Real Pleasure

In addition to writing these kinds of essays, I am also a part-time game designer, specifically for fantasy roleplaying games. Like creating anything, designing cool adventures and interesting encounters and devious traps requires a combination of imitation and innovation. I don’t attempt to reinvent the entire concept of a Dungeons & Dragons adventure from scratch every time I begin a campaign. Instead, I draw upon what I already know and expand on it, creating something hopefully both familiar and new.

Specifically, however, I spend a certain amount of time thinking about what I enjoyed most about the game. Perhaps I thought it would be a good idea for the characters to get lost but then found the actual experience of them wandering around trying to find their way back home kind of boring. Maybe I noticed how much better it is when the players hate the villains as much as their characters, or that combats are more exciting when the players believe death is a real possibility. Sometimes what I think will be fun isn’t, and sometimes an off-handed idea is responsible for an evening’s best moments. Experience, in the end, is always the final arbiter. It cannot lie.

I have had to learn to apply this same approach to my own life. The best way for me to think about my future, if I feel I must do so, is to ask myself what I actually enjoy most in the present. I spent many years more or less overlooking my lived experiences when dreaming my future, as if I would be a different person once this or that happened – or that life itself would be different, all struggle and uncertainty gone forever like a virus cleansed from my body. The longer I have lived, the more I have had to accept that neither life nor I change much except for my willingness to recognize my own pleasure.

It is odd to me that I should have to pay attention to something as desirable as my own pleasure, but I know I am not alone in this. When I discovered them, I knew I loved roleplaying games because there was no winning and losing when you played; the entire point of the game was literally to have fun. Bizarre. This was a game I wanted to play, but when I was done it was back to real life, where the point seemed to be success, when in fact I was learning more about life from that game than I knew.

If you like the ideas and perspectives expressed here, feel free to contact me about individual coaching and group workshops.

Everyone Has What It Takes: A Writer’s Guide to the End of Self-Doubt
You can find William at: williamkenower.com