Performing the Tale: On Telling Story as a Dungeon Master // Jeremy Luke Hill and Ethan Hill
Aspart of our guest-edited month, “D&D and Creativity,” JeremyLuke Hill and Ethan Hill have created a collaborative piece navigating the differences between storytelling as a Dungeon Master and as a fiction writer.
My eldest son Ethan, aged 13, is sitting at my mother’s dining room table. He has the basic tools of the Dungeon Master in front of him.No terrain or models. Just pencil and paper, dice, and codecs.
It’s a beautiful summer evening on Manitoulin Island, and he’s just finished rolling characters for my mother (Nana) and her husband (SirAlex). Nana is playing a Dragonborn. Sir Alex is playing a dwarf. I’m playing my regular half-elf (since replaced by a custom-raceCentaur). Ethan is playing a Goblin (a custom-race based mostly on Gnomes). He’s named it Skarsnik, after the character from the Warhammer fantasy universe.
After a break to refresh everyone’s drinks (whiskey for the adults, pop for Ethan), he’s now trying to explain to Nana and Sir Alex how aD&D campaign actually works. It’s not easy. They’ve both entered their seventh decade without coming into close contact with tabletop RPGs, having grown up in social spaces where D&D implied devil worship, suicide, and (most worrisome of all) socially awkward people who wore too much black to be entirely trusted.
It’s like telling a story, Ethan says. But you get to decide what some of the characters do. And some stuff gets decided by chance.
Which isn’t really sufficient to satisfy their curiosity, but since there’s no way to explain it better than doing it, he starts the campaign. It isn’t long before they’re getting the hang of it—developing their characters and discovering how to roleplay within them. They start experimenting with how much they can add to the story and how much to risk with their characters. The evening is successful. No characters are harmed in the making of the campaign. There is treasure and glory for all.
And afterward, there’s also time to debrief the experience. Nana and Sir Alex (both artists of different kinds—she a visual artist, he a musician) express interest in the art of storytelling through a D&D campaign. They want to know how Ethan finds it different than writing regular stories (which he also does). And although he doesn’t have much to say at the time, he does have some ideas by the time the opportunity comes to write this essay.
There are a couple of differences between writing a story and telling a story in D&D, he says. First, when telling a story in D&D, you have to predict what players might do. The story has to be flexible because players don't always follow the nice thought-out path you put in front of them.
WhichI’ve always thought is a key distinction when it comes to telling story through a role-playing campaign. When I write for readers, I’m certainly concerned with how they’ll react to my story, but I don’t have to worry about them changing the plot on me. My task is to use plot, character, and dialogue to produce a certain effect in them, and although I may not be successful, there is no risk that they’ll hijack the narrative. They might put the book down, or tell someone else how much they hated it, but there’s not much else they can do.
ADM, however, needs to tell a story that is flexible enough, and to tell it nimbly enough, to account for the unexpected choices the other characters might make. In other words, the DM might be the primary author of the story, but it’s really a collective narrative, at least to some degree. And the more the other players are involved in the story, the more collective it becomes. In fact, the better the story, the more likely it will engage the players and encourage them to respond in creative, unexpected ways. The better the story, the less control over it the DM has, and the more flexible and responsive the DM needs to be in the telling of it.
Second, you have to make a story that your players will enjoy and that their characters can fit into for the story to make sense.
Which is to say that the collective nature of tabletop RPG storytelling forces the writer to understand the audience differently. The writer generally accounts for audience only in the sense of demographic. TheDM needs to account for a very specific audience, and must do so on at least two levels: the human beings who are sitting around the table, and the fictional characters being played in the campaign.
This means that the DM needs to account for things like how experienced the actual players are (because it would be no fun for Nana and SirAlex if Ethan threw them into a long, complicated, dangerous campaign on their first time out). Or how experienced the characters are(because although I’ve played enough to enjoy a serious campaign, my character might not be at a high enough level to do things thatEthan’s character can). It means accounting for the personalities of the players (Nana probably wouldn’t like anything too gory or horrific), and their characters (Sir Alex’s dwarf, with its backstory hatred of humans, might need some careful storytelling in certain situations). And so forth.
Ina sense, then, characters no longer serve to further a narrative arc.Instead the narrative arc serves as a space for the expression of character, and a good narrative becomes one that allows the characters (and the people playing them) to express themselves in interesting and authentic ways. My goal as a DM is not to accomplish a certain storyline so much as it is for the characters to express themselves within the outlines of a story arc. A successful story is one that feels suited to the characters who inhabit it.
It also helps to act out scenes sometimes, to add sound effects and other things to jazz up the story. Otherwise, the players might get bored or lose interest.
To write for readers is always a performance of a kind, but being a DM involves far more immediate performative elements. This is obviously because it’s an oral storytelling form, but it’s also because aDM needs to elicit engagement and response from the other players in order for the story to be successful. A traditional storyteller can get through a performance, even a bad one that fails to captivate the audience, with the story at least complete. But, the DM needs audience engagement for the story to progress.
This dependence on audience engagement requires the DM not only to tell an exciting story, but also to tell the story well, to perform it in away that relates to the other players. That engages them emotionally and intellectually. That makes the narrative interesting, challenging, surprising, amusing, or frightening enough that it elicits a response and furthers the campaign. Success is when the other players become immersed enough to perform their characters.Where it’s not merely one storyteller performing a tale, but all the players contributing to the larger narrative.
The terrifying part for the DM is that you can never guarantee that you’ll get this kind of engagement. You can write a great campaign that tries to be flexible enough to account for player choices, tries to incorporate elements that suit the personalities of the specific players and their characters, and tries to create a fascinating performance. But, if the players themselves aren’t willing to participate, the whole thing can still flop.
All of which brings us back to Nana and Sir Alex, and to their question about how telling story as a DM differs from telling story as a writer. The answer lies (at least partly) with them. Sure, their introduction to D&D was to some degree based on the fact thatEthan led them on a good campaign that was well-suited to them as players. It was a short, simple, fun story that didn’t expect too much experience from either player or character. But the success of the evening was equally dependent on Nana and Sir Alex being willing to put aside their assumptions about D&D and engage with the campaign.
And that’s what lies at the core of telling a story through tabletopRPG: collaborative engagement. All of what the DM does is in the service of provoking and enabling this collaborative function. It’s in the service of seeing what story will take place when all the players make their contributions to the narrative framework that theDM lays out. This makes it a unique form in many ways, and one that I think has increasing relevance in a culture that fosters virtual connections at the cost of personal relationships. It’s a form that has the central virtue of sitting us down around a literal table and discovering the stories that we can make together.
Ethan Hill is a high school student in Guelph, Ontario. His writing has placed 3rd in the Guelph Public Library Teen Writing Contest and been published in the 2019 ETCH anthology. He does some of his best storytelling as a Dungeon Master.
Jeremy Luke Hill is the publisher at Gordon Hill Press, a literary publisher based in Guelph, Ontario. He is also the Managing Director of Vocamus Writers Community, a non-profit community organization that supports book culture in Guelph. He has written a collection of poetry, short prose, and photography called Island Pieces; four chapbooks of poetry called Poetry of Thought, CanCon, Trumped, and These My Streets; two poetry broadsheets called Grounded and Indexical; and an ongoing series of poetry broadsheets called Conversations with Viral Media. He also writes a semi-regular column on chapbooks for The Town Crier. His writing has appeared in The Bull Calf, CV2, EVENT Magazine, Filling Station, Free Fall, The Goose, HA&L, The Maynard, paperplates, Queen Mob’s Tea House, The Rusty Toque, The Town Crier, and The Windsor Review.