What being a Dungeon Master taught me about Writing Fiction
When I was a kid, I read a lot of fantasy and sci-fi books (surprising no one). My major reads started with Animorphs by the amazing K.A. Applegate, which I began reading in 3rd grade, and upon reflection realized I had no business reading something that intense and violent and life changing at such a young age, but it happened, shaped me, and now you see the result. As I got older, a book cover attracted me in the local book store and I started reading Dragons of a Summer Flame by Margaret Weiss and Tracy Hickman, only to realize that just because something is the first book in a trilogy doesn’t mean it’s the first book chronologically. I went back, found Dragons of an Autumn Twilight and got hooked.
A few years ago I looked back and found that my original copies of the War of the Lance trilogy that began with Autumn Twilight actually had the 3.5 edition of D&D’s logo printed on the spine. Newer editions don’t have that, I think they just have the Hasbro logo, which I never would have connected the dots with at a young age, but I realized that D&D literature was something that had driven a lot of my more fantastical choices in books. I bet that a lot of people who’ve read my other blogs and have caught onto my inspirations and references, may well find books and series that we have in common cropping up now and then.
(As I write this, 12 Months by Jim Butcher is hitting shelves, and I still need to force myself to finish Battle Ground. It was just too much for me to handle during COVID, and now I’m worried about more emotional damage from letting it wait for so long).
This inspiration kept going for years, and finally pushed me over the edge into writing when I was a senior in High School. My English teacher ran a creative writing club, and I got a lot of very positive feedback from friends and fellow writers in the club on my poetry, so I decided to challenge myself. I started writing a book based off of a character that came to me in my own little day dreams. I didn’t finish it until I was in college (I was a much slower writer back then) and needed to do a lot of reworking on how it was supposed to look and sound, but eventually I completed it, and the second book in the trilogy I was writing. I started the third, but nothing ever came of it. I guess I lost interest in the project because, to me, it was never as good as anything I was reading.
Flash forward maybe five years or so, and I was returning home from a terrible stint working a job in another state. My mental health was at an all time low, my dreams and ideas of a future were in the toilet, and the last thing on my mind was delving into anything creative. However, there was one thing down in that terrible place that shall not be named that had kept me sane. Originally, I started going to a local game store to play in the FNM Draft (this was during the Dragons of Tarkir block, and let me tell you, I still have too many commons from that set floating around despite trying to offload them). What ended up happening was meeting a group of guys who were starting this D&D campaign since the new edition, 5e, was coming out. I decided to join them, began playing, and found myself feeling like one of the Heroes of the Lance with my friends.
This was a feeling that never really left me, and so I kept playing, even upon my return home, I kept playing. I even dragged Andrew (our esteemed Timm) along to play. As you can see, we didn’t change much as it's been over ten years since then and we’re still playing this game together. However, back then we were players together, neither one of us had taken the chance at DMing just yet. Many stories happen in here that I can delve into, but at one point, our DM was heading to China for a honeymoon/wedding combo, and so he’d be gone for a few weeks. We needed someone to keep the game going, and I volunteered.
Well those weeks became months, became forever, but pretty soon I was getting the hang of it. Excessive planning became outlining, and then outlining became learning to improv, and learning to improv taught me very quickly that having some kind of plan was important, and soon the circle of learning was spinning hard and fast. I learned a lot from the mistakes I made and through maturing, but in both DMing and writing, I found that these three lessons hold up exceptionally well:
1. Beware Mob Mentality
I’d like to say that I was a lot younger when I made this mistake, and in fairness I was. But I was also not that much younger when I made the mistake again. I’ve been actively working on making sure I don’t fall into this pit trap again, and am fully prepared to make amends if I do, but sometimes the mob can pull you in a direction you don’t mean to go, both at and away from the table.
