Dungeon Master Growth Patterns

            Those who have been following my blog for a while will have noticed how much Dungeons & Dragons has become a part of my life in the past few years. In that time, I’ve been part of about fourteen different games, and I’m currently involved in five active games. During this time, I’ve been both a player and a Dungeon Master, but what has captured my attention today is the rise of new DMs and how they follow roughly the same growth pattern that I went through.

            Most people starting out as a Dungeon Master (though not all) have played the game before, so they have a pretty good idea of how it works on the players’ side of the table. They know that it’s a challenge to switch to being behind the DM’s screen, where they essentially have to create and control an entire world – much like a writer does, only a writer doesn’t need to account for the craziness that players come up with.

            The first game the new DM runs isn’t bad (with a good group of players, it’s very hard to have bad D&D), but it isn’t quite where they want it to be. Often the plotline railroads the players – that is to say, there’s pretty much only one way for the players to go, and one way for them to solve problems. This isn’t ideal in a game that revolves around the decisions made by players, but it’s also extremely understandable – because allowing players complete freedom takes a lot of thinking on your feet, and that takes practice.

            That first game usually falls apart within the first few sessions, but the new DM doesn’t give up. They learned a lot in those games, few though they were. The next game they run is significantly better. They’ve learned to prepare for players doing crazy things, and so they adapt their new game for that. This game goes much better, but it still isn’t perfect. The rails are still there, and still noticeable, and the DM runs into two similar problems: the players don’t catch on to what they were certain was obvious, so they need to improvise huge hints; and the players respond to things in ways previously unanticipated. Once again, the game usually falls apart at this point – but the DM has learned even more.

            Now comes the time for over-preparedness. The new DM has realized that players are wild and uncontrollable, and so the solution is to have a plan for everything. A massive world begins getting built, populated with interesting people and things. Histories and mythologies are created, as well as multiple dungeons and ways to attract the players to them. It becomes overwhelming, and at some point the DM realizes that if they keep this up, they’ll never get to play again – and so they take a leap of faith and start the game with what they’ve prepared.

            This time, the game goes very differently. Instead of the players going in crazy directions and forcing the DM to improvise, they seem to stick to the plot and avoid 90% of the content the DM has painstakingly created. This isn’t out of malice – this is simply because the DM has improved enough that the players feel that they are on the most natural course. The game lasts longer, and now the DM learns and perfects the rest of their skills. Their world is more in-depth, so they find improvising easier when it’s necessary. They get more of a feel for how to run and balance the game. They learn how to anticipate what their players are going to do, and to plan accordingly – but also how to have backup plans for when the players surprise them.

            Finally, DMing begins to come naturally, and less preparation is needed for each game. A lot of work still goes into running the game, but it becomes easier and more natural – as does coming up with things on the fly when the player throws a curveball at them.

            This isn’t a precise formula, as different people improve at different speeds. Some people manage to hold together that first game, improving as they go, while others have a few more false starts. However, by and large, this is the basic pattern of learning and growth I’ve observed in multiple new Dungeon Masters, and I find it to be fascinating – because running Dungeons & Dragons isn’t a skill you can learn everything about by being taught, or reading a book. It’s a form of art that you can only learn by doing.

Check out my YouTube channel where I tell the stories of my D&D campaigns.

Click here to find the charity anthology containing a couple of my short stories.

Also, make sure you check out my wife's blog and her website.


If there's any subject you'd like to see me ramble on about, feel free to leave a comment asking me to do so.

Psychology, Sociology, and the Art of Manipulation

            Whether you are creating a book, a D&D campaign, a video game, movie, or any other type of game, there’s a particular skill set you need that is often overlooked: you need an understanding of psychology and sociology, and you need to have a knack for manipulation.

            Psychology and sociology are fairly self-explanatory. If you want to accurately represent people, and groups of people, you need to understand how people think. You also need to know how they behave when in groups, not to mention how groups as a whole act in various situations. You don’t have to study or research these in-depth, but at the very least you need a general understanding – be it an innate understanding, or one gleaned from study – or your characters and interactions won’t be believable.

            Manipulation, though? That sounds a bit strange, particularly since manipulating people is rather frowned upon. Yet, at the same time, it is essential – even expected by consumers – for a creator to have this skill, because it’s the ability to manipulate people that draws them into the story.

