Why I Stopped Correcting Grammar at My D&D Table
There's a version of me from a few years ago who would stop a player mid-sentence to fix the way they'd phrased something. Not the content. The grammar. I told myself it was about precision. It wasn't. It was about control — and it was killing the story.
The Washing Machine Incident
I was in Bangalore, meeting a game designer I genuinely admired. Nervousness does strange things to language. In the middle of a busy restaurant, I announced that I needed "the washing machine." I meant the washroom. The mortification was immediate and complete.
But something useful came from it: the reminder that imperfection is the condition under which most real connection happens. The polished version of yourself isn't the one people actually remember.
The Oslo Origin Story
I discovered D&D in Norway. I was so protective of the rulebooks on the flight back that I kept them dry while my then-infant daughter got rained on during a transit dash. I'm not proud of this. But it tells you something about how transformative that discovery felt.
The Oppenheimer Dungeon
At some point I built an elaborate 3D-printed dungeon. Months of work. It looked extraordinary. And it made the game worse — because the constraint of the dungeon became the point, rather than the story happening inside it. Beautiful constraints are still constraints. Index cards and improvisation turned out to be more generative than the thing I'd spent months making.
The FARTS Framework
The most useful preparation system I've found covers five things players will attempt in any situation: Fight, Avoid, Research, Trick, and Speak. Prepare responses to those five approaches and you're ready for roughly 90% of what your table will try. Everything else can be improvised from that foundation.
Four Levels of Roleplay
Players engage with character at different depths, and all of them are valid:
- Pure intention — "I want to convince the guard to let us through."
- Third-person narration — "My character tells the guard to open the gate."
- In-character speaking — speaking as the character without vocal performance.
- Full voice acting — accents, physicality, the whole thing.
Level four gets the most attention. Levels one through three produce just as many memorable moments. The table's job is to make all four levels feel equally welcome.
Every Correction Is a Small Violence
This is the thing I had to actually learn rather than just understand intellectually: every time a Game Master corrects a player — their grammar, their pronunciation, their knowledge of the rules — it sends a signal. The signal is: you're not doing this right. And once that signal is sent enough times, players stop trying things. They start performing safety instead of playing.
The same dynamic appears in every facilitated learning environment. The room that feels safe enough to be imperfect is the room where the real learning happens. You can't create that environment while also policing language.
On Indian Mythology and Cultural Authenticity
Indian mythology presents a specific design challenge: it's exotic for international audiences and entirely mundane for Indian ones. Using it well means integration, not decoration. Dropping Hanuman into a campaign as a cool reference isn't the same as building from that mythology's actual logic — its structure of time, its conception of the divine, the way it handles heroism and failure. The decoration approach tends to feel hollow. The integration approach requires more homework but produces something that actually resonates.
The GM Shortage
The TTRPG community's actual bottleneck isn't players. It's Game Masters. One trained GM introduces dozens of players to the hobby. Train enough GMs and the growth becomes self-sustaining. This is why I offer free facilitation resources at puttheplayerfirst.com/course — not as a side project but as infrastructure for something I think matters.