Recently I’ve been working on a Dungeons and Dragons campaign to run with a few friends. It hasn’t been the greatest thing I’ve written by a long shot. I put most of it together while I was flying from Georgia to Oregon, taking breaks to charge my laptop and conceal it from those hideous sky-bitches who always want me to turn off my lovely toys. It wasn’t the best environment for writing, and it shows. The language is poor, I frequently change the names of places mid-paragraph, there are spelling errors and failures to account for certain bits of casaulity. The encounters are hastily assembled and I have no idea how they’ll play out. The story itself won’t hold up to close examination, and some of my attempts to account for decisions the players make are sure to backfire. And yet I cannot bring myself to change it.
I won’t go into the details of the campaign since people who may participate in this game do read this blog occasionally, but I want to talk about why I don’t care that it’s not perfect, why I don’t plan on revising or improving it and why I’m so excited to see how it plays out. When I was young, in third grade or so, I was hooked on Choose Your Own Adventure books. I spent hours and hours reading the Lone Wolf series of books, laboring over choices and doing my all to make the “correct” decisions. I’d labor over paths in more conventional Choose Your Own Adventure books and even tried my hand at writing my own. But however the books turned out I always felt they were guiding me down a singular path, and as time went on I realized that they were kind of bad. And when I began work on my own campaign I didn’t want it to be that way.
The writing in Dungeons and Dragons campaigns has never been particularly interesting. In fact it’s often kind of laughable. The campaign I gutted in order to make my own contained threads of story that didn’t make sense, self-serious and turgid prose and the character development and depth of a porkpie hat. The enemies are evil because they’re evil, less self-serving and more mentally ill. Ideal-less goblinoids inexplicably provide adventurer with nice, guiltless fodder. I didn’t want to tell that sort of story, the kind where faceless foes fight against good guys who win because they’re good and bad guys lose because they’re bad. I didn’t want to tell a dumb story. I didn’t want to lead a band of Mary Sues to an easy victory. I wanted players to feel challenged and enjoy the game as they played it.
Listening to the Penny-Arcade D&D podcasts was something a revelation for me towards this goal. When I heard the way Chris Perkins seamlessly wove the actions of his players into narrative by accepting even the dumbest ideas into an investigative effort he made a story I actually wanted to hear. In college I’d decapitated my fair share of orc and heard many a Monty Python fan’s idea of what was funny to do in a gaming context. It never really grabbed me, that sort of wish-fulfillment onanism, as far as narrative experience was concerned. But the moment I saw that there were players willing to laugh at themselves, my kind of nerds, I realized how amazing Dungeons and Dragons’ capacity for collective narrative was.
It seemed less like a silly bit of wish fulfillment and more like a group of people legitimately enjoying themselves. This is not to denigrate the people who quote Monty Python and love Monty Hall D&D, it’s just that these aren’t people I like spending time with. Listening to funny people play the game, I could imagine me and my friends from high school sitting down and getting drunk off of one of our parent’s liquor cabinets. I could smile and speculate at the fun we could’ve had, had we tried the Points of Light during our youth. But these forbidden feelings, like my repressed homosexuality, needed to be buried deep within my subconconscious, then engaged in safe places, like orgy clubs with a higher number of men then women, so that they could be at the very least partially resolved. So I did what any rational person would do. I joined a D&D game where I wouldn’t have to DM.
It wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t great. There were organizational problems, no sense of place or story, and I seemed to be one of two people interested in actually portraying a character in the game. It was the sort of group that I’d more or less wanted to avoid. I appreciated the opportunity and enjoyed my time there, but when the group as a whole disintegrated it was hard to feel particularly bad about it. The one thing that game did do for me was whet my whistle for playing Dungeons and Dragons with people I knew better, people I felt would appreciate the game in the same way that I did. And so I set out to write something that could amuse these people.
But my friends hate my writing. When they read it they always seem to react to it in ways I didn’t intend, taking offense at embelishments and interpretting fiction loosely based on fact as perceived truth. So when I sat down and read over my draft, finding frequent gaps and poor choices, I realized I’d made the perfect adventure for them.
By making a piece of writing I wasn’t terrible fond of, one which at times even endeavored to make fun of itself, I’d make the perfect playground for my friends. Together we could explore, interpret and dismantle the various narrative frameworks I’d worked to coonstruct. At last I’d have my captive audience, and they their input into my asinine stories, but we’d both be fine with them dismantling and reworking them simply by merit of their loose and open nature. By refusing to refine and labor over the narrative I made it into something that could be more easily played with, subverted and turned into an active, participatory story about warring gods, fearful ignorant people and racism.
That might’ve almost been spoiler territory.
But regardless, trying to think of how to write for Dungeons and Dragons was in and of itself a challenge. And while I’d hardly go so far as to make grandoise claims about the improvements writing a D&D campaign have made to my own writing I would say that I take the whole process less seriously after thinking of it in terms of how I can actively adjust my authorship to fit my audience. It is, in many ways, anathema to the manner in which traditional creative writing education taught men to write. In creative writing we’re told to ignore our audience, to consider them completely passive and potentially non-existent, but to make a good Dungeons and Dragons campaign you have to see the readers as literal participants in the story and plan for their responses and present yourself with general purpose outs so that you can accomodate the crazy shit they devise on the fly. It’s a valuable set of lessons, and I’m glad that I’ve tried my hand and creating the loose framework for a story for my friends to participate. It makes me feel a little bit like I’ve improved in my approach to my writing. Instead of operating in a vacuum I’m thinking a little bit more, even unconsciously, of ways to dick with my readers. And while I’m not sure it’ll show in this particular venue for my writing I look forward to bringing this newfound playful antagonism to everything I write in the future.
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