Psychiatric Help 5¢ : The Doctor is In…

Can we talk?

You look stressed; very stressed.

In fact, everyone looks stressed!

Maybe it is the political climate right now, or the state of the planet, or the time of year or the fact that even our superheroes are fighting one another, but every person I have met in the past few months has been a giant stress-ball. And not the good kind…not the kind that you can beat the crud out of and feel better. No, we are talking about walking prescriptions for Xanax, ball o’ stress kind of stress-balls.

More often than not we turn to a screen to alleviate that stress for a moment. I mean, it is pretty cathartic to watch Captain America lose his cool and Superman get his derriere handed to him. If you have had a particularly bad day, you can always tune into Game of Thrones. There is bound to be one person (O.K…probably a small village of persons) who is having a worse day than you are. We hop on video games or MMOs to take our angst out on hundreds of people, real or imaginary. And, if you have lost all hope for humanity, you can always load a version of Pandemic and obliterate the world with your bad virus self.

But, there are times when you really want to be someone else; to forget for a few hours that your world doesn’t really have dragons and your boss wants you to invent time travel to get a project done. What the frell?! You want to smash monsters, throw magic, create some otherworld mayhem and drink a beer, or Romulan ale, with your friends! You, my friend, need a prescription for a table-top rpg.

A few months ago, we creators of A’Kyria had to take a dose of our own medicine. It occurred to us that every group we were playing in was some form of play-testing group. As fun as it was, it meant that we had one foot out of the game gauging it with a developer’s eye, rather than cooling our toes in the playing pool. So, we backed up, grabbed a pod adventure we had already released and set up a group for the sole purpose of playing.

You know what? It has been pretty amazing. My husband and I, for the first time in our role-playing lives, decided to play a married character couple. As married gnome wizards, Valerie and Miracle Max, (if you don’t get the reference, then you really have been mostly dead all day) we can nag each other with impunity…and magic…and still like each other at the end of the night. You could call it geek marriage counseling.

So, if you are stressed, ditch the screen. Grab some friends, hassle them into coming over and start up a table-top rpg…preferably A’Kyria. They, and you, will not be sorry.

We are Our Own Game Company…Playing for the fun of it!