I’ve fallen in love with dungeons and dragons again, descending once more into the depths of the nerd.
As I’ve written previously, I am employed as a dungeon master to run a D&D campaign for a group of NDIS-funded participants (who have autism, in the main) at the local community centre. There are obvious reasons why I derive such satisfaction from this, not the least of which is fusing my twin life callings of community service and extreme nerdom. I discussed, in the previous article, how the radically social game of dungeons and dragons can be beneficial for those living with autism.
(Click on PDF icon, upper right, if you prefer to read this as black print on a white background).
Here, I’m going to focus on the relationship between being a dungeon master and a writer. Or, more precisely, the 
lessons one can give to the other.
Briefly, and if you’ve never played dungeons and dragons: it is a role-playing game. Pencils, paper, dice, vivid imaginations, and four-to-six malodourous men and women eating chips, arguing, and slaying orcs with extreme prejudice all through the night. Created by two Americans – Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson – in the 70s, it’s a role-playing game governed by detailed rules, and decided by dice rolls and the narrative whim of the dungeon master. Each player plays one character – the heroes in the story – while the DM creates the storyline.
Far more popular now than when I played in the 90s (when D&D players were firmly in the closet), so much so, beefcakes can openly discuss their D&D addiction on prime time television.
Populating a World with Vivid Characters, quickly:
As a dungeon master, you have a lot of characters to run. Good guys, bad guys, townsfolk, hostages, the Inn Keeper, the Blacksmith, the Druid in the Grove, the dread Cleric of Iuz, the goblin captive tortured by the heroes for information (what is it about D&D players and torture?) And so on.
To make the characters vivid in the minds of the players, I’ll give each a single physical detail, a signpost to help imagine the whole. I simply don’t have the time in dungeons and dragons – as with writing – to flesh out every possible minor character, to delve deeply into their history; nor the space to describe every physical detail. A scar, a notable weapon, a turn of phrase, these things can do the trick just as efficiently.
D&D and writing aren’t exactly the same here, sure. For example, in D&D I often put on outrageous accents for various minor characters – ostentatious displays which rarely fit the mood and atmosphere of much of my writing. D&D can be gleefully pulpy, which I discuss further below.
Pacing:
The game can sometimes be a slog. It’s easier to avoid this when you write, because, as James Ellroy advises, I try to “leave out the part that readers tend to skip”. In a sense, dungeons and dragons is the first draft of a story. Even if you run the same adventure, the players will approach it in radically different ways. Thus, and inevitably, the players will sometimes pursue a fruitless plot strand, and an encounter will drag.
Raymond Chandler said, when talking of the pulps: “When in doubt, have a man come through a door with a gun in
his hand.” This is true of writing (though, of course, this depends on the type of story you are writing – presumably if you are an upper-class academic writing a literary novel about an affair with a younger student, you would hate to interrupt your lyrical ruminations on grass growing out in the quad).
This depends on the D&D campaign, as well, as some are more sophisticated than others. Yet, even the most complex will have large dashes of pulp. If the encounter is dragging, maybe it’s not a bad idea to have an orc kick down the door with a broad sword in its hand.
Character Drives Action:
Authors talk about characters in their novels doing things they didn’t expect, having a mind of their own: I never expected the protagonist to do that. To which I always think: wanker.
The character’s ‘mind’ is the writer’s mind, so please, let’s not pretend we are possessed by the spirit of our imaginary friend. Please let’s not pretend the act of writing has some ineffable mystery attached to it. It’s a craft, fuckchops, so shut up and write.
And yet… it’s also kinda true. My characters do do the unexpected. Maybe they say something funny, maybe they take a course of action I hadn’t consciously planned out, and I have to adjust.
Well, welcome to dungeons and dragons, where all your main characters literally have a mind of their own. You hope you can figure out what they may or may not do in any given situation, but you’ll be wrong.
All you can do is prepare. Know the world they are in intimately, the shape of the adventure in which they are enmeshed, and the background and motivations of all people they will meet. Prepare, so you can react intelligently and consistently, within the storyline.
Which leads us to:
The Seat of Your Pants:
You probably know the distinction between a plotter and a pantser (but maybe not. I’m teaching creative writing now at university to undergraduates, which very quickly has reminded me what knowledge I should and should not assume on the part of new writers). If you haven’t heard: plotters plot. They generally figure out, in advance, the whole story. Chapter by chapter, beat by beat. Pantsers, on the other hand, write by the seat of their pants.
George RR Martin is a notorious pantser. Game of Thrones was going to be three books. He had a sense of the ending, some of the major reveals, but not a great deal more. Which is why we’re up to book six, with no motherfucking end in sight. Stephen King, too, is a pantser, who starts with a single idea or inspiration and writes from there.
John Irving, on the other hand, always writes the last line of the novel first. He says he’s never changed it. The novel unfolds exactly as he planned. JK Rowling, apparently, does extensive plotting before she gets going.
Most of us are somewhere between these two points. I would call myself a plotter: generally I have the main characters, half the chapters, and (mostly, but not always) the ending in mind. But I quite deliberately leave one or two plot strands open, storylines I have no idea how I’m going to tie in.
So far it has always worked out. I’m always pleasantly surprised at the solutions my brain has worked out. This is often over weeks and months, subterranean, being figured as I sleep, or exercise, or read. But it gets there, in the end. And if I’m surprised by the solution, the reader certainly won’t be able to see it coming.
Dungeons and Dragons is a pantsers’ paradise. The DM always has to extemporise: the characters do something completely unexpected, the dice do weird things, the storyline veers savagely.
Now, you don’t have to follow this route. A dungeon master can always railroad the players along the narrative path they desire, and there are DMs who can’t help but take this approach. But I think it a mistake.
In a sense, the players are the readers, they are discovering the story as it unfolds. No reader likes the literary version of forcing an outcome against the flow of the storyline – the Deux ex Machina. The hand of god, or the dungeon master, or the author, swooping in to deliver the result they desire, rather than the result that makes sense within the internal logic of the story and the nature of the characters.
Somewhere in here is art. I’m not using the word ‘art’, here, as a creative product that will resonate through the ages. Rather, art as in the combination of experience and intuition that allows you to make the right decision; one that is not readily obvious. The art in letting go of the narrative reins, and trusting your ability.
This is not to denigrate plotters – I am one, after all. Rather, dungeons and dragons teaches us the wild possibilities in letting go, and the satisfaction that comes from finding order – or a credible plotline – in the chaos.
In “about”, on the left hand side.