Geek Confession: Dungeons and Dragons made me a better writer!

Prawn · Sep 16, 2006

Wait a minute, perhaps I should post this in the Tech Help forum instead.

Just kidding!

I have been running a Dungeons and Dragons for a number of years, and I am certain it helps with my writing. In a typical game I will plan out the game in scenes. Here's an example:

Scene 1: Heroes called to the king
Scene 2: Task from King: Princess not returned from evening ride
Scene 3: Crime scene. Carriage tracks lead away
Scene 4: Ambush on trail
Scene 5: Tracks lead to powerful Lord's Castle
Scene 6: Negotiation or Infiltration
Scene 7: et cetera

I also routinely describe fight scenes like this one:

Player 1: I charge. I roll an 18 and do 15 points damage.

Me: The dwarf bellows the name of his clan and charges forward, swinging his axe at the Orc. The Orc tries to catch the blow on his shield, but it catches him in the thigh. There is a thunk and a scream as the axe strikes bone.

I mean, I have described thousands of scenes like these. It gives me great practice.

Geeks of the world unite!

Nangleator · Sep 16, 2006

Harpoon and the Stealth Fighter games (F-19 and F-117) saved me tons of research hours if I ever want to write a Clancy-style thriller. (I probably should.)

Orbiter (freeware) taught me, and is teaching me, everything I know about orbital spaceflight.

Willowmound · Sep 16, 2006

Nerds have more fun. We all know it.

Nangleator · Sep 16, 2006

No way, man. The meek shall inherit. The rest of the universe is for the geeks!

Willowmound · Sep 16, 2006

"The geek shall inherit the earth."

Heh heh, now that's funny!

DeadlyAccurate · Sep 16, 2006

I improved drastically when I wrote two d20 adventures for one of the print publishers, because my biggest problem has always been description. Writing an adventure, where you have to give the players descriptions of each room they enter, really helped me see how I was having my characters speak and do everything on a blank canvas.

RedWombat · Sep 16, 2006

It's a good thing--just as long as the writing doesn't READ like a novelization of a D&D adventure. I recall a fair number of fantasy novels that I read as a teenager where you could practically hear the dice in the background.

When you know the THAC0 of your characters, you may have gone too far...

LloydBrown · Sep 16, 2006

D&D has helped me so much in so many ways.

*plotting. Each week, I prepare a mini-story, and I've been doing this on and off for 26 years.
*vocabulary. I was already well-read and would have encountered many of these words elsewhere anyway. However, the early D&D books were treasure troves of odd words and Latin abbreviations (e.g. I learned the difference between et al and e.g, et al).
*characterization. Why do people remember Strahd and not Acererak (the lich from the Tomb of Horrors)? Simple: Acererak was just a big boss monster at the end of a killer dungeon, while Strahd was a great character.
*readers (gamers) come first. No matter how cool you think something is, it's the reaction that counts.
*practice. My first 400,000 words or so written for pay were gaming-related

The benefit I've gained is incalculable, unlike my collection, which is my largest financial asset (ahead of my cars and the equity in my home, sadly enough).

allion · Sep 16, 2006

Being a DM is like being a writer. You have to create the world for the characters, help them see what is going on around them, and you had better be interesting while you do it.

My bag of dice are somewhere around here...

Karen

Gemsong · Sep 16, 2006

I played D&D for years. Loved it. Introduced my spouse to it, thus his obsession with dragons and related. I ended up creating an entire world with magic rules, races and the whole thing.

Thus I am a moron. This thread reminded me I have a ton of research material sitting on a shelf.

It's also given me an idea for a story.

CSI meets The World of Grayhawk (or something like that.)

soloset · Sep 16, 2006

I agree 100%, it's made me much better. I ran a d20 modern campaign for a year and a half recently -- my first turn at DM -- and it was good enough to end up being two full campaigns. We're doing Iron Heroes pirates now (arrr!).

I learned a lot about discipline in particular. It doesn't matter if you don't want to write the game, you still have players showing up at your door on game day who want to play, so get your tush in that chair unless you want to disappoint everyone!

And I thnk I showed my players that a game with a lot of complex, complicated relationships can be a lot of fun. That's where the love is for me, anyway -- the characters, and tormenting them mercilessly.

Your combat descriptions made me laugh, because I do that as a player in our alternate week campaign.

"Okay, I stab him! Stabbity stabbity!" And the poor DM tries to make it sound dramatic. It's the funniest thing; when I'm DM'ing, I'm charismatic, witty, adaptable, and descriptive (and modest), but when I'm a player, my mind just goes blank.

Prawn · Sep 16, 2006

Yes, its true, by responding to this post, you have all outed yourselves as geeks.

Are you all on for a DnD game this week-end?

PattiTheWicked · Sep 16, 2006

I still have a bunch of my old D&D books in a box in the basement. Every once in a while when I feel like geeking out -- because that totally happens to all of us sometimes -- I'll dig one out and read through it. They're very useful for helping you get thru a sticking point in a WIP, even if it's not fantasy.

