Tag: Dungeons and Dragons

The Read/Write Report – January 2023

It has been a while since I did one of these posts, but the new year seems like a great time to jump back into it. Here’s what I’ve been up to lately.

Vacation

At the end of 2022, I took what is probably the longest vacation I’ve taken in the past 15 years—three whole weeks. The last two weeks of the year were “stay-cation” around the house, and in the first week of 2023 my family escaped the snow and cold of Minnesota and went down to Florida.

I stayed fairly busy during my time at home, and we did quite a bit of sightseeing and beach time while in Florida, but I was able to do about twice as much writing as I typically do. Most of this went into Razor Mountain, but I couldn’t entirely resist poking at side projects and some potential future blog stuff. But I’ll talk about those things another day (maybe).

New Year’s Resolutions

I generally don’t put much stock in New Year’s resolutions, but I’m trying one this year. I’m not a person who tends to collect many possessions, with a couple notable exceptions. Firstly, as you might expect from a writer, I tend to collect a lot of books. I have a couple shelves full of physical volumes I haven’t yet read, and a handful of e-books on the Kindle.

I’m also a sucker for video games and, to a lesser extent, board games. There are a lot of inexpensive video games these days, especially with various services competing to offer the best sales. So I wish-list a lot of games and buy them when they’re cheap.

My not-too-serious resolution for the year is to not buy any new books or games, and try to work through the backlog that I already own. We’ll see how that goes.

Recent Reading

As usual, I have ongoing bedtime reading with my kids. We finished Startide Rising and moved on to The Uplift War, the last book in David Brin’s first “uplift trilogy.” It has been interesting, because these were formative books that I read in my teenage years, but I actually remember very little about them. I’m certainly seeing things that I missed when I was young.

On my own, I’ve started a slim little volume called Invisible Cities, by Italo Calvino. The book is framed as conversations between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan, where Polo describes the many cities that he’s visited in his travels.

I’ve been sitting on an idea for a fictional city for years, but I’ve never quite figured out whether it fits into a novel, a TTRPG, or something else. Invisible Cities is one of the pieces of fiction that I’m investigating to find some inspiration with my own fictional city.

Waiting for the Secret World

In November, a Kickstarter project popped up on my radar: The Secret World TTRPG.

The Secret World was originally an MMORPG released in 2012, back when people still believed that a new game would someday overthrow World of Warcraft. It was moderately successful on launch, but it was a little clunky, didn’t get a lot of updates, and slowly lost players over time. In 2017 it was relaunched with some new systems as the free-to-play Secret World Legends. That iteration was equally unsuccessful, and it eventually went into maintenance mode while the developers moved on to other projects in order to keep paying the rent.

Secret World, in both its iterations, was a very strange MMORPG. While the gameplay itself never really shined, it had a fantastic story, amazing settings, great voice acting, and some interesting puzzle design that was often a bit like an ARG. It’s a little cosmic horror, a little X-Files, with some Jules Verne and The Matrix thrown in for good measure. It still has a cult following, and those that love it stick around because of the story.

A TTRPG seems like a perfect fit for this kind of rich, expansive setting, so I’m excited to see what Star Anvil come up with. A few people have voiced concerns that it will be using the Dungeons and Dragons 5E rules, which may not be a perfect fit for this style of game. However, that’s the most popular TTRPG around, so I can’t really fault a small indie studio with a relatively unknown property for hedging their bets.

The current goal for releasing the book is October 2023, and over-funded Kickstarter projects aren’t exactly known for meeting their deadlines. , the project got me itching for some science-fiction or science-fantasy TTRPGs. To scratch that itch, I dug into two other games: Shadowrun 6e, and Cyberpunk Red.

Shadowrun

I’ll be honest. Shadowrun 6e seems like a mess. Both gameplay and setting feel like they took the “kitchen sink” approach, with a lot of different fantasy ideas and sci-fi ideas all fighting for attention, while nothing really stood out to me. Some of the ideas, like big dice pools, seem fun. But, having never played Shadowrun, I felt like the core book really didn’t give me a good feel of what it would be like to play, and I didn’t get enough of the setting to feel comfortable running a game. I think any core rule book should have snippets of gameplay or an example adventure, and this had neither.

I was a little leery of spending any more money on the game, so I tried looking in the…somewhat legally gray areas of the internet…for campaign books. The 6e adventure books I found were still frustratingly vague about actual gameplay, and seemed to largely eschew the mission-based play described in the core book.