            An audience needs to be connected to the characters, which means the creator needs to know what buttons to push to get people to relate to the characters. From the very beginning, the story needs to draw people in – and this is done through manipulating people by instilling curiosity or some other emotion that will prevent them from turning away. And, throughout the plot, you want the audience to feel certain things at certain times – it keeps them interested and makes everything seem much more real. And all of that is done through manipulation.

            It puts a whole new spin on creators when you look at media from that perspective. Entertainment basically becomes the art of manipulating people. In many cases, this manipulation has been honed to a science, refined into a simple formula – but at some point, someone sat down and decided how best to manipulate people – for their own enjoyment, of course.

            I also feel like it puts a new spin on the connotations we have around manipulation. We look at it as a negative word, yet nearly all of our entertainment relies upon it. It’s almost as if there is nothing inherently negative about any particular skill – it is merely the use it’s put to that defines if it’s good or evil.

            Either that, or the entire entertainment industry is trying to control our brains for their own personal gain. I’ll let you decide for yourself.

Check out my YouTube channel where I tell the stories of my D&D campaigns.

Click here to find the charity anthology containing a couple of my short stories.

Also, make sure you check out my wife's blog and her website.


If there's any subject you'd like to see me ramble on about, feel free to leave a comment asking me to do so.

Balanced Learning

            As I’ve been progressing through learning to code, I’ve been working my way through a lot of tutorials. The trouble with tutorials is that, while they’re great for showing you how to do certain things, a lot of your time is spent following along and just copying the work you’re already being shown. Yes, you’re usually being told why you’re doing each of the steps, but when your goal is learning, how do you know if you’re actually retaining that information?

            It’s a challenging prospect, especially if you pick things up fairly quickly, to figure out if you’re actually learning. Being self-taught, there (usually) aren’t any tests to take, so I have to find a way to measure my own success. So, the first method I came up with for proving to myself I was actually learning was to skip ahead of the tutorial. I’d pause in the middle of an instruction to finish writing the code the way I though it should be – it was very rewarding when I got it right, and when it was wrong I felt I’d learned more – because I now had a comparison of two different ways of approaching a problem, and that gave me more information than simply being told how to do it right.

            More recently, I moved on to playing with designing some of my own projects. This is very challenging because, unlike tutorials, there’s nothing there to teach the right way to do things, and unlike with proper tests, there’s no way of knowing if you even have the skills to accomplish what you want. I knew this going in, but I found one additional unexpected challenge – my own desire to learn.

            The important thing to know about programming is that there is a lot of code that has already been written – either built into the language, or that other people have written for their own projects. Just about anything you want to do, someone has either done, or has done something similar enough that you can make minor changes to their code to make it work.

            But, I want to learn and prove to myself that I can figure out how to solve the problems on my own. Yet, there’s no reason I should re-invent the wheel, especially when it’s already built into the language, just so I can say I did it. On the other hand, it’s an excellent exercise for testing my capabilities.

            In the end, it comes down to finding a balance between using what’s available and writing my own functionalities. The important part, after all, is getting the code effectively and efficiently written – and it’s just as important to learn how to look up code for things I don’t know how to do as it is to learn how to do it myself.

Check out my YouTube channel where I tell the stories of my D&D campaigns.

Click here to find the charity anthology containing a couple of my short stories.

Also, make sure you check out my wife's blog and her website.


If there's any subject you'd like to see me ramble on about, feel free to leave a comment asking me to do so.

Roondar Nackle

            Meet Roondar Nackle. He is a forest gnome with some magical talent who enjoys nothing more than watching corpses decay. It may seem like an odd hobby, but for someone who may live up to five hundred years, taking a year or so to observe the process of a body turning to dirt seems totally reasonable.

            It’s probably a good thing that he’s more interested in the dead than the living, because the living tend to have no idea how to deal with him. It would be better if he was morbid and morose, because his constant enthusiasm and excitement when talking about corpses is rather unsettling. He tends to get a lot of vacant and confused looks, though those that know him well have discovered that the best way to avoid his decomposition lectures is to point him in the direction of a dead animal they saw recently.

            Roondar is a character I made for playing in a D&D campaign that, sadly, didn’t last that long. However, I’ve recently joined another game that is allowing me to play him again – my hope is that this time, I’ll be able to explore him to his full potential. However, this isn’t really a blog about D&D; this is about that picture up there.

