they both showed the highest integrity.

Independence:

Lots of campers play the same kind of characters in the same kind of ways.  Most of the rogues that campers create at Will’s World follow a similar trope:  the assassin.  With the popularity of Assassin’s Creed, it’s not hard to see why.  Scale up walls, hide in plain sight, have an arsenal of medieval gadgets, and spy on important political figures.  The assassin is a classic way to play any rogue.

Jack, though, wanted to try something else entirely.  While he wanted to be a rogue, Jack also wanted some magic at his fingertips.  When he built his character, he made an arcane trickster and gave his rogue some magic to conquer obstacles.  Jack’s character also has ways to talk with people instead of being a silent, stoic spy.  Jack wanted to be the life of the party and a negotiator, and during play, he’s managed to talk his team out of a few situations as well.

Friendship:

Robbie plays a wizard (Corzak), and him and his party were tasked with finding a missing city council member.  The elf that hired them, another council member, Lothas, gave them a few documents and directions to help them on their mission.  Without any delay, Corzak grabbed the documents and made for the door.  As the guards stopped him from leaving the councilman’s presence, the wizard insisted on putting them to sleep with a spell.

When the guards cuffed Robbie’s character, Andy, who was playing a dwarf cleric and the party’s diplomat, immediately apologized for his friend’s action and insisted that Corzak merely wanted to start on the case as soon as possible.  Taking the cue, Robbie followed suit and agreed with Andy’s plea.

Andy could have easily let Robbie’s character wind up in prison and out of the game, but he stood up for his friend even when a powerful councilman was doing the talking.  Many similar events happen at Will’s World with campers taking risks to help each other out.

Will’s World certainly isn’t as physically intense as many of the activities at camp.  It doesn’t teach campers how to build fires or tents.  It gives campers a chance to exercise their imagination and solve problems all while having fun exploring fantasy worlds.  Campers learn through their exploration how to grow into a good person.