Write Like a Dungeon Master
Wherein a student reminds the mentor of something he inconveniently forgot.
This concept came up in conversation with some Writer Mentorship students in Nashville a week or so ago. Val, Doug, and Daryl were relating their struggles and love-hate relationship with the practice of writing first drafts of their scenes in second person strict present tense.
So, naturally I shared a metaphor that has been top of mind for me since a private story mentoring client of mine gave me her perspective and euphoria on the practice which has unlocked her writing in an amazing way. We’ll call that client Kitty, since that’s her name.
Inciting Incident
Kitty and I have been working together for about six months since she took the six-week Story Grid Scene Writing Workshop earlier this year. She was my student in the SWW and decided not to join the WMP. Like many of my private clients, she wants to work exclusively on her own stories (not the “arbitrary homework” scenes we assign in the Writer Mentorship at level one). This makes sense for Kitty, since she’s in film school pursuing a degree in screenwriting and already has more than enough “homework” in her life.
The first month to six weeks of our work together was hard. Even though she had the grounding in the fundamentals of the SWW, Kitty was still intermittently struggling with the 5Cs and often getting “lost in the words” while trying to write third person limited past tense. As you’ve heard me pontificate elsewhere, there is something about third person which tempts writers unto omniscience and lures them into the tar pits of exposition.
I was frustrated. Kitty was frustrated. Her scenes weren’t working and we weren’t making progress.
The Crisis
Whatever is a struggling mentor to do with a struggling mentee? Make her uncomfortable, of course. 😈 That’s what Mr. Miyagi and Yoda would do. So, I took away Kitty’s third person toys and constrained her to scenes of only five hundred words in second person strict present tense as we do with beginning WMP students.
I’m not going to say that there were tears, but…as Val, Doug, and Daryl were complaining, Kitty was uncomfortable with the constraints. But I was firm in my requirement for her next week’s work.
Would Kitty do the hard work requested or continue to struggle with her old habits?
Turning Point
Writers love words. We need to be reminded sometimes that we also need to love Sam more than we love our words. 💝
In this case, Kitty knows who her Sam is and why she is writing this particular story. That all-important fact was getting lost in the noise of exposition as she tried to dump everything she knew about the world and story onto the page. She just needed to be reminded to focus on the core Crisis of the scene and upon Sam.
Kitty came back the following Sunday with a banger of a scene. She was ecstatic. I was ecstatic. There was certainly polishing to do, but the fundamentals of the scene (the signal) was strong and clear…in less than five hundred words in second person strict present tense. Now, we could do the all-important work of amplifying the signal and removing the noise.
But I had to ask, “What was different this time, Kitty?”
Climax
Kitty grinned and lit up like the magical Gen Z fangirl that she is. “When I realized that this was just Dungeon Master Voice, it was easy!”
It was my turn to be stunned.
Full disclosure: I grew up with Dungeons & Dragons. Emotionally, I was there when St. Gygax came down from Mount Doom with the stone tablets of Chainmail which eventually became the game system we know and love (and hate sometimes, too). If I’m being honest, I was seven the year of that blessed event, but I was already a regular little nerd in the gaming store by then. Which is why Stranger Things is a fraught, nostalgic experience for me. There’s a little PTSD triggered in every episode because they did such a great job of capturing the small Hoosier town I grew up in Indiana. But I digress.
I should have recognized what Kitty taught me from the beginning. I used to volunteer for Wizards of the Coast to run public play D&D games at game stores and at PAX West and PAX South. I’ve been a veteran dungeon master for decades. I’ve even published my own tabletop roleplaying games. Doh.
Second person strict present tense present tense is literally the mode in which the DM presents the story to the players in every game session. It’s a perfect metaphor.
Thank you for the much-needed reminder, Kitty.
Resolution
What I didn’t know was the Shawn Coyne (who was at our table nearby, pretending do something on his laptop) was eavesdropping. When Tim came over after lunch, Shawn dropped the metaphor on him. Tim immediately promised to turn that into a YouTube video. I don’t know if that’ll happen any time soon, since Tim’s a busy guy, but here’s to hoping that it does happen.
