To celebrate the 50th anniversary of Dungeons & Dragons (D&D), the High Fantasy track at Dragon Con welcomed Michael Chatfield, Matt Dinniman, Brianna Marie, and Jay Boyce to the Marriott track room (L401-403) Sunday at 5:30PM to examine the impact of D&D upon a generation of fantasy authors who grew up with it. John G. Hartness moderated the panel which focused much of its energy on D&D as a vehicle for storytelling.
Chatfield, author of almost 50 novels, didn’t play a lot of D&D as a child. He did, however, enjoy going through the books and using the material to feed his own imagination. At a very young age he began creating stories and writing them down for himself. He used the D&D books to inform those early stories. He admitted that his engagement with D&D impacted the way he writes, offering an opportunity for a writer to develop characters in the process of playing the game. This process is directly related to the character development that defines good fantasy writing.
Boyce did something similar. A veteran not just of D&D but a variety of tabletop role playing games, Boyce would take D&D modules and rewrite them. As a dungeon master, she hated playing a module as written because her players, who could also purchase the module, would already know what was coming. So, she simply rewrote them. Dinniman found his way to D&D through the novels, including the work of Margaret Weis, Tracy Hickman, and Michael Williams. Hartness fell in love with the original boxed basic D&D set with the red dragon on the cover.
For all the panelists, D&D has infused their work as a vehicle of storytelling. Creating a set piece, or a campaign, requires the dungeon master to create a series of stories and thereby build out a world in which the game characters interact. Characters too must go beyond the statistics on their character sheet and be realized through their own back stories. Thus, at every turn D&D offered them an opportunity to create.
Chatfield raised an interesting point when he discussed the injection of chaos into his work. As part of his creative process, he will intentionally roll dice. He allows himself three times a book to allow the dice to determine a course of action. It introduces an element of “chaos” into the work. He embraces the fact that this has the potential to change the story, leading to interesting and different story lines.
Hartness, a professional dungeon master, pointed to another dimension of the relationship: performance. Whether leading a game for a group of 5 or a YouTube audience, the DM is performing. She is weaving a tale that she has created and infused with life. There are different expectations that must be met with mastering a game before an audience, or for a group that has paid you to master a game for them, but the element of performance remains. Dungeons & Dragons has had a long and complex history, but it is now a cultural landmark. This panel, all published authors, is proof of the impact, legacy, and continuing power of Gygax and Arneson’s creation.
