We Dungeon Masters often describe our roleplaying game worlds like neutral, all-seeing narrator robots, and that means we’re wasting a lot of potential. Fantasy authors use this trick of picking viewpoint characters to provide sharper, more useful, more flavorful narration filtered through their characters’ expert lenses. Of course, that would never work at a Dungeons & Dragons table. We couldn’t possibly use viewpoint characters to punch up our scene-setting narration. Or could we?

I’d love to teach you my stupid narration tricks, but not until you’ve proven you can handle normal narration tricks. Start drilling, kids.

As a Game Master, you are an author, but that doesn’t mean what most people think it does. What it mostly means is that you can learn a lot of stupid narration tricks from authors. And video games.