Want to Become a Better Storyteller? Join a Role-Playing Game.

You might think that improv troupes are hard to find, but odds are good that an acquaintance of yours is conducting one around the dining room table at least a couple of times per month.

I suppose I was about eleven when I first discovered Dungeons & Dragons and the world of role-playing games in general. It was at the now-defunct Kay-Bee toy store in my local mall, where there were perhaps half a dozen different modules sitting in a white wire rack along one of the aisles. Having successfully cajoled my parents into buying me one — and then eventually another and another — I was soon picking my way through the ruins of the Ghost Tower of Inverness and plumbing the many secrets of Saltmarsh.

At first, I was just reading the modules. It took a while to romance my friends into playing some of the adventures with me serving as the “Dungeon Master” (DM). Unfortunately, it quickly became evident that they much preferred to just throw the football around in the backyard — something I enjoyed also — and it wasn’t long before my D&D modules were buried like detritus under a growing pile of comics and other pre-teen memorabilia. But the hobby marched on around me. Our local Waldenbooks dedicated an entire shelf to an increasingly diverse assortment of RPGs to suit a variety of tastes — space operas, tactical, horror, etc. And with changes in my friend group over time, I was back into RPGs again when I hit high school.

My second go wasn’t with Dungeons & Dragons however. No, I was a huge comics fan and TSR, Inc. had wisely chosen a different and even more irresistible infection vector — a Marvel Comics role-playing game. I didn’t buy every single game module and supplement that they created for that variant, but I’m sure I came close. And while my friends and I didn’t play RPGs all the time — we had other interests — the games were remarkably memorable, to the extent that certain situations and catch phrases have achieved a somewhat legendary status within my family to this day.

I know that RPG groups are typically portrayed as insular and their participants as reclusive, but I’ve always found the exact opposite to be true. When I gamed in high school, my girlfriend was part of our crew and others brought their girlfriends as well. It was a genuinely social activity. And when I went off to college, my then-girlfriend — now my wife — enjoyed participating too. In fact, we often muse that we first realized that our relationship might be on the serious side when I retrofitted the ending of one game scenario after seeing she’d been upset with the conclusion. (I’d inadvertently killed off a character she’d enjoyed designing — and when she got teary-eyed, I kind of bent the rules to give her an out. Probably makes me a bad DM — but a better boyfriend.)

After we were married and started to lean hard into adulting, I figured all of that was behind us. Dog-eared game modules and squashed-flat boxes languished at the bottom of plastic storage tubs moving with us from apartment to apartment and then our first house — retained for the sake of nostalgia, something to be smiled at when found and then just as quickly repacked. Occasionally, we’d play with our kids — both of whom expressed some level of affinity for RPGs and both of whom have moved on to play with their respective friends. But even then, I’d seen this as a seeding activity — a “nerding forward” situation, if you will — and not as any sort of prolonged re-engagement on my part.

And then something really curious happened — role-playing seemed to go through a very visible renaissance. As some of my friends have since explained to me, an underground of die-hard gamers had continued to flourish as a lot of dads quietly replaced “poker night” with an RPG night. These weren’t teens in heavy metal tee shirts crouching in the basement under a dim ceiling light with pencil and paper. These were accomplished professionals sitting on their decks with beer or other spirits in hand using apps on their smart phones to track their stats. They would come to gaming events with velvet dice bags carrying high-end brushed bronze dice or perhaps dice they molded themselves. (They could roll dice on their smart phones too, but if you don’t like the tactile feel of a twenty-sided die — or d20 — well, then you just might be a monster.)

How the media portrayed RPGs began to change as well — first by rediscovering them with ironic hipster fascination and then later by embracing them more wholeheartedly as a legitimate form of entertainment. Simply put, RPGs as a subset of overall gaming culture got well… sexy. Serialized RPGs would pop up in content on YouTube and Twitch and in podcast form. Entire auditoriums would fill to capacity to watch live celebrity gaming events — like the “Acquisitions Incorporated” series conducted annually at Penny Arcade’s PAX Conventions. While I won’t attempt to summarize all of that content here, you can easily find recent gaming videos including the likes of Vin Diesel, Joe Manganiello, Terry Crews, and Deborah Ann Woll. Some televised campaigns like Critical Role have gone on for years now at this point.

