For the past year and a half, I — like many, I’m sure — tried to set up rituals to have some small semblance of consistency during (as every marketing email never failed to mention) an unprecedented and uncertain time.
I baked endless plum crumbles during stone fruit season. I started a podcast with two friends, like the dutiful millennial I am. I joined an outdoor class at the YMCA and spend two afternoons every week on a stationary rowing machine in a teen center parking lot. And, most importantly, I spent 3-4 hours every Wednesday pretending to be a dwarven cleric named Moila, a gravedigger who had dedicated her life to the service of Morghul, the god of death and decay.
To put that last item another way: during shelter in place, I played a lot of Dungeons & Dragons.
Dungeons & Dragons (or, more colloquially, “D&D”) has long been the cultural touchstone for the socially awkward nerd, playing in the dark of their parents’ basement. It’s painted as something played by people who are unable to interact in normal ways; it’s laid in contrast to teen parties and make-outs. It’s the antithesis of cool. It’s the realm of the geeks.
But (as is probably super-apparent by the existence of this blog), I’m not all that worried about being nerdy. So, when a friend of mine invited me to join his new campaign, I was thrilled. Our cohort of seven met weekly on Zoom to adventure through a fantasy world that only existed in our collective imaginations. A number of folks in the party were people I had literally never met in real life, folks who lived on the opposite US coast.
As the pandemic continued and the novel luster of Zoom meetings quickly wore away, our group continued to dutifully meet every week. When we finally got to the end of the campaign, we did some quick math and realized that we’d spent about 100 hours together in this self-made world of gods, monsters, puzzles, court intrigue, and, of course, both dungeons and dragons. Playing D&D was easily one of the brightest and most treasured things that came out of a really terrible period of time. It was something I looked forward to, especially during a time when all of my other usual social wellsprings had fully dried up.
But there's something besides socializing that made me excited to play every week, something that, I think, has also contributed to a recent resurgence of D&D, despite its longstanding cultural baggage: In a world of IP grabs, the idea of singular “artistic geniuses,” and increasingly monolithic companies being the arbiters of culture, Dungeons & Dragons — and tabletop role-playing games in general — offer an alternative and a challenge to the dominant structure of artistic creation. They show us a way of coming up with stories collaboratively, as a community.
My partner loves Star Wars. Or perhaps I should say he loved it. He’s just the right age for the original trilogy to have a steadfast nostalgic grip on his heart. He remembers seeing Return of the Jedi in theaters. He remembers the Ewok Halloween costume his mom sewed for him (and that he got a slight case of heat stroke while wearing). And, when there were no more movies to watch but he was still so eager to hear about what was going on in this galaxy far, far, away, he read a great deal of Star Wars novels.
Before Disney’s Star Wars was even a glimmer in Bob Iger’s greedy eye, the original trilogy of Star Wars movies created a legion of fans who, like my partner, were eager for more content. But what to give them? Movies were massively expensive to make; significantly less expensive are pulp paperback novels. And so an entire pantheon of Star Wars books erupted, taking the seeds planted by the movies and letting them grow into a vast world of stories. There were novels about young Han Solo; novels about Luke’s kids and Leia’s kids; novels about eerie space witches; novels about Thrawn, an Imperial villain who was also an art collector; over a hundred some-odd novels, spinning out into the cosmos.
My partner loved these books, as did many other fans. The novels — as well as a myriad other forms of non-film Star Wars media — became known as the “Expanded Universe” or “EU.” The extensive stories and lineages outlined in the EU were fastidiously collected by the good volunteers at Wookieepedia. It was a treasure trove of ideas, created by a (legally sanctioned) broad web of authors, all with different ideas of how the story might go. So it was a bit of a blow to this particular group of fans when Disney purchased Lucasfilm in 2012 and wasted no time in stating that the EU was no longer “canon.”
A work is “canon” when it is seen as genuine or true. In our capitalistic world, “genuine or true” usually means that the person or conglomeration who own the intellectual property says that a particular story is genuine or true.
Take, for example, JK Rowling’s endless missives about the world of Harry Potter, which are “canon” because she, as the original author and IP holder, is seen as the only person who can genuinely determine what about the Wizarding World (tm) is “real” or “not real,” i.e. what is canon or not. Never mind the fact that Harry Potter’s world is fantasy, or that Rowling has no claim to the idea of schools for wizards (just look at Ursula le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea or Terry Pratchett’s Unseen University in Discworld). Any outside, non-sanctioned works about Harry Potter or Hogwarts are “fan canon” or “head canon,” and thus not “real.” People might write fanfiction that answers questions raised in the Harry Potter books much more adeptly than Rowling could hope to do, but we’ve been taught to see it as less true to the “actual” world of Harry Potter than whatever Rowling tweets about wizard toilet habit in between her screeds against the rights of trans people.
So, when Disney declared that the EU was no longer “canon,” they were say saying those stories were no longer true. There was only one story: the one that Disney as a corporation wanted or was willing to tell: one created with the stamp of approval from all the highers-up, one that could be marketed out to the masses easily, one that could build theme parks and rake in money. One singular story, told by a singular author whose intent supplants any outside interpretations of the text.
All this reminds me of sitting in English class in grade school. The amount of time I spent as a young person reading books only so that I could sit in class and debate what the author meant by what they wrote. It was like I was part of some weird detective agency, piecing together literary clues, left behind by an invisible presence.
