To my wife’s occasional chagrin, I play Dungeons and Dragons.
It’s preposterous that I try to hide this hobby. I might as well try to hide my desire to write, or my background in the theatre, or the fact that I used to read encyclopedias for fun. And yet I find myself attempting to cast a spell of invisibility around who I am and what I enjoy. Somewhere I got the impression that I had to squirrel away my true nerdy self.
This is all doubly confounding since we have been living in the “Age of the Nerd” for the past 10 or 15 years. Think of the cultural dominance of Marvel, Star Wars, Game of Thrones, Stranger Things, The Big Bang Theory and so much more. The global video game industry is worth a quarter of a trillion dollars, and could eclipse sports in the coming decade. Even D&D itself has become mainstream since around 2015.
In 2022 the New York Times said that the tabletop roleplaying game was “moving beyond nerd culture”. Around that time I told my wife that Critical Role, a D&D live-play show on YouTube and Twitch, was “wildly popular”. She still makes fun of me for saying that, but was I wrong? What started as a group of voice actors live-streaming their D&D campaign is now a global media enterprise that employs dozens of staff and reaches millions of viewers every week.
When I mention that I’m a Dungeon Master or “DM” (meaning I run D&D one-shots and campaigns) I can expect about half of all reactions to fall somewhere between “I’d love to play, I’ve just never had the chance” and “I’m in three groups, two of them online. Do you homebrew?”
D&D and Me
This year marks 50 years since the first version of D&D was published. The earliest iterations were rough, stitched-together guidebooks for roleplayer-led storytelling combined with tabletop combat simulations (a mix that continues to be at the heart of the experience today). The mechanics and flavour were vastly different from the standard 5th edition ruleset of today—but the essence has remained the same. And there are countless other TTRPG (table-top roleplaying game) systems that take their cue from D&D, such as Pathfinder, Call of Cthulhu, and the Star Wars RPG. Another such system, called Coyote & Crow, was created by a team of First Nations designers and is set in a near-future where the Americas were never colonized.
For me, D&D has been the gateway drug that brought me back to the creative power of games. It made me realize that fantasy storytelling and world-building is not just a hangover hobby from childhood, but an essential part of my creative DNA.
I played D&D as a teenager. At least, I thought I did. I remember sitting around a campfire on a school winter camping trip, building a basic character with no sheet to track stats and equipment. The only thing I remember doing was voyage off… to a town to buy supplies. I didn’t get further than acquiring a quarterstaff and asking about a horse before the “session” ended.
But there were others. My next character got himself an adamantine staff. I made a ranger. And a thief. This was all during the later days of the “Satanic panic”, and some of my classmates thought that playing D&D was synonymous with summoning the devil through a Ouija board. I suppose their imaginations were equally active. Regardless, D&D was a secret hobby: one we had to hide from teachers and some other students.
After dozens of half-baked character sheets and many disparate sessions—often just conversations about the Red Wizards of Thay and what it meant for spellcasters to memorize spells—we just stopped playing. In retrospect, I can see that computer games took over where D&D left off (specifically Baldur’s Gate and Baldur’s Gate II, with which I was obsessed in high school). It’s not that I grew out of D&D, but rather found a more reliable outlet.
I started playing again about seven years ago when I found a group in Kingston, Ontario. I felt a mixture of excitement and regret: thrilled to play and share in an imaginary experience with a like-minded group of geeks, but also regret for missing out on so much for so many years. All this time, D&D was there, swirling beneath the surface.
In 2019 I started running my first campaign, and I couldn’t help but to dive head-first into making up all of my own stuff (not a requirement for a DM, but a non-negotiable for me). D&D revealed a part of me that never actually went away. And the abundance of its influence in creative industries today, especially game development, showed me that my creative instincts were not misplaced—just postponed.
D&D and Writing
Over the last few years, I’ve witnessed a proliferation of think-pieces about how table-top roleplaying games are a wonderful thing with tremendous personal and social benefits. To name a few, D&D improves mental health, can be used as therapy, helps kids open up in our digital age, is good for the workplace, is an effective tool in classrooms, improves literacy, teaches communications and theatre skills, and can even help you get a job (some game studios pretty much insist on prior DM experience).
Most of these benefits are probably just as true for other social activities, whether it’s sports, music, or art. It’s hard to say if D&D has an edge, except that it’s popular, fun, and easy to get into. As a writer, however, there are scant better ways for me to flex my creative muscles.
You don’t have to make it a complicated, imagination-intensive activity like I do. You can go find a pre-made adventure (some books are glorious works of worldbuilding, art, and immense branching narratives) and run it precisely as written. You can focus on the rules, the combat, and the joy of getting friends together around a table to roll some dice and make fun of each other. But for me, D&D has always been about building a truly responsive world and finding the human stories within.
