Speech class, leadership role helps PFW junior find his voice

Anyone who gets to watch Dell Kaufeld expertly and smoothly operate a game table at Saturday’s MastodonCon might think this story is made up.

Though he’s president of Purdue University Fort Wayne’s Tabletop RPG Club and has worked at nationally recognized game conventions for six years, the junior describes himself as being a much different, significantly socially awkward person entering college. Even speaking before small groups was an almost impossible challenge.

“No matter how confident you are in speaking to people one-on-one, public speaking is entirely different,” Kaufeld said. “Every single time, I was physically shaking.”

What helped the most was taking a speech class during his freshman year, taught by Laurence Dearing, a limited-term lecturer in the Department of Communication. Kaufeld was required to research and write speeches, organize his thoughts, and then deliver them before the class. Immediately, his fight or flight instinct kicked in, before repetition helped him conquer it.

“It especially helped me get over my nerves a lot,” Kaufeld said. “That class really helped me because I stopped shaking when I was giving speeches because I knew they were going to be OK.”

MastodonCon debuted last year as a way to emphasize the club to the larger campus and Fort Wayne community. Play runs 9 a.m. to 10 p.m. on Saturday in the Classic Ballroom at Walb Student Union. The cost is $5 for PFW and Indiana University Fort Wayne students and $20 for community members. Visit mastodoncon.com for badge prices and registration details.

Serving as a gamemaster allows Kaufeld to show off the communication ability he’s developed as he essentially delivers a two- to four-hour storytelling speech to up to seven people playing his game.

He also uses his skills as a math major. Role-playing games such as Dungeons and Dragons or Kaufeld’s favorite, Starfinder, revolve around the gamemaster spinning a tale that involves each of the players, but all moves start with a roll of a 20-sided die, which means probabilities and statistics determine everything.

And Kaufeld has always loved numbers and games. That’s why he’s regularly invited to participate at GenCon each summer in Indianapolis, which bills itself as the best four days in gaming and as the second-largest game convention in the world. He also runs games each year at CinCityCon in Cincinnati and LexCon in Lexington, Kentucky.

“What’s really helpful during these games, at least for me, is I gain a little bit of comfort when I can rattle off the percentages of something that might happen, or the averages of how much damage that might come into play,” Kaufeld said.

While he’s conducting a game, Kaufeld said he can sit at a table and converse with strangers from 9 a.m. to 1 a.m. Partly that’s because he knows it’s a game, but that ability also shows how far he’s come in his public speaking. Using his math skills is a bonus.

His love of math is so strong that Kaufeld wants to become a meteorologist, not to serve as a TV weatherman, but to conduct the behind-the-scenes work on a website or a government weather service that helps warn and protect people with forecasts.

“It’s a bit of a thankless job sometimes, but I think it would be very interesting,” Kaufeld said. “It’s something that to many seems very benign but is actually really important to how we live our lives.”

Kaufeld will use all the skills he’s developed this weekend, including how to organize the room to make the players more comfortable.

“One reason I really enjoy running role-playing games, especially with new people, is they are really good about teaching you so many things,” Kaufeld said. “They teach you confidence, public speaking, basic math, statistics, acting skills, and conversational skills, along with puzzle solving, critical thinking, problem solving, strategy, and tactics.

“It’s also a really effective way to get people talking, get them to know each other, but also to train their brains. They are really great educational tools, and can be used for education, and it’s great for people to learn and to better themselves without them knowing it.”