Killing Gandalf: How Role Playing Games Made Me a Better Writer

The rattle and clatter of dice being cast--this was the cadence of my adolescence. A salvaged dining room table took up most of the garage. I sat at the head. Depending on the night, four to a dozen others surrounded the table, too.

     The lights were always off. Candles and oil lamps provided better ambiance, and that was quite important. So was the background music. The score from Coppola’s “Dracula” was best for delving into cursed ruins. The droning discord of Joy Division and the Sisters of Mercy set the stage for Gothic cities plagued by the undead and seemingly endless rain.

     This was my proving ground.

Two years before my birth, a company named TSR released Dungeons and Dragons, ushering in a new genre of game: role-playing  Sixteen years later, I caught up. My initiation to D&D came as a matter of chance during my second year in middle school. I was in the school library, browsing through the newest additions to the Choose Your Own Adventure rack.

     “Some of those are based on a game,” a boy said. He was a lanky kid with hair like straw and a wide mouth. I didn’t know him. He introduced himself as James, and spent the next half hour trying to explain what a role-playing game was. When the bell for the next class rang, I still had no idea what he was talking about, but I was intrigued.

     “I’ll show you tomorrow,” he said.

I checked out the book his sales-pitch had prevented me from finishing, and spent the rest of day trying to wrap my head around the concept.

“The cave ends in a strange wall. It looks man-made. What do you do?” James asked.

It’s been over two decades and I still remember my confusion. “I guess I leave?” I said, uncertain.

James sighed. I apparently sucked at this game.

“What? It’s a dead end!”

“Maybe you should search for hidden doors?”

Hidden doors? Who hides doors? “Okay. I’ll do that, I guess.” The table was strewn with oddly shaped dice. A pyramid-shaped one generated numbers from one to four. Others had eight, ten, twelve, or even twenty sides. I was instructed to roll some of them.

James inspected the result, and declared that I’d found a hidden entrance. “It opens just enough to slip through. It’s dark and dank on the other side. Will you dare to pass through the narrow opening?”

     I dared.

     A few minutes later, a band of trolls ushered my very first character into the afterworld. It was a messy end for Simon, the level one human warrior. For me, it was a beginning.

The concept finally clicked.

James and I hadn’t just played a game. We’d told Simon’s (tragically short) story.

Role-playing games involve two kinds of participants. First, there are players. Think of them as actors, playing individual roles in a larger narrative. The second kind of participant has many titles. I prefer “storyteller”. If the players are actors, the storyteller is the director.

     After a few weeks of playing, I found where I fit in that paradigm.

     “How can all of these mindless, flesh-eating monsters live in the same dungeon without killing each other?” I asked. “Also, why does the tribe of Orcs live there, too? What do they eat? Why don’t they just move? Do they really want to kill everyone in the local village just because they’re evil? They have to have a better reason than that! Maybe they want better farmland? Wait. Did the humans force them into the caves? Hey! Are the seemingly innocent villagers really the villains here? Those bastards! Orcs are people, too…”

     James sighed and answered my barrage of questions with the suggestion that I try storytelling.

     At first, my gaming group consisted of James and his brother Jacob. By my sophomore year in high school, I had around a dozen regular players. We gathered during lunch, after school, and spent weekends in marathon sessions that often ran over twenty-four hours.

It was fun, but it was also instructive. This was how I learned to write--organically and intuitively. None of us knew terminology like “character arc” or “character depth”. Instead, we learned from experience that characters with flaws, quirks, and complex back stories were just more interesting.

 That lesson hit home after a several month campaign ended with the players defeating my story’s primary antagonist--a necromancer bent on destroying the barrier between life and death to restore the family he’d tragically lost. “I am going to miss that guy,” one of them said. “I really hated him!” The other players agreed and began talking among themselves about all the horrible things the villain had done--killed their friends, tortured love interests, tricked them into hurting innocents.

They had loved hating him.

A couple even felt sorry for him. “He just wanted his wife and daughter back…”

I sat back and listened, internalizing it. I wouldn’t have used the word “investment”, but that’s what it was. Twenty years later, those players still occasionally mention the necromancer when our paths happen to cross.

Other lessons were less easily digested.

Imagine this. You’ve toiled for weeks to write a brilliant story. The antagonists are complicated, the moral ambiguity is compelling, the danger is thrilling, and the plot is layered in Machiavellian twists. You begin to tell your masterpiece, and your protagonists do everything wrong. There’s a joke among gamers to depict this scenario*.

Storyteller (to Frodo’s player): You put on the ring, becoming invisible. What do you do next?

Frodo’s Player: I kill Gandalf and search his body for treasure.

     When you write fiction, you have complete control over the cast of your story. They do what you want, when you want, precisely the way you want. As the storyteller of a role-playing game, that never happens.

In the beginning, this meant a lot of thinking on my feet. As I became more experienced, I learned to look at story construction differently. Instead of linear story development, I started to consider the different directions every scene could take. In order to have plots that could survive the proverbial death of Gandalf, I effectively wrote a dozen stories for each one that my players experienced.

For example, a scene plan might look something like this:

The player’s characters are summoned before the king to be given a quest:

If the players accept the quest, the king is a benevolent man that just wants them to rescue his daughter from the evil cult that kidnapped her. If they refuse, he’s a cruel tyrant that will use hostages to compel them, and the daughter wasn’t kidnapped: she ran away. If they try to kill the king, then the king will really be a demon in disguise, and the woman isn’t really his daughter. She’s a priestess that knows his true name.

The important part is that they go after the “princess”.

It was a lot of work, but it forced me to consider things from different angles--to think in ways that I normally wouldn’t. Often, just trying to think ahead of my players resulted in better storylines than I’d started with.

What if the seemingly innocent villagers really were the villains?

I still think this way when I write.

By the time I started college, my group had shrunk to a core three or four. We played on weekends--or whenever our work and school schedules permitted. Even that became less frequent, but I still had the desire to tell stories. I had given up writing in favor of storytelling games. Without that outlet, I went back to the world where everyone, heroes and villains alike, did exactly what I wanted.

     Only, the world I came back to wasn’t the one I’d left behind. My heroes were no longer unblemished. My antagonists were no longer evil for the sake of giving the hero someone to fight.

     I was no longer just a writer.

     I really was a storyteller. 


* The origin of the joke...