I run “homebrew” campaigns. I make up the setting, the storylines, the items and creatures, and even some of the rules. Obviously, it’s all familiar to fantasy readers and gamers: elves, dwarves, wizards, hidden treasure and BBEGs (big bad evil guys). Some of the fun is subverting expectations, turning the genre on its head, and finding deeper, unexpected meaning.
But a lot of the fun—it’s fantasy, after all—is surrendering to these expectations and tropes. We love The Lord of the Rings because it exists unapologetically in a sword-and-shield, magic-and-mystery world. There are plenty of people who argue that Tolkien was writing allegorically about the Second World War, whether he realized it or not. But that’s not what the vast majority get from it. We want to escape into a different set of clothes (or armour) for a while.
Running a campaign is hardly an escape. I outline plots, sketch out characters, prepare encounters, and place clever, idiosyncratic, and challenging obstacles in front of the protagonists to encourage their growth. I find and exploit drama in the world and within the cast. I create continents and nations and criminal organizations and families and everything in between. I relish in the player’s growth, as they themselves become more proficient and invested—levelling up their ownership as their character becomes more powerful.
I write and write and write, and a lot of it never gets used. The players might decide to simply not open that door, or better yet, they find a clever way around. But like prior drafts of a short story or a poem or a novel, or homework for an actor, all that unused material informs the finished product.
Being a DM also keeps my imagination churning in those latent creative periods. My dry spells as a writer have still been filled up with worlds and narratives and characters and themes. D&D—at least the way I run it—isn’t an accessory to or an escape from writing. It is writing.
Here’s a few other ways in which D&D (and being a DM) is helpful for the creative process:
Failure. In D&D, so much comes down to the dice. And that means failure is bound to happen. These moments (like when players roll a 1, or “critical fail”) are usually far more interesting, funny, and dynamic than simple success. In narrative, failure is a wonderful gift—when characters fall down, we get to see what they’re made of. When people get in trouble, we get to watch them innovate or adapt or will their way out.
Chance. You can build whole worlds, campaigns, characters, dungeons, whatever, simply with the roll of the dice. D&D sourcebooks are filled with guides to let the dice decide everything, from a character’s motivation to the type of terrain to the theme of a particular encounter or puzzle. This can liberate the imagination by taking the pressure off the writer to make every tiny decision. Randomness is clumpy and often compelling.
Shared storytelling. D&D is at its best when every person at the table—DM and player alike—shares in the storytelling. It’s like a good band, or improvized and devised theatre: sometimes it falls flat without leadership, but when it ticks, it can be utterly transformative. And the sense of ownership that players feel over their characters and the whole story explains why some campaigns can go on for years, even decades.
Branching narrative. This is also a theme for game writing today (often called narrative design), but I think it’s helpful for any storyteller to learn to imagine possibilities. As a DM, you have to think about what your players might do (it’s rarely what you first expect), which forces you to embrace a much wider possible arc. I think this helps us avoid cliché and predictability, even if the form of storytelling ultimately collapses back down into something linear.
Why so serious? D&D is fun. I’ve been in sessions that provoked more tears than the end of Forrest Gump. But usually we’re laughing. The default setting for any campaign is to take the piss out of the DM, as well as find the silliness and humour in any world. I love the balance between serious roleplaying, good storytelling, and poking fun at the whole thing from within and without. Sometimes a creative pursuit can get so heavy, weighted down with expectation and self-importance. Sometimes the lighter side of the human experience is what an artist needs. And sometimes it’s what the art itself needs, too.
Do you play Dungeons and Dragons or something like it? Does it help with your own creativity? Does it make you a better writer, or is it a distraction?
Writing
I’m deep into revision right now. I’ve got two short stories I’d like to finalize and submit, one next week and the other by the middle of next month.
I’m also working on a chapbook of my poetry to submit next week. If that doesn’t go anywhere in Canada’s very small poetry publishing industry, I am considering publishing it myself by the end of the year.
Reading and Listening
Still working through the audiobook of The Library Book by Susan Orlean.
Catching up on The New Yorker and The Economist, which always seem to pile up at home. I also have hundreds of articles saved on the Pocket app, some of which have been waiting to be cleared out for a decade.
Quote of the Week
“Dungeons & Dragons is the original role-playing game, and it teaches so many of the aspects of storytelling that I use in my writing today. It's about creating a world, building characters, and telling a story together. It's an invaluable tool for any writer.”
I cannot wait to share this with my sons! So good. And man, this is a book in the making. "The Dungeon Master's Guide to Writing". The audience is built-in.
Hey me too!!! I got into writing then I got into D&D and I noticed that it's helped with my writing and inspirations as well!