How Roleplaying Prepared Me for Writing Fiction

It wasn't until I began interacting with authors outside of my close friends that I realized how much those hours spent into the wee hours of the night—huddled over dice, fueled by Red Vines and Mountain Dew—made my transition to writing fiction oh-so-much easier. Here are some of my insights that might help others.

What is roleplaying, anyway?

Veteran roleplayers can skip this section. 🎲🎲 For everyone else, read on!

Roleplaying is exactly how it sounds: you play the role of someone else. Roleplaying games gamify this concept around structured rules, such as character generation and combat mechanics, usually with a leveling system that grants increased power to reflect the characters' increasing experience in their chosen professions.

There are hundreds of different roleplaying systems. Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) is the best known, so we'll use it as the benchmark.

An ideal roleplaying group consists of 5-7 people. While groups can certainly be larger, more people means less time each person has to play and a greater chance to become bored. 4 players seems to be the sweet spot. One person is the Dungeon Master (or Game Master in other systems), the rest are Players.

The Dungeon Master bears the bulk of the work. They prepare the campaign—or storyline—ahead of time, which may take hours or weeks of preparation. This includes coming up with one or more settings, populating the world with people for the Players to interact with—known as Non-Player Characters (NPCs), designing enemy encounters, treasure tables (loot!), world maps, dungeon maps, and anything else they feel will add to the Player experience. During the game, they present this much like a storyteller, using words and (optionally) visual cues to immerse the Players in their fabricated world. They play everyone in the world who aren't the Player Characters (PCs), using different voices, accents, personalities, and any other acting skills they can scrounge to make the world feel truly alive. The best DMs entice the PCs into their campaign while still allowing them to freely explore the world. This means sometimes setting aside the hard work they put into their campaign to satisfy an ad-hoc side adventure or three and generally going with the flow, rather than forcing the Players down a pre-determined path.

Players inarguably have the easiest role. Each player creates a single character with unique attributes (strength, dexterity, intelligence, etc), skills, personalities, history, and goals. A Player's job is to set aside their own personality and slip into the skin of their character, interacting with other Players as if they were their characters. They roll dice when the DM tells them to, adding a random element to actions the players take, which increases the drama and tension.

Lastly is the group responsibility. PCs may argue or fight, but the Players themselves need to realize it's just a game, as does the DM, who is also the referee. The DM may use world elements to diffuse conflict they feel will erode the player experience. This includes adjusting—or balancing—the world itself so it's genuinely challenging for the PCs, but not so deadly that they don't have a fighting chance.

Put it all together and it's a recipe for a roaring, hilariously good evening.

My experience

I've played every edition of D&D ever released, except for the most recent 6th ed, which is sitting on a shelf waiting for my adult kids to have a little free time. I've played almost every Palladium game in existence, including Robotech, TMNT, Heroes Unlimited, Ninjas and Superspies, Rifts, and Palladium Fantasy. I've played and DMed in equal measure, having run fantasy and contemporary campaigns that spanned over a decade. I've created more characters than I can count, but remember most of them fondly. My characters have ranged from plucky gnome wizards to blind ancient martial art masters to cyborgs to mutant tigers to over-the-top superheroes.

And, throughout it all, I learned. My first character was really just me rolling dice. My second had a slightly different personality. My third had a different voice and darker motivation, and so on. Running my first campaign was a bit of a boring disaster. My second had a more interesting plot. My third was too loose, my fourth too tight. I initially lost patience with Players when they went off my painstakingly crafted script, but later learned to embrace those unscripted moments because those were what the Players really remembered. I learned to let go of my plans and adapt on-the-fly to the Players', incorporate it into the world, and make those organic events part of the campaign.

Break it down

Right. So, what does any of this have to do with writing? Some of it may be obvious, but others not so much. So, here goes.

World building

This is probably the most obvious. DMs create worlds for Players to live in. Authors do the same for readers. When I sat down for my first novel world building exercise, it felt like winding back the clock to my college days when creating a new campaign for my friends.

Characters

Another no-brainer. What brings a roleplaying world alive are vibrant characters who surprise and delight the Players. Each character has different attributes, skills, personality traits, and motivations that make them unique. My first novel characters were carryovers from a roleplaying campaign. I already had their character sheets and the world; all I had to do was set the campaign course and let them go. Creating new characters for my first unique series was simply more of the same. Knowing what a good "balanced party" looked like made creating characters with appropriately complementing and conflicting personality traits a natural exercise.