            About a year and a half ago, I decided to start working on several tasks every day to improve skills that I wanted to develop. One of said skills was drawing. I used to thoroughly enjoy drawing as a child, but at some point I felt my skills had reached a plateau and – that plateau not being particularly high, I stopped. However, I never stopped wishing I could draw – so, at last I decided that what I lacked in talent, I would try to make up for with practice and skill.

            I wasn’t certain I would get anywhere with it, but I knew I’d never find out if I didn’t try. So, I started working on drawing exercises. Every single day, I spent some time drawing, constantly moving on to the next task and training my hand to actually draw what I wanted it to. I very rarely attempted anything outside of the various drawing tutorials or exercises I found.

            When I resurrected Roondar for a new D&D campaign, I decided it was time to attempt an original piece – no model, no tutorial, just something straight from my imagination to paper. It took some work, and I still had to reference some of my earlier exercises for proportions and such, but I at last completed something that I was happy enough with that I was willing to share – and I was delighted to see that my efforts had finally paid off.

            Roondar here is the result of a year and a half of drawing daily – only spending between 10 and 45 minutes on each of those days. Looking at how little time that is in the grand scheme of things, I’m quite happy with how far my drawing skills have come. Soon I’ll have to stop claiming that I can’t draw.

Check out my YouTube channel where I tell the stories of my D&D campaigns.

Click here to find the charity anthology containing a couple of my short stories.

Also, make sure you check out my wife's blog and her website.


If there's any subject you'd like to see me ramble on about, feel free to leave a comment asking me to do so.

Learn to Code

            Today I want to tell you about a wonderful resource I came across for learning how to program: code.org . As those of you who are regulars around here know, I’ve been teaching myself to code for a little over a year now – and it’s been going well, with the one hiccup that I eventually run out of material on the website I’m learning from, and have to find another.

            Then a hashtag caught my attention on Twitter that was something about an hour of code. I did some research, and discovered that it was part of a movement for encouraging students to learn programming. I was enthralled, so I looked into it some more and found my way to this website that offered tons of lessons on coding – all for free. And so, my education continued.

            As technology becomes more and more prominent in the world, it’s becoming more important for people to understand how it works. Sure, it does what we want it to (at least, most of the time), but how does the technology actually accomplish this? Even a rudimentary understanding of coding is helpful in understanding what’s going on behind the screen, making it easier to deal with those infuriating times when the technology just won’t work properly.

            So, why not pop by code.org and learn a little about programming? Not only is it extremely good knowledge to have, but it’s fun, too! And it isn’t nearly as hard as you think. Really! Anyone can code.

Check out my YouTube channel where I tell the stories of my D&D campaigns.

Click here to find the charity anthology containing a couple of my short stories.

Also, make sure you check out my wife's blog and her website.


If there's any subject you'd like to see me ramble on about, feel free to leave a comment asking me to do so.

2017

            Egadz, is it that time again already? The years certainly seem to be getting faster as they rush past. And what an eventful year it’s been.

            The year started off with rats, then went on to form new friendships, have lots of Dungeons & Dragons (including a 12 hour marathon for Cystic Fibrosis), and drew to an exciting close as I started a YouTube channel.

            Alongside all of that, I started a project – well, more of a system of goals, really – at the beginning of last year, and it has lasted all the way until now. While I haven’t mentioned it before, I’ve hinted at parts of it.

            Essentially, I noticed that the best way to get myself to do something is to do it every single day. It’s part challenge and part... well, part that once I get on a streak, I really don’t want to break it. For example, I have written every single day for coming up of seven years now. Imagine how horrible it would be if I missed a day and had to start over again!

            And now I’ve expanded that list. Since the beginning of last year, I have also read and exercised every day. On top of that, I’ve also worked every day on learning two new skills: drawing and coding – both with fair success. And I’ve been practicing piano as well, which more along the lines of continuing learning a skill I’d given up on several years ago (because I’d never worked hard enough at it. To be fair, this one I didn’t do every day, but only because a piano wasn’t available on my vacation).

            To keep track of all of this, I’ve made a spreadsheet with Google Sheets with little boxes that I check off every day when I complete a task. I even have a colour-code for “rating” how well I felt I performed on that task for the day. Pretty neat, I think, and overall a huge success! So, as a New Year’s gift to all those out there seeking to set goals for 2018, I’m giving you this idea, that you might do with it as you see fit.