There were several instances, neither of which I will go into detail about here, where I allowed the influence of the table to drive the story to near or even all out bullying. Would I have called it bullying at the time? No, because I would have thought we were just joking around, having fun, and nothing needs to be permanent in the story, it can just be retconned. But you can’t retcon the feelings of a player at your table. The best you can do is apologize to them if you make this mistake too, and hope they forgive you. Some did, some held a grudge, and some I don’t really hear from anymore. This is a risk of letting the mob control you as the DM. You’re so worried about the group having fun that you’ll risk stripping the fun away from one person just to keep the laughter going.
Never do that.
There are safety tools that can be put in place, and barring those, conversations about these instances need to always be taken seriously, but it is the job of the DM to keep the game fun for all, otherwise, you really did blow it.
How does this apply to writing a book? Well, in the era of booktok and mean reddit threads, there’s endless supplies of immediate feedback that can influence a writer to either change their storyline or mute down ideas because of backlash from a community. One need not look farther than Star Wars for this, as there is a great deal of evidence and fan theories that point to the idea of Darth Jar Jar, which is a fan theory that I hold near and dear to my heart, but suffice to say that the premise behind it was that Jar Jar Binks was supposed to be the main villain in the prequel trilogy, but the fan backlash and the mental toll it took on George Lucas robbed us of that reveal and a potentially amazing pay off.
There are other fandoms that are so toxic and terrible that they can just as easily ruin something the writers are creating for them. I’m even guilty of this (Games Workshop, stop letting Phil Kelly write T’au books!), but despite the hypocrisy of what I just said about Phil Kelly (who shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near T’au lore!) authors need to be allowed to work on the story they’re driven to write, and we as those who consume the work need to choose to respond with either constructive criticism (like, hey, Phil, why not go write for the Space Marines and let Simon Spurrier have another crack at it?) or just not interact with the medium at all. (I have chosen that second path, despite my quips here. While the Farsight novels were tempting, they just didn’t seem to understand the lore and character, so I stopped reading them, stopped buying them, and just won’t buy a T’au book written by Kelly. Haven’t had a chance to read Elemental Council yet, but I’ve heard good things about you, Noah Van Nguyen, so I’m looking forward to it!)
In the end, we have to make our decisions as individuals, and we have to live with those decisions for the rest of our lives, as well as the consequences of those decisions. And enough voices being hurtful to one person can seriously damage them, and the thing that they made that we love, so beware the mob dragging you in, because it may create a world you don’t want to be a part of. Like a world where Palpatine… somehow… returns.
2. Follow the story, don’t force it
As a DM, we have a plan for where the story is going to go. For most newer DMs, that plan is spelled out for you in the book. I cannot express how many times in the beginning of my DMing tenure my players decided to do something, take some action, talk to some person, and fundamentally removed every possible route the book told me to take. The villain they were going to fight? Now a friend. That ally they were supposed to make? Zero interest and completely ignored. That task they were supposed to complete? Well now, not only are they not doing it, they’re going to work for who was supposed to be the bad guy originally, but they have, based on logic, determined that the bad guy was actually in the right, the good guy was being an ass, but no, death was not the solution so we’re going to have to set up some negotiations to work this out peacefully, by force if necessary!
What do you do when the book doesn’t prepare you for them? You gotta roll with it. You can’t just ham-fist the story back into place. It feels unnatural and like their actions have no real effect on the world. Why play the game if your choices don’t matter? You’ll get no greater understanding about the importance of choice than looking at the reaction to the ending of the Mass Effect trilogy. Ask a Mass Effect player how much choices matter.
Now, you can’t really give readers the same choice you give players. Reading is a far more passive experience. The reader’s input, as previously stated, shouldn’t and doesn’t have as big an impact on the story as a player’s in a game would. But even if I weren’t transcribing our game from TTRPG to novel, readers would recognize a forced interaction, a scripted event, or anything else that steals agency away from the characters placed in front of them. Whether these characters are based on real people or are people all their own, their personalities and choices matter more than anything in the world. When a character begins acting out of… well… character, readers notice.
