A Dungeon Master Exposed
Welcome to A Dungeon Master Exposed. If you’ve never heard of Dungeons and Dragons or don’t know what a TTRPG is, I may not be the kind of dungeon master you seek. But since you’re here, you may as well stick around—I will occasionally talk about leather armour and whips.
This is a podcast and a blog about my journey as a Dungeon Master. I’m the author of four books for teens and two for tweens. I’ve written about vampires, werewolves, martial arts, zombies, and historical parodies. I know, pick a genre, amirite?
My one constant throughout my life is that I have played Dungeons and Dragons. I’ve been playing and running games since I opened my red box edition as a twelve-year-old. As a creative outlet, this game taught me how to tell a story, how to world-build, and, most recently, how to 3D print. It’s what I turn to for comfort, how some will turn to a meal they ate often in childhood.
I had to stop playing a year and a half ago because my brain felt broken. I was stuck in what is called a “hyperfocus,” and after seeing a psychiatrist, I learned that the quirks that make me who I am–some good and some not so good–were mostly because I have ADHD.
I spent the next 18 months learning how to be in a better relationship with myself. I was given some medication that helped immensely, but the best thing I did was to find myself a really good therapist. Medication is like a healing potion for when you’re low on hit points, but a therapist is like a Dungeon Master who leads you on better quests. I’ve learned to manage my life in a way that works for my brain.
It’s been quite the journey. Talking out my real-life stories to my therapist was like becoming a halfling wizard venturing on a quest for the first time. But in that dark tavern, a hooded ranger was keeping to himself in a dark corner. In this campaign, I was both the halfling and the ranger.
One of my adventurers was the published author. A sidequest that had resulted in recorded interviews that I could now listen to and say, “I hear you asking for help here.” Another adventure was as a streamer who played Dungeons and Dragons on Twitch and YouTube. “I see you struggling,” I say often while watching those old broadcasts.
Much like how my brain works, I will tell my story by jumping in my timeline all over the place. It’s the most structured way I know to tell it. And if, at times, you see yourself in my quirks, that does not mean you have ADHD. I’m not a psychiatrist, and only a psychiatrist can diagnose you.
In 2021, I had this grand idea to join the many Twitch streamers with my D&D game. At the time, I had a handful of author friends who were great storytellers, and one of them had even played D&D before. The rest I could teach as the game progressed.
My plan:
I would write the adventure, set up the virtual tabletop program, help the players create characters, manage the Twitch channel, run the Twitch stream with OBS software, and set up OBS to stream and handle nearly all the promotion.
And I would do it on an upgraded 13” 2012 MacBook Pro (upgraded to 16 GB RAM and two internal SSD hard drives).
What could go wrong?
1) Well… at the time, unbeknownst to me, there was an issue with Mac OS streaming desktop audio over OBS.
An example of how the audio was affected by my old 2012 MacBook’s struggle to run all the software I wanted to run.
2) The MacBook Pro I had was almost 9 years old. It couldn’t run streaming software, the Zoom channel for my players, two versions of the virtual tabletop program (one for the dungeon master and one for the player’s viewpoint for streaming), and all the notes I’d need for the game.
Plus, and probably most important, was #3: I didn’t know how Twitch or OBS worked.
If you’ve ever met anyone with ADHD, you might be familiar with something called “hyperfocus.” I mentioned it briefly earlier, but for the uninitiated, it’s a hijacking of the ADHD brain when it finds something interesting, and it shuts out everything else around you. And I mean EVERYTHING. Little did I know that this game would put me into hyperfocus and everything else in my life would be put on hold.
So, back in 2021, I decided to organize this D&D game online. In addition to that, I worked at my full-time library job and taught two online classes once a week. And I had a book due that I was struggling to finish.
Like a wizard using a concentration spell, my hyperfocus activated. I spent a night learning how Twitch and OBS worked. I did have a basis of understanding from my day job, where we explored both of these things, so I’m sure that helped. But single-handedly, I set up my Twitch channel, set up the game on Roll 20, set up the Zoom meetings, worked with each author to create a character using D&D Beyond, and even put together a trailer.
What I didn’t do was ask for help. I don’t think I would have even known what to ask for, although I know now. I was confident I could do all of this.
And I know now that part of me wanted this to work because I liked the people involved in the game and wanted them to like me. ADHD creates some interesting personality quirks, one being overly sensitive to rejection. It’s not a symptom of ADHD but a result of trauma from a life that hears up to 20 thousand more negative comments by the age of 18 than non-ADHD people. And so I needed to “people please” to make myself feel worthy of these people’s time. This is a trait I wouldn’t even be aware of for a few more years to come.
That first session with the authors came with unexpected challenges. First, my then 9-year-old MacBook wasn’t up to running OBS, Twitch and two instances of Roll 20. The stream was glitchy, and my audio cut out nearly completely. To my friend’s credit, they were incredibly patient as I attempted to figure out a fix. Watching that session through my current eyes, I do so with compassion. I can now see where I struggled, where my working memory glitched, I couldn’t remember words, and I had trouble forming sentences. I stuttered. And sometimes, I lost focus and didn’t hear questions asked of me (though I answered them).
Overall, we played 8 or 9 sessions over a year. During that time, I sometimes forgot to hit record when we started playing. I sometimes lost audio. I attempted to use different software to broadcast over Twitch. I switched to Linux from Mac OS (which meant learning how Linux worked) and eventually bought a Mac M1. During this time, I changed my players from Zoom to Discord and from Roll 20 to Foundry VTT–both of which meant a learning curve for me to teach my players.
A short video before our second session where I explained everything I had to do to create the first video.
And, of course, because struggling with that wasn’t enough, I started a second weekly online game that I streamed over Twitch.
I’ll give a director’s intro to the streams in future episodes and talk about what I had to do to remaster them and why. I may be unable to restore the sessions I did with the authors because my audio struggles were that bad. We’ll see. My episodes with the Scornful Swords went much better, at least as of episode 8. Still, even with that group, I never got episodes 3 to 7 recorded.
I’ll let you know how my current Dungeons and Dragons games are going. I may even chat about my writing process occasionally. But for now, I’ll say thanks for listening to A Dungeon Master Exposed—and hopefully, I am the kind of dungeon master you’re looking for.
