Dungeons & Dragons – Lessons in World building and Character Development.

Dungeons and dragons celebrated its 50th anniversary last year and has become something of a global phenomenon. Buried within this game are some key lessons to be learned with regards to storytelling. So, here are a few insights from someone who has been running dungeons and dragons sessions for a few years.

For those who may not be aware of exactly what it is, dungeons and dragons (also known as D&D), is a tabletop role playing game, where one person – known as the Dungeon Master or“DM” – plans out a world and an overarching plot with non-playable characters (NPCs), and villains. The players create their characters from a variety of races, classes, and backgrounds, and determine their characters actions as the DM lays out the events of the world surrounding them. As someone who has been playing D&D for a few years now, and acting as a DM for just as long, I have found that the experience can help develop narratives, evolve fictional worlds, and produce complex and well-rounded characters. So if you’re looking for inspiration, it can be a gold mine.

The structure of dungeons and dragons creates a perfect environment for collaborative storytelling, with role play, improvisation, and an element of randomisation as outcomes are often determined by dice rolls. As player characters attempt to achieve their goals, there is no guarantee that they will succeed, and unless the story is well told, this can frustrate the players. As such it is important to ensure that any failure of a character is either explained by the situation or creates an opportunity for the character to learn a lesson and develop.  

The collaborative nature of D&D makes it essentially a continuous improv session, where nobody really knows where the story will go, and it is the DMs job to guide it and mould it into something coherent. Players develop their characters, and whilst they may come to the table with vague ideas of who they are playing, over time they become deeply invested in that characters journey. Each game session brings new experiences for the characters, and as the players have time to reflect on how these events may affect their character in particular, characters naturally become more complex and well-rounded. Player characters are fleshed out with backstories, in-game experiences, and interactions with the world around them. Everyone playing comes to know and understand them as they would a close friend. “That’s what my character would do” is a phrase that is often thrown around in D&D as an explanation for making objectively poor choices, justified by character motivation, demonstrating perfectly how characters can get themselves into absurd situations whilst remaining true to who they are.

If you are looking to write a story this can be a useful lesson to learn. Reflecting on how each character would respond or feel in each situation and recognising that some events may shift their outlook on the world. It helps to remember that your characters are malleable and that having identifiable development even to B-storylines can make them feel far more three dimensional.

Similarly, the DM finds ways to develop NPCs that capture the imagination. DMs often have to play numerous characters in every session, and whilst many of these characters may be forgettable background characters, those that the players enjoy or have some affinity with will often become recurring characters, fleshing out the world and giving the players reasons to care about the world they inhabit.

This essentially boils down to brainstorming the background characters and taking steps to make them memorable. An unusual quirk, a strange way of speaking, or a particular aesthetic can make a random interaction into something that sticks in the minds of the audience, and makes the world seem more fully developed.

When it comes to world building, I began my D&D campaign by creating a very simplistic landscape and found that the finer details of the world were quickly developed as players will inevitably ask unexpected questions about how things work and it is the DMs job to find a way to answer this. Finding rational reasons to justify fun concepts is necessary to ensure that the players understand the rules of the world and allows them to come up with fun ways to interact with these systems that you may never have considered.

When writing a new fictional world, thinking about the reasons why the world developed to be the way it is can create depth and feeling of the world being lived in. You don’t need to include every detail of the world in your story, but you need to understand it and how this may affect the story, and the characters.

With the recent success of Dungeons and Dragons in the media, with numerous podcasts, Critical Roles animated series “Vox Machina”, and the 2023 movie, “Dungeons & Dragons: Honour Among Thieves”, it is clear that this style of storytelling is becoming increasingly popular, and perhaps some of these lessons could be the reason why.