I have always had a love for storytelling, which is why I was attracted to Dungeons and Dragons and other role-playing games at a very young age. I was fascinated by the concept of a game that allowed the players to do just about anything, whether it’s mincing around town in a floral dress and sunhat calling yourself Mrs. Nesbitt, or riding a flying pink whale named Bubbles into battle (both of which have been actual occurrences in D&D campaigns that I have run). As a form of expression, I think it appealed to my unique imagination. The mapping out of dungeons, monsters, characters, and story arcs satisfied my desire for meticulous, pain-staking detail, while the fact that players could pretty much do whatever they wanted appealed to my chaotic, creative side.
When I first started, I didn’t exactly play by any set of rules. My brother and I just played what amounted to a more organized form of make-believe, taking turns playing as the storyteller and the main character. We’d create new worlds and new play styles to adapt to whatever ideas we had at the time. I think my favorite game that we played was one where my brother was the storyteller and I was the player. The way I remember it, my character was a wizard who had discovered a source of powerful blue magic that manifested itself in any way I willed it to. I could hurl spears of blue magical energy, create magical shields, turn into animals, anything I could think of. The only catch was I had a limited reserve of this power, and the crazier the spells I casted, the greater drain on my supply, and if I ran out I had to recharge by drinking blue potions. I had fun fooling around with my powers for a while, but then I met a rival wizard who had a form of red magic that was just as versatile and powerful as mine. I quickly discovered that in order to defeat him I would have to use my magic in more creative ways, without depleting my power reserves. I don’t remember exactly how it played out, but I remember it was fun, exciting, and very rewarding. I hope I have a chance to recreate it in a story at some point.
Even when we got a hold of the D&D rulebooks, we rarely used them. We found the rules to be way too complicated for what we were trying to do. We didn’t need to know how to calculate initiative or armor class to tell a story and have fun. But we did start to draw out our worlds on graph paper, and incorporated dice into our gameplay. My parents used to marvel at how we could spend hours a day sitting at the dining room table, captivated by nothing more than paper, pencils, and dice, without even glancing at the TV or computer screen. It wasn’t until high school that I was able to put together a bona fide D&D campaign, and I fully realized the intricacies it possessed as a form of storytelling.
Over the past few years, I’ve come to view running a Dungeons and Dragons campaign not only as an art form in and of itself, but as an extremely challenging one, combining aspects writing, drawing, acting, and improvisation. The person who runs the game, called the Dungeon Master, creates and controls the world, but the players are the ones who drive the story. The DM describes the environment to the players and portrays the characters they encounter, all while keeping track of everyone’s location, health, defense, attack, and the order of their turns, and do it all in a way that concise, yet entertaining. I’ve found it to be an exhausting, but satisfying exercise.
Because the players can take the story in any direction they want, and usually take it in very odd directions, the DM also needs to be able to think on their feet. Also, my experience has taught me that no level of preparation will allow you to predict the players’ intentions. There have been multiple occasions where I have spent a week preparing for the next session, then been stumped by a player asking a question I didn’t expect. So, rather than attempting to chart out every possible path for the players to take and every possible reaction for a character to have to them, I try to establish the world and the opportunities it supplies them, and flesh out the personality and motivations of the characters so I can extrapolate how they would react in any situation. There is some material out there on tricks to make running a campaign easier and more fun, but in general every Dungeon Master needs to develop their own technique. This, in my opinion, along with its inherent spontaneity, is what makes Dungeons and Dragons a highly individual experience for anyone who plays it.
