Played an awesome D&D one-shot tonight with some mates and I learnt [reminded myself of] a pretty awesome thing about writing and staying true to characters.

I’d only previously played one character – a young half-orc warlock who was smarter than he was wise, so fairly impulsive with a lot to learn, and a bit of a chip on his shoulder. He was relatively quick to action, and fairly in it for his own internal reasons of gaining a better understanding of the world he hadn’t yet explored enough of.

In this adventure, I shifted to a different character, a much older mountain dwarf who had retired to an arctic region to life his best life, until his village was slaughtered by frost giants and now he’s back out in the world to kill giants and generally pay this debt he feels to having lived when he wishes he hadn’t.

In the events of this one-shot, my party went aboard this abandoned and, we quickly learned, pestilent ship, and then we heard a young girl below deck cry out. This gave me a moment to consider what I would do, and I thought about specifically what my dwarf, Egil Frostwalker, would do because it was different to what the half-orc, Trank, would do.

Trank probably wouldn’t have overly cared on a personal level, but he would have gone down so he could battle. Whereas I knew Egil would instantly become emotionally invested, knowing a young person was in danger would remind him of too many grandchildren he saw killed, so he would be in this for the rescue [which I could also tell would be a great way to lure Egil into trouble and fool and sway him in other adventures].

D&D is great when it gets you thinking in character. Not what’s the *best* thing to do, not what would *I* do, but what would my character do. It made me realise and reflect on writing my own stories that when events occur, people need to have their own personal reactions, as we all do in real life.

The outcome of playing as Egil lead to a great moment where he encounters the person behind the young girl’s cry – actually a halfling woman – and he finds her trapped in some nasty webbing in a crawl space and I knew Egil would be absolutely 100% concerned with getting her to safety. As such, he reaches in to talk to her, comfort her, and then manacles himself to her in an effort to make sure she won’t be left behind. Egil then tells the group if he dies then they are to cut his arm off so she can survive.

There is no way Trank would have done this, and I feel it was a great storytelling moment born purely from character, which is usually the best way for things to happen.

So, that’s what I learned at D&D this evening.