Game Week 3: Dungeons and Dragons

There's a game that actually improves your abilities as a writer immensely...and it's not Scrabble. Nor does it have a Mensa sticker or proudly exclaim that it's "educational."

In fact, it in no way advertises its helpfulness in this field. However, the sheer number of successful people who played this game in their youth speaks for itself.

Yes, yes. I'm that much of a geek. Dungeons and Dragons is a recent love of mine. I always wanted to get into it, but it seemed like such a...time investment. And it is. Getting started in a game is enough to deter most people from playing...setting up a character and learning the mechanics is frustrating. It took me several sessions to get the hang of the fighting and when to roll dice and which dice to roll. During that time, the game was frustrating and difficult. I wasn't really having a ton of fun and I was so busy with the rules I wasn't getting into my character properly.

Once I had the mechanics down though? Just trust me on this...if you stick with it through the learning curve, you will have a great time.

I'm off topic though. You didn't come here to have me tell you to play this game - you came here to see what literary merit the game has.

I have always thought that there is no way I could be a teacher, because my method of teaching would be totally bizarre. My students would watch the BeeGees's "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" in order to teach them the concept of deus ex machina.

I would totally make a creative writing class play Dungeons and Dragons.

I'm not kidding.

(Now tell me I should be a teacher. Parents would riot.)

It would work. I believe this fully. I just don't think the people in charge of curriculums would give me a chance to explain. You, my captive audience, have no choice. (Well...you do. But I assume that, if you're still reading, you're willing to hear it anyway.)

Here's why my students would be forced to spend each class period making perception checks and my budget would include an invoice for 20-sided dice.

Dungeons and Dragons is literally creative story-telling by committee...and possibly the greatest exercise ever for enforcing character-driven plots.

For those of you whose knowledge of D&D is limited to, as a comedic animation put it "a shit ton of rules and a lot of funny shaped dice"...a bunch of nerds in their parents' basement eating Cheetos and drinking Mountain Dew and never having girlfriends...and dressed up in silly medieval outfits holding foam swords...let me explain it to you.

First of all, most of the stereotypes, whether they've been true in the past or not, are pretty much untrue or exaggerated. My group has two girls, (including myself). Our DM (Dungeon Master...I'll explain later) hosts the games in his own apartment. Sometimes there's mountain dew...but typically we go out to eat as a group and sometimes we have alcohol (depending on the age of the players and who's driving). All of us have had a significant other at some point, whether we're currently attached or not. And the dressing up and foam weapon thing? Completely incorrect, that's a different thing altogether. That's called "LARP" or Live Action Role Play. It's a small subset of D&D, which is a table-top role playing game, that combines the game with theater. I've never played, but imagine that it's vaguely similar to working at RenFest.

Ok, that's out of the way. Here's how you actually play.

The best way to explain D&D, which just proves my point, is that you are writing a story. It's not a competitive game. There's no "winning" or "losing" the game.

Gameplay breaks down into two roles: you are either the DM in charge of the plot, or you are a player in charge of a character.

To begin a game, the DM prepares a basic story construct. The DM decides what the world looks like, how it works, generally what's going to happen and what has been happening...Meanwhile, the players create characters.

Everyone who writes a story should make a D&D character. You don't simply come up with a name and looks. You have to decide all of the backstory of your character and ok it with the DM to make sure it fits the world he's created. You have to decide what your character's strengths are. Are they highly intelligent but a little naive? Strong and intimidating but not very charming? No character can be perfect...and your abilities have to match your backstory. If your character grew up studying extensively but didn't interact with other kids much, your "charisma" points are going to be low while your "intelligence" points will be high. Which means if you need to lie convincingly, you're not going to do well...but if you need to remember some random bit of history you'll do just fine.

If you decide that you character is really big, they'll be stronger but they'll also be slower.

If your character has distinctive looks, they will have trouble being inconspicuous.

EVERY decision you make has to make sense, and will have logical consequences.

Game play simply involves the DM relaying the story in the guise of narrator and the minor characters. The players, however, are responsible for the individual decisions of their characters.

Sometimes, this has unintended consequences that the DM was not expecting.

I will give you an example from the game I currently play.

My group was hired by the government to investigate a mysterious group that had been causing some trouble. Our investigations led us to leave the city...which we had not been authorized to do. When events led us to return to the city we had warrants out for our arrest. We fell into a trap and were captured by bounty hunters.

This is where things get interesting.

We have in our group a character played by my good friend Alex. Alex's character is a changeling who, while being useless in a fight, is an incredible liar. He has impressive magical abilities and a great deal of charisma...so when he lies he not only makes them believe him, it makes them believe him passionately. As with all skills, this depends on the roll of a dice...in this case a 20-sided one. The idea is that you have a certain amount of natural and trained ability in something...which creates a "modifier". However, any endeavor also depends on your luck and the ability of others to resist you. Now Pique (Alex's character) has a ridiculously high "bluff" modifier...something like +20. The bounty hunters had an unfortunately average ability to sense the motives of others...such as when they are lying, (a stat known as "passive insight"). Alex then made the situation even more interesting by rolling really well.

What was the result?

"Pique" decided to distract the bounty hunters by getting them interested in a "new" God, (something we'd been investigating at the time and therefore was fresh in his mind.) However, he lied so well that he not only got them to let us go...he started a new religion.

Which meant that the next time we entered the city (a few months later in game time) the religion that he had started had become a major force and the followers hailed him as a prophet and offered us all kinds of aid.

The DM did not create that story line...Alex did through his decisions.

That is the essence of a character-driven story. I prefer character-driven stories over plot-driven stories any day...and you probably do as well. In a character driven story, the events unfold based on the decisions of a character. In order for this to work, the character has to be well-written and function like a real person. They make decisions that are logical given the knowledge, background and personality of the character. An impulsive character will act impulsively. A character that does not know he's walking into a trap will continue doing so regardless of what the reader and author know, etc. etc. etc.

An event-driven plot, however, will force a character into the sequence of events the author has already come up with. This is not a bad thing necessarily. As long as the character reacts in a logical way based on the events and it still works then it's perfectly fine.

There are downsides to each style. Character-driven plots have more chance of derailing on the author as the character reacts to events in a way the author doesn't expect and makes the ending impossible or boring...necessitating a re-write. (e.g. a timid character may decide to stay at home and do nothing in reaction to scary things happening...and therefore not be in the right place for the plot to continue and completely throw the author off as they try to think of a legitimate reason to place the character back in harm's reach.) Event-driven plots, on the other hand, have a much higher chance of deus ex machina style events...plot points that come out of nowhere for no clear reason for the sole purpose of moving the plot along.

Between the two, I prefer character-driven plots because they force the author to rewrite the story until it logically works rather than taking a shortcut.

Playing D&D is literally practice in creating character-driven plots in game form. It's wonderful.

So, yes...if I was a creative writing teacher my poor students would be forced to play.

They would also have a required unit on grammar and sentence diagramming, know the difference between intransitive and transitive verbs (or know my wrath) and would suffer dire consequences for mixing up your/you're.

They would hate me.


This is my D&D group, minus the DM who is taking the picture. You may notice that we are all having an awesome time. You may also notice that we are huge dorks.