We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Scott Stevens a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Scott, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Let’s kick things off with your mission – what is it and what’s the story behind why it’s your mission?

Our Mission: “The Hero Workshop is here to provide youth with a safe, fun place to gather together to play tabletop role playing games such as Dungeons and Dragons. We believe that there are many benefits to playing tabletop games, and are excited to introduce new heroes to the hobby as well as provide high quality narrative experiences for newcomers and veteran players alike. The Hero Workshop is dedicated to creating an inclusive and engaged community around our shared hobby.
At The Hero Workshop, we want to nurture heroes in the game, and in life.”

The Hero Workshop is the kind of place that I wish existed when I was a kid. A place where I could go, meet up with my friends, and play Dungeons and Dragons. Out of my house, so that I felt like I had somewhere fun to go and look forward to. I remember being a kid and spending days on end with “nothing to do” – growing up in Washington State in the late 80’s it was coffee shops or bowling alleys after 5:00pm.
Being a father myself now, I am noticing how good playing a social, academic game like Dungeons and Dragons can be for kids. Something about this game where we pretend to be wizards and roll dice to fight dragons just brings you out of your head in a way that is totally unique. There really is nothing else like it. I love witnessing each kid’s own personal “awakening” – when they connect with the game in a way that I know is going to stay with them for the rest of their life. When they start casting spells in their dreams and conquering the monsters in their own lives.
The benefits of games like Dungeons and Dragons are so many; you work on your “soft skills” such as collaboration, creative problem solving with a group, how to “fail forward”, and just basic communication. You also get a decent amount of math practice (okay, you hit the dragon with your sword – roll 2d6 and add 3 for your Strength modifier, then tell me how much damage you do), playing a game of DnD is like doing math drills and everyone’s proficiency goes up. You also learn about statistics, probability, averages, and you experience a practical application of math facts. Creative problem solving – okay the rogue isn’t going to be able to pick the lock on the castle door – how else can you get in? Storytelling, game design, pacing, vocabulary building, reading comprehension, creative writing and active listening.

With The Hero Workshop, we wanted to build a fun place where we could build a community of people to share our love of this hobby. A headquarters where you could meet up with fellow nerds and talk about the newest character build you’ve been thinking about. Where you can paint the mini you just got, or check out the newest campaign setting.

I started The Hero Workshop because I wanted to play more Dungeons and Dragons, and I wanted to share my love of this game with my kids and their friends. And then it grew into their friends friends, their friends friends parents, other kids at their school – heck, let’s all play!

Scott, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

The Hero Workshop facilitates interactive storytelling workshops for heroes of all ages. We organize a time and place to play, prepare the materials, and guide the game. A typical game of Dungeons and Dragons provides the template we use for all of our stories. In it, you have one player who is the Narrator of the story, called the Game Master, and the rest of the players are the Heroes of the story. The Game Master presents the Heroes with an imaginary scenario, the Heroes decide what they will do next, then we roll dice to determine if their actions succeed or fail. We respond to the result of the dice and the story continues.

It’s fun, a great way to ignite the imagination, and we touch on many educational aspects as part of our adventures including; basic math, algebra, puzzle solving, teamwork and collaboration, and of course storytelling.

I started The Hero Workshop about six years ago as a small game that I set up to help my oldest son make new friends after we moved here from the San Francisco Bay Area. When we moved down here he had to say goodbye to a lot of his friends from preschool, and to make matters worse he broke his arm almost immediately when school started. I was worried that it would be difficult for him to make new friends since he couldn’t play at recess so we set up a home game for him to invite his classmates to. That game filled up quickly and we started a waiting list, then we started an afterschool game and joined the afterschool program offered at his school.
What started as me taking a long lunch to run a game of DnD at an elementary school quickly turned into two games, then three. I had to leave town for work so I hired someone to run my games while I was gone. When I came back I realized that two people could run twice as many games! Two turned into three, and so on – today The Hero Workshop employs 7 professional Dungeon Masters (and we’re looking for more!).

I think the biggest service we provide is actually preparing and running a great game of Dungeons and Dragons. It takes a LOT to get a game together – preparing for a typical session of Dungeons and Dragons can take hours. On top of preparing for each session, there’s the years of knowledge you accumulate by virtue of just playing a lot; you memorize rules that come up often. Learning how to play Dungeons and Dragons feels like learning how to fly an airplane – there is a lot going on! The core of the game requires three books, and new options are added each year in addition to entire new campaign settings with their own unique take on the rules. We have an entire bookshelf dedicated to player options and campaign settings at our little community center in Culver City. Not everyone has time to put all of that work in for a weekly game night.