What I’ll leave you with are the characteristics of Dungeon Master Voice that make it a compelling way to create a first draft of your scenes.
It focuses you on Sam.
As a good Dungeon Master, you know that the story is not about you. The story is about the players. They didn’t show up to act out your carefully crafted, beautifully imagined setting and plot points. They brought pizza and imagination because they want to act out their story.
In Dungeon Master Voice, you can only tell Sam what she perceives, not how she feels about it, right? The sensory experience of physical action and verbal action (dialog) of characters in pursuit of their goal are all Sam needs and wants to know.
Each player at the table embodies a character that has wishes, wants, hopes, dreams, and goals. Whatever those are, the player is trying like hell to get the DM to give their character what they believe in their hearts their characters want, knowing full well that it won’t be easy. But they tell the DM what they want their characters do with the limited resources at their disposal.
A good DM also knows that they won’t enjoy just magically getting everything for the asking. The players came prepared for a fight, physically and socially, to earn what they want for their imaginary avatars. The story is only as fun as how close to disaster the characters come before their players finally figure out their own way to “win.” (And, in an actual game, when the mercurial dice gods cooperate.)
Bad DMs (and sometimes by accident, good DMs) will orchestrate a TPK (total player kill) in which everyone dies, are imprisoned in a shadow dimension, or utterly fail to save the world in the nick of time. This happens when Bad DMs feel like it’s a power struggle between the players and the DM. Good DMs know that they have to play both sides of protagonism and antagonism just enough to make the players earn the cathartic payoff with good roleplay and high drama.
The emotional win for everyone is the catharsis of a costly, hard-won victory over impossible-seeming odds.
It focuses you on the five senses and minimalist description.
A good Dungeon Master knows that she can’t tell her players how to feel about anything. That’s up to them. What a good DM can do is describe the situation, events, and actions. Because tabletop RPGs are collaborative storytelling (just a like novel!), the DM only describes what’s important to the scene. The players imagine (or ask about) everything else.
For example, a DM might describe the most iconic scene archetype (an OTS: obligatory tavern scene) for players thus:
You walk into the tavern. The place is abustle with worried, grubby farmers and anxious, smelly shepherds. The grimy sawdust on the floor crunches underfoot as you trudge toward an empty table at the back.
A man dressed like a traveling minstrel holds court in front of the hearth. He is regaling everyone with a tale about the most recent bandit attack on the Drover family farmstead. To hear him tell it, every member of the family was raped and killed before the place was put to the torch. You roll your eyes at his melodrama, more interested in the mouthwatering scent of roasted boar that wafts from the kitchen.
A familiar-looking barmaid who smells like spilled beer and fresh-baked bread meets you at the empty table before you can even sit down and asks, “What in the name of the gods gives you the right to sashay back into my life?”
You can see immediately that there are at least two sources of conflict. You can imagine the place without needing a detailed description. If I did my job correctly, you can see it, smell it, touch it, and hear it. If I were more ambitious, I’d get you to taste it, too! You can imagine a relatively idealized medieval setting. You can see the story promises that are being made already. And you are immediately challenged to respond by something unexpected (Inciting Incident).
What do you do next?
It focuses you on being interesting instead of clever.
Humans, especially tabletop RPG players, are easily bored. Their attention wanders if they’re not engaged. A good DM knows that she must keep them interested. Reading them the sociopolitical info dump that she had fun imagining for the world is not interesting to the players because it’s NOT ABOUT THEM. A good DM will kick things off with immediate conflict of a social or physical variety to get the players rolling dice and making decisions.
Just like video games, there are always inevitable “cut scenes” which stitch the narrative together. In Story Grid, we think of these interstitial things as connective tissue and transitions. (Trivia: we used to call them blue beats. You’ll still hear veteran Story Gridders call them that from time to time.) But a good DM knows these moments must be brief in order to get the players back to making decisions for their characters and taking actions toward their self-chosen goals.
