Everything I learned in business school I already knew from gaming

[mkill]

I'm only semi-joking. Being a long-term gamer does give you skills that are very similar to things they try to teach you at business school.

Take presentation skills. If you can sit down with a DM screen and some notes and create a shared world in people's mind, you can hold a team presentation. And you can do it without power point slides.

Teamwork. If you know how to get a fighter, a wizard, a thief and a cleric to work together, even if they've just met, you can work in a team with an engineer, a designer, a product manager and a marketer.

Hiring & Firing. If you can judge whether Bob is contributing to the campaign or just leeching XP, you can do so with employees.

Reward systems. Ever heard "what get's measured, get's done?" Give XP for wearing a chicken on your head and watch the magic.

Tax accounting. The guy who wrote Pun-Pun used the same skillset as the guy who came up with the Double Irish and the Dutch Sandwich. If you love charop, consider this as a career.

Creativity. The latest trend in business schools is to do improv theater seminars and sculpting. Just have them paint miniatures and roll up characters!

 

[The Monster]

For years I've been scanning the business section for gems I can bring into my GMing. Presentation skills, teamwork, yeah, all that stuff - especially books on how to run/facilitate meetings. I've never figured out how to boil it down into a coherent article for a magazine or anything, but I've wanted to.

The first time this struck home was the time my boss handed me a sheaf of business practice revisions and asked me to run the meeting where they were being distributed. Under a cloud of minor panic, I soon realized that my GMing skills were going to save me:
-- presenting material in a steady stream, without losing flow or impact of any of the major points;
-- fielding questions on the fly, as constant interruptions, without losing focus or train of thought;
-- being alert for individuals losing track, wandering attention, etc. and massaging the message to bring them back in;
-- encouraging questions and discussion without making anyone feel embarrassed or stupid for asking;
-- recasting explanations to catch a different perspective;
-- having a sense of time - how much is left compared to the material to be covered;
-- being the 'one in charge' of the discussion without being the boss of anyone (in fact, I was just a clerk, and some of the people at the table were second-level managers).

Not that I hit all these right on the head, but these were all things I was already comfortable with addressing in my well-practiced role as GM.
I'm sure there's a pop-advice book based on the idea of how D&D equips you for business meetings, or vice versa...

 

[AeroDm]

I actually believe that the core skill in GMing is the most important skill you could every possess. When I GM, what I am fundamentally doing is looking at an idea (an adventure) that I think is a great idea, and tailoring it real time to try and thread it through the various likes and dislikes of the people at the table. I'm massaging how I present it, what aspects I highlight, and incorporating feedback that I interpret from body language of my audience to constantly nudge my presentation closer to their collective ideal.

I went to law school and got an MBA. Routinely people asked me where I learned to present or talk the way I did. It was absolutely due to a lifetime of dungeon mastering. Nothing prepares you more to sell an idea or articulate an argument than having to sell your own ideas for hours at a time, week in and week out, to the harshest critics in the world: your friends.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

I'm a lawyer with an MBA, and I agree with your premise. You forgot a few, though: backstabbing, detecting traps, resource management, identifying what kind of monster you're fighting so you can tell your allies its weaknesses, battlefield strategy & tactics...

 

[mkill]

backstabbing

Yeah.

* how to keep the party rogue from taking more than his share (especially after loot was distributed)
* spotting when the Paladin is secretly worshipping Baal
* how to blame it all on the dwarf in front of the king

Essential skills.

My defining moment was when we had a group project and I would just sit down at the front of the table and coordinate the whole thing, as if behind a DM screen. Worked great.

 

[S'mon]

I think GMing helps me with chairing meetings and with holding tutorials, it is less useful for lecturing, as no GM should be talking for an hour without a break, but there are some connections with giving exposition while pausing to make sure the listeners are engaged.

To a lesser degree I think being a good player can hone useful skills for good participation in meetings, also. Getting your point across, making sure other participants are engaged.

But definitely the strongest connection is between being a GM and being a chairman of a board/committee or similar. I get a lot of praise for my chairing and I doubt I'd be as good if I didn't GM. I'm particularly praised for getting through a 2-hour meeting in 90 minutes while keeping everyone engaged and getting through the whole agenda!

 

[Celebrim]

I've used the same small group management and speaking skills I developed as a DM to:

a) Chair a corporate meeting
b) Make an academic presentation
c) Lead a small group bible study
d) Lead a software development team

I can say with confidence that there would be no way I'd be fit to lead a small group of anything had I not first been a DM. Prior to DMing I probably would have had a literal panic attack in any of the above situations. Now, I'm often the person people look to in these sort of situations.

As a somewhat more personal revelation, it also would not be an exagerattion to say that I learned virtually all my social skills playing RPGs both as a DM and a player, and its not with irony that I say that when I am being socialable, smiling, engaging in small talk, being witty, and relaxing in a social situation that I'm merely pretending to be a character who does these things and has these skills. The natural me is a shy, introverted, nearly autistic person who is intensely uncomfortable looking straight at a person's face and still finds normal human interaction to be a game with occasionally baffling rules, but through RPGs and a few other sources I've found enough order in the madness of social situations that I can succesfully fake it most of the time and most people appear none the wiser. I can even remember back when I was practicing my persona that most people think of is me, consciously going through the effort of leaning forward, standing closer, looking at a person, smiling, and thinking what my self would say in this situation rather than saying what I was thinking or feeling. Over time, doing those sort of things became more natural, just as over time doing those sort of things in the game had become more natural.

In D&D terms, I'm never going to have an 18 charisma, but with the right sort of effort you can end up with enough diplomacy ranks to compensate.

I'll go further and say that having learned this stuff myself, I'm now on several occasions had the pleasure of watching several intensely nerdy people with bad social skills, self-esteem, and assertiveness issues develop more functional public personas while at my table. That's one of the true pleasures of DMing; watching someone blossum into a great RPer and then see them take those skills out into a larger world.

To a certain extent, this isn't surprising. Before roleplaying was a term mostly associated with gaming, it was a term most associated with training and psychotheraphy. Because of that, you'll never find me among the crowd that says, "It's just a game." Yes, it's a game but it's not just a game. With great power comes great responcibility. I hear horror stories about encounters with RPers where I can't help but feel that the games that they played made their natural problems worse rather than better, to the point that their deeply dysfunctional play is probably reflective of a deeply dysfunctional social life rather than an improved one.

 

[nedjer]

RPGs are stacked with enterprise skills and opportunities to get involved in enterprise.

There's the added bonus that promoting RPGs in this light is difficult to argue against/ focuses on pointing in the direction of concrete 'productions'.

 

[Kaodi]

This may sound silly, but:

I can perhaps accept the emise that the skills associated with being a good DM might be the same or similar to skills associated with being good in business, but...

In order to get to, " Playing D&D makes you better at business, " you also have to prove that, " D&D has measurably improved your DMing skills, " . And while I am sure there is some improvement, I think it is still distinctly possible that you either, " Have it or you don't, " when it comes right down to it.

Feel free to prove my concerns are completely meaningless.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

you also have to prove that, " D&D has measurably improved your DMing skills,

I can say without fear of contradiction that before I played D&D, I could not DM at all.