Why play Dungeons & Dragons to learn Design?
D&D shares a lot of elements with UX Design. Here are the lessons I learned by playing D&D and becoming a Dungeon Master.
“You’ve been on the Triboar Trail for about half a day. As you come around a bend, you spot two dead horses sprawled about fifty feet ahead of you, blocking the path. Each has several black-feathered arrows sticking out of it. The woods press close to the trail here, with a steep embankment and dense thickets on either side. What do you do?”
That was the start of a game of D&D that I hosted as a Dungeon Master (DM) for the first time a few months ago. I prepared 18 hours for the game, cramming all the rules, learning how to conduct a game, roleplaying different characters. It was exhausting but fun, and with subsequent games that I hosted, the 18 hours reduced to 4–6 hours of prep before the games. I was getting good at DM’ing!
After one of the recent games, as I started packing up, picking up tons of die lying around the room, I couldn’t help but think how similar D&D is to UX Designing. A lot of the elements of the gameplay have parallels in the design process. The act of being a Dungeon Master puts you in situations that build skills that are vital for a UX Designer. After some intense sticky note session about my learnings, I decided to share them with the design community through this article.
What is ‘Dungeons & Dragons’?
To best explain the game, I will use excerpts from the official DnD website.
Dungeons & Dragons is a roleplaying game with stories in worlds of sword and sorcery. It’s about picturing the towering castle beneath the stormy night sky and imagining how a fantasy adventurer might react to the challenges that scene presents. And players roll dice to resolve their attacks or if they can scale a cliff or pull off a dangerous task.
It is a form of make-believe, adding structure to the stories & using dice rolls to determine the consequences of the adventurers’ action.
Who is a Dungeon Master?
The Dungeon Master’s role is to host the game for the players. The DM narrates the story for the group and roleplays various in-story characters and monsters based on the player’s actions.
The goal of a DM is not to play against the players, trying to stop them from progressing. Rather their goal is to help the players embark on a journey where they all are engaged, invested, and enjoy the gameplay.
Before we go on, if you’d like to read more about Dungeon’s & Dragons and the commonalities it shares with UX Design and Design Thinking, I recommend this and this articles. And now, read on to find out what I learned and if you should become a Dungeon Master yourselves!
It teaches how you can get out of analysis paralysis
Analysis paralysis. It’s a term that haunts every designer at some point in their career. They find out something new about your user base and you believe that more research is needed before you synthesize the results.
Confronting this paralysis and moving on with the project is a trait that designers develop through their professional experiences. Well, if you are a Dungeon Master you will experience something similar.
Every new bit of information would introduces more concepts that a DM has to jump around the book to learn and memorize.
While preparing for the first game, I needed to read the story and study game mechanics and rules for that story. Every sentence I read would introduce 2–3 new concepts that I had to jump around the book to learn and memorize. Each new concept introduced even more game mechanics which I would again flip pages for. Eventually, I was lost and it was just the 1st event in the game! I felt like I was getting into a rabbit hole, never to make it through, and host a great game.
I decided to take a step back and see where I am in my preparation for the game. If I can keep track of the information that’s critical for the story to move forward, I can focus on the story rather than the mechanics. The mechanics which are not important, I can make a note of it and check the mechanic in the game rather than right now. Understanding that I am lost and refocusing on the story notes helped me host my first game.
Confronting analysis paralysis and moving on with the design project is a trait that designers develop through their professional experiences. By DM’ing a few games, I was being put into similar situations where I had to host a game without knowing everything that there is to know. Working with the information that you have becomes ingrained as a DM, which is a trait that transfers well into the design profession. Practice like this can make a designer feel more confident in their research and design decisions.
You understand & build better user personas
When designing for people, it’s vital to understand their goals, motivation, what walk of life they come from, what delights or frustrates them. We pour this information in personas that can guide our designs and build better user journeys. But, noticing this information about a person is a skill that comes with practice. Again, DM’ing comes to the rescue!
Understanding player’s background to tell a story, making sure all of them enjoy the journey is a challenge a DM faces in every game.
During our games, all of my friends had a distinct style of playing the game. Their personalities mixed with the characters they chose created unique personas that directed the game.
One of my friends is very careful with every step the group takes. Another one is meticulous with the numbers and guessed all the stats of the monsters with great accuracy. The 3rd one always goes into the game all guns blazing, which makes us worried he might ruin the game before it even starts. Taking these players through the story and making sure all of them enjoy the journey is a challenge I face every time I am the host.
Being a DM or a UX Designer, I am creating journeys for my players/users to embark on. In D&D, I create mental personas of the players in the first 30 minutes of a game and tweak the journey so that all of my friends can enjoy it. This quick user observation and ideation is a skill that has helped me in many of my design projects. A 30-minute interview with research participants might not be enough, but DM a few games and 30 minutes will be enough for you!
You practice crafting stories that create great experiences
I believe design decisions tie together to create a story where the user is the lead character. But, a decision in a given moment is taken based on the current problems and past decisions. Any new decision has to address user’s needs while also building a cohesive journey for the user. This is exactly what a DM needs to do throughout a game!
As a UX Designer, you will craft stories through user flows, storyboards, wireframes, and mockups, which a DM does in every game.
After hosting so many games, I can read the reactions of the players quickly and customize the story for them. Remember, my goal is to create an engaging and invested journey for the players to embark on and enjoy. So, does the group think it’s a breeze fighting 4 zombies? I let 2 zombies attack and the other 2 sneak up on the group to scare them. Are they too scared to even talk to the villagers? I will give them simple tasks to boost their confidence.
Things like this give the story an adventurous and personal experience that is unique to every game I host. My friends always want to come back for more stories, more adventures.
As a DM, I need to make decisions to craft a story that’s cohesive while also keeps the players engaged and entertained. As a UX Designer, I need to craft the stories through user flows, storyboards, wireframes, and mockups.
A design project of multiple months is converted into a D&D game of a couple of hours, but the challenge and the skills required remains the same. So by DM’ing some amazing D&D games, I have improved my storytelling and have created better designs.
To become a Dungeon Master is not an easy task. It is a reflective art similar to Design and the skills required in both these practices oddly overlap.
Both need you to research about the space and tackle analysis paralysis. The communicative nature of the game makes you better at understanding users. And the storytelling aspect teaches you to craft better experiences. You can indeed learn a lot about UX Design by becoming a Dungeon Master.
Of course, not all the skills transfer across in both these practices. D&D and Design have different contexts and serve different purposes. But through a game like D&D, vital skills can be learned which improves your value as a Designer.
So, go ahead, host some amazing D&D games, and become a better designer!