By the time I got through the book I was fairly irritated, and I went down the rabbit hole of reddit posts and forums. As far as I can tell, Shadowrun players spend about half of their time debating which version of Shadowrun to use, or which bits to cannibalize from all the different versions. 6e doesn’t seem to be popular. And I started regretting purchasing the book at all.

Cyberpunk Red

To soothe myself, I moved on to another venerable franchise, one that recently had a very over-hyped video game made in its image: Cyberpunk. The latest iteration of Cyberpunk is called Cyberpunk Red. It is also quite recent, and interestingly, it seems to have been made alongside the development of the video game.

One of the challenges of the game’s namesake genre is that it was popularized in the 80s, and in some ways it has become retro-futurism. Cyberpunk Red takes an interesting approach to modernization. Rather than rewrite history, Red moves it forward. In the “Time of the Red,” decades have passed since previous Cyberpunk games (and their outdated references). The world has changed. It’s still an alternate-history version of our world where technology advanced faster than it did for us, but letting a few decades pass allowed the creators to change the setting so that it feels like it’s exploring and expanding upon today’s problems, not the ones that were relevant thirty or forty years ago. It’s an elegant solution.

It may not be fair to compare Cyberpunk Red to Shadowrun, but I read them back to back, so I’m going to do it anyway. Cyberpunk Red pretty much addresses all of the things that irritated me about Shadowrun. Where Shadowrun is all over the place with fantasy and sci-fi tropes, Cyberpunk Red is laser-focused on its cyberpunk setting. There are lots of character options: you can play as a rock star, mid-level executive, or freelance journalist, as well as the soldier and hacker types you’d expect from the setting. You can outfit yourself with all sorts of cybernetic hardware. But everything fits nicely in the setting. Everything seems to make sense.

The book includes a thousand-foot view of world history and geopolitics, but it focuses on a single city. This overall focus makes it feel like Cyberpunk Red can dig a lot deeper into the details of the setting. Even better, it includes a meaty section on how to run the game, some fiction to get a feel for the setting. It doesn’t include an example adventure, but there are a couple small free ones easily found online.

Back to the Grind

With my long vacation at an end, I’m back to work, kids are back at school, and we’re getting comfortable with our routines again.

My main writing project remains Razor Mountain, and I look forward to finishing it in 2023. After that, I’m going to have to think about what to do with this blog—I’ve been working on that book in some form for almost the entire life of Words Deferred. It’ll be an exciting new adventure!

For now, I still have a ways to go, and I’m back in my normal writing routine. Look for a new chapter next week.

Writing Lessons from Dungeons and Dragons

I recently wrapped up a Dungeons and Dragons campaign that I’ve been running for over a year. This is the longest that I’ve run a group, and it’s been a fun experience with a lot of lessons learned along the way.

Many of those lessons are specific to D&D and to table-top role-playing games in general, but I think there are a few that apply to writing fiction.

What’s this D&D Thing?

Even if you’ve never played Dungeons and Dragons, you may be at least vaguely familiar with it through the various ways it has popped into the broader cultural consciousness over the years: the 80s cartoon, the references in Stranger Things, or the myriad video games that draw from it directly or indirectly.

If you’re not familiar, D&D may seem obscure and confusing. It’s often portrayed in pop media as the sort of thing that obsessive nerds obsess over (and they certainly can be, on occasion). But these games really aren’t as cryptic or complicated as they’re often made out to be.

Dungeons and Dragons is the most popular table-top RPG. Table-top RPGs (or TTRPGs) are simply games where players collaborate to create a shared fiction, with rules. Depending on the game, the rules may be extremely complex or very simple. They may or may not have some element of chance — usually involving dice. Ultimately, a TTRPG is about creating a story with some friends.

Many TTRPGs have a special position: a player who runs or otherwise facilitates the game. In D&D, she’s called the “Dungeon Master,” in other games it’s often the “Game Master.” It’s often the responsibility of this person to provide the setting and the scenario, while the other players bring characters who will move about and interact in that scenario.

Now that we have a baseline understanding, I want to talk about what I learned playing these games that can be applied to writing fiction.

Lesson #1 — Give Your Audience What They Want

Dungeons and Dragons is typically played in Tolkien-esque high-fantasy settings, but there are other settings you can use, and TTRPGs in pretty much every genre. The campaign I just finished is called “Curse of Strahd,” and it’s based on classic monster horror: vampires, werewolves, witches, ghosts, and even a sort of Frankenstein’s monster.

However, it’s important to realize that genre goes beyond these “which-shelf-is-it-on” kind of classifications. In TTRPGs, many groups focus on combat and the rules-heavy play of slinging spells and swinging swords. But you can also craft scenarios where the players are solving mysteries, or perhaps socializing with the movers and shakers of the world, trying to convince them to take particular action. Some groups may be interested in romance or sex in their fiction (while others will be vehemently uninterested).

