Mischa Stanton
Where I started with this is I have been working in the arts since I was a teenager. I was trained as a live theater audio engineer from a tender age, and I was trained in that professionally. I have a BFA, which is a silly degree to have, but I've been in artistic production my entire life. I got into those—

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
If you're listening and not watching on YouTube, you will find that Mischa might be a little bit older than he sounds.

Bex Taylor-Klaus
They, sorry, they, sorry. That they are zza if you're spicy. Zm what? Z Zm. If you're spicy.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
Yeah. Well, we're neurospicy around here, so OK, so you've been doing this for a while.

Mischa Stanton
Yeah, so I've been doing this for a while. I had to get out of live production because I'm also physically disabled, so I had to shift into something that was still creative and still storytelling—but from home. At the same time, I have always been a gamer. I love video games, board games, card games, and tabletop games. I've been playing tabletop roleplaying games for almost 12 years now. A tabletop roleplaying game is something like Dungeons & Dragons, where you and your friends sit around a table, create characters for yourselves, and then embody them to tell a story together based on what you all do, random prompts, and dice rolls—which give your stories a random element so not everyone is always in control, and you have to adapt.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
And so that brought you to The Wandering Path. Enter Bex Taylor-Klaus.

Mischa Stanton
Yes. So about a year ago, I was a little frustrated with some things happening in the entertainment industry. This isn't an entertainment-industry podcast, so I won't get into it, but suffice it to say I was feeling cooped up. I approached Bex and our other producer, Lynn, about making an actual play podcast—where podcasters play a tabletop roleplaying game as a means to create a podcast or video series.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
Right, OK. And that is what The Wandering Path is. In this case, it's a Dungeons & Dragons framework. Correct?

Bex Taylor-Klaus
It's based on the Dungeons & Dragons fifth-edition rule set. However, we've brought in some of our own homebrews and also some supplementary—how would you describe them, Mischa?

Mischa Stanton
We call them modules—what we used to call them back in the old days. I've also hacked whole other games into our game. I'm a big fan of stitching things together and making it your own. We started with Dungeons & Dragons, which might be intimidating for newcomers, but it's the most popular tabletop roleplaying game in the world, and for our first season, we wanted to give fans of these games an easy on-ramp to our story.

Bex Taylor-Klaus
And as Mischa said, because we love hacking and stitching things together, we've brought in elements from Tony Hawk's Pro Skater and Street Magic, plus creations from across the tabletop roleplaying space that we've borrowed, modified, and adapted to fit our world.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
Beautiful. Well, the reason that I asked you two to this conversation—as much as I want to promote the Wandering Path because I think it's so fabulous—bless you and thank you so much. What is, because as I was listening to it, and I did start understanding—it took me a while, folks, to really understand what was going on—that it was a game, a story they were creating together as it unfolded based on the role of the dice. So there was some framework to the story that was already kind of set, but then it unfolds based on what happens with the dice. And it took me a while to really understand. And so your sibling Bex sat down with me and explained that there are five characteristics in the personality kinds of thing.

Bex Taylor-Klaus
The strength in front of me, so I can actually count it in a second.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
So anyway, there's this whole framework, and what I started to piece together—this is to the people listening—is that there is a huge amount of executive function required to play a game like this successfully. And that there are a lot of social skills required to play a game like this successfully. I started realizing that there are parents in our community who complain about the amount of time their kids are spending gaming, who are upset about the time they're spending on technology, who are frustrated, and who may not realize there's actually something really useful and helpful and constructive and creative happening—something that might be really good for their kids' development. Now, I'm not saying everyone playing first-person shooter games is having this creative experience, but I can tell you the people playing tabletop roleplaying games are definitely working their executive function and social skills. And that's why we're here—because I really wanted to help all the adults who don't have experience with it understand the depth of what's really happening in these games or what can really happen in these games.