Settings

Roleplaying is 98% verbal. Every time the PCs enter a new area, the DM has to describe just enough to make the Players feel like they're there, but not so much that they're overwhelmed with excessive details that detract from their enjoyment.

Writing is the same. The reader's only view into the world are the words on the page. Every word needs to have a purpose because too many can slow the story down, but not enough can make it difficult to feel immersed.

Pacing

One pitfall of writing is that, while you're doing it, your only audience is yourself. There's no one to squirm or get bored or sigh heavily when a character is going off on an interesting, but wholly unrelated, soliloquy that doesn't push the plot forward in the slightest.

Not so when DMing. The audience is on your couch, hanging on your every word, and they will wander off if every step of the campaign isn't engaging—and engaging to everyone. I learned the hard way how to keep things moving, what engaged players, and what turned them off.

That same sense carried over to my books. I can innately tell when the story is stalling and needs a little kick to liven things up, or if the characters really and truly need a break to regroup and gather their thoughts. Both are necessary to create a sustainable and engaging pace.

Action

Similar to settings, everything that happens in a roleplaying game must be described to the players. Action scenes that are delivered with energy, creativity, and vivid descriptions keep Players on the edge of their seats.

Writing action scenes, as you can imagine, came easy because I was already used to breaking them down into short, exciting segments that were clear and easy to follow.

Balance

Ever read a story where the protagonist defeated an ultra-powerful foe that, frankly, they shouldn't in any universe have been able to defeat? Or worse, where the protagonist was so overpowered that it was difficult to see how they could lose?

That's balance—an issue DMs face every single session. If the enemies are too powerful, the party dies—or the DM needs to introduce an often unbelievable miracle to pull them out, which almost never sits well. If the enemies are too easy, Players get bored and/or it robs from their sense of accomplishment.

Same goes for writing. Pitting the protagonist against truly impossible odds can make readers want to give up for another book that sounds more plausible, regardless of what "cool save" the author has hidden behind their back to save the day at the last moment. Make it too easy and the reader may wonder why they should continue when the path to victory is obvious.

For me, balancing protagonists to antagonists felt like a natural step right from my first book.

Winging it

The thing about DMing is that the most significant characters in the story aren't under your control. You can't tell them what to do, how to react, what they like or don't like, or to not poke that sleeping nine-headed dragon because it will crush them and everyone they ever knew into dust. Players gonna do what Players gonna do. Trying to make them conform takes control away from the Players and creates a lousy game experience. It took too long for me to learn that lesson. Once I stopped fighting the Players, however, and instead went with their shenanigans despite my carefully planned adventure, everyone had more fun—including me—and the overall story became better because of it.

The worst-kept secret among authors is that characters tend to take on a life of their own. This can be singularly frustrating to a plotter who's spent months making sure all 1200 subplots tie together like a boatswain's knot, only to watch their characters try to unravel it with a hacksaw in every. Damned. Chapter. The natural solution is to simply force the characters to comply. In my experience, this disrupts the story's natural flow, making it feel fake and less engaging.

DMing has taught me that the best way to influence the characters down a certain path is to set the scene so they will want to do it. Then I simply write the scene and see what happens. Does it always work? HAHAHAHA! No. But I often find that, even if they didn't do what I wanted them to, the characters did what needed to be done—what they should have done, if I'm writing it truthfully. My job is then to evaluate how it affects the rest of the story and adjust accordingly. In almost every case, doing so has only made the story better, while preserving the natural flow.

Being "the world"

Yeah. Player Characters aside, the DM is the world. Every person, every setting, every monster. And they do it all in real time: switching personalities every other sentence, slipping from character to narrator to another character in the blink of an eye. Adjusting world events in their head in reaction to Player dialogue. Making stuff up to fit the conversation, then tracking it for future events. It's a lot.

You can imagine, then, how nice it felt to sit down with some writing software and take as much time as I needed to do exactly the same thing I'd had to do in real time. Writing is a luxurious stroll on the beach by comparison. In a way, I look forward to DMing again because I have trouble now remembering how I managed it all.

Drat, I've gone soft. =[

Conclusion

Every author's journey is different. Does my roleplaying experience make me a better writer than those who haven't? Impossible to say. But I can say 100% that it made my entry into the craft much easier, and that I feel very fortunate to have that experience under my belt—not to mention the wonderful friends I made along the way.