A Dungeons & Dragons Night for Friends: What Research Says

Picture a group chat that has said “we should hang out” for eleven months. Now picture the same people around a table every other Thursday, with a map, a bag of dice and a goblin ambush on the way. A recurring tabletop role-playing night solves a problem most friend groups have: it gives them a reason to be together that is not simply being together.

Is there evidence that role-playing games help friendships?

A little, and it is early. Two sources are worth knowing.

In 2025, Billieux and colleagues published an exploratory pilot in Royal Society Open Science. Eighteen adults with social anxiety and heavy gaming habits played a Dungeons & Dragons-style adventure offline in ten weekly two-hour sessions, in groups of five. Social anxiety fell for most of them, and loneliness fell for 11 of the 18. The authors call it a pilot, with no control group, and some people got lonelier.

The second is a survey of 305 current players in the New Zealand D&D community, led by Courtney Matthews at the University of Canterbury, with the paper titled “Tabletop roleplaying games (TTRPGs) as a source of belonging and wellbeing: A social identity perspective.” According to the university’s release, players rated their D&D groups among the most positive and supportive in their lives, even though they spent less time with them than with family or other friends. Stronger belonging went with better wellbeing and self-esteem. I read the release and not the paper, and the finding is a correlation.

The summary is modest: people who play together weekly tend to feel they belong, and one small trial hints at less loneliness. Neither study tests whether it keeps an adult friend group intact.

Why might it work for a friend group?

A guess from the pattern, not from either study: a campaign gives each session a purpose and a next session. Nobody has to invent a plan, and the story carries over, so skipping a week means missing something. It is the same logic as a standing weekday plan, with a plot added.

How do you run a first session?

• Pick three to five people and a date. Send a calendar invite for the next session at the end of the first, as in this note on friendship calendar invites.
• Choose one person to be Dungeon Master. They narrate the world. Everyone else plays one character.
• Start free. D&D Beyond’s essentials page offers free rule books and six free characters, and suggests the Starter Set if your group has no adventure to follow.
• Keep it to about two hours. That matches the length used in the Swiss pilot.
• Expect clumsiness. The first night is for learning the rules aloud. D&D Beyond’s own line is that running a first game “doesn’t have to mean spending hours learning how to play it.”

Your group might not take to it. Two people left the Swiss pilot citing stress, so let anyone who is unsure watch a session first.

A time-limited alternative with a similar shared-problem feel is an escape room.

If it clicks, the hardest part is not the rules but everyone arriving on time, every other Thursday, for months.