For the Love of the Game
Hello all! I took a week off because I had some other issues that needed addressing, but I’m back now.
As you may have guessed from the picture for this entry, I’m going to be talking about Dungeons and Dragons.
I was introduced to the game when I was 12 years old, at a birthday party. We the players really didn’t have any idea what we were doing, though our intrepid Dungeon Master did his best to guide us through the very linear story. I came away from this experience having learned a few things.
Dungeons and Dragons was not the devil worshipping, demon summoning experience that it had kind of been made out to be by some of the people in my small Idaho town.
My budding love of fantasy literature now had a whole new outlet for my imagination (one that was going to cost me an arm and a leg, little did I know).
I really wanted to play more, if for no other reason than to try out and test all the different options available.
That night I discovered a hobby/pass time that is still with me today, more than 30 years later. In the early years of my participation I acted as a player. I would create a character, a process that involved rolling dice to get stats (how much Strength, Dexterity or Intelligence my character had), picking what race my character was (elf, dwarf, human, etc.), and determining what class I was going to play. This choice tended to be the biggest and, if you were playing with an established group, often required some consultation with your fellow party members.
For the few of you that may not have ever played D&D the game essentially breaks down into a party of players that run the characters, and a Dungeon Master that runs literally everything else. There isn’t really a ‘win’ condition beyond the party not wanting to get killed. Thus, when preparing a party, you want to make sure there is a balance of abilities represented so that in any given situation you have at least one or more characters that can tackle various problems.
As a player I often took the classes that nobody else really wanted to play. Instead of being a sword swinging fighter able to crash through enemy lines, or a spell slinging wizard capable of destroying many enemies at once, I usually played a druid, or a cleric, both of which tended to get assigned to the duty of healing the party when they were hurt (the druid was more of a fighter just not as focused). I didn’t mind, because my joy came more from the comradery and social interaction I got from the game, not in how many gnolls I could kill during a single combat.
Eventually though, I started writing adventures of my own. The main catalyst of this was a long road trip my family took between my sophomore and junior years of high school. We spent many days on the road in a rented RV, and during much of that time I sat hunched over a thick notebook where I began my first efforts at worldbuilding and dungeon design. They were, to be polite, really crappy. But it taught me that I wanted to be the one behind the screen someday. The one who controlled ALL of the characters in the whole world, with the exception of a 4 to 6 player group.
Before the end of that year some of my friends had bought me my first couple of core books. These large volumes were chock full of rules, stats, diagrams. Pretty much they were the rules. Technically there were 3 of these; The Dungeon Masters Guide where all of the behind the scenes rules and magic items of the world could be found by the Dungeon Master to help them build their world. Next came the Players Handbook where all the rules for creating and playing a character were found. Finally you “needed” the Monster Manual, where the vast and diverse cast of enemies that existed in the world could be found. I put the needed in quotes because originally, I didn’t have the Monster Manual.
By the time I moved out of my parents house I had switched full time from being a player to being a DM. I had started to hone my craft of telling stories and setting scenes for my players. In my early 20’s I really started making big strides, writing full length adventures and collecting a multitude of books (including many editions of the core books) and supplemental materials so that I could bring my worlds more fully to life.
One of the tricks of being someone who not only is willing to DM, but who has enough experience to do it well, is that you can almost ALWAYS find a group of players if you look hard enough. There are a number of reasons, especially in those days, that people choose not to go down the road of being a DM. Only in the last maybe 8 years or so have I seen this trend truly reversing itself, as D&D becomes more and more mainstream. Lots of people these days are ready and willing to DM.
Around the time I turned 33, I spent a few months unemployed. It was during this time that I created sort of my Mangum Opus. A huge sprawling world with 30,000 years of history. Ancient empires, hidden tombs, secret societies, populations of monsters, and thousands and thousands of sites where glorious treasures and terrifying traps awaited only the bravest adventurers. I still use the world, or at least parts of it, in my games today. A kind of central group of characters from this world actually make appearances in all my games these days, and may even have counterparts in my novels (wink).
The reason I chose to ‘blog’ about D&D is that it is, on the whole, the place where I learned to BE a storyteller. Or at least a good storyteller. When I sat down to write Eyes in the Dark I did so secure in the knowledge that I COULD tell a good story. A lot of the mechanics of writing were still eluding me at the time, but I’ve learned and grown, and even now I’m working on my follow up novel. In the end I owe a great deal to that first game of D&D I played all those many years ago. It’s a journey I look forward to continuing.