The only good stories are from Dungeons & Dragons

The narrative value of tabletop games.

After school, Kid Raccoon gathers with their friends to play a session of Dungeons & Dragons in an abandoned train car. By me.

A few months back, I started listening to a podcast called Dungeons and Daddies. It is notably not a BDSM podcast, but instead a Dungeons & Dragons podcast.

In my social circle, which is a Venn diagram of teachers and people who enjoy escape rooms, I’ve found that many people are interested in Dungeons & Dragons but are confused by it. As I’ve explored it and games like it, I’ve become enamored by tabletop roleplaying games as an overlooked storytelling medium. 

For the uninitiated — tabletop roleplaying games (TTRPGs) are essentially board games that allow a group of friends to come together and collaboratively tell a story. There are many varieties of TTRPGs, and Dungeons & Dragons is simply the most popular one. Typically in each, players assume the role of fictional characters and describe what they would like to do. A player says something like, “I want to jump over that table and punch the bad guy,” and then they will roll a dice to determine how well they do it. Some stories you tell in one night, some you play out across multiple sessions over a few months or years. It’s imagination with rules. Importantly, it’s a storytelling engine that has inspired me to switch up my approach to writing.

The main conceit of the tabletop format is that randomness is a significant factor in the storytelling beats. Since a dice roll often decides outcomes, a character can flub a potentially heroic moment and experience a tragedy. While the randomness of the dice can sometimes result in anti-climactic moments, they also often provide unexpected and serendipitous paths for the story that you couldn’t script better if you tried. 

The podcast I’ve been listening to, Dungeons and Daddies, is a long-running fictional story where four dads get flung into a fantasy world and go on a quest to rescue their lost sons. 

In an early episode, they accidentally drop a literal pyramid on a town as the ultimate result of a bad dice roll. It was an absurdist and hilarious moment in the episode, but it also created long-term implications that affected the story over fifty episodes later.

Most of my favorite authors are architects, folks who plan out storytelling beats far in advance. But tabletop games can present an extreme version of the gardener-style of storytelling, which is when you let the story take shape naturally as it unfolds. 

The other piece of tabletop games that I love is that they confirm that storytelling doesn’t have to be a solitary act. I’m sure TV writers, who do much of their work in writers’ rooms, understand this. But it is a harder lesson for memoirists and novelists. 

The idea behind all good improv, which is at the heart of most tabletop games, is the mantra of “Yes and… .” If someone throws out an idea, you accept it and build on it. It is a bump-set-spike style of storytelling. In an ideal game, no one person is taking all the glory, or trying to get the most punchlines or dramatic moments. You collaboratively build the story to allow everyone to get their time in the sun. Everyone is reliant on each other to make fun and interesting character and narrative choices that provide opportunities for each player to get significant moments.

As an essay writer, I find that utterly romantic. 

I know many writers feel the impulse for all of their thoughts to be entirely original. It is in part due to fears of plagiarism and a reasonable desire to provide fresh insight. So an improviser’s mindset doesn’t seem to jive with what a novelist is setting out to do. But, I don’t believe there is a writer out there who wouldn’t benefit from riffing off the creativity of others. As Roy Peter Clark says, “The notion that new knowledge derives from old wisdom should liberate the writer from a scrupulous fear of snatching the words of others.”

As I approach my writing these days, I become more aware not of the inadequacy of my own ideas, but how much better they become as I riff and expand on them with friends. This past year, I’ve made a habit of setting up calls with creative friends. We catch up and do all the fun stuff, but we also come in with the expectation to be no-judgment sounding boards for one another. Behind a vast majority of my good ideas is a conversation where I got to explore it with someone else. 

As I approach my writing these days, I become more aware not of the inadequacy of my own ideas, but how much better they become as I riff and expand on them with friends.

A few weeks ago, I ran a game of Lasers & Feelings, a “quick” tabletop roleplaying game designed to be played in one night.

Me and four friends sat around a table for four hours and told one long-winding tale about a spaceship crew stopping a rogue captain. It was absurd from start to finish, and it went in directions none of us could have expected. The twist villain was the pilot’s twin brother and the navigator’s ex-lover. And my friend’s character, an android named Andy 3000, heroically sacrificed himself (and everyone else) to save the day. Every dice roll was accompanied by laughter pressing against the walls. It was ridiculous, it was silly, it was fun, and it was, in some respects, a good story.

If we had transcribed the night and tried to publish it, it probably wouldn’t win a Pulitzer. But spinning that little tale together was probably the most fun I’ve ever had telling a story.

Every dice roll was accompanied by laughter pressing against the walls. It was ridiculous, it was silly, it was fun, and it was, in some respects, a good story.

Listen, stories are supposed to be fun. Writing essays and novels can get dull as a Sisyphus-style hell. I love the craft and diving into the minutia of commas, parallelism, and all of that. But it’s worth remembering that stories can be magical and organic. Some of the best storytellers in my life aren’t writers by any stretch of the imagination. You can pull back. Make sure you are enjoying some part of putting a story together. And I don’t think everyone needs to play TTRPGs, but storytelling is more than a lonely, scotch-swirling, vampire-like figure churning out page after page in their study. Ironically, however, that is a great premise for a character to play in Dungeons & Dragons.

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*This is not the first newsletter to reference Roy Peter Clark, the quote in this letter and Clear pebbles off the path both come from Writing Tools: 55 Essential Strategies for Every Writer.

*Special thank you to Kelly Wei and Ashen Pennington for their wonderful insights this week!

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