This goes for fantasy writers across all demographics. If you are a fantasy writer and have not engaged with Dungeons and Dragons in some way – be it a campaign you’ve played with friends or episodes of a campaign you’ve watched – then you need to stop what you’re doing and do just that. You are missing out on a huge part of your fantasy foundations and world-building practices.

What is DnD? Well, I’m glad you asked. Dungeons and Dragons is a tabletop role-playing game created by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson in the 1970s. It is a game where you build your own character, interact with your fellow adventurers, and fight in some epic battles all framed by the wonderful minds of Dungeon Masters (DMs). Dice play a major role (haha sorry, I’ll avoid making more puns) in how scenes and skirmishes play out as it is up to you to roll your character to greatness (or humiliation, or failure, or absolute madness).
But why do fantasy writers need to play or watch DnD? Why can’t we just write and do what we do? Do you want to better understand your characters? Do you want to create better dialogue and interactions with other characters? Do you want to understand the impact chance and luck have on a story? Do you want to grasp the subtleties between character descriptions, their voices, stances, posture, movements and more? Watching DnD will have you wading through the shallow end of the pool, but playing DnD will give you access to the whole ocean of possibilities. Becoming a Dungeon Master, well, I won’t spoil the whole point I’m writing this, so you’ll have to wait and find out what I think about Dungeon Masters.

So let’s start with character building – by playing DnD, you can create a character and see how your chosen design and focus shape their experience in this world. You see how your character engages with the framework of the story world. You get to know how the societal and cultural practices of a place impact your character or how your character is perceived. You get to banter with characters created by your friends, often inciting off-the-cuff exchanges and spontaneous reactions to what is happening. You get to embody your character and actually feel what it would be like to live as them, breathing life into your character and giving them the chance to exist in a space. Sometimes when we have to think about everything in the story world, we can miss moments where our character can be their genuine selves, acting or reacting in a way that we as their maker wouldn’t have intuitively headed in. By playing DnD, we get to not only witness those moments, but live them, act them out, and gain a better understanding of our characters and what makes them authentic.

Trying to perfect our fantasy worlds often makes us forget that imperfections and genuine mishaps are far more believable, funny, and exciting to experience as a reader. This is where the elements of chance and luck come in. If you’ve watched a few DnD campaigns and one-off episodes, you’ll know what I mean. The roll of the dice is life or death for our characters, but life isn’t just living, is it? Life is the ups and downs, the ragers and the moments of stillness, the funniest of times and the saddest of times. There is something so precious about the character most prepared, more skilled and most ready for something failing miserably with a Nat 1 role. These Nat 1 roles, or the low roles across the board, can completely change the trajectory of the story but it will still work out in the end. Sometimes it gives you the perfect way to build character, create drama and tension over this failure, and have a character who shouldn’t have been the one to achieve the next step miraculously learn something or do something that achieves the mission. There is power and beauty and appeal in characters failing throughout the journey, losing now and then, or even stuffing up something so completely there is no chance of continuing down that path without bloodshed and ridicule. They make your story far more interesting than the perfect sequence of events unfolding magically at the feet of your characters.

Dungeon Masters. Oh, Dungeon Masters. Dungeon Masters are gods, detailing every piece of these fantasy spaces, from the landscape to the lean of a cobblestone arch that was erected three generations ago, to the grizzled beard of the innkeeper who is cleaning a stein, watching your character start a fight with the local poker cheat, to the smell of the peculiar bread the old grandmother troll is making next door which has an ever so slightly fermented smell which triggers your character to have an epiphany about the villain your party came across the night before. Dungeon Masters are supreme beings and I am constantly blown away by not only the detail they bring to their campaigns but the NPCs (non-player characters) that live in these settlements. As fantasy writers, we are non-verbal Dungeon Masters, but to truly understand how your world-building comes across to the reader, you should experience a Dungeon Master narrate. Dungeon Masters also must utilise spontaneity and flesh out the NPCs while interacting with the adventurers in the party, making the interactions between the player and DM hilarious and immersive for all. Dungeon Masters command the space, and when the scene gets serious you can feel that tension thicken in the room.

Fantasy writers, don’t feel like you can’t enjoy some DnD from time to time. It will not only be an immensely entertaining way to spend an afternoon, but it will help you get out of your head, remember the wonders of chance and luck and failure, and make your writing richer, more intriguing, and more enjoyable in the long run.