How Dungeons and Dragons has made me a better scientist (really)

A close up of a gaming table with cardboard dungeon tiles, where a grey plastic miniature of a humanoid with a club faces off against a larger figure of a red dragon. It’s not looking good for the human… Stock photo via Unsplash.

A confession: I am a nerd.

If you know me personally, this is probably something you suspected already. But I can’t emphasize this enough- however nerdy you think I am, I’m at least twice as nerdy as that. This cannot be overstated enough.

So when I tell you that I play Dungeons and Dragons, that icon of pure nerd-dom, weekly, and have since I started my PhD…well, that probably isn’t going to be that much of a surprise. I’ve always loved sci-fi and fantasy since I was a kid, and parallel to that has been an urge to tell stories of my own. When DnD started to explode in more mainstream popularity a few years ago, of course I ended up interested. I’ve been an avid player and, for three years now, Dungeon Master (DM), and it’s one of my favorite hobbies.

It started out as a fun thing to pass time, but the longer I’ve played, the more I’ve become convinced that the skills DnD develops are extremely valuable away from the gaming table, and ones particularly of interest to scientists. It’s not a huge surprise to me that many of the most active players I know are scientists, but it may be for those less familiar with the game and how it works. So, because I occasionally like to write about lighter fare, I would like to present my argument that DnD is an excellent way to practice and develop skills vital to being a good scientist:

1: Both DnD and research work best when it’s a team effort

When I sit down at the gaming table as a DM, I’m not planning on leading my party through a static set of scenes, where they just passively fight whatever monsters I’ve dreamed up. While the DM certainly frames out the story- the setting, the goals, whatever- the actual heart of the campaign is what happens when you get the whole group of people together and let them tell their parts of the story. When you get comfortable with this, it’s amazing the things that happen.

This was a lesson I learned in literally my first session as DM. I had set up an encounter where the party had to infiltrate a crime ring that had set up shop in an abandoned temple. I had pages of notes of non-player characters (NPCs) that the party could talk to, the pressure points they could use to get information, secret passages they could find. Instead, the party’s druid turned into a cat, and the rest of the group literally threw him through an open window so he could drop into the literal center of the crime ring and spy on them. It was hilarious and so much more satisfying than any of the solutions I could come up with, and from then on I decided to trust my players when they came up with creative (aka batshit wild) ways to deal with obstacles.

While very few research problems can be solved by turning a coauthor into a cat (although perhaps that should be attempted more often), this dynamic is one that is definitely found in collaboration. Have you ever had one of those great conversations with a labmate or colleague where you just really dig into an observation or sticky issue with your project, and leave with an amazing outside-the-box situation? That process of riffing off each other until you arrive at a novel way to tackle a question is, at least in my experience, one of the most joyful parts of doing science. But to really happen, they require a mindset where you are willing to admit your solution may not be the best or only way forward, and to trust others to both have good ideas and to not dismiss yours. Any collaborative storytelling endeavor, be it DnD or improv open mics, will give you a chance to routinely practice this mindset, so that you can more easily get in the mode where you can have these interactions.

2: It helps you practice thinking on your feet

What do the senior curmudgeon in your department saying “this is more of a comment than a question” after your seminar and your party’s monk accidentally turning themselves into a 14-foot-tall hamster and nearly capsizing a boat have in common? Well, as either the speaker or the DM, respectively, you now have to think fast, preferably without anyone catching any whiff of panic.

These two scenarios may be wildly different- but they use a lot of the same skills. You have to remain calm and be able to quickly remember a bunch of information that you can then reassemble to handle this new challenge. It’s something I have always struggled with, as someone who prefers tackling questions by careful, drawn out consideration. Luckily, like a lot of these skill sets, they can be improved with practice- and while conferences or seminars may only be a few times a year, regularly hanging out in a low-stakes environment where you can use those same cognitive muscles? Perfect place to build those skills up.

3: A good story keeps everyone interested

While the day-to-day of PCRs or figuring out why R crashed can be monotonous and mechanical at times, sharing that science, in papers, presentations, and proposals, is a highly creative endeavor. It’s not that you’re making things up, but that simply writing “this is what we did and this is what we found” is just half of the process of communicating your work. Why is this what you decided to test? What does it mean? Where does it sit in the scope of your field? This, whether you realize it or not, is storytelling. You’re taking a set of facts and numbers and tying them together with strings of narrative, weaving them into a broader context. A good paper has the feeling of motion- of the reader being borne along by a current from one concept to the next, carried along by a progression of ideas arranged in a logical way.

That’s story-telling! It may be radically different than your favorite fantasy epic, but the principles— setting up the stakes, moving the action from one thing to the next in a way that makes sense, reaching a resolution of some sort that both wraps up the specific episode at hand while tying into the larger world— those remain the same at the core. It’s because human brains tend to process things in terms of narratives, whether it’s battling dragons or the evolutionary history of lowland Panamanian birds. And once again, story-telling is a skill that can be learned and sharpens with practice, which the structure of a regular DnD campaign provides great opportunities for.

A pile of very colorful 20-sided dice, in both plastic and metal. Photo by JFM.

Now, obviously DnD isn’t the only way to practice these skills. I know researchers who do improv, write epic novels, or perform in bands, which all scratch different parts of that creative itch in ways that help grow these less-tangible skills. And in general, I wouldn’t suggest running out and picking up a new hobby just because it will make you better at these things— like, it’s fine to do things that are just fun, relax a bit please? But to discount these creative things we do as completely separate, as frivolous distractions even, is a mistake that ignores that our lives are rarely so easily compartmentalized. What we do when we’re not at the lab bench can still help us grow in these other facets of being researchers, and we should embrace that whatever form it may take.

Alright, sound good? Great- now roll for initiative!

If you’d like some more examples of scientists playing DnD, check out Science and Sorcery and Dugongs and Sea Dragons, which are two of my personal favorite examples of very nerdy scientists being even nerdier.