I want to use this space to talk about a lot of things. The last little while has been about my photography and mental health but I want to talk about another passion of mine; Dungeons and Dragons.
But not just about the world’s most popular tabletop gaming (according to the company that owns D&D) but about how lessons from the table can be (and should be in my opinion) applied to leadership.
These ideas stem from a talk I gave to colleagues a few years back. In it, I made the argument that if you want to be a better leader, you should learn how to run game nights with a role-playing game like Dungeons and Dragons being the best way to really learn some leadership skills.
Before we dive into the lesson though, I want to take a moment to explain a key point that many misunderstand.
Leadership and management are not the same thing.
Anyone can be a manager if they arrive at a position where they are in charge of people. But being a manager doesn’t make you a leader. And, a true leader doesn’t mean they are a manager. These ideas tend to get linked together (usually by bad managers) but I have seen rooms of people led by a colleague and I have seen managers lose a room and have no one in an actual leadership position.
And so I’m writing these posts to try and teach others the lessons I’ve learned along the way from either the tabletop or from the rooms I’ve worked in.
And we’re going to start with a really easy idea: Let people figure it out for themselves.
Matt Colville gained fame in the tabletop community for a series of videos called “Running the Game”. He gave instructions and ideas on how to put a story together, build out your world, create complex moments, and how he felt the game should run. There are lots of these videos that if you’re interested in running a D&D game, or really any role-playing game with people, I do recommend.
But for the purpose of this article, I want to go to the video titled “Roleplaying | Running the game”. Matt is covering a lot about what he sees as what good and bad roleplaying is, and I do agree with most of the points he’s making here. But I want to skip ahead to near the end of the video. Around the 43-minute mark. He makes a point I feel all leaders need to fully understand:
“It’s okay not to know how your players going to get out of a situation. It’s not your job to get them out of the situation. It’s their job. It’s your job to listen and be open to good or interesting ideas. Don’t be afraid to say no. But also say yes, when it’s time to say yes ”
Matt Colville
How does this relate to being a leader?
Anyone whose worked anywhere for a good amount of time gets to know how to get things done. You know the right buttons to press, the right words to write, the right people to talk to. You’ve probably even taught other people your method, and possibly to good success for most part.
But every now and again you come across someone who wants to do it differently. Instinct can often be to say ‘No, I know this way works, trust me and just do as I say.’ It can be a way that you guarantee that the steps followed will lead to the success you’ve accomplished in the past and seen work for others.
Now let’s talk about Critical Role. (Don’t worry, we’ll come back to the point in a moment)
For those unfamiliar, Critical Role is the largest “actual play” (a fancy way of saying that you’re literally just watching people at a table rolling dice and playing a game) D&D shows on the internet. Millions of people watch their stream, thousands will pack live venues to watch them play. And this is not a small commitment. A session of the show can easily top 4 hours.
So, let’s look at one particular moment to understand the point Matt Colville was making, the one that I want to emphasize for leaders. It’s in the second campaign. (For those who have never seen anything, don’t worry I’ll do my best to explain without getting too much into rules and lore and the rest)
Campaign 2 episode 93 with what fans know as the cupcake and the hag. (Or just The Cupcake incident)
Here’s all the backstory you need to know: One of the players is cursed. Everyone wants to break the curse. The hag feeds off of misery so won’t break the curse until someone comes up with a trade.
Matthew Mercer is the guy running the show. He’s the Dungeon Master (DM) and Mercer has created this world, and more specifically this hag for the players to deal with. He has spent hours if not days building a battle map in case there’s a fight. He has spent time thinking of lore and reactions and character and…I’ve DMed a little and I can tell you that when you’re getting near a fight like this it consumes your mind from the moment you set up the encounter till the moment you sit back at the table to play things out.
Over the course of this session each of the players, one-by-one, goes in to try and negotiate. It all goes badly, until Laura Bailey steps into the room.
As I’ve said, Mercer has a plan, an idea. He knows all the spells, for the most part he knows what equipment his players have, he’s played with these people for years at this point and so he’s built ideas around what he figures is likely to happen. A boss fight. A Faustian bargain. Any manner of possibilities except for the one that actually played out.
This scene has been directed and reviewed over and over by fans and so it’s after that we can see Laura spending time talking to one of the other players about stuff. She’s going over items, spells, she’s formulating a plan. She sends her character in.
Her bright bubbly character played up against this oppressive presence. Mercer and Laura played this out for a while acting out their respective roles as the entire table starts to worry that the character Laura is playing will make a deal she doesn’t fully understand.
But it’s the players who don’t quite understand, and neither did Mercer.
Laura casts a spell. It requires the hag to make a “saving throw”. This means Mercer will roll his dice behind a screen to see if the hag succeeds or fails. It’s important to know, as well, Mercer does not need to be honest. DMs sometimes do something called ‘fudging the dice’. We’ll get into that idea at another point, but the DM isn’t an antagonist, though they play them in the story, they are part of the group. They are the chief storyteller, giving parts of their story to players to build on.
And here we have the moment I want us to focus on. As I said, Matt has planned for every contingency he could think of. Hours and hours and hours of painstaking…wait..what is Laura doing? Wait…how does…shit.
Laura came with a different idea. A unique one. One Mercer had not seen coming at all. And her plan was incredible. It was one of the most creative uses of that spell and incredibly on-brand for her character.
Mercer roles, makes a few faces, and then lets Laura know her spell worked.
So what’s the lesson?
Let them try.
Let them try their way rather than imposing your plans on others.
Mercer could have lied in that moment. ‘Nope, spell fails. Hag is pissed. Roll initiative.’ But he didn’t. He let the roll of the dice decide and we have one of the most legendary moments of the campaign.
Plans are great, and we need to make them. We need to have ideas on how things might unfold and plan for that. But we can’t forget that players and colleagues have their own ways of working things out. They have their own ideas, their own solutions, and often they will work as well.
Let them try.
It’s not your job to tell your colleagues or employees how to solve a problem. It’s your job to give them the problem, have ideas on how to solve it in your head, but let them solve the problem. Be there and prepared if something goes wrong, but let other people explore a problem and see if they can come up with a creative solution you would have never thought of.
Dungeons and Dragons has given me a lot over the years. But lessons like these are why I love the game, and, if I’m honest, why I love being in a leadership position. Teaching someone how to do something is great, but watching someone come up with their own solutions…that’s what being a good leader is all about.
At least in my opinion.
(The featured image comes from a fan’s animation of the scene.)