Dungeons and Dragons, aka DnD, is the tabletop gaming phenomenon that nerds love. Critical Role made it popular. Thanks to Matt Mercer and other voice actors bringing the characters and world to life. However, it’s still pushed aside as a useless tabletop game.
But there are many benefits to DnD that many people write off. It can help in a bunch of areas, some are a bit weird, and some even include blogging. Which you may scream in disbelief at, but it’s true. Let me break down the many benefits of DnD.
Narrative and Worldbuilding
No matter what type of blog post you write, you have to hook your audience. You do that by building a narrative. Even the intro for this post has some narrative and weaves a story into it. Now with some types of genres of blogging, the reliance on narrative becomes smaller. If you are a travel blogger, you need it in spades, business blogger? Then it’ll be short bursts.
Now I can hear you asking, ‘So where does DnD fit into this? Hence, in DnD, you have you and your friends. Some of you will play as characters you have created. Someone else will be the Dungeon/Game master. Who decides how the plot will play out throughout the game, considering how you’ve utilised your characters. With this in mind, as a DM, you learn narrative techniques and storytelling. This will help you with future blogs, and as you DM more/blog more, this will only improve.
What if you aren’t the DM?
You will pick up on the DM’s storytelling style if you play, influencing your writing style. Plus, through creating your character, you will write your backstory/narrative for them. Whilst it doesn’t last as long or advances as much. You will be thinking about it and learning something about the writing process, and that will enable you to develop your writing style and the way you can weave a narrative into a blog post. Hooking your audience in will be one part of why the number of reads/views increases.
Even when it’s not blogging, and you turn your writing skill into a script or novel. It helps with that too!
Character
Now in DnD, you have to make a character for the game. You will think about their backstory and work with the DM to make it impact the story. Working with this character and their actions for a long campaign teaches you to write characters and show, not tell their motivations. And what makes a likable one different from an unlikeable one.
This can help you write for your blog and make the people in your posts come to life. Or if you’ve moved on to something like a novel, it’ll help with your character writing.
DnD fulfills Social needs
Now we’re going on to the stuff that isn’t content creation related necessarily. Because you have to play as a group of four or more, you have to regularly meet up with a group of friends. And if the DM and players are good at Dungeons and Dragons, you’ll bond over the weird stuff that happens during a session.
Strengthening those bonds of friendship can make you feel more connected to the group. And this connection can reduce loneliness and feelings of isolation which can reduce mental health problems such as depression.
It can also make you find new connections if no one else plays it and is equally beneficial as you meet new people and grow as a person.
Organisation
Because of the number of people needed to play the game, you have to get many people to agree on a time and place to meet up. Yes, other areas in life teach you organisational skills. However, unlike school or college, you won’t be in the same place and doing the same things. This makes it harder to get hold of people. And because it’s more challenging, it reinforces the lessons on the organisation, such as messaging people more clearly and quickly.
DnD helps creativity + problem-solving.
Dungeons and dragons enable you to create and roleplay in many fantastic worlds with an abundance of characters. Creating and acting in these worlds with these characters can help your creativity, especially the DM.
Another thing about being the DM is you constantly have to think of solutions to your story and the puzzles. And the characters and their development. This is a form of creative problem solving that helps in other areas of life. Such as jobs in retail or solving a problem with equipment when live streaming.
Loads of people say Dungeons and Dragons are bad. As you can see, there are a lot of benefits in a multitude of areas, from content creation to developing your skills. Maybe we should all become a bit nicer to the weird hobbies of the late ’80s
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