“Yes,”
I say.
Wouldn’t you?
As a parent there are those moments when you wonder
if you should feel proud that your child is following in your footsteps or
horrified that you’ve created a monster. My recent moment like this occurred
last weekend, when my son asked, “Dad, can you help me create a dungeon
adventure?”
Yeah, you heard right, a dungeon, as in Dungeons
& Dragons®.
As a kid in my household it is easy to find out about
D&D, especially if you wander into my den (aka, The Fortress of Solitude).
Even though I haven’t done much role-playing in years all the DM and players
guides, the multi-colored/multi-sided dice and scads of metal figures (enough
to give you lead poisoning if you hang out long enough, according to some of my
friends) are all there waiting, tempting.
I agreed to help my son come up with his adventure,
as long as I could do other things while he worked. As he rolled dice, drew
maps and selected monsters I was reminded how once upon a time D&D was one
of the first places that I (a teen who liked to write) got to experiment with
elements of story and character to entertain others and myself.
In some ways I see role-playing games as a kind of
school for aspiring writers.
·
If you are a dungeon-master, it’s up to the DM to create a world—the setting and backstory
·
If you are a player running a character, you have to decide on their
strengths, weaknesses, what they look like, wear and carry—characterization
·
The characters end up being heroes (or villains) who hopefully have
goals and obstacles to overcome—motivation
and conflict
·
To be satisfying a gaming adventure, like any other story, needs to have
a “triggering event” (in this case a dwarf offering adventure), a beginning,
middle, ending and a “climax” (the point in the adventure when the dinosaur was
found and tried to eat our group). In other words, structure.
·
Hopefully there are also some twists and surprises along the way, as
well as character growth. One surprise in our adventure: We learned the person
hiring our group was my dwarf-cleric’s grandfather.
So when my son’s adventure was ready, we talked his
mom into playing too, and the three of us spent an afternoon exploring a broad
countryside killing monsters and dinosaurs—which I’m sure for any 9-year old is
really the appeal of the game.
Overall,
my son did great running the adventure. His story was fast moving and
entertaining and he didn’t get flustered by difficult players (that would be
me). As we played there were a few moments I had to remind my son that he, as
the game master, didn’t get to decide what my characters did—just like in a
good story where the author shouldn’t be too heavy-handed making the characters
do things that don’t fit the character. The DM also had to remind me to stop on
a few occasions, where I tried to fit things into his world that didn’t belong.
When cooking velociraptor flambé over an open fire I was corrected that I had only
a clay pot—not the aluminum pan my fighter/chef wanted to pull from his
backpack.
It
was fun for me to see my son using his great imagination, reading, using
mathematic tables, rolling dice to add things up, when the distractions of TV,
the Internet and video games are all easier and so readily available. Does he
want to be a writer when he grows up? That remains to be seen. But, for the
time being he is having fun playing with the tools of writing whether he knows
it or not.
My
proudest moment: When our group went to find the one armed dwarf who had hired
us to get our reward, we found our gold, but the one armed man was missing—leaving
only a few clues to where we’d find him next—a cliffhanger my son had included, and a lead-in to a future
adventure. (What we authors would call the sequel,
or maybe book 2 in a trilogy, maybe.)
So
did we kill the marauding allosaurus? Yes, but we were much worse for the wear
after the fight, all hanging on the verge of death.
A word of advice: When using a dwarf covered in rotten
meat as bait to lure a dinosaur into your trap, first verify how fast an
allosaurus can run.
Wishing
you adventures in dungeons deep,
Mark
@manowords
Side
note: In the book Thirty
Years of Adventure: A Celebration of Dungeons & Dragons (D&D
Retrospective) there are stories by some interesting people about how role
playing influenced them: Stephen Colbert, Vin Diesel, and Wil Wheaton. One
interview in it I really enjoyed was that of author, Laurel K. Hamilton. In this book she talks about her
writing role-playing adventures and how it influenced her skills as a writer.
She says:
“It was interesting to watch people go through
something I had created. It showed flaws I hadn’t seen; it showed pitfalls and
things that worked. That was very interesting, to allow live people to go
through part of my made-up world.
It was also very enlightening…. So having real
people going through an imaginary world probably did have an influence on me
and made me more open to listening to my imaginary characters as well.”