            With that, I wish you all a Happy New Year! May this one be better than the last.

Check out my YouTube channel where I tell the stories of my D&D campaigns.

Click here to find the charity anthology containing a couple of my short stories.

Also, make sure you check out my wife's blog and her website.


If there's any subject you'd like to see me ramble on about, feel free to leave a comment asking me to do so.

The Art of Writing

            All you need to start is one word. Just one. In fact, you don’t even need that – you could start with a single letter, although that is much more difficult if you don’t know what to follow it with.

            You take that one word – or letter, as the case may be – and follow it with another, stretching it out onto a sentence. If you want to get fancy, you can even add some punctuation, making it a compound sentence.

            Then, you do it again, adding a second sentence, then a third. (It is always a good idea to vary the sentence length.) Before you know it, you have a paragraph and you’re ready to do it all over again.

            Except, this time, the words and ideas are different. Just as the paragraph after that – and after that – are different.

            It doesn’t have to be perfect. The words can be changed later; the grammar fixed; the ideas altered. The act of writing is the important part. You aren’t chiseling it into stone – the details can always be changed.

            Just take it one step at a time – one word at a time. It happens faster than you think. You have a blog post. A chapter. A short story. A book.

            Writing is more than a skill. It is an art. It takes practice. It takes time. But when you’re finished, you have something you can be proud of – because, if you aren’t proud of it, that just means it isn’t finished yet.

            All it takes to start is one letter. One word. One sentence. From there, it grows and builds momentum until it is complete.

Check out my YouTube channel where I tell the stories of my D&D campaigns.

Click here to find the charity anthology containing a couple of my short stories.

Also, make sure you check out my wife's blog and her website.


If there's any subject you'd like to see me ramble on about, feel free to leave a comment asking me to do so.

Ageing Time

            Woah, is it August already? How did that happen? I could’ve sworn it was barely July. I guess it’s true when they say time goes faster the older you get. It seems a bit too fast for someone my age, though.

            It makes me think back to my days in school, when each day dragged on and on. I wouldn’t go so far as to say I disliked school, but I always found it tedious. I enjoyed learning, but the information I was taught was spread out over too much time. I always felt that everything covered over the course of a school year could’ve been taught to me in a month or two.

            Then, there’s all the time that was spent reviewing what was taught in previous years. True, it was necessary to a point, but I always felt I was being re-taught what I already knew when all I needed were a few key points.

            I look back at all those years now and think, what a waste. I know that I learned a lot of valuable things – my love of reading and writing was greatly nurtured by school – but, at the same time... I feel like I learned far too little for the time spent. Especially with how much longer the days felt.

            The absolute worst part, though, is the skill I became most proficient in. The skill of how to do nothing.

            Either because I finished my in-class work early or because my brain wasn’t feeling up to it at the time so I was leaving it for homework (this was quite common in the heat of summer, during the two allergy seasons that hit me or if I had a cold in the winter), there were times in school when there was simply nothing to do. Everyone was supposed to be working, so we weren’t allowed to talk (not that I was much of a talker). So, I learned the art of doing nothing.

            If my brain was feeling functional, I could spend the time thinking – the favourite pass-time of an introspective child. If not, well... it was simply a trick of looking like I was working while waiting for the class to end.

            I almost feel like this is something intentionally taught in school. The other side of looking at it is “how to pass the time when there is no work to do” which is, sadly, directly applicable to the workplace. It’s almost as if we are intentionally taught how to waste time.

            Then we get older and time goes faster. We’re proficient at wasting time, but there no longer seems to be time to waste. We base all our perceptions of time off how long those days in the school room were and we wonder how much we could get done if we had that much time and energy again.

            Whereas a day used to be a long time, soon it becomes short. Then a week becomes our definition of a short amount of time. Not long after that, months go flying by as if they were only one week long.

            Before long, a year is thought of as a short span of time.

            I watch all this time zipping past and wonder how fast time will pass for me in another decade. More than that, though, I look back to my years in school and wonder why I was forced to waste so much of my most valuable time.

Click here to find the charity anthology containing a couple of my short stories.

If there's any subject you'd like to see me ramble on about, feel free to leave a comment asking me to do so.

