Ode to Collaborative Storytelling
This weekend was the four-year anniversary of my first-ever RPG campaign (still running!). We were meeting (remotely) after a six-month COVID hiatus, and most of us were playing new builds thanks to an in-world event that saw most of us changing class. It is an impressively complex campaign; I am often bad at it. There is something about the mechanics of D&D that I find punishingly difficult to comprehend. Before every session now I sit down for an hour and work the game out all over again, and even then I usually do a substandard job.
But this campaign holds a particular place in my heart, and not just because it was my first one. Our players are in three countries, across three time zones, up to ten hours apart. Over the last four years, we’ve held 36 three- to five-hour sessions. We use Roll20 to play and speak to each other over voice; we record the sessions so we can go back and listen after the fact. Our characters have died and been resurrected, changed class, changed allegiance.
After the session this weekend, after so long apart, we stayed on the call and reminisced about the last four years—how good it always feels to sit down to this campaign, how much we trust each other with this story. Our lives have changed so much since we started: we’ve moved cities and countries, started and changed careers, had revelations about our sexualities and genders. We’d been friends online for several years before starting to play, but several of us have since met in person for the first time. One of our players married our DM a couple years ago, falling in love partly through the campaign.
Among the things we talked about was how we’ve sometimes outgrown the characters we made back in 2016. These characters are reflections, in ways, of who we were when we made them. Going back in to play them now can feel like a bizarre experience. At least to me, it wouldn’t feel as possible to do that with a group we trusted less.
(img. credit WOTC; Storm King’s Thunder, 5e)
I think several of us left the call emotional. The session started emotional, too; I retired my first-ever player character in the opening scene. I’d outgrown the character, but more importantly, the campaign and the party had outgrown her. For more than a year I’d been taking notes like “Loraaga doesn’t like this,” “Loraaga no longer trusts Alana’s judgment,” “Loraaga is afraid of the choices the party is making,” “Loraaga is lost and alone here.” At one point Loraaga was given a magical compass by a passing NPC and she relied on that to point her true—and yet the further it took her from home, the more it felt like it was pointing her wrong.
Shortly after Loraaga died in battle and was revived, the party went through a divine ritual that allowed them to change class. Loraaga looked around and didn’t recognize the people she started this journey with, and she realized—I realized—it was time for her to leave.
I only felt empowered to do this because I’ve spent the last several months listening to Rusty Quill Gaming, the only Actual Play podcast that’s ever stuck with me. In it, one character opts to leave the party due to a stark difference of priority with another. I didn’t really realize, being relatively new to RPGs, that was an option. Something I’m still learning when it comes to collaborative storytelling is how to strike the balance between my own narrative instincts, the DM’s story, and the story we’re all telling together. I write characters with strong motivations in my own work, and so my characters tend to enter campaign worlds with agendas—and then very much find hills to die on.
Loraaga was my first ever RPG character. I had no idea what I was doing when I made her. I also just wasn’t as good of a writer back then. I don’t think I ran a bad character, but I also didn’t run a character that was, four years later, still right for the campaign. At this point, Loraaga devalued all the things the campaign’s story was oriented around. I wanted to make room for a character that was invested in its outcome. Adding to that, what I’m able to bring to the table now is different than when we began, best actualized through a new voice.
I’m still not great at TRPGs. Creating my new ranger took me three days and eight hours and I had so many false starts and weird questions. I get discouraged a lot. I have no idea why DND specifically is so hard to wrap my head around, because I’ve played a number of other RPGs since and have nowhere near the same level of difficulty. The complication of the system is among its assets, and I do derive satisfaction in getting used to the mechanics after enough hours of play.
But talking with my friends talking about how far we’ve come in the four years we’ve been playing, I stopped thinking about this game in terms of mastery or from the perspective of writing and started thinking about it experientially. I have learned a ton, even being kinda bad at this game: narrative beats and character arcs, dialogue and reactions. The collaborative nature of DND flexes muscles that I can learn on my own, but that I can’t learn the same way: playing off real people and their emotions, responding to something friends crafted out of themselves. It’s one thing to know you are telling a story, another to know you are telling a story with friends, and another still to understand what it is to experience the story in a real sense—to have the words said to you, responding to them on the spot, and manipulating your figure on the map.
Our campaign is starting to draw to a close, but I’ll always carry this—that we shaped this story with ourselves and each other. I’m probably still going to keep being kinda bad at DND, but maybe that pales in contrast to everything else we put into it and have been able to take away.