Relational Tabletop Role Playing for Mental Health Professionals

Clinical Track

This Clinical Track introduces mental health professionals to relationally facilitated tabletop role-playing. The program combines RCT teaching, guided practice, and clinical debriefing across the life of a game group.

At a gaming table, someone offers an idea and waits to see whether the group will make room for it. The story is imaginary, but the experience of being heard, taking a risk, or finding a way back into connection can feel familiar.

In this six-hour experiential training, we will explore relationally facilitated tabletop role-playing games through Relational-Cultural Theory (RCT). We will move through character creation, Session Zero, starting play, returning to the group, and saying goodbye. Along the way, we will practice attending to mutuality, culture, power, and the relationships among players and characters. Teaching, guided play, and clinical debriefing will help us consider therapeutic goals, metaphor, participant choice, and the risks and benefits of this work.

Social workers and other mental health professionals interested in using relationally facilitated tabletop role-playing in clinical practice.

An in-person, six-hour experiential training at Bloomington Center for Connection in Bloomington, Indiana.

Relational RPGs use a unique format; an experienced game master (we call them a narrator) as well as a participating clinician in every game.

The participating clinician is there to help guide the party, watch for activation or increased anxiety, note possible challenges, and enjoy the game.

The same concepts that help people name relational patterns can also reveal what designed systems make possible—and what they leave unsupported.

The 48 RCT Toybox concepts informed a 172-question rubric applied to 84 role-playing game source packages. Rather than ranking games from “good” to “bad,” the analysis keeps three kinds of evidence separate: the relational possibilities a game supports, the relational risks it embeds, and the structures it explicitly provides through its rules, table process, and fiction.

A game can distribute meaningful authority while still concentrating power. It can invite connection without helping participants repair disconnection. It can represent diverse identities without making identity consequential in play.

Among possibility-oriented questions, Authority was most strongly integrated, while Identity was least integrated. The greatest opportunities for added support clustered around Repair, Conflict, Identity, and Continuity. Among risk-oriented questions, Power was the most strongly integrated—and the area most often calling for safeguards or counterweights.

RCT therefore changes the critical question from “Is this a relational game?” to:

Where does this game support connection, where does it organize relational risk, and what must the group supply for itself?

Teaching, guided play, and clinical debriefing accompany each stage, from creating a character to ending a campaign.

Use a fictional intake survey and participant-defined goals to practice character creation. Explore metaphor without assuming that a character tells us a player’s personal history, and consider developmental fit, risks, benefits, and contraindications.

Practice a first encounter while moving between player and character conversations. Attend to party decisions, communication, and relational skills, then reflect on facilitation choices and session transitions.

Explore how campaigns and groups meet endings, loss, or failure. Practice character goodbyes and participant choices about reconnecting, then reflect on what can be carried into practice and what requires further training, consultation, or support.

We use fictional intake and case materials. You may play, observe, write, or pass on personal sharing. Character stories and reflection do not require disclosure of your own history. Facilitators attend to pacing, access needs, and emotionally laden material, with clinical reflection after each experience.

By the end of this program, participants will be able to:

1. List 3 principles of Relational-Cultural Theory
2. Explain the key ideas Relational-Cultural Theory contributes to RTTRPGs
3. Describe three therapeutic functions of relationally facilitated TTRPGs
4. Discuss risks and benefits of Relationally facilitated TTRPG for different ages, developmental stages, and therapeutic needs.
5. List three skills necessary for leading an RTTRPG
6. Describe the role of the clinician participant in the RTTRPG
7. Understand collaborative identification of therapeutic goals for participants in RTTRPGs
8. Discuss use of relational facilitation to support therapeutic goals and objectives
9. Understand use of metaphor in character development for use in individual therapy
10. Describe three methods of creating safe and clinically appropriate RTTRPGs
11. Describe the use of role-playing in relational skills development
12. Describe the structure of a Relational TTRPG
13. Discuss 3 techniques the participant clinician can use in supporting therapeutic goals
14. Identify 3 contraindications for participation in an RTTRPG

RTTRPG refers to a relational tabletop role-playing game. Session Zero is the meeting before play when people learn about one another, create character relationships, and agree on how they will participate.

Email us to ask about upcoming training, participation requirements, fees, and continuing education details.

BCCRPGs@centerforconnection.org