Dungeons and Dragons, and Dragon and Dungeons

Michael
Nov 20, 2019
4 min read

If you missed it, that title is intended to be sung to the tune of "My Favourite Things". Try it.

This past week has seen me reading some content that isn't normally in my wheelhouse: legal and financial articles. See, I made a decision to try and publish some content online and wanted to know what goes into such a thing. Having now done some research, I am chasing it down at full speed, so I thought I would write a post about it. What does that have to do with the title? Well, everything.

A Creative Outlet

In my last post, I mentioned that I have recently started playing Dungeons and Dragon (D&D for short, or DnD) and I promised I would talk about that in a future post; this is that post.

DnD has proven to be a fantastic creative outlet for me, allowing me to engage in world-building, character development, story plotting, painting and model building (yep, another thing I enjoy when I actually get round to it, it's just expensive), math problems, and socialising with friends in person. I enjoy all of these things in and of themselves, so I could hardly not enjoy something that allows me to do all of them at once.

But, some of you may be a bit lost right now, so let me pull back and supply some context.

What is D&D?

Dungeons and Dragons is a tabletop roleplaying game. The tabletop part just means you play it around a table like a board game rather than online like a video game, but the role-playing game part can be a bit more difficult to explain.

Basically, the game is a group of people getting together to tell a story. The players in the group will all pick a character to play as, and will have certain skills and abilities based on their choices (a thief will be sneaky and pick locks, while a wizard can throw fireballs and teleport, and a barbarian can smash things with an axe and take massive hits, etc). They will then play the role of their character in the story, deciding what that person will do in any given scenario, and rolling dice to see how successful they are at the various things they try to do. The better your character is at something, the lower the number they will need to roll, so a sneaky thief would need to roll a lower number to hide successfully compared to a knight in a suit of clanking heavy armour, but the dice always maintain an element of randomness to keep things interesting.

One player will take on the role of Dungeon Master (the general term for this role is Game Master, but specific games give it a specific name, such as Dungeon Master, Keeper, Story Teller, etc.) and instead of playing and controlling a specific character, they will control the world around them. This player will decide what monsters the other players might encounter, whether there are any traps, and how other people in the world will react to the players' characters and their actions. They are not opposing the players in a competitive sense, they are building a world and story for the players to explore and act within. This is the role that I have found myself enjoying.

What do you do?

There are a variety of ways to run a game of DnD. Wizards of the Coast (the company that owns the game) are regularly releasing new, official adventures to run. These adventures supply a DM with a readymade world, filled with monsters, non-player characters, quests, items, locations, and history. This is a great option for people who are looking to run a game but do not have the time to plan out everything and do large amounts of preparation, as it is all done for you, and ready for you to sit down at a table and run it for your friends.

You can also construct your own world and build an original story, using the catalogue of resources available, and this was the route I took, jumping at the opportunity to engage in world-building that people would get to engage with directly as opposed to it going unseen for years until I finally publish a book. I've been loving this method, but for people without the same attraction to writing or world-building, the need to create every setting, character, and storyline from scratch could sound like the opposite of fun.

The third option is to look for homebrew content. "Homebrew" is a term used to refer to any content that is not an official Wizards of the Coast publication and allows players from all over the world to create their own adventures, creatures, abilities, settings, and more, and share them with people who want to use them. This is the same as the second option, except that one does not only use it for one's own game but puts it out there for other people to use too.

So... Publishing?

If you recall, I began this post by talking about the fact that I had plans to publish content online. I have found myself doing a great deal of homebrewing in my spare time, and with the school holidays on the horizon, my tutoring work will likely be nonexistent for a few weeks until classes resume. To fill that gap of income, and to make use of all that free time, I have decided to write up some homebrew adventures of my own, and publish them online. Wizards of the Coast allows people to post their homebrew content for sale on a website called the DMsGuild, and the goal is to get my work selling there, as well as to gain some valuable experience in the world of online publishing.

I'm sure I'll learn several unexpected lessons in the process, and those will make for an excellent future post.

Until then, I'm going to keep at my writing, both for these game modules and for NaNoWriMo, and I encourage you guys to do the same. Find what you enjoy, and see what you can do with that, there may be surprising avenues available.