In addition to providing the game and a cool place to play it, we also handle all of the scheduling and work to find more players to join the table. There’s a joke in DnD circles that says “the final boss of every campaign is scheduling!” This is alluding to the fact that a full campaign can take a long time to complete, and in that time people join sports teams, get cast in a local play, move to a new school, or take a semester abroad. I’ve seen a lot of groups dissolve because schedules got complicated. If you are invested in a campaign it can be a real bummer to see the group break up and go their separate ways. Happily, as we are always seeking more heroes to join the adventure, we can add in new characters as you go along to replace those who are leaving the game – allowing the adventure to continue all the way to its end. If a table gets too full (we cap our games at 7 players), we can always start a new game and welcome more players.

So – we organize the game, we tell a great story, and we make sure the game continues. It’s important to us that everyone who comes in to The Hero Workshop has a great time, and we are very proud of our success in this regard.

What do you think helped you build your reputation within your market?

It has always been very important to me that everyone who comes into contact with The Hero Workshop has a positive experience. This extends to absolutely everyone – our members, our staff, the vendors we interact with, donors, and people we pass on the street. I think of it as “everybody wins”:

Our Members win because we do everything in our (considerable) power to ensure that they are getting a top tier tabletop gaming experience. This starts with some of the best Game Masters the world has to offer. We follow that up with an amazing community center that is created to be a haven for our members, on site we have every source book you could ever want, so many dice, mini figures, 3D terrain, snacks (rations) and drinks (potions). We want our heroes to have such a good time that they can’t wait to come back.
Coincidentally, our primary method for finding new players is word of mouth. So our interest is aligned with our players – we show them a good time, they tell their friends who come in to have fun too.

Our Staff wins because we value everyone who works here so much! This starts with paying our Game Masters a living wage for their time – and we pay for each game session that they run, plus an hour of prep time for each game. It wasn’t that long ago that I was an employee myself, and I know that if I don’t like where I work I can just go work somewhere else. To that end, we have a weekly staff meeting to make sure we are transparent with any decisions that we are making, we get everyone’s input, and our Game Masters have a chance to bring up any issues they might be having at the table our in their personal lives that we can help with. We are so grateful for our amazing staff and work hard to keep everyone we have working here. We hire the best, and we know it!

The Hero Workshop wins because by prioritizing our members and our staff when we make decisions, we ensure our own success. Making our members happy has ripple effects throughout our community that extend beyond the gaming table. I’ve seen heroes come in after a bad day at school leave it all behind as they take their seat at the table and spend a couple hours vanquishing evil – then when they leave here they are smiling and excitedly telling their parents about their adventures. Prioritizing our staff’s needs and making sure that everyone is happy working here ensures that our staff is in a good place to deliver the top-tier gaming experience that we provide. Our happy Game Masters go out of their way to make their games memorable and awesome, because they are respected and valued and pillars of our community themselves.

Can you open up about a time when you had a really close call with the business?

We had a close call a couple years ago, early on as we were still figuring out how to make this work. The Hero Workshop is rooted in afterschool programming, and we offer weekly games in the evenings during the week. During the summer months, our enrollment drops off pretty sharply as a lot of heroes take a break for the summer, or embark on real life adventures and travels. The first year this really caught us off guard and we ended up struggling for a few months until everything came back online in the fall.

We mitigate this drop in regular programming by offering a killer summer camp. The summer camps have been great for us as it allows us to keep our awesome Game Masters working through the summer, brings in enough revenue to offset the drop in enrollment, and we can do some things at a camp that you don’t get during a regular game of Dungeons and Dragons. Thanks in large part to our fantastic Program Director, Jane Adams, our camps really are great. Our camp games are interconnected, with each table being a team of heroes adventuring in the same area, and sometimes heroes change tables as they move around in the game world. It’s really cool!

Anyway, this represents a bit of a pivot, but has enriched our program, and enabled us to keep our employees going during periods of low enrollment.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.heroworkshop.org
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/heroworkshopkids/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/heroworkshopkids
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-hero-workshop/

Image Credits
Photo Credits: Valentin Roussellet, Scott Stevens, Seattle Stevens