Author's Notes on: 5 Ways that Playing D&D Can Make You A Better Writer
As an avid player, watcher, and general consumer of Dungeons and Dragons content, there are a lot of lessons that I try to take away from it, both on a session-to-session basis and campaign to campaign.
If you somehow are just finding out about Dungeons and Dragons (D&D), I’ll admit I’m not the best resource to explain what it is and how it functions, but I’ll try to give a brief overview for the sake of the unaware.
Dungeons and Dragons is a fantasy tabletop roleplaying game. There’s various rules and dice for combat, but today we’ll be focusing more on the roleplaying/collaborative storytelling aspect — the part where you, a player, play a character within the group’s story.
The narrator and organizer of all the player’s/character’s stories is known as the Game Master, or more commonly, the Dungeon Master (DM). While you play a PC (Player Character), the DM controls all the NPCS (non-player characters) active in the story. D&D groups can vary dramatically in size, but generally a party will fall in a range of 4-7 players plus a DM.
I imagine there is a whole treasure trove of ways that being a DM could also help your writing, but I’m primarily a player, so I’ll be speaking through that lens.
1. D&D allows you to experience stories other than what you would write
There are lots of different ways a campaign can be run, but generally speaking, there will be a development of an overarching narrative that’s fueled by smaller narrative arcs, usually covering the resolution of characters’ backstories.
Each character’s backstory arc will revolve around a different problem and resolution, often with different themes, tones, and atmospheres. They can be very magical and fantastical, or they can be incredibly grounded.
This means that in the course of a campaign, you are able to be exposed to several different types of stories told by several different types of people, who all bring their own styles and narrative “voices” to the table.
Often in the character creation process, each person works with the DM to ensure that their character feels unique, with their own niche in the party and its story. This means that no two backstories will be the same, and each narrative arc will feel distinctive from the last.
Getting exposure to all kinds of stories outside your normal purview is a very enriching experience as a writer, opening your world to stories and possibilities you may not have considered or explored.
2. D&D can be a place to experiment with themes and stories you are unfamiliar with or want to try out.
In a similar way to the first point, YOU can write stories you wouldn’t normally write, and explore character dynamics, aesthetics, and much more that you haven’t before.
You can try new things with your narrative voice and style, or tailor your story towards a certain genre you haven’t touched much and expand your horizons! It can be daunting, but especially having the collaboration of a DM and party, D&D is a great place to start trying new things.
Never done a seafaring story? What about something with vampires and werewolves? Star crossed lovers? Revolution? So long as everyone involved is interested and willing, you can explore a virtually endless selection of possibilities at your leisure.
3. D&D can help you build more complex characters.
Not all D&D games are made for complex backstories, but this is still worth a very important mention. It’s simple, but effective — D&D is a great medium for getting into a character’s head, and offers you the benefit of fleshing out one character extremely well.
Instead of focusing on a book’s worth of characters, you can focus on one and get intimately familiar with what kind of person they are and how they interact with the world.
This isn’t just a conceptual thing either — the great thing about D&D is that your character will be put into a variety of situations throughout their runtime in the party. You’ll have ample room to figure out who they are and how they’d react to things you’d never have expected to happen.
You can transfer these skills back into your writing, learning how to focus on a character and get more familiar with who they are and why they do what they do. It helps you put new situations in front of them and have a better sense of how they would react to them.
Sure, not every character needs to be having a deeply complex reaction to everything going on with them, but that’s were we get into our next point —
4. D&D can help teach about narrative focus and spotlight.
In a game of Dungeons and Dragons, no one is the main character. The party collectively are main characters, which means that each character will have their times to shine — both in the arcs that focus on them, and the arcs that focus on others.
Nobody is a flat background character. They all have thoughts, feelings, and purposes that govern their actions and reactions to what is going on around them.
On a large scale, this means that the narrative spotlight is often shifting. Even if an arc centers more strongly around one character, every other character still has meaning and importance to the story, and there’s a delicate balance involved both in stepping up to the spotlight as well as backing out of it when it’s someone else’s turn to have their cool moment.
It teaches a lot about balancing multiple complex characters and competing storylines so that the overall narrative feels complete and satisfying, not interrupted by something that isn’t important right now — or falling flat because a character didn’t step up when they were meant to.
It teaches you how to determine when a character should have the spotlight, so their impact and importance on the story doesn’t fade, but also when to have them step back and support other characters’ stories.
