Since I was a pimple faced teenager, I have been playing the famous, and sometimes infamous, table top game of Dungeons and Dragons. Now, as a pimple faced twenty-seven-year-old, I have more than a decade of playing, both as a DM and a player. While there are many great reasons to play D&D, the one that has effected my life the most is what it’s taught me about writing. Below, I break down the top five most important writing lessons I learned from D&D:

1- Characters form the story. 

A DM can set up the world and all the NPCs and BEBGs, but it’s the player characters who decide where the story goes. This is the same for any story you write. Your characters are their own people and will have reactions and motives that are different from what you are trying to make happen. Just as a DM has to go along with their player characters decision, so too do you have to go along with your characters’ decisions. And while worldbuilding can be fun and provide a lot of interesting situations for your characters, the story is not about showing the world to your players or readers, it is simply a sandbox for your characters to play in.

2- The importance of well-rounded characters.

Going along with characters’ decisions only work if you have fully developed character. My favorite part about D&D is character creation because, while you can get super creative with it, you have limits to what your character can do. If you make your character skilled in strength, dexterity and constitution, their intelligence, charisma, and wisdom could suffer for it. Those ability scores determine what the characters are skilled at and what they suck at. Not only does it affect the gameplay and how your character does when trying a certain task or engaging in combat, but for a strong player, it also determines how you roleplay as your character. It is important that we provide both strengths and weaknesses for our characters. If you are playing D&D right, you cannot make a Mary Sue or a Gary Stu, which shouldn’t exist in your writing either.

3- A magic system is far more compelling than “A wizard did it!”

Listen, we don’t need to get crazy with a magic system, let’s not be nerds about this, but we do need limitations to magic that both the writer and reader understand. More than anything, this is about not having your wizard, or some other magic wielder, deus ex machina with their magic. If magic users can just snap their fingers like noodle armed Thanoses whenever their in a tight spot, you’re going to have a boring story, even if the spell looks really cool. Even with a super loose magic system, your characters will have to navigate the limits of their powers, whatever you determine them to be. Just like with the characters themselves, magic needs to have both strengths and weaknesses.

4- Leveling up your characters.

Why tell a story in which the characters don’t grow over time? We send characters out on their hero’s journey for a reason, so we need to be developing their growth over the course of said journey. After every encounter or challenge your characters overcome, they need to be a little more stronger or skilled in a particular area. What’s even better about this in writing than in D&D is that you can do this gradually rather than BAM! now my wizard can do three way more powerful spells that they had never showed signs of understanding before. Developing your characters’ skills and powers over time through experiences they have also replaces those annoying training montages that take anywhere from 5 to 100 pages and waste everyone’s time, including the characters’. 

5- A varied cast is far more interesting.

I’ve read too many books where all the main characters were more or less the same with only slight differences in their personality or skills. You rarely will see a D&D party consist of the same class, race, or background. One time, I tried to DM a campaign for a party of all wizards from different schools of magic, and it got out of hand real fast. A strong D&D party will consist of a tank (fighter, paladin, or barbarian), a face (bard, paladin, warlock, or sorcerer), a healer (paladin, cleric, or some sort of subclass), a magic wielder (you get it), and a sneaky rogue. Every character has their own specific set of skills that makes them useful to the party, and their race, class, and background also adds a different flavor to the story telling. Even if you have only a couple of characters, each of them has to bring their own skills and story dynamic to the table (or desk).

There is so much more than what I’ve mentioned here about why D&D is such a great game, especially for writers who want to hone the craft of story telling, but that’s all I’ve got for you today! Please be sure to follow this blog for more content, which I post every Friday. You can find links to my Instagram and Twitter in the menu above.

Happy Writing!