Last week I pulled out the Bard's Handbook, and it inspired me to add a few paragraphs in my WIP about a secondary character who is a storyteller.

Yay for geekiness!

PeeDee · Sep 16, 2006

I_Shrugged said:
The geek shall inherit the earth.

How nice, they have a helluva time.

He's NOT the Messiah, he's a very naughty boy!

*ahem* sorry.

I once, just once, witnessed a group of LARPing D&D'ers. It was the single most terrifying experience of my life. I have never played D&D, the closest I ever got was that I was passably good at Magic: The Gathering.

However, I have learned a lot of about life from computer games. I think I got all my morals from the Hitman series, or possibly Sam & Max.

allion · Sep 17, 2006

If you have had a bad day, there is nothing better than some Serious Sam to get the stress out.

My D&D books are precious to me. Good memories of a past time.

LeeFlower · Sep 17, 2006

PeeDee, even we laugh at those people.

(Ok, most of us do). I can't speak to whether or not it's made me a better writer, but I've certainly had tons of fun with RPGs. D&D isn't really my cuppa, though. I prefer D20 Modern, the Cascade System, and WoD (or at least I used to prefer world of Darkness... D20's a much more elegant system, though).

Shadow_Ferret · Sep 17, 2006

People still play D&D? I haven't played since 1980. And even then I only played a few games. Enough to create a few characters and then turn around and start a novel based on them.

Anonymisty · Sep 17, 2006

Shadow_Ferret said:
People still play D&D?

I'm in the middle of a game right now - the DM just took someone aside for a private consult, so I figured I'd drop in here. I never figured I'd run across this thread!

soloset · Sep 17, 2006

We play every Sunday. We've been running two campaigns (somehow, I ended up being one of the DMs), alternating two weeks, for a couple of years now. D20 Modern and Iron Heroes, mostly.

We sort of drifted away from DnD proper once we finished our traditional Faerun campaign. Magic just makes things too easy on the players and too hard on the DM. With my first campaign (secret agents and the supernatural), I really liked how much more I could do with the PCs and NPCs in a low magic setting.

I wanted to do Arthurian fantasy for my new campaign, but somehow I ended up agreeing to run a swashbuckling pirate game instead. Arrrr! Now if I can just get my players to start abiding by the Code and buckling the swash instead of thinking like modern monster hunters, everything will be cool.

PeeDee said:
I once, just once, witnessed a group of LARPing D&D'ers. It was the single most terrifying experience of my life. I have never played D&D, the closest I ever got was that I was passably good at Magic: The Gathering.

I've never LARP'ed or seen anyone LARP, but every story I've ever heard about it has ended up being cringe-worthy. Mostly bad DM'ing, I think, that would have been worthy of mockery even around a table.

Snitchcat · Sep 17, 2006

Oh, geez, I remember DnD. Played oh-so-long-ago, hehehehe. But what really helped my writing wasn't DnD, it was playing computer RPGs and insane amounts of reading. Hehehe.

PattiTheWicked · Sep 17, 2006

Watching other people LARP is funny. We once had a campaign going on where there was a player who was... shall we say... a bit more LARPy than everyone else.

At one point he held up an invisible medallion and screamed at the DM, "You see this talisman around my neck? THIS IS WHAT KEEPS MY SOUL, YOU FOOOOOL!"

And the best part was, he was serious. I laughed so hard I nearly peed my pants.

Mark Lazer · Sep 18, 2006

Is anyone going to hit me if I don't know what Dungeons and Dragons is?

If yes, I just say I really like it.

Ardellis · Sep 18, 2006

Geeks rule!

My father bought D&D when it first came out and was DM for my brother and me when we were like 12 and 10. Except for a couple of years in high school, I gamed pretty steadily right through about age 35, when my gaming crowd started moving too far away from each other.

Warhammer was always my favorite fantasy RPG. The broad range of character careers was just to much fun. That and the extremely graphic critical hit table descriptions.

Having a long-term Gamemaster who felt that how the player characters related to each other was as important as the actual adventures was a big influence on the way I look at fantasy stories.

LloydBrown · Sep 18, 2006

I_Shrugged is essentially correct (although the first boxed set appeared in 1974, hardly late 70s). Most of the fun comes from a group of friends engaged in a cooperative social activity.

I disagree entirely on the geek part, however. Vin Diesel's a gamer. He even has his character name tattooed on his stomach. That should be the new tagline--"not just for geeks anymore."

Prawn · Sep 18, 2006

Yep, but those pencil neck geeks have grown up. I have a regular Tuesday night game, have had for years. In my game most of us are married and have children. We have a Ph. D in Linguistics, a Lawyer, a Computer Tech Manager for a Fortune 500 company, an arbitrator for the court. The story lines are mature. It's a different kind of game, and great prep for me as a writer!

Geek Confession: Dungeons and Dragons made me a better writer!

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