On a smaller, scene-to-scene basis, you can take a lot of lessons about how to (or how NOT to) handle the flow of a scene with multiple characters by interacting in character with a group and DM. If the scene is flowing straight through, or panning back and forth between several smaller groups in ways that make sense and break at appropriate times, there’s likely a good sense of narrative flow in the group.
If the scenes seem to be interrupted or switched away from just when they were getting going, or if one PC dominates the conversation, the flow of the narrative is going to feel a lot bumpier and difficult to manage. This balance is collaborative. Part of the responsibility is on the players to understand this narrative flow, and part of it is on the DM to have final say on when scenes switch and who is getting the focus.
In your stories, you want it to flow, not be bumpy and uncoordinated. You have the “voices” of all the characters in mind, and it’s your job as the story’s arbiter to make sure those voices coordinate and cooperate, that scenes shift as feels right, and don’t jump around without direction — or with too many directions to get a proper sense of intent and flow.
5. D&D teaches you about triumph and tragedy.
Dungeons and Dragons is a bit scary in the fact that there really isn’t any guarantee of where a story is going to go. You can work with your DM to help them get a solid grasp of what you want out of your character’s arc or what dynamics you would like to portray or see portrayed. You can even work with them about backstory NPCs (characters played by the DM) and how they’d interact with your character.
(It’s worth noting that this isn’t foolproof — even if you’re very explicit about what you want from a story, every DM is a storyteller and how exactly they handle your story may not be what you thought it’d be, but hopefully is still satisfying for you as a player!)
But what makes this all actually scary isn’t that at all — it’s the dice. The dice infuse randomness into the story, ensuring that fights and conversations don’t always have automatic success — or failure.
As a writer and forger of your own story, you can make decisions about what happens to your characters. If you want to dictate that they win a difficult fight, or lose at the last second, that’s yours to decide and the exact fallout is yours to mold.
In Dungeons and Dragons, though, you don’t always have assurance of anything. In fact — the lack of assurance is what makes the story gripping and fun to play. You can play to your strengths and hedge your bets, but you don’t have the ability to just say “we win”. You can be in dire straits, only for a Hail Mary to save you, but you can’t just decide that it works — the dice do.
It forces you to think in character and strategize, and each character will shine in their respective approaches to solving problems.
But where you really learn from this is not in success, but in party failure.
Full disclosure, this article has come about because my Friday game has just ended our sea-faring arc of piracy, monsters, and diplomacy… but not the way any of us expected. I’ll try to be brief:
We’ve been ramping up to the end of the arc for some time now. Our goal? To unite several coastal regions with a peace treaty, preventing a war and preparing a united front against a greater enemy. Our final foes were a terribly ancient, frighteningly intelligent sea monster known as an aboleth that had killed and warped one of the last tribes we intended to bring to the table, and a narcissistic, genocidal mage who saw the Isles and their peoples as the perfect stage for a battleground — a place for him to test his limits and push his capabilities.
The sea beast and the mage were not working together, but the setting of this conflict meant that it was a messy, bloody three-way conflict. The mage was actually willing to completely ignore us, but stepping on his toes provoked him and his two wizard cronies into attacking us as well, before attempting to leave.
At this point, the mage had just obtained an artifact of some kind from another plane of existence — and surely would use it to enact destruction on a catastrophic scale if he and his cronies were allowed to get away. It was a difficult decision — focus attention on the sea beast and let the wizards teleport away, or focus on killing the wizards and risk not having enough left in us to finish off the aboleth and its minions.
Party opinion was split, and combat moves too quickly to sit and hash things out. My character managed a near-impossible feat of deceiving the aboleth into helping us, and with both the party and one of our enemies working against them, the wizards were all slain before they could make their exit.
It came at a cost, though. After the mage’s death, the artifact he’d taken was added to the playing field, and the aboleth, knowing the item’s power, turned on us to take it for himself. We discovered, then, that the item controlled a powerful leviathan — an ancient creature that could easily wipe out entire coastal cities and civilizations.
The character who had grabbed the item survived — knowing how many lives she held in her hands, she fled as fast as she could to get the item away from the aboleth. It was an impossible decision, but she was the only one fast enough to do it.
Another character signaled the retreat then, using her magic to teleport herself up and away.
My character stayed and fought at range as long as she could, but there was no use. She had to use her final turn to move as fast as she could towards the surface, and only breached it by the thinnest of margins. With a magic item, she was able to walk atop the water, saving her from the fate that befell the others.
The other two members of our party, not to mention a guest character, plus an NPC that had once been a player’s character, and that character’s father, never breached the surface again.
