After a painful six year hiatus, I'm finally playing Dungeons & Dragons again. Last time I played was senior year of college, I DM'd two games simultaneously - one group with 8 players, another with 5. It was ambitious to say the least and a total blast, albeit very tiring.
These days, I'm waiting for a potential job on a new show to come together at the end of the month (hopefully, fingers crossed that it gets greenlit) and just writing as much as I can in the meantime. That means writing these posts, writing video essays for Skybound, working on a series document & pitch for a digital company, and of course trying to write more TV, features, and fiction all the time. And, now, finally D&D too.
I'm leading a group of close friends, 7 players total, and man is it fun. But it's also sort of surprising to see how I create an adventure and storyline now that I've evolved as a writer. It's way more world building and subplots than I remember ever doing growing up or even in in college. The mechanics of 5th Edition feel pretty different, so that's just a natural change (pretty well constructed game play, I'd say. Nicely done, Wizards of the Coast). I'm remember how to act, inhabiting the roles of every single character they encounter, which are fun muscles to get back. But more importantly, it feels like I had forgotten the number one most important skill as a dungeon master -- improvisation. It's all well and good to write down every little detail in advance, but you sure as hell can't remember it all when the times comes and you can't inundate them with every morsel of information too. There'll be no story, you lose momentum and interest. Better instead to know the world for your own sake and see where the spirit of the players takes you. And the amazing thing about D&D is you don't just know your audience, you're directly feeding off them for your own creative process.
For example, my players freed some refugees tied to a tree by bandits who posed as soldiers. The refugees led them back to their encampment which was a rag tag group of peasants who had been stripped from their homes. At the encampment, my players spent a very long time gathering information -- tapping into all sorts of potential plotlines. A refugee leader who wants their help leading a caravan to a supposedly safe land. A sketchy smuggler who wants to steal from the refugees and bring it to a nearby city. Mysterious Dwarves who have magical items. In the end, after lots of talking and bartering, and my feeling that the players were losing steam, something amazing happened. They freaked out the Dwarves, pressed them too hard, and instigated a little defensive spellcasting on the Dwarves part. Things continued to escalate as they tied the Dwarves up, deciding to search their goods. That was all I need, the chance for stakes, for things to really get out of hand. I had the smuggler try to get involved, make a buck off the thievery of the Dwarves, and then things escalated again, naturally. The players ended up attacking him, and he raised the alarm - trying to rat on them. One of the players (my wife, who is awesome) cast a crazy spell that made it sound like a booming voice was shouting in Infernal (devil-speak) from above. From my storyteller's P.O.V., the fuel had just been lit. The refugees lost it, thinking they were under attack and feeling P.T.S.D from their previous marauding experiences. Chaos ensued, and the characters all reacted in their own ways - whether it was taking advantage or getting into trouble or protecting themselves. All the backstory, the details, the plotlines, well they weren't exactly buried under an avalanche of action but they were no longer important. A new flavor had been introduced and it was all the sweeter because of its disregard of expectation. The expectation to pick a pre-set path, or even act in a certain way.
And that's a lesson I'm really going to try to remember for all my writing. Obviously the process and experience isn't the same, sitting down and writing a book in isolation or something, but you can still transport yourself into the reader's eye as you go. You can remember what draws a person into a story -- what surprises them, and use that instead of sticking to only what you enjoy creating, like the details or mythology or backstory... Destruction of expectations is always thrilling.
The final lesson is just that... the more you do something the better you get. D&D is writing, it's story creation. The more I do it the better I feel creating other worlds in other formats, even if the challenges are different.
Also, I will say that D&D presents an interesting challenge in regards to "character arcs" -- you don't really need to focus on that at all, it's up to the characters. But to try to catalyze them to change, to offer environments or cues or clues that might spur or trick them into transforming themselves and the way they act in the game... that's a beautiful challenge in and of itself.