It focuses you on the Crisis stakes.
Dungeon Master Voice focuses the story on hard choices the players have to make. Humans subconsciously know that anything meaningful in life requires sacrifice. Characters in story must have difficult choices to make that require them to pay a price in some way to get what they want or get what they need. If you’ve ever been unsatisfied with a story ending that felt unbelievable and you didn’t know why, it’s most likely because the protagonist got both what they wanted and what they needed. In a satisfying story, a character can only get one or the other. It’s a prescriptive story if the protagonist sacrifices what they want to get what they need. It’s a cautionary tale if the protagonist sacrifices what they need to get what they want.
To that end, a good DM will often use a MacGuffin or a player-chosen goal to setup the story. Then a good DM will put obstacles in between the characters and their goal. Using Dungeon Master Voice, you can establish straightforward rewards and consequences for Option A and Option B in your Crisis question. Those stakes are what give meaning to your characters’ Climax choices.
The players in a game, of course, will immediately push back and try to avoid all of the consequences and obtain all of the rewards for both A and B. A good DM knows this and is prepared with Progressive Complications in the form of obstacles and tactics that make it harder to get both A and B at the same time…all the way up to the Turning Point of the scene (and the global story) when the characters must choose one or the other. If they can get both A and B then the Crisis is meaningless and the imaginary struggle will not be fun.
It’s like line art.
Back to you as the writer, I’ll offer you a last metaphor: painting. I commission art from human painters because I want beautiful things in the world that are made by real people. As part of commissioning art, I give the painter a description and a vision that I have in my head. Because the painter knows that I’m unlikely to imagine the same thing that they do, we start with rough sketches. The painter will usually give me three pencil-type line art sketches that are quick and dirty but capture an idea. We go back and forth with the sketches until we both agree that it’s time to start layering in the actual color and more difficult shading, lighting, and polish work.
Dungeon Master Voice is just like sketching. The marketplace hasn’t indicated that it’s accepting of second person fiction yet, but a few people have tried. Perhaps the LitRPG folks will make second person present tense a thing someday. If anyone can, it’ll be those unsung heroes. Until then, after you get your scene working in five hundred words or less in Dungeon Master Voice, you can readily revise that already-working scene into first person or third person.
Here are six examples that I’ve drawn using this technique all starting with Dungeon Master Voice and then revising into first person strict and third person limited past tense so that you can see the differences and the effect of a higher word count.
My next practice scene of the “You and Me against the World” archetype is close. I’m hoping to get that out next week, life and day job-permitting. 🤞 Wish me luck! 🍀
What’s next?
If you’ve never played a tabletop roleplaying game and are having a hard time imagining the experience, then I recommend picking an episode of Critical Role at random and watching some other entertaining folks play a game. If you’re a completionist nerd (I see you), you can start with the very first episode. If that looks like fun, give it a try in your next scene and write your engagement with your protagonist as if she’s the Sam of your story and see what happens!
Want help with your story?
If the Nine Circles of Revision Hell seem daunting to you, you’re not alone. They can be a slog, even when you’ve done them many times. For a lot of writers, the editing process is the most painful part of publishing. I’m weird. I enjoy it! But I’m aware that not everyone does. If you don’t get off on revisions or if you don’t even know where to start, let me help you.
I’m a Story Grid Certified Editor and founding member of the Story Grid Guild. I’ve been helping my clients with developmental editing of their novels and screenplays as well as chapter-by-chapter scene coaching for their works-in-progress since 2020. I joined the staff of the Story Grid Scene Writing Workshop as a coach in June 2024 and the Story Grid Writer Mentorship cadre as a mentor in January 2025.
Yes, I’m still closed to new clients. I’ll be open to accept new clients once more in January 2026. Slots fill up fast. I’ve already got two new folks on the docket for the first Monday after New Year’s. Tuesday’s open, though. 😏 Book a campfire chat and let’s see if we might be compatible story adventuring companions.