We’ve all been in that situation where we’re watching something or reading something, and we just scream at our medium of choice: “WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT?” The character has done something profoundly stupid or monumentally egregious, and we cannot reconcile with the choice they made. Then there are other times, we can look at it and just go: “You know, you’re an idiot… but yeah, that sounds about right.” As a big DBZ fan… this is Vegeta. We know it’s stupid. We know it’s going to backfire horribly, but we also know Vegeta. We accept the stupid decision because that arrogant little short king is made of stupid decisions.
Everyone: Vegeta no!
Vegeta: Vegeta yes!
Without that suspension of disbelief (in this case, I cannot believe someone would be that stupid) we get a character acting in a way that tears us out of the story just as completely as a player whose agency is getting undermined is pulled out of the game. I think that’s one of the reasons characters like Daenerys from the Game of Thrones TV show (haven’t finished Dance of Dragons, so I’m not going to talk about the books) got so much hate. A lot of people tried to pull the gender thing here, but in reality, who was more loved than Daenerys in that show? It wasn’t until the moment she turned on her people and slaughtered them all that people took issue. Yes, when a Targaryen is born, the gods flip a coin, as we all know, but that moment took everything we’d learned about her as a person, every characteristic we valued in her, and threw it out the window. If we were to follow her storyline, that action would never have been made. If the storyline had dropped stronger hints at her fraying sanity to the point where her psychotic break was inevitable, we would have seen it as an unavoidable tragedy. Since neither of these things happened, the story of the character was lost for the sake of the story the production team wanted to tell.
3. Not everyone is going to be happy with an outcome, but those who are worth your time will at least be satisfied with it.
Finally, you can’t please everyone. Or as the fun little office sign says: “I can only please one person per day. Today is not your day. Tomorrow doesn’t look good either.” As amusing as this little anecdote is, it’s a bit flawed. It tells us that people are impossible to please, and that no matter what we do, no one is going to be happy with your effort.
Correction: No one will ever be 100% happy with what you do.
My players often thank me for sessions when I feel they were mediocre and I could have done better. For really great sessions, maybe I get a lot of positive feedback, even from the most quiet. More often than not, I’m sure if I asked specifically for feedback on what could be done better, I’m positive there would be something. I don’t always ask, mostly because we’re usually wrapping up by near midnight and have work the next day. Sometimes it’s volunteered, but that’s usually when they want something specifically involving their character’s personal story. Then it’s less feedback and more of a strategy session for going forward.
Simply put, some sessions are more fun for some players than others. Some players love a good dungeon dive, where others would rather tear their own eyes out than map a million rooms and figure out those dimensions in space. Give em a straight up fight any day! But then the ones who like to talk their way out of problems won’t be having as much fun. Because we’re so diverse, we all have more fun in one setting than another.
The key phrase there is more fun.
Not everyone is going to be 100% happy with the session, especially if it doesn’t coincide with the type of session that is most fun for them. I have one friend in my Dragonlance campaign that hates dungeon crawls with a burning passion. Does that mean I don’t run any? Not at all, I just run fewer, or I edit them down so they’re not as long. We were in a 100 room dungeon a few weeks back (a 5e conversion and edit of The Lost City) which could have been a campaign all its own. This particular player wasn’t overly thrilled with the idea of a dungeon crawl, but rather than forcing them through the 100 rooms, we broke it down into just about twenty or so, cutting out the fluff where it wasn’t needed, getting them to the boss, and then handwaving a lot of the navigation out and back to the story.
The important aspect here isn’t to avoid something that a player doesn’t like (though do avoid crossing their lines or ignoring their veils), but to work with them so that the thing they don’t like, that other players do, doesn’t make the experience unpleasant for them. “Oh great, another dungeon crawl” isn’t the same thing as “Okay, it's not my favorite, but we’ve been doing a lot of other things lately and the group seems excited. I’ll be okay for a bit.” Like any relationship, it's about balance. You may not like the farmer’s market much, (I mean, I do, but hey), but you will go if your significant other loves it. Inversely, they won’t let it be the whole day if they know it's not something you enjoy. Throw them a swoon worthy NPC and a cool magic item every now and then, and they’ll happily trigger a cool trap you spent hours building on purpose just to see you smile.