Bex Taylor-Klaus
I love that you're bringing in the executive function aspect because there are so many different types of—we call them character sheets. Essentially they're worksheets that help you organize the things your character has in their arsenal, the things that your character can do. And there's this one game that I'm not gonna mention, but we were trying to play it, and Lynn was gonna lead the game. And I remember sitting there trying to do the character sheet, and I ended up having a full emotional breakdown and called Lynn. And I was like, "I feel stupid. I feel like I'm losing my mind. I can do these things. I'm so good at creating a character. Why am I melting down right now?" And Lynn took one look at the character sheet and said, "This is the worst thing I've ever seen. This is just the poorest formatting. This almost gives me a panic attack." And Lynn has better executive function.

So that's sort of when I knew, "OK, this is not a game I can be playing. It is not neuro-spicy friendly enough for me to be playing it." And the thing about Dungeons and Dragons, specifically the character sheets that we use—Mischa has created one that I love. I can't modify it well enough, but I love the format of it, and it really does help match my brain with colors and layers of where I can find the things that my character can do. So I can help organize my own brain on the paper to be like, "OK, I have options right now on what I can be doing. I know exactly where to look to find these options for myself."

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
Can we explain what—because even what you just said, you are starting with an assumption that people understand that you have rules that you have to follow. What I think I figured out is that there are some frameworks or rules that go with the game, and then there are a whole bunch of rules you created at the beginning for yourselves to follow. Is that correct? I'd say so. That is true.

Mischa Stanton
So, generally, in tabletop role-playing games, what happens is there's a rule book for players that will teach you how to make a character for yourself. For Dungeons and Dragons, that includes stuff like, "Are you an elf or a dwarf or an orc or a human? And what is your job? Do you fight with swords, or do you fight with magic, or do you fight with a bow and arrow?" And then it sort of teaches you like, "OK, well, when you want to do these things, here's how you do it." Generally, when you want to try something, when something takes effort and skill, the person running the game—the Game Master—will ask you to roll dice to see how well you do in this moment. Your character usually has some modifiers to improve their chances with certain skills, possibly over others. So, for example, Bex's character in our show is, like, highly trained, was trained to be a warrior, so they're very good at the physical skills. And so they'll roll a die, but they'll do better than somebody that has plus zero, because they've trained in this their whole life. This is the character that we've created.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
They've got advantage.

Bex Taylor-Klaus
Yeah, exactly—so to speak. There's also a mechanic called "advantage," where you get to roll that dodecahedron—that 20-sided die—twice if you have an advantage at this particular skill.

Mischa Stanton
Yeah, so the game includes rules for interactions when you want to do things. That's sort of just for any story. And then you were talking about our world-building episodes, which I'm very proud of. We created the setting of our story live, improvised together in one room. It wasn't prepared; we just sort of did it. And now we've been playing in it for a year. I think it's pretty cool. I skipped your call, just so you know.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
I didn't actually listen to it till after I had listened to the podcast.

Mischa Stanton
Sure, that's OK. We designed it that way, yes. So this setting—the story we collectively decided we want to tell—had certain themes. My players were very much like, "We want a world where there's magic, but the magic is heavy and has a cost, and you have to give up things to attain things." As we built that world, and as we built a story with those themes and a world for those themes to live in, it helped us tell the story to create additional rules on top of the rules the game already gave us. So that those choices would come to the forefront, so that we'd constantly be making those kinds of choices, so that the story's themes would shine in anything we did.

Bex Taylor-Klaus
That's a huge benefit that we have from all of us having played tabletop role-playing games before and having familiarity with it. One of our players, Ian—he wasn't quite as well-versed in tabletop role-playing games as the other three of us. How many are there of us? There's five total?

Mischa Stanton
Four players and the GM.

Bex Taylor-Klaus
I did not count myself in that—my bad.

Mischa Stanton
You gotta count yourself.

Bex Taylor-Klaus
Thanks. But Ian, being surrounded by a bunch of players who had more familiarity, allowed him a chance to jump in at this higher level of play than he probably would have if he were just joining a general home game.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
So, we're gonna take a quick break and double-click a little bit and dive deeper into some of the skills that kids are getting when they play these games. My guests are Mischa Stanton and Bex Taylor-Klaus, the co-producers, et al., of the Reimagined Peaceful Parenting podcast. We've been talking about the framework of the games and of tabletop role-playing games—I'm gonna get this by the end of this episode. And what I wanna do now, if you will, is dive into what's the benefit to kids who are playing these games—teenagers, young adults—in terms of their development, in terms of the skills that they're gaining. I mean, I know they're out there and they're having fun, but what else is in it for them? And what I've identified is executive function skills, social skills, and in particular, emotional regulation skills. Seems to me those three—and emotional regulation is a subset maybe of the other two.

