Why Would You Punch That?: My Adventures with Character Agency // Thanos Filanis

As part of our guest-edited month, “D&D and Creativity,” Thanos Filanis has shared an essay about becoming a Dungeon Master for a chaotic table and how that experience made them a better writer.

Part One: An Introduction of You.

You are a young writer, starry-eyed and full of ideas. You have vague dreams of writing becoming your job one day and you like imagining how your name would look on book covers.

You’re working towards improving your craft. You’ve studied and gone to workshops. You know your Three Act Structures, your Seven Basic Plots, and your Hero’s Journeys. You feel like you’ve watched every video titled “X’s advice for young writers” that has ever been uploaded on YouTube.

Your stories are fine ... other people have told you they like them so you must have done something right. But lately you are not feeling them breathe.There’s no life in them and you find it hard to handle anything larger than a short story. Attempts at outlining novels fail spectacularly. What can you even do with a story in so many pages?

You respond to the problem in the worst possible way. You just don’t write. For months you wait for the gods of Writer’s Block to show mercy. You don’t realize at first, but it’s probably eating you from the inside.

It’s not all bad. Some new friends invite you to a game of D&D. You haven’t played in years and they have a deeper, more grown-up approach to the game than the one you had previously encountered, which proves to be both fun and very fulfilling. Making new characters scratches that creative itch and you slowly realize that you may also grow to like the “performance” part of it. You decide to DM for them.

Part Two: So, You Make Up a Campaign.

You have a fantasy world of your making lying around, one with meticulously cataloged rules and nations and secrets, but with no stories to tell in it yet. Seems like it could be turned into aDungeons & Dragons setting with a few tweaks, to reduce the necessary amounts of exposition. Some of the stranger creatures could be removed, to make way for Elves and Dwarves and the like. Some of the more abstract metaphysical powers could be squeezed to fit into the game’s well-structured magic system. You make a world that feels both yours and easier to explain.

You create NPCs and keep notes on their personalities and stories. You make up twists and turns, monsters to be fought and a great conspiracy waiting to be uncovered. You prepare for more than one possible outcome in each scenario. You’re not stupid—you know there is more than one way for the story to unfold. You draw a map, of course. Things start looking pretty good.

Part Three: You Sit Down and Play

You gather around a table. Dice, character sheets, a few miniatures. The story starts. “You are soldiers in a faraway, exotic frontier. The boat transporting you to the nearby fortress flips over. You’re washed up on an island.The warlock—who the rest of the players don’t yet know is a warlock—feels a presence at the center of the island calling to him.”

Pretty straight-forward introduction. Seems near-impossible to deviate from it. Right?

Part Four: Wrong.

Your session dissolves into chaos. Your Player Characters are running around, punching things that they shouldn’t, fighting amongst themselves, ignoring plot points that you thought would be impossible to miss. Did they just make fun of obviously more powerful NPCs? Ones who would have no reason not to kill them on the spot? Did the druid just ask to create a weird plant so that he could smoke it? You feel as if each player has grabbed your story by the edge and tried to pull it towards another direction. It’s a disaster.

Part Five: You Feel Angry for a While.

You know what? Maybe your campaign is not right for them. You don’t know them that well. Maybe your expectations of engagement didn’t match theirs. Or maybe your writing and delivery wasn’t good enough. Maybe they felt disinterested in what you presented them with, and decided to make it fun in their own terms. You know what?Maybe one more session will help make sense of everything.

Here we go again. Dice, character sheets, miniatures. “You reach the fort and find it under siege. You fight your way in. Now you’ll have to make up a battle plan.” You present them with a battle map and let them arrange the troops. They spend two hours playing around with ideas. Wait a minute. This is engagement. They are engaged!

And then it comes to you. All the chaos and the needless group in-fighting was done wholeheartedly In-Character. This is not a lack of interest. It is actually quite the opposite. They are behaving exactly how these characters would behave in this situation. They are quite a strange and diverse group. Surely, you couldn’t have expected the conquered and then conscripted tribal warrior to get along with the posh diplomat from day one.

Somewhere in those interviews that you devoured instead of actually writing, you remember something that authors said about their protagonists: I tried to steer the story one way, but my characters disagreed.I don’t know what they’re going to do next. I’m not driving the story. They are.

Part Six: Is This What Character Agency Really Means?

Taking a look at your old short stories, you start realizing what the problem was. These characters are not really people. They’re thinly-veiled versions of yourself, narrating as they aimlessly wander through the plot, going wherever you wanted them to go. What happened around that table felt dynamic and real. These people, on the other hand, are starting to feel like puppets.

It takes some time to get used to. Granting a simulacrum of freedom to a fictional person inside your head is scary. It means you now have to listen to what they say, and that usually leads to throwing away scenes, chapters or entire plots and having to go to places you don’t feel comfortable with.

But, on that gaming table, with the characters being played by actual people, with agency of their own, you’ve seen what it can create.And it’s kind of beautiful.

Part Seven: At Some Point You Sit down to Write Again.

Part one of your campaign was completed successfully. You’ll start with the next one soon, a little bit bolder, a little bit darker. It will probably be fun. But, for now, there’s something else on your mind.

You make coffee and you sit in front of your laptop. You had an idea recently that you think might be worth exploring. Maybe a short story. Maybe longer. You have some fragments of personalities, a lot different that you are, that could be shaped and grown into characters. In your head, an imaginary table is formed, with people who are ready to take over your story and drive it wherever they see fit.

They start rolling the dice, and you start typing, feeling that, this time, something interesting is bound to happen.

Thanos Filanis is a writer and IT student from Thessaloniki, Greece. He may be found in various places over the internet, writing about pop culture, narrative structure and whatever thing he has been obsessively reading on this week. Two of his short stories have been included in the Athens FantastiCon Contest’s Winners’ Anthologies.

Back to blog Next