The Power of Storytelling
As a child I had a tape recorder by my bed. I would get one of the various tapes from my very full tape cabinet and listen to the stories as I fell asleep. I had so many: Roald Dahl, Just William, Tintin, The Hobbit, Harry Potter, and many more! I listened to my recording of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy so much that I could recite the whole first episode from memory (and can still do a decent chunk of it!) Going to bed did not often seem such an annoyance as a child… for I had my stories to listen to. Thinking back, I think these tapes were a strong contributing factor in my pursuing a career as a creative.
Theatre is a medium that has lasted for thousands of years and is still going strong.
Human beings are at our heart storytellers and lovers of stories. I was in Forbidden Planet today, a shopping haven for all things nerdy, with shelves upon shelves of sci-fi and fantasy books, wondering: How long would it take me to read them all? Theatre is a medium that has lasted for thousands of years and is still going strong. In the last century the cinematic industry has grown to revolutionise how we experience stories. The video games industry is one of the biggest in the world, bigger than the entire film and music industry combined. 500 hours, or just under three weeks, worth of content is uploaded to YouTube every minute. It would take a literal lifetime of some 82.2 years to watch all the content uploaded to YouTube in a single day. We are storytellers and consumers through and through.
Players would accomplish the impossible: killing dragons and saving the world; with little more than pencils, paper, dice, and the ability to create vivid, collective hallucinations.
And of course, good reader, D&D is no exception. D&D has its roots in wargaming, the simulation of historical battles with miniature soldiers; but was adapted by Gary Gygax and co to include more mythological and Tolkien-esque foes. But it very quickly became so much more. Players would accomplish the impossible: killing dragons and saving the world; with little more than pencils, paper, dice, and the ability to create vivid, collective hallucinations. That is the power of storytelling.
Just a group of people sitting around a table with comparatively few visual aids. That is the power of storytelling.
D&D has seen a massive resurgence in recent years. This is in no small part, I believe, to Critical Role. I have been a fan of this hit web series (aka a Critter) since the very beginning of the show and I could wax poetically about it for hours. Suffice it to say that it has moved me to greater emotional heights of joy and sorrow than most anything else I have seen on screen. And that is all due to the performances and descriptive skills of the cast. Just a group of people sitting around a table with comparatively few visual aids. That is the power of storytelling.
Critical Role are making an animated series based on the adventures of their first campaign and the adventuring party known as Vox Machina. Now animation is a very expensive medium to produce, and major studios, being the incredibly cautious beasts that they are, did not want to risk investing in such a niche series (D&D is for nerds! Am I right?!) So Critical Role turned to crowdfunding, asking their fans, the Critters, to help them out. Their initial aim was to raise $750,000 over the course of 45 days for a couple of episodes… they raised that amount of money in 45 minutes. Their campaign ended up being the most successful Kickstarter for a television series ever, and the 6th most successful Kickstarter in history. Their campaign ended up raising some $11.38 million and has been picked up by Amazon Prime, for 2 whole seasons. That is the power of storytelling.
To me D&D is at its heart a storytelling game, with rules to provide needed boundaries to the collective hallucination. You can tell this by the language people use when talking about their games. Very often it will be: “So we were in this dungeon-” “I drove my sword into the shark’s mouth!” “When that evil wizard told me I was worthless I felt so angry!” It’s all first person. You were a different character. Still you, but with a new identity, in a world where dragons are real and people can genuinely summon lightning into their hands. You drove the sword through that dragon’s heart! Not the protagonist of a book or show or play… You!
You were, in other words, immersed; not passively reading or watching a story, but actively making decisions. Decisions that affect you and those around you. Making a difference in the world, when it is so easy to feel powerless to make meaningful changes in today’s society. That is an incredibly powerful thing.
So I am eternally thankful to my parents for that childhood tape recorder and those tapes. They seeded my love of stories and storytelling, which has led to a career as an actor, writer, and of course, professional DM.
It brings me great joy to be a such a storyteller and I look to the future with excitement at the prospect of future stories to experience and to tell. Be it through performance, writing… or at your table behind a dungeon master screen cackling maniacally as a mad lich who wants to do the same thing he does every night… try to take over the world!