Mischa Stanton
Well, I would say you hope that emotional regulation is something people are learning at these tables. I have played some games with fully grown adults who did not have those skills, and it made it harder playing the game.

Bex Taylor-Klaus
Tough. I've been there too.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
Say a little bit more about that. OK, so let's start with emotional regulation. What creates the capacity for people to practice or learn emotional regulation?

Mischa Stanton
Sure. Well, I think that there's two aspects of tabletop role-playing games that really lead to the development of executive function. Now, I'm not as familiar—I'm not a psychologist. I'm a media producer and gamer, so go with me. I think that the two things you really learn are planning—so the game says, "Here are your options in any scenario." And then it's the game master's job to present you with specific scenarios, and it's the player's job to go, "OK, these are the tools at my disposal. What should I do?"

Bex Taylor-Klaus
Also sequencing. Within that, not just planning, but the sequencing therein—like multi-phase…

Mischa Stanton
Planning ahead, saying, "I'm gonna do something in this turn that will help us all next turn," is a big part of it as well.

Bex Taylor-Klaus
Just to get a little bit more specific, there's bonus actions, there's actions, there's reactions, and you can only use one of each for the most part during your turn. So sometimes you'll wanna do a bonus action before an action, and it won't work if you do it after.

Mischa Stanton
Yeah, there's this thing called the "action economy," where you only have a certain number of moves you can do in a turn, and it really helps you prioritize what needs to be done, what might help your other players. 'Cause you're working together with other players—tabletop role-playing games aren't competitive. And the other thing it does is it gives you a character, it gives you a person to be, with a viewpoint and things that matter to you. And then it puts you into community with a couple of other people that might have different points of view than you. So, the other thing it teaches is those social skills of like, "I care about something going one way, another person cares about something going a different way. Where can we find that compromise? How can we work this out given the tools at our disposal?"

Bex Taylor-Klaus
And that's one of the ways that emotional management and emotional regulation can really come into play. It can be a challenge when you wanna go one way and your fellow players wanna go a different direction. You have to remember that you are on the same team. You are meant to be working together. The game doesn't really work if you wanna be a lone wolf. The "lone wolf" moniker is a misevaluation of wolves anyway, and this game sort of reestablishes that—if you are a lone wolf, you are looking for your party, you're looking for the pack that you fold into, just like a lone wolf would have been. You need to be working with other people. You cannot take on anything alone. That's why it never works when you split up a party.

Mischa Stanton
That's one of the maxims of playing these games—after you've played a little while, you learn not to split up or else you might get picked off one by one. So these games give you a safe space to learn these skills, where the thing at stake is your character might die, or the villain might win, but then you leave the game behind and go back to your normal life. It gives you a big safety net to learn these skills in a place that won't actually affect real life, unless temporary isolated high stakes.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
Yes. So there's like a recoverability, is what I think I'm hearing. It's like you may lose, you may fail, something may not go the way you want, and then you get up and walk away.

Mischa Stanton
Yeah. And well, it also, you know, because the story is based on dice rolls—truly a random element—there is a factor to these things where sometimes the dice just may not go your way. And it also teaches you like, "OK, but how do you pick yourself up after that? You know, how can you come from a place of defeat and still carry on and put a plan back together?"

Bex Taylor-Klaus
Yeah. And it's from the bare bones of executive function—from working on handwriting so you can read your own notes, to paying attention so that you understand what's happening in the story and you can call back to it later or see what's gonna happen in the future based on what's happened already. It's really a great exercise in all of these different things, not just the emotional stability. Because sometimes you're gonna have a panic attack in the middle of a game, and hopefully, you can manage to isolate that to your character and bring yourself back to emotional regulation after that moment is done. As we were saying, there's the safety net of coming back to reality. You really get a chance to be present in the moment, in the game that you're in, which is a beautiful thing. And then you come back to the present of the moment outside of that game, and you're no longer in that panic space. And I think it allows the body and the brain this subtle subtextual ability to be like, "Where am I right now?" And if right now is in fantasy world, that's just as valid as right now is sitting at the table in physical world.

