How did TTRPGs help you improve your social skills?

Gave me a reason to interact with people.

Ended up with me getting into other scenes as well, so I'm overall pretty happy about it.

I'm not that dude, but:
Generally, striving for better doesn't involving blaming everyone else for consistent group issues and resigning to nothing rather than being accountable.

TTRPGs helped me get over a large chunk of my crippling social anxiety. When I first started out GMing (I'm a foreverGM) I'd get so anxious that I'd become physically ill the whole day before each game. (think gut pain, and cold-like symptoms). But I pushed through it and now I don't get sick from it now. Not much anyway.

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Fpbp

Seriously they didnt. I got involved with a shitty group with clique hiveminds and they ended up letting drama poison everything until things eventually broke apart.

I hope others had better experiences than I.

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When I was little, tabletop RPGs taught me the idea of having a persona one presents when they're in a different environment. So there's the real me, a miserable unhappy hermit who hisses when his door is opened and who burns in sunlight, and the persona I present to the outside world, a strange but affable fellow who knows a little bit about a lot. It's like I'm playing a character.

I always gm with stranger, it made me a little bit better at holding conversation with people I initially don't know
I used to be nervous before each session I was gming, it feels good that I now manage to keep my nervousness and anxiety in check. I think it comes from the various group telling me that they had a fun night

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Greatly. Talking more eloquently, being persuasive, ignoring social anxiety, getting better at improvising, managing butthurt, despising everyone, not taking shit from anybody. Roleplaying and GMing is probably second biggest influence on my social skills after bullshitting my way through university exams for 5 years.

It has helped my mental health and my social skills greatly. Unlike many of you who call each other autists, even though you most likely dont even qualify for it, I have asperger, which now got changed to some sort of low level autism, and at first I barely even got out of the house or socialized with anyone but my twin. After we started to go to our TTRPG club 7 or so years ago, we have become more social.

Not so much social skills maybe, but I did stop caring about shit in games like

>How does my character look
>Having a great/cool name
>What my character did before the start of the adventure
>Min-Maxing
>A bunch of other stuff that is hyped up but you find that nobody at the table but you cares about

Now I just usually roll the most generic fucking guy you can imagine and let him evolve from his experiences on the adventure. It's honestly a lot more fun ending up being Steve the grand mage and savoir of beastfolk for example

Stunted my social skills tbqh

I met my wife and almost all of my friends through my college gaming club.

You don't think that's what I do?

There's a reason I haven't left the 5 month old campaign I'm in despite the fact that That Girl who has to attentionwhore and put herself in the spotlight even when a situation is focusing on someone else, and the other guy who misses 25% of sessions because he wants to bang some girl, and the other guy who gets whiny and upset every time something doesn't go the party's way irritates me.

I deal with lots of shit just like in my job. And this is Veeky Forums so I will bitch about them.

It helped me realise people don't mind listening to a bit of weirdness.
As a forever DM it help me be a better leader and helped me learn how to work out differences, it's made me more adaptable.

I learned that some much of human interaction and storytelling is playing off someone. It's about working with the people you're given giving them some time to shine and playing off that.
That when the game, any game, any experience begins it's not about who you are but what you do. At the end of the night no one gives a shit about your character sheet or your lore. What really matters is play and the story your group will share.

In art it taught me the value of everything in the piece. It's not just about the rules, it's about the illustrations in the book, the smell of the pages, the sound of dice rolling, the light of game room, the snacks, the conversation between actions, the mental sensation of working the crunch. I have a whole new view on how I experience and appropriate movies and paintings and plays. There are so many elements to these games it's kind of glorious when you sit back allow yourself to appreciate it.
It's not even about big serious meticulously planned campaigns it's about using whatever you have on hand and working with it.

I guess that's what it's really about working with what you have to make something more. Finding the best in everything that's given. Because, fuck man, ttrpgs give a lot.

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I also learned this, as well as making quick decisions

What really improved mine was volunteering for or being on the committee of university clubs, then doing work as a tour guide.

