Writing with ‘DM’ Knowledge

I mentioned briefly in another blog entry that I accomplished a lot of my early world-building through hosting pen & paper role-playing games. I ran dozens of players through epic campaigns in Dungeons & Dragons, Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 2nd Edition (the majority of them), Rolemaster 2nd Edition and Palladium Megagames.

The reasons for this were:

• I wanted to continue building my fictional world
• I loved being Dungeon Master and controlling a plethora of non-player characters each session
• It let me flex and hone my on-the-fly storytelling skills
• I thoroughly enjoyed role-playing in general

It let me receive real-time feedback from players, so I could refine things that missed the mark or emphasize things that landed properly

Those sessions lasted between 1994 and 1999. Many players came and went, but there were a core of them who flowed through almost every campaign. Most of my campaigns lasted five to six months, and we played between one and three sessions per week… often lasting eight to ten hours per session. In other words, we took it seriously… way too seriously.

I demanded that my players develop backstories for their characters. If they couldn’t, I got together with them days or weeks before the game started and helped them develop one. Most of my campaigns didn’t start with a full party, as I took turns running private sessions with players to guide their characters to a common location. Players joined each other in real life when their characters met in game. It all flowed rather well.

I favored storytelling over dice rolling, and attracted players of like mind. It was common for us to have only one or two combats in a given game day. Though there were certainly battles that required several days of gaming to play through.

The point of all of this is that I lived for a very long time as a DM in my world… not a player. I spent a healthy amount of time developing personalities and traits for many of the non-player characters that I am covering in my writing. However, the separation of ‘DM knowledge’ and ‘character knowledge’ was something that worked well when hosting games, but became a trap when attempting to write my stories.

When you’re hosting a game, you hold all of this information ‘behind the scenes’ that your players and characters aren’t aware of. Things such as:

• The motivations of a group of NPC’s
• The stats of an enemy they are fighting
• The name of the person(s) they are trying to discover
• What so-and-so thinks of what they’re doing
• What’s happening in the neighboring kingdom while they do what they’re doing

The further you branch into those thought patterns, the deeper your world is. That’s great… but it’s easy to get used to telling your story with a limited perspective. You don’t tell your players, “well, because you guys went to the tower and talked to that sage, so-and-so is sending an agent to intercept you.” Instead, you wait until they are intercepted by said agent, and they might discover that so-and-so sent them.

When I started writing Bathed in the Blood of Ravens, I chugged along quickly and smoothly for several chapters. Then I went back and read what I’d written. It felt shallow and hollow… something was missing. I read it several times, the whole time thinking things like, “well, he’s doing X so so-and-so is thinking Y”. Then it dawned on me… I was thinking what Y was doing, not writing it.

I had fallen into a trap!

I immediately went back and filled in all of those extra details that as a DM in a role-playing session I would have held close to the cuff. This forced me to expand several scenes, and even add new scenes. My chapters grew in size, gained depth and started to represent the world… and not just a small subset of characters.

As I’ve continued to write I now pause after each scene to make sure I’ve included that ‘DM Knowledge’. I feel that my book is far better for the effort. I also think it’s humorous that my mind still tries to separate what a DM would know and what a character would know. After all, I haven’t run a pen & paper role-playing session in over 20 years. Go figure.

Now… I’m not suggesting everyone thinks this way, or writes this way. I’m probably in a very small subset of writers who think the way I do. At the end of the day, the lesson is: include those ‘trivial’ or ‘off camera’ details in your story. Your world will feel more whole, and your readers will thank you for it.

Campaign Veterans of Note:

• Kristina Parker - Saerasha, Euphoria, Darkstorm, Gnately, Patricia Melgt, Cassandra Smythe
• Robbie Powell - Arcana, Lehthanis
• Tim A. Ryan - Oblix
• Jenny Connell - Nightfall