Mischa Stanton
Yeah. It creates an artificial event threshold, where the thing exists in one space, and there's an ability to step back across the doorway and step outside of it and leave it behind where it was. It allows you a layer of detachment—I mean, it's the same safety-net kind of thing—but the ability to go, "OK, wait, this was a very stressful thing. I was emotionally dysregulated, but it wasn't actually happening to me. It was happening to my character." So you can take a step back and examine it and learn lessons without it being an attack on your person.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
Right, or your life. Right. What's really jumping at me as I'm hearing you say it is we've talked some about emotional regulation, right? And you're also speaking to that capacity to tolerate—to tolerate frustration, to tolerate disappointment, to tolerate intense emotions. And for a lot of our complex kids, I think it gives—what you're saying is—you can pull out of whatever's not going well in your everyday life or what you don't feel strong about or safe about, and go into this place where you can practice with lower stakes, and practice what it is to interact and connect and communicate and plan, or whatever it is, with lower stakes that don't actually show up in your real life.

Bex Taylor-Klaus
This is super nerdy, but I've had moments in real life where I've been like, "I am not having a good time here. How would Ebra handle this?" And sometimes Ebra would not handle it better than I would—

Mischa Stanton
Yeah, Ebra has their own panic attacks.

Bex Taylor-Klaus
Exactly. But sometimes it's just that much of a disconnect—a reminder of disconnect, a reminder to myself that I can disconnect safely and comfortably and in a helpful way, and allows me to embody a different side of myself. Because that's one of the other things I love about making these characters—you get to decide your bonds, your flaws, your ideals, the base level of your character. Are you very charismatic? Are you very intelligent? Are you very physically strong? You get to really make these decisions and see what part of yourself you wanna heighten and play into.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
Are those the core components that Sydnee was trying to explain to me—the strength…so there's five?

Mischa Stanton
Well, tabletop role-playing games tend to have these base skills just to base all of the math on. Dungeons and Dragons has six at the very basic. Those are strength, dexterity, constitution—which is your physical fortitude—intelligence, wisdom (which are two different things), and charisma.

Bex Taylor-Klaus
And I always forget that constitution is one of those scores.

Mischa Stanton
Yeah, constitution doesn't really come up very much.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
But what I want people listening to understand is what that means is, before you start playing, you've gone through each of those six areas and decided where your character is on the spectrum of each of these.

Mischa Stanton
Yeah. In fact, one of my favorite things I've ever seen in a tabletop role-playing game—Lynn, our co-producer on The Wandering Path, also plays in a home game that I run for my spouse and a couple of our friends. And as Lynn was joining, Lynn said—Lynn plays a minotaur, like a half-bull man with a big sword and big armor, big energy—and Lynn said, "So out of 20 points, what if I gave this character an intelligence of four? Would that be good? Would that be funny?" And it is. It's so funny. It's very funny. They intentionally were like, "I'm just gonna create the stupidest cow I can."

Bex Taylor-Klaus
But then, because they don't have the intelligence to know what's going on, they only know what they feel is right. They became the heart of the group, you know—they became the conscience, the mascot a little bit.

Bex Taylor-Klaus
And that's also like the difference between wisdom and intelligence is something that can really help in real life, I think, as well. It's the difference between book smarts and street smarts for some people. It's the difference between knowing that a tomato is a fruit and knowing whether or not to put it in a fruit salad sort of thing.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
I love that. So when Sydnee explained that to me, it gave me—that was actually my first thought of, "OK, I gotta have them on the podcast." Because, as parents, we're always worried about our kids: do they recognize how intelligent they really are? How can I help them learn to trust themselves? What I'm hearing you describe is when they create a character, even if they create a character that's four on a scale of 20 intelligence, it takes a certain amount of intelligence to play that off.

