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Dungeons and Dragons

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Lessons from the Tabletop: Know Your Domain

This is Part III in my series Lessons from the Tabletop: Things I’ve learned about project management from Dungeons & Dragons. Read Part I. Part II.

Many dungeon masters fall victim to the trap of over-preparation.

Spending a lot of time preparing a specific plan for a game can make it difficult to let go of that plan (as I wrote in Part II). One might conclude that planning is a waste of time. As an absolute, this could not be more wrong.

“Planning is essential. Plans are useless.”

Rather than preparing for one story, a good dungeon master prepares for any story.

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Lessons from the Tabletop: Letting Go

This is part II in my series Lessons from the Tabletop: Things I’ve learned about project management from Dungeons & Dragons. Read Part I here.

Game masters also have an inside joke: “No plot survives contact with the players.”

When I attempt to drive the plot, dictate the player options and the pacing, the players begin to disengage. The same thing happens on teams when a leader begins to white-knuckle the steering wheel.

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Lessons from the Tabletop: Things I’ve Learned about Project Management from Dungeons & Dragons

For the past year or so, I’ve been getting together with a group of friends once a week to play Dungeons and Dragons. The popular role-playing game from the ‘70s has enjoyed something of a resurgence in the last few years.

In the game, 4-6 players act as characters that they create using randomized dice rolls. One player, the game master, tells the other players about the world and what they see. The players respond by saying what they’d like their characters to do, and the game master will tell them if they need to roll any dice to determine the outcome of the attempted action.

Unlike most RPG video games, the (usual) goal of Dungeons and Dragons is not to win. The goal is to tell a good story. To that end, it is an extremely collaborative game. The players and game master together craft a narrative. There are heroes, villains, growth, remorse, and the usual range of human (or humanoid) emotion. Usually there is a fair bit of conflict too.

In my group, I act as the game master. Even though I’ve been leading professional teams for over a decade, I have learned a lot about project management in the process of adjudicating a world born out of my friends’ collective imaginations.

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