And more than that, my interpretations would be graded. There was, apparently, a correct answer regarding the author’s intent, one that we could all find if we simply looked hard enough.
I don’t know if it’s changed since I was in school, but it seems that most of my peers were taught a similar lesson in their respective lit classes. We were taught “reading comprehension.” We were supposed to draw concrete meaning from texts, meaning that the author wanted us to find, meaning that was more “true” than how a text might make us feel. Or, to put it another way: we were taught that books were a lecture, not a conversation. The former implies one truth (the truth of the author). The latter implies multiple truths, all held simultaneously (the truth of the conversation).
D&D, as it turns out, is all about conversation.
Like many table-top roleplaying games (“TTRPGs”), D&D’s central game mechanic revolves around a combination of planning, improv, and chance.
The planning is largely done by the Dungeon Master, or DM. The DM stands apart from the rest of the group. They determine the skeleton of the story (e.g. where does the story take place? who is the main antagonist? what is the group looking for?) and play all the characters not covered by the folks in the group. The DM lays the groundwork for the adventure and, though they are the only ones with a clear sense of where the story might go, they are not an omnipotent god in this fantasy world. They are not the sole author.
Instead, the rest of the people at the table are the ones who breathe life into the world through their choices. The players decide how they might want to interact with the world the DM creates and, through their choices, the DM then builds out the world. It’s a back and forth. It’s improvisation.
The final component, chance, balances the battle of storytelling desires. In D&D, whenever a player’s character wants to do something that requires skill (picking a lock, climbing a steep wall, trying to understand the intent behind a stranger’s words), they are asked to roll a twenty-sided die (a “d20”). The number they roll determines if they’re able to do what they want to do: the higher it is, the more likely they will succeed. Player’s can add on to the roll depending on their character’s skills (a charismatic character might have a bonus to any rolls made to charm a person), but even a highly-skilled character might suffer a bad roll. This chance keeps the story interesting; sometimes a failure leads to a more interesting story than a success.
Between the planning, improv, and chance, a story emerges. Because of the interplay of these three elements, there is no singular author to the story, since it’s made between the push and pull of everyone at the table, along with the will of the dice.
The practice of one person controlling or forcing the story is so discouraged in D&D that if you say that a DM or player is "railroading” the story, you are absolutely laying down fighting words. Speaking for myself, it can be hard to avoid the desire to railroad. We’re so used to sole authorship that it feels like a personal slight when the story you might want for your character — or for the story as a whole — is not the one that emerges.
But, as you might expect, though it might not be what you wanted, it’s usually full of surprises, and compromises, and mistakes, and bad calls, and on-the-fly decisions that have lasting repercussions for your character and everyone else’s.
Say, for example, that you make a character who is a knight, valiant and brave. However, every time you enter battle, you keep rolling low when you try to hit an enemy. Rolling low means you miss. So your valiant knight character is swinging their sword around and only hitting air. This happens again in the next battle. And the battle after that. Suddenly, the story of who your knight is changes. Another player’s character decides to talk to the knight after another terrible battle. They ask they knight if something is on their mind, something that might be making it hard for them to fight. How does the knight respond? How does this conversation change the course of their story? Who are they now that they weren’t before?
With D&D, the story that we tell ourselves is just the jumping off point. It’s the first line in a conversation, one that is often deeper and more interesting than if we had insisted on being the sole author.
I could talk forever about my recent D&D campaign. I could tell you about the time that a member of our party ended up on stage at the fantasy opera, or the time that we reunited a god with her giant idiot son, or the time we accidentally started a prison riot due to some bad intra-party communication, or the time our giant barbarian took up woodcarving and made a new prosthetic leg for his love interest, or the fact that bridges were without fair our biggest downfall, or the time that a character died after pissing off a whole village of body snatchers, or the time that one character became the new god of the dead after eating some bad meat.
I could talk forever about it, but it’s a story that will always be incomplete if I’m the only one telling it, because it was a story that existed between the group of us playing it out.
I have a half-remembered story somewhere in my brain about the relationship between trees and fungi. There’s a theory (as I recall) that certain fungal strains help trees communicate with one another, that the tendrils of one wrap into the other to create an underground network. These networks, it’s theorized, store nutrients and allow the trees to support one another in the forest: where one tree has a surplus, it can pass along to another that has a deficit.
I read another story about how pecan trees all flower and fruit at the same time. Their schedule is odd — they might miss years at a time, depending on conditions — but when they do produce fruit, they all do it together (across groves, across states, across vast territories), and no one knows quite why that is.
In both, it’s a spin on an old classic, a reminder to not miss the forest for the trees.
Collaborative storytelling is the forest that is often missed for the giant, towering trees of rampant individualistic capitalism, the system that tells us that things have value because they are singular and because they belong to you. (See: the rise of the NFT pyramid scheme.)
So, in collaborative storytelling, there’s a direct challenge to Disney and Rowling and English lit classes and the cultural idea of there being a sole story or a sole author. It opens us up to the idea that stories are mutable and, more importantly, that they belong to us all as a community. It scoffs at the idea that there’s one person or group who gets to say which stories are inherently more valuable than other ones, and it rejects the idea of the singular genius. It looks at the wide forest of experiences and ideas and holds them up, together.
It says: find a group of exquisite weirdos, grab some dice, and tell a story, together.