Bex Taylor-Klaus
Oh yes, it does. Yes. Oh yes, it does.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
Right. So there's something about the creative process of choosing how I want to express in this space that gives them a place to practice with all kinds of life skills.

Bex Taylor-Klaus
The whole thing is an exercise in flexibility. That's one of the reasons I got into it, was because I missed improv so much. It's long-form, collaborative improv in a lot of ways—in most ways. And you're gonna have to readapt if the dice say that what you wanna do is not gonna work; you're gonna have to accept that and try something else.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
Yeah. That took me a really long time to understand as I was listening, was like, you really did. And there were days where the dice were really with y'all, and there were days the dice really weren't.

Mischa Stanton
And there are some days where the dice—we like to say that the dice tell a story. Like yes, the five of us are telling a story at this table, but the dice are telling their own story. And sometimes the story the dice wants to tell is not the story you wanted to tell when you started.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
Which is a great skill to learn, to adapt to. Alright, so we do need to start wrapping the conversation a little bit. Let me tell y'all how you can find out more about these two fabulous humans and their people, their cohort. You can find them at wanderingpathpod.com.

Bex Taylor-Klaus
Or on Patreon at patreon.com/wanderingpathpod.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
Patreon.com/wanderingpathpod. Thank you. And as always, wherever you happen to podcast, they will be there. And if you wanna come—what is it you want me to say, Mischa? "Journey, rest along the path with me."

Mischa Stanton
Oh, just take a little step off the path with me and just chill there—just until we catch our breath, you know, just 'til we catch our breath.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
It is a lovely place to catch your breath. I will say those of you with younger children, there is some language advisory, so do watch out for that a little bit. It's not designed for young children, but I do think that the storyline really, if you're comfortable with that, lends itself to children much younger than adults, to teenagers certainly.

Mischa Stanton
I think so. I mean, one thing that I really struggled with was learning how and when to trust folks. And one of the big themes of our first story here—now we've been doing one story for a year; eventually that story will end and we'll go onto a new story, and I'm very excited about that as well. But one of the big themes of our first story is we wanted to create a world where everybody wants to trust the people around them, but due to environmental circumstances, it's very hard. So when society benefits people who lie, people who steal, people who cheat, how do you find your way to trust within that? And that's a thing that I really had to learn as a kid. So it feels good to be able to put a template in the world for people struggling to do that.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
Yeah. So that's a great segue—let's look at this for a closing question to discuss: what do you feel like are the greatest gifts you've taken away, each of you, from—whether it's this podcast or tabletop roleplaying games in particular or whatever, from gaming in general—like, what's the gift it's given you in your life?

Mischa Stanton
Great question. So many. I think the gift it's given me is what I like to call the ability to say the plot out loud, which is to say sometimes it can be hard to have frank discussions about your feelings and about planning with a group. People want to find a way to soften things; that might take too long, and it might get to a sort of passive-aggressive point where you're spending years and years not discussing the issue in the room. With a game, it's gonna be over in three hours and you gotta fight this dragon—you gotta talk about stuff, you know? So it's taught me how to initiate complex conversations and know that if we're all here to succeed, if we're all here to achieve one goal together, you don't have to be afraid of initiating those discussions. If you're on the same team with people, they will want to engage in those discussions with you and find the solution. Because it turns out, when everyone stops avoiding things, that is what we all wanna do.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
That's beautiful. But Bex, before you go, here's what I wanna call out for the parents in my community: we do a lot of work around trust-building and cultivating relationship and building trust and getting on the same team with your kids so that they feel safe, so that they can trust that you are on their team—so that you can have those conversations. Whatever the conversations are that you're not having, that you wanna be having, require a sense of relationship trust to be able to have effective communication. And what I love about what you just shared, Mischa, is that when your kids are practicing there, they're gaining skills to do that, so that you can then—as they begin to trust you differently and feel like you're on their team—then you can begin to have some of the conversations you may not have been able to have before. Beautiful. Thank you. That's a great example. Bex, what about you?