They fell, one after the other.
The sea beast summoned a vortex that tore their bodies and souls asunder, creating more minions out of them.
They had died, but their sacrifice gave the rest of us time to get away, ensuring that the artifact did not fall into the grasp of anyone that would use it for ill.
With their sacrifice, we were able to complete our task. The DM walked us through the final arrangements of this chapter of our story. How the remaining party members were able to gather everyone for the peace talks, and across three days and nights of negotiation, emerge out the other end with a signed and sealed treaty between all factions.
Generations to come were saved from the perils of a pointless war.
It was powerful. Emotional.
Completely devastating.
And nowhere near what the DM (or anyone else) thought was going to happen. The original intention of the DM wasn’t for this to be the final fight of the arc — he was expecting us to work with the mages to kill the aboleth and its spawn, leaving them to teleport away but finishing off this threat. Then, we would have the option to research and look for clues about the item that the wizard had taken, all leading up to the peace talks, where the mage would sabotage them with the leviathan. There was supposed to be a final fight with many important NPCs in attendance, the deaths of which could have rippling effects over the entire rest of the story.
It was a grand battle, one certainly fitting to end an arc on. One that didn’t happen, because we knew that letting the mage get away with the artifact could only lead to catastrophe, and we were willing to throw everything at him to make sure he didn’t get that chance.
We paid a tax in blood for that.
There were certainly alternative routes to the fight that could have ended better, and many more that could have ended worse. If this was a book, you could choose the ending you wanted, tailored the story to make sure scenes happened the way you want and lead to the things you want. But this is D&D, and that means that the story doesn’t always go the way you expect it to, not as a player and not as a DM either.
You always want player characters to survive, to make it to their arc — to see their story through. But in order for a story to have stakes, it must have the threat of death and danger, and that threat must be real and present in these character’s lives. Their struggle is what makes their story meaningful.
We all had plans and ideas for how this all would go, but we all knew that the story was subject to dice rolls and player choice — there’s always the knowledge that things can go awry. Player characters are powerful, but so are the threats they face. We have many tools at our disposal to help us win, but there is no such thing as plot armor.
And so, the story took a turn none of us were expecting. The surviving characters managed to complete the mission they set out here for, and disbanded back to their home countries to mourn and prepare for any trials that might come their way in the future.
The game has taken a break while new characters are made, and the remaining party members reckon with the fallout of this traumatic incident.
It can be easy to write a story where your protagonists never fail. Where they are prophesized heroes that kick butt and take names, and where the danger is implied but never enforced. There’s nothing wrong with a story where everyone makes it to the end — there’s absolutely a place for those stories.
But there’s also a place for tragedy. For fear. For trauma.
For failure, in all its iterations and forms, and the safe sorrow you can experience vicariously through all the characters.
It can be scary, letting your characters fail. Letting their plans fall through and their actions bite them in the worst ways possible. It can be scary to end things on a bittersweet note, or to have something happen that permanently changes how the survivors interact with the world.
But it can also add new depths to the story, and new avenues to explore with them. It opens up a range of possibilities for how all the remaining characters could react, grow, or fall back into old ways. It opens up new ways for new characters to interact with the ones who experienced it, in positive ways and negative ones.
Even if you don’t go through with it, I encourage it as an exercise — ask yourself what would break your characters, and then break them. Ask what your characters couldn’t live without, and then take it from them. Ask yourself what would happen if plans fall apart. If people die. How do people change? Where do they go? What do they do? Where do they find solace? Or do they at all?
Let your characters fail. Let your characters struggle. Let them be forever changed by what the sacrificed to achieve a victory, even a pyrrhic one.
There’s a delicate balance to be had there, and a painful one. No one was left unmarred by what happened to our party and the people we lost. Emotions ran high, and there’s a certain pain in knowing that a character’s story will never be told, or that there are things you’ll never get the chance to do with them/as them.
But the story of the game isn’t over — people survived, and new blood is entering the party when next we see them again. Things will forever be changed by what happened, and the party’s dynamic will be changing in new and interesting ways going forward.
But the past will not be erased. The characters that were lost will be remembered, in ways big and small.
It was the end of an era, but not the End.
Overall, Dungeons and Dragons is a fantastic game for collaborative storytelling, and there’s a lot you can take away from it as a writer to improve your range, comfort level, skills, and experiences.
I hope you all get the chance to play, and if you do, that you’re able to find takeaways that help you in your endeavors! Or if nothing else, I hope you enjoyed this article, and thank you very much for reading.