So You Want to be a Writer?

            There are two tips that you will come across repeatedly while doing research on writing, usually in conjunction with each other: read a lot and write a lot. More than anything, these are the two things that will shape all writers.

            The later is self-explanatory. “Write a lot” walks hand in hand with “practice makes perfect”. No one in the world can just sit down and write a perfect book the first time. Like any art, it takes time to learn not only skills, but how to tap into your innate talents and develop your unique voice.

            I, myself, am amazed at the drastic improvement I see in my own writing. Each time I complete a book, I find it hard to believe I wrote the previous one. A more tangible example is the best-selling author Terry Pratchett. All you have to do is read The Colour of Magic and compare it to any of his later titles. It’s hard to believe they were written by the same person.

            As for reading a lot, it seems to be obvious, yet at the same time it can often feel counter-productive. During the creative process, our brains naturally regurgitate what they've absorbed and it sometimes feels like we’re accidentally imitating someone else’s work. It does happen to a certain extent; I remember reading Christopher Paolini’s Eragon for the first time and being able to pick out some of his favourite authors (I looked it up later to be sure I was right). However, imitation is the first step in learning. When learning to speak, we imitate sounds before we understand the meanings of words. When learning to write, we learn the letters prior to understanding how they’re used.

            The benefits of reading when you’re a writer are endless. It’s important to know what else is out there, plus it’s a great source of inspiration. More than that, though, it is how writers learn and improve. As you begin reading books as author, you learn to look at them a new way. You take a step back from simply enjoying yourself and analyse deeper. If you find yourself drawn into a book, you ask yourself, why? What has this author done to affect me so? You look more closely at the characters to see how they’re made to seem realistic, at the plot to see how it progresses and twists, at the words to increase your vocabulary, and at the style to see what you like and dislike.

            Much of the time, the learning is on a subconscious level. Other times, you find yourself searching for the secret that makes a good book so good.

            I've recently started reading Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time series and I came across something I've never seen before (or, at least, never noticed). A lot of authors build tension by keeping secrets from the reader. What’s that lurking in the shadows? Where is the villain? Who is the villain? Jordan did the opposite: he gave, what I felt, was too much information. It wasn't quite enough to tell exactly who the traitorous allies of the protagonists were, but it was enough to make me reasonably certain – while still leaving just enough doubt. It wasn't until characters were trustingly being led into what I was sure was a trap that I realized what he’d done. He’d given me enough information to guess the truth, but held back enough that I had to read on to be certain.

            And so, my repertoire of writing tricks grow, and I become a better author through reading. For those others out there aspiring to be writers, I shall reiterate the advice you will hear over and over again. Read lots. Write lots. You’ll amaze yourself at how much you improve.

Click here to find the charity anthology containing a couple of my short stories.

If there's any subject you'd like to see me ramble on about, feel free to leave a comment asking me to do so.

Thoughts on Talent

            When I was in higschool, I played the clarinet. I played it rather well, too. By my final year I was considered the second best clarinettist in the school band(s) – the person who was better than me practised very hard to get that way.

            The thing was, I never practised outside of rehearsals. I played using my innate talent and, since I did well enough for my liking (and for my marks in class), I felt practising was a waste of my time.

            However, there was one band rehearsal I’ll never forget. We were getting close to our concert and, as such, we were already quite familiar with the music. As we played through one particular piece, I suddenly stopped and stared at my sheet music as if I’d never seen it before.

            There was a note on the page that I had no idea what the fingering for it was supposed to be. I’d played this piece many times before and, every time, I had played this section flawlessly. Until now.

            I wracked my brain, trying to figure out how to play this note that I’d played so many times before and, at long last, had to look up the proper fingering.

            There’s a big difference between having talent and having skill. Talent is amazing and can get you far, but what happens when you reach the end of that talent? Or on that one occasion that your talent gives out and you realize that you don’t know how to do something you've done dozens of times before?

            That’s where skill comes in. When you have to work at learning something, the abilities you learn stay with you far better than if you pick them up easily with your talent.

            Having talent is great, but it can only take you so far. When it comes down to it, it’s hard work and practice that shapes a talent into a solid skill.

Click here to find the charity anthology containing a couple of my short stories.

If there's any subject you'd like to see me ramble on about, feel free to leave a comment asking me to do so.