So why should you, as an aspiring storyteller — as a writer or photographer or film-maker — care about any of this? Because this resurgence in role-playing isn’t a casual phenomenon — another turn of the culture wheel, another capricious shift in the zeitgeist. It’s a fundamental recognition of shared narrative as a distinct and novel form of performance art.

Being a DM (or game judge) is an enormous undertaking and I’m always very impressed by — and grateful to — my friends who are willing to assume that responsibility. While I suppose that you can still buy game modules, most of the DMs I know generate their own scenarios based on any number of game systems ranging from D&D to Pathfinder to Dungeon Crawl Classics. So that is clearly a great opportunity for self-expression — a literal world-building activity. Nevertheless, even just being a participant in a RPG offers near limitless opportunities for creativity and improvisation. In fact, the better DMs I know specifically build their campaigns to promote those activities.

I’ve heard it said that Gary Gygax — the co-creator of Dungeons & Dragons — didn’t intend for it to be a “fighting game.” Characters weren’t just outfitted with weapons and hit points. The rules were crafted to allow numerous paths to victory — through stealth and persuasion and cunning and guile. In a day before modern video games, it was the first “open world” game — taking place in the theater of the mind. And while I’ll admit that I love to hear the words “roll for initiative,” some of the best games I’ve joined involved very few battles.

In one recent one-shot hosted by one of my friends, my character didn’t need to unsheathe his weapon once. We ended up making a mutually beneficial deal with the monster and his family that saw them relocated to greener pastures. (Picture Beowulf meets Dirty Rotten Scoundrels.) But the fact that we could have engaged in a fight — one that likely would have gone quite badly for us — is part of what makes participating in a RPG such an ideal form of shared storytelling. Our DM had a few different outcomes in mind and reined us in ever so slightly — ensuring a measure of structure — but we had the latitude to pursue a wide variety of paths. And we weren’t the only players; because dice decide the success of actions proposed by both the DM and the gamers, Lady Luck always has a seat at the table as well. I recall one game where my wife just kept punishing the game judge with one improbable “crit” (when you roll 20 on a d20) after another — driving the game and the story into uncharted territory for hours.

In the best gaming circles, players identify with their avatars and craft reactions to suit both evolving circumstances and the world view of their characters. Likewise, the game judges — expressing themselves through numerous non-player characters (NPCs) — aren’t ever really in opposition to the gamers; they too are simply playing out the personalities and interests they’ve built into the characters forming the infrastructure of the game. The result is a mélange of ever-changing story elements with a narrative created jointly by every player at the table, the DM and the dice. And while it might not be Colin Mockery and Ryan Stiles playing “scenes from a hat” on Whose Line Is It Anyway, it can be an extremely fun, challenging, and oft-times amusing combination of improv and problem-solving.

There has probably never been a better time to get into the hobby either — both because of its recent rise to prominence and also the ease with which people can game collectively over different communication platforms even at a distance. And if you’re not a big fan of science fiction or fantasy, there’s enough diversity in the gaming world that you can likely find a lightly themed campaign that suits your tastes. So the next time you want to take a break from more traditional creativity-building techniques like story prompts, consider probing your social network to find out who is involved in a gaming group. You’ll note that such groups are usually quite open — even evangelical — as RPGs thrive on new blood and new perspectives.

I can only speculate on the impact it will have to your creative process. You might walk away with inspiration for your magnum opus or just a fond recollection of sharing some mead with a bunch of rowdy orcs. Ultimately, art depends on shared human experience — even if, as in this case, shared in an unreal setting. Most RPGs revolve around character growth — building XP, as they say. As luck would have it, so does being an artist. So given the opportunity to satisfy both needs, there’s really only one obvious choice — you roll with it.