Of course, few groups want only one thing, like pure combat or nothing but puzzles or social encounters. Furthermore, each of your players are likely to have different preferences. You have to balance everyone’s needs and provide a variety of experiences to keep everyone happy.

For a game master, talking with your group of players and understanding what they want to get out of the game makes a big difference when trying to craft a setting and scenario that they’ll enjoy playing.

For an author, you have to know your audience. Know what you like, and make sure you’re writing something you enjoy. Beyond that, who are you writing for? Can you imagine an “ideal reader” of your story — the theoretical person for whom the story is perfect? Can you distill a small list of things that you’re trying to give your audience?

Lesson #2 — The World is Always in Motion

An RPG called Dungeon World introduced me to the idea of “fronts.” They’re like the story version of weather fronts — something that blows in periodically and ushers in change. Fronts are a way to keep track of the things that are happening in the background of a game world.

For example, maybe the players are content to hang out in a comfy town for a few days, carousing and spending their treasure. Meanwhile, you know that the northern kingdom is preparing to invade the southern kingdom, and the king of the dragons is awakening from his thousand-year sleep deep under the mountain.

In a TTRPG, you may be the game master, but you do not control the players or their characters. Still, the world around them is a living, breathing thing. Stuff happens, whether they’re involved or not. So when they take their week-long vacation, the northern kingdom may be marching their armies. Perhaps Dragon Peak erupts, and the great dragon king takes flight, turning green valleys and hamlets into scorched wasteland.

There is a cost to inaction. Further, there may be no “right” choice for your characters. If they do one thing, their inaction elsewhere will still have a cost.

In your fiction, your characters may not cooperate, just like those players in your table-top game. Characters have to have agency in the world and make choices in keeping with their personality. If characters are forced into a plot where they have to do things that they don’t “naturally” want to do, you end up with soap-opera plots where the characters are just dolls being shoved around in predestined sequences of events.

Sometimes this can work to your advantage. The character can ignore their noble destiny and go do what they want. The world won’t wait for them though, and those fronts keep on moving. Villains have their own agendas, and aren’t about to accommodate the good guys. Whenever your characters are doing something in the foreground, things should still be happening in the background.

Lesson #3 — Good Ideas Can Come Out of Improv

TTRPGs are, in many ways, improv games. The GM can prepare and plan, but only so long as they can guess what the players might do. Inevitably, players will come up with unexpected and often creative solutions to problems that the GM couldn’t prepare for.

Likewise, the players may know the setting, but they don’t know the scenario like the GM does. They get only the information they can glean from the GM’s description and perhaps some lucky die rolls. Then they have to act on that information as best they can.

Often, the best and most memorable moments will come from a player doing something completely unexpected and off-the wall in a tense situation. As a GM, sometimes you just have to smile and throw away all your plans, because a player thought of something better.

When it comes to writing fiction, I’m an unabashed planner, but even the most organized and prepared of us have to do some improvisation sooner or later. If a scene feels wrong, we sometimes have to stop and ask ourselves, “is this really what that character would do?” Or perhaps we just feel there’s something missing, some spark of life. We may have to try a few different ideas to make something interesting happen, not knowing which will work out.

Lesson #4 — Feedback is Important

When running a TTRPG, it’s important to be excited by the story you’re trying to tell to your players. It’s also important to watch how those players react to that story. Are they invested, working together, trying to overcome impossible odds? Or are they distracted, disinterested, or apparently struggling to figure out how to participate?

Running a good campaign involves bringing in elements that you think your various players will enjoy. It also requires that you gauge whether those things actually worked the way you expected them to. Sometimes this is as simple as watching how they play and reading the room. Sometimes you have to explicitly ask if everyone is getting what they want out of the game.

This is the flip-side of lesson #1. As you’re writing, it helps to think about your “ideal reader,” and what will entertain your audience. Once you’ve got some draft pages, you can actually go out to that audience (at least some small bit of it) and ask what they think.

Family, friends, beta readers, writing groups or critique circles — however you can get it, feedback is vital. A book is a big project, and it’s almost inevitable that each of us will forget something, make mistakes, include a plot hole here or there. Feedback followed by careful editing can turn a good manuscript into a great book.

Interested in TTRPGs?

That’s all for the writing lessons. Perhaps in another year of running sessions I’ll find a few more to share.

If all of this talk about table-top RPGs piqued your interest, now is a great time to get into the hobby. It’s more popular today than it has ever been.