Rolling for Initiative: How Dungeons & Dragons Taught Me Everything About Team Leadership

The Unexpected Training Ground I never thought a game about pretending to be elves and wizards would teach me more about leadership than any management training I’ve ever attended. But here we are. Growing up, Dungeons & Dragons was this weird thing you did if you had friends—which, honestly, I didn’t have a lot of. My best friend and I played these sort of solo-person adventures, just the two of us hunched over character sheets and dice on pumped up inflatable air beds in the living room. It wasn’t exactly the epic party campaigns you see on Critical Role, but it was still magic. Years passed. We got older. Eventually, we managed to rope in some other friends, and now? Now we’ve got a whole group that gets together yearly, and those weekends have become something we all look forward to more than just about anything else.