Meet Scott Stevens of The Hero Workshop

Today we’d like to introduce you to Scott Stevens.

Hi Scott, can you start by introducing yourself? We’d love to learn more about how you got to where you are today?
The Hero Workshop is a non-profit based in Culver City that organizes and runs tabletop games – like Dungeons and Dragons – for heroes of all ages. We began as a small home game of Dungeons and Dragons that I started after our family moved here from the Bay Area. Someone suggested that I run a game as part of an afterschool enrichment program, and since then we’ve been growing pretty steadily.

We have grown from a solo afterschool project to an excellent staff of 11 professional Game Masters, and administrative support. This summer we have been piloting our job training program for teens called “Hero to Hire”, which has added ten fantastic and talented teen Counselors in Training to our roster.

Today, we are hosting over 40 games a week for kids, about a dozen evening games for adults, and camps during every major break in the school schedule (Winter, Spring, Summer and Fall). We opened our community center in Culver City in March of 2024, and are starting to think about opening new locations in the next year or two.

Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
I don’t think anyone who has started their own business will claim that it’s been a smooth road! There are so many things to juggle when you are running a business, and the landscape of your day to day experience changes frequently, and sometimes drastically. This results in a lot of long hours as you whittle down the list of things that need your attention to a manageable amount of tasks.

Starting your own business comes with a lot of personal sacrifice. There have been stints of working 8 months of 12+ hour days without a day off, deciding to forgo paying myself in order to keep crucial and dedicated staff going through rough financial times, and missed time with family. However, even in light of that, I feel a great pride in what we’ve been able to accomplish together. I tell people all the time that “this is my last job”, and I feel way better about watching kids interact with what we’re doing at The Hero Workshop than I used to feel watching kids play a video game that I made.

An anecdote that I use frequently is: “I spent 15 years making video games. I’m going to spend the rest of my life getting kids off screens!”

Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know?
The Hero Workshop is a nonprofit based in Culver City that organizes and runs tabletop roleplaying games – like Dungeons and Dragons or Daggerheart – for heroes of all ages.

A tabletop roleplaying game is an interactive story, where one of the players takes on the role of the narrator for the story – called a Game Master – and the other players will be the heroes in the story. The Game Master presents a scenario to the heroes, and the heroes tell the GM what they want to do in the scene. If anything involves a chance of failure we roll dice and apply modifiers based on the hero’s strengths and weaknesses. If the die roll is high enough to meet the challenge, the heroes succeed. If not, they’ll have to try something else. Either way, the scene changes and the GM tells everyone what has changed in the scene, and the game continues.

This is my favorite game! I’ve been playing Dungeons and Dragons, and other RPG’s, for over 44 years. I tell people all the time that I can draw a straight line from playing Dungeons and Dragons with my uncles at age 7 to becoming a Game Designer as an adult. Not only are these games great for exercising your imagination, you also end up getting real good at adding and subtracting numbers, projecting likely outcomes, get comfortable with statistics, and of course tons of reading and writing. On top of the academic benefits, I’ve been seeing huge social outcomes for kids in our program – which has added additional import to our work. Kids are making friends from other schools, getting practice being part of a team, overcoming social anxieties, and getting real world experience exercising all of those “soft skills” that are so important in the workplace.

One of the newer initiatives that we have started recently is what we are calling our “Story Based Athletics Program”. A lot of the kids that like art, playing tabletop games, and reading are not as comfortable engaging in team sports. We got the idea, during some conversations with a celebrity donor, to offer a program that would get kids who like stories more than sports a fun outdoor activity to get them outside and moving.

We are starting with our Swordplay program, where we outfit kids with rubber shields and foam swords and teach them the basics of martial combat. We are using guidelines outlined by Historic European Martial Arts, scoring points for the Target of your strike, the Quality of your strike, and how much Control you exercise over yourself and your equipment. To these points, we have added Chivalrous Conduct – where you can earn an additional point for honoring your opponent and demonstrating good sportsmanship. We teach kids in our Swordplay program that they want to win because they are the best swordfighter, not because their opponent made a mistake or dropped their weapon.

I am hoping that we can expand on our Swordplay program with adventurous hikes and other outdoor activities where you go on an adventure in real life and those experiences travel back to the table in some interesting ways.

I would like to see our community center become a hub for the local kids in our community. A place where kids come to meet friends from other schools, and go on adventures together. I love to see kids coming in afterschool to do their homework together, work on a project with new friends, play games, paint minis, and just have fun. To that end, we are always welcoming to new kids coming in, and we host several free events a week and monthly larger events.

I’m proud of all the progress we’ve made in the last seven years, and I’m excited to see what the future holds for our community!

Do you any memories from childhood that you can share with us?
I was lucky enough to grow up in the Pacific Northwest. My parents built the house I grew up in, starting with clearing the land, pouring the foundation, and building the house paycheck to paycheck. It took four years, and during that time my family were basically camping – though after the second year the house was basically functional but still under construction. We lived by a lake and in a forest, so my days were spent roaming the woods, fishing, riding bikes, and playing Dungeons and Dragons.

One very interesting aspect of growing up playing tabletop role playing games is that the memories of what happened in our game sessions are stored in my brain right alongside memories of my childhood, and my favorite movies, shows, cartoons, and books that I enjoyed growing up. I still have very vivid memories of some of my favorite moments from the game; that time we fought wererats in the sewers, or hanging from a stalactite looking down upon a drow raiding party we were sneaking up on in the Underdark. Saving a town from angry giants and being celebrated as heroes across the lands. An uneasy alliance with a powerful vampire named Strahd to defeat the lich Vecna.

Pricing:

• Heroic Membership $180/mo
• Week of Camp $595
• Adult Games $30 per 3 hr session
• Swordplay $150/mo

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.heroworkshop.org
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/heroworkshopkids/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/heroworkshopkids
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@AboveTheTableHW/featured
• Other: https://www.tiktok.com/@heroworkshopla

Image Credits
The Hero Workshop