...funny how many DMs take profound offense when i note that without player agency, they may as well just write a book...
"you sound like a terrible player; i would never want you in my campaign!" ...yeah, the feeling's mutual...
this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2026
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Yeah, a DM shouldn't write a story. The story gets written at the table.
A DM should write a scenario, the concept of a story. With many different NPC, locations, and lore. That can all be moved freely around and only get locked into existence when told during a game.
I call them information blocks. And even though you prepared an NPC block to be at a specific location block. The NPC can be moved to where the players are if the story calls for it. Same with lore blocks, especially if it is something important the players need to know in order to progress. The same lore can be said by any NPC, even if you prepared it to be told by a specific one. Having individual information blocks that switch around gives the players more agency and makes the story more fluently.
Hideo Kojima: "I want to make a game that's nothing but cutscenes."
Hideo Kojima: "I've been informed that that's called making a movie."
Potentially also solo-deving an rpg video game.
There's a concept called 'solo journaling RPGs' - the idea is that it's essentially a very lite set of rules that you use to generate writing prompts for yourself. The game gives you some loose guidelines for what to write about, and then you write journal entries as if you had experienced that thing, with the details being very largely open to your own imagination and interpretation.
Edit: In fact, if this concept is interesting to you, itch.io is currently offering a bundle to raise money for the Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota, which includes a lot of solo journaling RPGs, in addition to some other things.
It seems like it would be pretty easy with different sets of cards to randomly generate dungeons and towns and enemies and NPCs and quests… I would imagine this has already been done.
Also, let's not forget gamebooks.
my brother got into the choose your own adventure books. i got to read one of them when he was done, and it was fun, but y'know.
There are a lot of solo games. Its kind of funny that there seems to be a market for "group games minus the group."
There is probably some psychological angles here, like people are too introverted or whatever to find and join or just create a local group fornthese sorts of games.
Despite the funny meme, a lot are intended to be game like, with dice rolls and such to create some unintended spontaneous events and results.
Many however also are basically just a writing prompt. Or a writing prompt where the prompt has a dice roll at the start.
I didn't really play any but Instarted collecting up solo games a few years ago.
This joke is why I will say to DMs getting railroad-y, "are you sure you wouldn't rather write a book?"
This is basically exactly how the Iconoclasts series by Mike Shel came about. He was writing a module for D&D and the publisher was like "dude you wrote way more into this than it actually needs, you need to go write a book"
So he did, and it was great, go read Aching God
The best DMs have a stack of unfinished manuscripts in their study.
Maybe write manga instead. They like to include dnd style stats about each character and share mid-battle inner thoughts about strategy for the next attack.
Record of Lodoss War was created in 1986 by Group SNE as a Dungeons & Dragons "replay" serialized in the Japanese magazine Comptiq from September 1986 to September 1989 issues, though they also used the setting with other systems such as Tunnels & Trolls and RuneQuest.. Many shorter Lodoss scenarios and replays were published in the Comp RPG magazine (initially a supplement of Comptiq) that ran from 1991 to 1994. Replays are not novels, but transcripts of RPG sessions, meant to both hold the interest of readers and convey the events that took place. They have proven to be popular, even to those who do not play role-playing games but are fans of fiction (including fantasy fiction). Similar to light novels, many characters and parties in replays have become popular as characters of anime. An example of such a character is the female elf Deedlit in Record of Lodoss War, who was played by science fiction novelist Hiroshi Yamamoto during the RPG sessions.
Also, obviously, there's the Critical Role franchise that gave us Vox Machina and The Mighty Nein.
It's writing a book ✨with dice✨ :3
I used to run down d&d encounters by myself when planning to DM sometimes, just to make sure im not making them too easy/difficult. It can actually be decently fun
This made me think of like, an old school choose your adventure type book, but it tells you to roll whatever kinds of checks, in addition to actually just making decisions.
Ironsworn has entered the chat.
You can do it if you use a pathfinder adventure path.