Raise your hand if you've a) played DnD and b) thought "Hey, this character... kind of slaps."
You're not alone! TTRPGs are a great way to explore, define, and get to know a character before putting them on paper. We asked the authors of Tales of Ale and Chainmail, our DnD5e-inspired fantasy anthology, if their tabletop experiences influenced their writing:
Jonathan Maloney
My first inspiration for Bandy Fitzgibbon was found in a TTRPG – and it wasn’t even my character.
My fondest memories of playing TTRPGs are encountering people who understood core aspects of a culture, and then finding ways to channel or repress it. Characters that are not mere aberrations from the society that they are formed from, but those who have made an effort for whatever reason to deny it; which, while perhaps admirable, would also create inherent flaws in their personalities that could frequently lead to self-destruction. I remember playing with people who could do an astonishing job of taking such learned behaviours and channel them through the lens of denial or subversion, and play out the story through tragedy and triumph. One person in particular had a penchant for gnomes, and through their own playing they inspired me to make my own.
Bandy is a subversion. A very particular subversion that takes the core aspects of perceptions of gnomes – chaotic, inventive, colourful and rather erratic – and inverts them, while also recognising that such aspects are parts of himself that he is in denial of, and thus setting him up to be perfectly imprisoned by the authority of the device that he became enslaved to. I was able to bring him to life because of TTRPGs – I could envision how he would move and talk easily enough, but it was how he thought which created him.
TTRPGs are a goldmine for this sort of thing. They are where you can iron out a character, where you can find them and, most of all, fall in love with them - flaws and all. You can learn how their weaknesses can make interesting stories - when what they fail at doing is as compelling as what they succeed at accomplishing, and show how others can compliment those flaws - creating gaps where other personalities can shine and prosper. It’s tempting to want a character that can do everything - but a story is made when you cannot. The roots of creating a narrative and finding ways to work with others are what make TTRPGs the best place to find where your character fits into the world, and once you have that, you have all you need to write as much as you can wish for and more.
Crystal Roles
Humanity and story telling has always been interwoven: remembering, creating, community. My experience with TTRPGs has highlighted just how wonderful it is to connect and build stories together, whether in a fictitious world of our making (or someone else's) or connecting in our everyday lives.
I have been supremely lucky to have a regular Dungeons and Dragons group where I have seen through the eyes of many different characters that both I and my friends have taken on. I have been both the player and the Dungeon Master and thrilled in both roles in creating stories together with my friends. It builds a great sense of empathy, understanding of motivations and links between cause and consequences. All of these things helped inform my stories, especially that of Doc.
The great thing I find about TTRPGs is that, to work as a game that creates a world, TTRPGs already have the very foundations and framework to build your stories on. They are a working base consisting of what can be found in the world (monsters, creatures, pantheon of gods etc) to different planes of existence. It is also a very useful tool if you want to integrate magic in your world, and how it could function and work, keeping things balanced and with boundaries to work with and challenge.
My main three characters (Hickory, Deidre and Doc) were based loosely on archetypes that already exist (and therefore had rules/boundaries to work within) in DnD 5E. Doc was based on a knowledge domain cleric, Tiffen a druid, and the idea for Deidre kind of morphed from a rogue to a bard with a ‘homebrewed’ (made up) college of night dancing. The best bit about having a framework? Being able to shape and change what rules already exist to create something new!
Thomas Moore
I work on the opposite end of the spectrum of TTRPGs. Contrary to how I might come across, I think I have played DnD three times and my only other experience was playing ‘Betrayal at the House on the Hill’ where I got to play a blob monster. That was fun. I was blobbing around eating my former allies. They didn’t know what to do when the sentient blob started laughing and making crunching sounds. One day I’ll get to play it again.
Ashley Bravington
TTRPGs provide an amazing toolkit for character building. One of my early lessons in this was accepting that there was no “do over” sitting around a table and the dice roll for or against you (the player) but the consequences shape your character. A spellcaster slowly turning into a dagger strapped knife fighter due to dice rolls, the laughter around a table and an in-joke developing into a long term snippet of lore among friends. This helped grow my writing from moving from set piece to set piece, into something that develops a character and changes how they react to circumstances. While writing has the benefit of being able to edit afterwards, understanding how past events should affect future actions was a great benefit.
Beyond that, learning to build a character based off the archetypes provided by a TTPRG without being limited to a specific “style”. Rather than having skills and abilities tied to a class, Shadowrun uses six main concepts. None of these archetypes are a class; they are merely a way of handling what the game throws at you. A spellcaster may be an old guy in a robe with a wand, or a corporate suit with a fountain pen they use to focus their spells.Or a ragged tuxedo wearing gang member, complete with casting spells like composing a song midair. The presentation of a common idea in a more unique way helps build a world more than a simple ship of fighters and rogues.
When writing Khamid’s connection to Callath, and his friendship with Aldo and Yacen I wanted to create the impression that these things simply are without needing to go into the detail of why. That they exist in the world, and the events that caused them are already written. There is always of going back and putting these events to paper, but doing so should merely cement the future actions that have already transpired.
Alan Kent
No medium embraces the degree of creativity quite like the tabletop RPG. Within the pages of a book, you are confined to the words written by another author, and can deviate only as much as you can perceive the imagery conjured up by the words as you are railroaded along the adventure. Movies take it one step back by doing away with any degree of imagination you might have conjured up about the characters or the setting. Video games, while allowing you to participate in the story, only allow you to do so within the confines of an algorithm.
That’s why there is little to compare to the raw flexibility and chaos of a tabletop RPG, where the story is not merely an integral part of the game, it can be moulded, shaped, twisted and pulverised to within an inch of its life. Choices matter, and moreover they can have real life consequences, whether it ends in a valorous display that builds camaraderie among friends, or the escalation of a vicious dispute that can only end in the destruction of one side, if you play Warhammer.
It was this clamorous kerfuffle that I hoped to bring to The Teetotaller, where the story roils and contorts, brimming with the kind of randomness that can only be achieved through a party of die-rolling storytellers, rather than the constraints the come under the whims of a solitary author.
What are your thoughts? Are you currently playing a TTRPG character you'd write about?
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