Giving Good Thread

I recently started playing Dungeons & Dragons again after about 25 years. I used to play it as a kid, but now that I’ve picked it up again as adult, I’m with the idea that you can sit around and talk, yet this structured, elaborate immersive experience unfolds.

Now we have a regular tuesday game online, and a one or two in-person games each month, and I’m starting to warm up to the idea of being a Dungeon Master again. I tried it when we first got back into the game, but I got so overwhelmed by the amount of preparation involved. I spent 2-3 days reading and planning to bring the world to life for the players.

Better preparation is a solvable problem. What intimidates me are subtle dynamics of tension.

Knowing how to build tension, and when to release it, is the key to a good game. At any given point, players need the just right amount of narrative thread to keep things interesting. Sometimes you have to take the thread away and make them work for it. Other times you need to provide enough slack for them to stay engaged and keep the story moving.

This is a whole other type of storytelling. And what surprises me is how little guidance there is on the subject. There are so many resources on character creation, monster stats, and world-building, but not much on the art of interactive storytelling.

I’d love to know if there’s a specific term for this skill and if there are resources out there that explore it at depth. Understanding the contours of what makes for good interactive storytelling—and how to do it well—feels like it's at the beating heart of creating memorable games.

So essential, yet oddly unexplored.