Writing and role playing games

As a child, games were an escape, a way to be someone else for a little while, similar to books, they allowed me to leave the banality of normal life behind and become someone different. A hero or a villain, a lord or a scoundrel.

The ability of modern games to transport the player into the world of their setting so completely was a wonder to my young mind. I spent hours, days, weeks and months exploring these worlds. From the forests of Cyrodil to the grand city of Stormwind. I explored them whilst sat in front of my game screen and thought about little else while I wasn’t. I do believe they have a fantastic place to play in a healthy and full upbringing. For me, they allowed for a space to explore myself in a safe environment. They allow the player to make decisions under pressure, whether they be quick, instantaneous decisions while fleeing from a monster, or longer form moral decisions about their actions in the context of a story. Either way, a young person playing a game is given the opportunity to make these decisions in an environment where failure is possible without genuine physical or moral danger.

Unfortunately for my childhood self. I didn’t discover tabletop RPG games until my mid teens. I’m certain I would have loved it as a child, but alas, I will never know. Even more unfortunately, when I did discover these games, I was not blessed with a group of friends willing to play them with me. That’s not to say I didn’t have friends, I did. And they were fantastic, but they weren’t the type.

All this to say that I truly believe that if either of these unfortunate circumstances were different. I would be a vastly better writer than I find myself today. While I am certain that video games aided in my growth as a child and as a person. That aid pales in comparison to the aid that tabletop RPGs have given me in my growth as an author.

When playing one of these role-playing games, each of the players embodies a role (as you can surmise from the name). This total embodiment of a character engenders a kind of narrative empathy that is hard to accomplish without practice. To put yourself in a character’s shoes, and be able to say, “What would my character do or say” is a skill that all authors learn. But with years of tabletop RPGs beneath my belt, that part of the writing process came easily.

There are of course, other aspects of tabletop RPG gaming that help to improve skills useful to an author. However, a lot of these aspects are only relevant to one player in a DND group. The Dungeon Master is the player who controls the world in which the adventure occurs. I’m what a lot of people call a ‘Forever DM’, meaning that if we are playing, generally I’m running the game.

Memes tend to suggest that being a “Forever DM” is a bad thing. And while I do want to play as a player, I wouldn’t trade running the game for it. Being the dungeon master gives me so much more creative freedom, I can design cities and nations. Monsters and magic spells. Then, I place my friends in the middle of it. They explore, and when they inevitably go where I didn’t expect them to, I have to come up with more on the fly.

Every writer knows and can tell you about the state of flow you reach when you write the right scene. When you are as much writer as observer. The characters reacting and acting almost of their own accord as you simply type out the story as you watch it play out in your mind.

For me, tabletop RPGs are that feeling. But with my friends.