Writers Should Play Dungeons and Dragons
I mean, if you’re not already. Forgive me if I’ve presumed. But if you have any interest in creative writing, you owe it to yourself to try.
Dungeons and Dragons, huh? A Role-Playing Game? Nerd stuff. “That’s a game for a nerd,” I said, smugly, eighteen years old and memorizing the mottos and sigils of all the houses in A Song of Ice and Fire. “A big, dumb nerd,” I proclaimed. (By the way, “A big, dumb nerd” is in the running for my personal motto.) But what D&D and other games of its kind really come down to is a new kind of storytelling: each player “becomes” a character with special skills and their own goals, joins a group, and plays through a story run by the Dungeon Master, DM for short. And as complicated as it can seem, at bottom, the games run like this: you pretend to be someone else, the DM describes a situation, you say what you want to do, and then roll some dice. The dice tell you how successful you were, and the DM tells you what happens next. It’s a collaborative story.
Pop culture is starting to recognize how engaging RPGs can be, even to people who aren’t playing: Critical Role (starring some of the best voice actors around), The Adventure Zone (starring your favorite West Virginian family, the McElroys of podcast fame), and Dimension 20 starring the cast of College Humor all earned huge fandoms in the past 5-6 years. Look past the dice on the table, and you’ll see some very talented people telling wonderful stories that put a lot of the fantasy novel shelves at the library to shame.
And what’s the benefit for you, a writer, aspiring or otherwise? Well, as a player, you can practice making decisions for a character (their background, voice, pet peeves, hobbies, and flaws), creative problem solving, and building off the decisions’ of others. Writers can draw inspiration from anywhere, so why not a high-stakes story you’re writing regularly with your best friends? All of that’s a plus.
But if you take the step to running your own game, introducing people to a story of your creation, the benefits are even greater. First, it introduces what many writers desperately need: chaos. Whether you’re a builder, planning every detail of your story, or just used to winging it, telling a story with others forces creativity. Running a game is a crash course in improvisation. Players rarely do exactly what you expect, and even if they do, the dice have their say as well: suddenly, anyone can die. Great plans can go awry. Horrible plans can unexpectedly succeed. Learning to roll with those surprises is not only fun, but it will stretch your story-telling muscles, helping you tell wild, unpredictable tales you never would have thought of before.
But second, and even more appealing to me, was the thing that I missed most in writing: an audience. Writing means delayed gratification. When you write a scene that you love, it can be painful to have to wait months or years to show it to people. When you’re running a game, you get to see your friends react to the story you’re writing for them right away. When I killed off one of my friends’ favorite characters, I got to watch them grow to hate me in real time.
Not into fantasy? RPGs cover tons of genres. Sci-Fi? Stars without Number. Zombies? Apocalypse World. Supernatural/Buffy-style monster of the week shows? Monster of the Week… that one kind of speaks for itself. Pirates, historical drama, romance, whatever. Maybe you’ll find out this isn’t for you. Maybe you’ll have a fun new hobby (an easy one to play online with your friends). You’ll never know until you take a chance and roll the dice.
… I regret nothing.