Bex Taylor-Klaus
There's just so many. I'm struggling to find one to focus on right now, and I think I'm gonna go back to social skills. It teaches me how to interact with my friends and interact with people that I don't know—not just to get what I want out of them, but to have real connections and real conversations and real moments of substance with other people. Like sometimes I imagine in my head, "All right, is it time to roll for charisma? Is it time to roll for persuasion? Is it time to roll for an insight check? What am I looking for in this interaction that will help me enjoy it more or even navigate it easier?" And, you know, the dice in my head aren't as hard to control as the dice in real life. It gives me a chance to be like, "I'm gonna roll high on this. What is it that I'm rolling high on?"

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
Yeah. That is fascinating. For those—once you listen to it, you'll understand exactly what they're talking about. But it's a beautiful framework, that I get to use this framework and bring it into my life and let it guide me to be my best self—to roll high. Yeah, to choose to find what I wanna bring into my life.

Bex Taylor-Klaus
Sometimes even rolling high, you're not gonna win at a certain situation because something else happens, just like real life. But as long as I feel like I'm doing my best job at whatever I'm trying to do, then whatever else happens that gets in the way, that keeps it from succeeding—it's not coming from me, and that feels a lot better.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
Yeah, I get that. What advice do either of you have for parents—well, Mischa, it looks like you wanna say something?

Mischa Stanton
No, I think what I was gonna say is gonna answer the question you're about to ask. So go ahead.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
Go for it. He's got—he scored high on insight. They—sorry, they.

Mischa Stanton
So, yeah, for anybody for whom this sounds like a good framework and skill set to be teaching to your kids, and you don't really know where to start, 'cuz I understand there's a somewhat high barrier to entry with this kind of stuff—in your community, hopefully there is a local game store, a place where you might buy board games. Those kinds of stores also run events and play events, where someone who's a little more experienced might run one of these games. I encourage you to go with your kids and play together. Learn how to play these games together, and then maybe you can bring them back into your home and into your own life. But there are ways, there are accessible ways, to learn, "What the heck is going on with all this stuff? Why do I need a weirdly shaped die to play this game?" Well, they'll tell you.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
Well, and what I would add to that, Mischa, is that whatever game your kid's playing, if you can start getting interested in what they're playing and start absolutely finding ways to play with them, that builds the trust, and that builds the sense of team.

Bex Taylor-Klaus
There's a lot of—not just tabletop roleplaying games—but there's video games or online games that may not have the same mechanics, but have a similar—you have to interact with other people, you have to find the best solution to get to the type of gameplay that you wanna play. Get curious about what your kid's playing, and even if they can't answer why they're playing it, if you are watching and you're seeing what they're doing in the game, you can get a lot of insight about them.

Mischa Stanton
Yeah. Games are not just a silly little thing they do alone in their rooms. That is an opportunity to build a relationship with your kid.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
A couple weeks ago, I interviewed somebody from Roblox.

Mischa Stanton
Oh wow.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
And that was their message. It was, "Go play with your kids—like, play, play, play." I think we do a great job of playing with our kids when they're really little, and then they go to grade school, and somehow we start judging play in a way that just doesn't make sense, because the brain learns from play.

Mischa Stanton
Yeah. We've been playing games to learn social and planning skills for tens of thousands of years. Like, this is not new. This is how we've always been learning. The reason games speak to so many people is because for a certain subset of us, our brains are wired to play games, to learn through games. This is an incredibly valuable tool that puritanical society says, "You must be working, you must be functional all the time." There is value in play. There has always been value in play and storytelling.

Bex Taylor-Klaus
Yeah, and storytelling. This game can be a resource-management game as well.

Mischa Stanton
That's true.

Bex Taylor-Klaus
It can be all about figuring out what you have at your disposal and utilizing it as best you can, and then having to restock whenever you run out. That's one of the games that I'm scared of playing—it has a lot of menus and a lot of resource management—and I know that I want to play it because it scares me, because it's something that I can learn from it.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
But you might not have started with it—or you didn't start—

Bex Taylor-Klaus
No, definitely not.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
No, you gotta kinda work your way up. I get it.

Bex Taylor-Klaus
Yeah. I mean, if I'm starting with resource-management games, I'm actually starting with Minecraft.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
OK, got it. Which might be a whole other podcast episode—a whole other podcast. Alright y'all, this has been great. Here's what I wanna ask: is there anything else that we haven't talked about that you think is really important and you wanna share, or something we have talked about that you wanna highlight or button?