This post, made me remember how much I love ttrpg's and now I'm probably do something, thanks user

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I never had the social skills to get in games outside of a crappy high school club

I didn't learn much and I guess I'm just a hermit who people only talk to if they need something done.

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One of the sadder things they helped with was showing me some things about social trust and modulation.

When I was a young dude, just getting into the scene, it was just me and my brothers playing. I met some other guys through Scouting who were into it, and were willing to talk to me about it. This is like, 2000, 2001. Like, I'm learning D&D off of the new 3rd edition, and these guys are Mind's Eye Theatre Vampire the Masquerade players. And they were kind of social misfits, compared to many of the scouts, who were more 'normie' types. They'd get picked on some, mocked and fucked with by the normie crowd, and I just accepted that as part of the social order: we chose the activity that got us mocked, so be it.

But I distinctly remember one evening where like, one of the non-players came and made an effort to understand. He wanted to see what this stuff was about, because we'd been doing it for months despite being made fun of. Clearly, it had to be something cool if we were willing to take that much shit for it.

And he kind of got invested, some very basic kind of freeform psuedo-LARP character gen and dungeon exploration. And then the "GM" pulled a targeted Rocks Fall situation, clearly doing it as a revenge for the mockery the other guy had given him in the past. I think he even openly stated it as the reason.

And here's the thing. I get that choice. I see why he made that call But the GM was like, 17, and the normie was like, 13. And I realized in that moment that it was a BAD call. It violated the trust the normie had put in us, and perpetuated the cycle of bullshit. Half the group that fucked with us were this dude, his brothers, and my brother. If we'd converted him, we'd have probably completely ended the bullying within a couple weeks. Instead, by choosing to satisfy his desire for power, the GM kept things as they were, for YEARS.

(cont)

And years later, I was teaching some of our younger scouts about D&D, and Roleplaying, and a counselor at the summer camp overheard, and stated that several of the counselors played, so if the kids wanted to do a big silly session, they'd be happy to. Everyone starts with, say, 5-6 levels, and we just do a Battle-Royale fight. The kids were excited, and worked on their characters for like, 2-3 days.

We met up with the counselors, and the battle started, and I immediately knew what they had done.

They had said "all characters have 5-6 LEVELS". They hadn't said "have an Effective Character Level of 5 or 6". So one of the counselors was running a Level 5 WIzard Vampire Lord, and just tearing through the kids' characters.

And again, I 'understood' the objective. It was a semi-clever trick, and it let them power-trip for an hour or two. They're never gonna see these kids again, what the fuck do they care? But several of those kids were trying this stuff for the first time. We're talking 12 year olds here. And it was just...heartbreaking. To watch someone wring the joy out of a group of 6-7 kids by tearing down their ideas by a twist of wording they didn't even understand.

And that taught me a lot about being clear, and honest, and sharing enjoyment with others, instead of exploiting them.

Gaming also let me see other nerds make weird mistakes or bad calls, and helped me discreetly rein myself in by example. There's a guy I know who just has no fucking idea how to control the volume of his voice, and listening to him, and seeing people flinch when he gets excited, reminds me about my own volume.

Since I appear to have strangled the thread, allow me to pick some more cheerful examples, in the interest of lightening the mood:

One thing that TTRPGs helped with was establishing a value on my interests. My family are not bookish people, while I am, so as a young boy, I often felt like my interests were, well, weird.

But later on, mostly in high school and college, my knowledge of settings and RPG rules and relative lack of severe social issues lead to people who were interested in RPGs talking to me about them. And serving as that kind of social authority on a subject let me feel like my interests had value. People would say "hey, my brother/cousin is into this stuff, what would they like for their birthday," or "user, you play games with my boyfriend. Can you explain how the games work? Like, what's the story. how do you win?" and so on.

Heck, I can trace my college degree, as well as most commended workplace skills to tabletop gaming. (not entirely RPGs, but w/e)