Mischa Stanton
Good question. No, I think that last bit—that gaming isn't new. Gaming has been a part of human society since it began. Do not be afraid of its value.

Bex Taylor-Klaus
Just because it has more flashing lights than it used to doesn't mean it's any less valuable.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
Beautiful. Anything else you wanna add, or is that—

Bex Taylor-Klaus
Trust in the process. It can be weird, it can be hard, it can be confusing, and that doesn't mean that it's always going to be that way. Let it start where it starts, and understand that it's gonna end somewhere else.

Mischa Stanton
As they say in the NBA, "Trust the process."

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
Awesome. OK, folks, this has been amazing. And we usually end our podcast with a question to the guest, which I don't think I prepared you for—

Mischa Stanton
Oh, hit me!

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
Which is, do you have a favorite quote or motto that you'd like to share with our listeners?

Bex Taylor-Klaus
Oh, no. Thank you. Well, alright—I do improv, so I very much lean into "the first thing that pops into my mind." As long as it's at least semi-appropriate, that's the right answer. "Don't let the fear of striking out keep you from playing the game." Yes, it is from A Cinderella Story. No, I refuse to take judgment. And I have a little strikeout on my wrist—a little X—so that there's always one strikeout on the board. Getting the first strikeout and the last strikeout are always the scariest ones. The one in the middle is not as scary, so if I'm always on the one in the middle, nothing is quite as scary as it was before.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
Beautiful. Well, and I will say as your mom, that was a quote that got you through a lot.

Bex Taylor-Klaus
Oh yeah.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
For a lot of years. "Don't let fear of striking out keep you from playing the game." And sometimes, it still does. It doesn't only work in softball games—

Bex Taylor-Klaus
It's true. It's for all of life. Sometimes, I'll find myself letting the fear of striking out keep me from playing the game, and I just remind myself that's not helping me.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
It's a great reminder—beautiful. Mischa, what about you?

Mischa Stanton
Ooh, the one that comes immediately to mind is from a book that I read in college called House of Leaves. It's a very sort of introspective, spiraling-inward book. And one of the phrases that gets used by the main character over and over again is a Latin phrase, which is non sum qualis eram. The book roughly translates that as, "I am not what I was." Just a reminder that the person you are now doesn't have to be the person you will be. That the person you are now is different than the person you were, and that's a good thing. You have the capacity for change.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
Always beautiful. And I want to take that and bring it back to the parents and the providers who are listening—that's the message we hope you'll take away from this as much as anything is exactly that. Your kids are in the process of becoming, and I don't care if they're 4, 14, 24, or 34—they are in the process of becoming themselves and who they are. And they may or may not be doing it on the timeline you once expected, but here's where they are, and they're in the process of growing and developing. And when you can help believe and see what's possible for them, even when they don't see it for themselves, that vision is so powerful to their capacity to move in that direction.

And, you know, I reference this podcast episode all the time, but I interviewed a guy named Andreas Croft, who's a futurist. He's done all this global research on hope—just a beautiful conversation. And one of the things he talks about is how important it is for us as parents to believe in our kids, and that we as humans need to feel like we have hope and that we can move toward something—that we are moving forward toward. And it's when it feels like the world's coming at us that we shut down. But when we feel like we can move forward—that's hope, and that's possibility.

Mischa Stanton
Yeah. And that's what tabletop roleplaying games do. They teach you how to find the way forward.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
Beautiful. Thank you. Thanks, both of you, for being here. Thank you for this beautiful gift of creativity that you've brought to the world. And thank you for my listening while I'm in pottery class.

Mischa Stanton
My pleasure.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
And to those of you here, take a minute, check in with yourself. What are you taking away from this conversation? What's your insight, your A-ha, your gem, your nugget? What are you aware of now that you weren't aware of 45 minutes ago? And maybe how do you want to bring that forward with you into your life? How do you want to apply that in the coming weeks? And as always, thank you for what you do for yourself and for your kids. At the end of the day, you make an extraordinary difference. Take care, everybody.