Effortless Creativity
We weren’t supposed to provoke the Redbrand Bandits. They were flavour characters, an amorphous group of men playing cards and sinking ale in a shadowy corner of the tavern. Then Sesh the Sledgehammer had overturned their table. He always had an unfortunate appetite for a fight. Like it or not, we were careering towards a brawl.
***
At his kitchen table, Ricky* leans back from his Dungeon Master screen. ‘Time to roll initiative, everyone.’
The muted thuds of several twenty-sided-dice against the tablecloth (laid out to protect the wooden surface beneath; we may be nerds, but we weren’t animals). I roll the highest. Damn. Combat is my least favourite part of Dungeons and Dragons.
Ricky turns to me. ‘You’re up first, Mac. What’s the play?’
***
I didn’t know there were principles of clowning. It seems funny (pun intended) to use structure and discipline to create something so carefree. It reminds me of ballet; muscle and force made to look weightless, delicate.
These principles talk about red nosed clowns. The classic, tumbling dum-dums. And while they provide guidance on physical comedy, I think they can be applied more broadly to dynamic storytelling.
Based on this, I understand that to be a good clown – or a good storyteller – you need to be skilled in:
Emotional vulnerability
Physical awareness
Sense of play
***
This is a story about my friend, Ricky.
***
Clowning principle #1: The body tells the story.
We weren’t supposed to adopt the goblin. But his grouchy attitude was so adorable. And his deep, raspy, Gollumy voice was so…familiar. We christened him ‘Crabmeat’ and kept him as a mascot, toting him between adventures.
Ricky’s voice wasn’t prepared for it. For a flavour character, he’d gone big: hunched in on himself, eyes rolled skywards, voice squashed against his throat, the voice of a creature. I don’t think he even practiced it; the whole performance just came to him. Later, he killed off Crabmeat in a complex (but moving) murder-betrayal, saving his vocal cords from irreparable damage.
‘You can’t script D&D,’ Ricky tells me. It’s theatre of the mind. And as with live theatre, sometimes you have to improvise.
***
Nobody knows where Benk and Denk came from. They just materialised one day, spruiking their stocks in gold, grain, and ham. And then they just kept showing up. Ricky would roll a percentile dice (00% to 100%) to determine each stock’s fluctuating worth.
I can’t even remember why they turned up in the first place. Why did we have Wall Street-style stocks and trading in-game? Had someone really asked for that? Regardless, it became Ricky’s double-act with one of the players; he starred as Benk, the player as Denk. We loved it.
***
And then there was Vincent Trench. My smooth-talking, crime detecting, demonic-tiger-disguised-as-a-human husband (he was very handsome too).
Despite taking place in the fictional city of Waterdeep, Trench spoke with a southern accent. Less Yee Haw, more Knives Out’s Benoit Blanc. In fact, Ricky would summon his voice by chanting this mystical phrase from the film.
***
It was Crabmeat’s debut that convinced me: Ricky must have done local theatre at some point (he hadn’t) or at least entertained dreams of doing it professionally (he didn’t).
In some ways, he reminds me of a cabaret performer. He makes bawdy jokes, he likes a good costume (seriously, he has an impressive and varied hat collection), and there’s a general aura of ✨showmanship✨about him. And like in cabaret, he performs for a select and intimate audience: his friends.
It’s an honour to see this private razzle-dazzle.
***
Clowning principle #6: Everything can be seen as a problem to be solved, a knot to be unravelled.
Improvising is a beautiful thing. Your brain becomes wonderfully flexible; logic is defunct, jokes are plentiful, and mistakes feel more like opportunities.
At the time of writing, Ricky has been hosting the Curse of Strahd campaign. It’s a sweeping, gothic story known for its gore, horror and high-stakes character development. When the time was right, he shared a flashback scene with the players – a plot twist concerning two of the campaign’s main characters.
Whose names he accidentally mixed up.
‘Everyone could tell that I’d goofed it,’ he reflects. The players were happy to look the other way; what’s a little retcon between friends? But Ricky had other ideas.
‘When I make a mistake, 90% of the time, we roll with it. I thought, I can do something entirely different, and arguably better, with this.’
The resulting plot twist was far more sinister. In fact, depending on who you ask, it might even be better than the one in the rulebook.
***
Clowning principle #5: The most basic technique of the clown is to create and maintain rapport.
It may surprise you to learn that D&D isn’t all…well, dungeons and dragons. It can also be a vehicle for intricate storytelling and, if the players are up for it, meaningful character arcs.
I remember a campaign where a character was unknowingly sharing his body with a demonic dragon. He was dealing with aggressive mood swings and would disappear for days at a time. When he returned, he had no recollection of where he’d been. Some days, he complained of a burning fever. It transpired that the creature inside him would take over during the night and wreak havoc on the town. Jekyll and Hyde given the D&D treatment. This character had to make peace with this beast with whom he shared a body. It brought up questions about whether he and the creature were two sides of the same person, and who was really to blame for the horrors they caused together?
As we created our characters for this campaign, we were encouraged to give them a secret. Ricky then worked with us in private to shape our characters’ overall stories. This was useful when we’d discovered something new about our characters during a session, or if we wanted to change the direction our stories were going.
It’s also one of the reasons why Ricky is a good DM. He knows that no matter how much effort you put into creating the world and writing the campaign, ‘it’s not your story. It’s the group’s story.’ It becomes a shared fantasy that unfolds with everyone’s input – for better or worse. Sometimes the players will skip through a detailed section in mere minutes, other times they’ll spend half an hour bartering with a shopkeeper for a menial item.
Ricky also takes care to cater to what each player wants out of the campaign. Sometimes we would get to the end of a session and he would say, ‘that was a combat-heavy one today, let’s do more story next time,’ or ‘that was a really emotional session, but you made great progress; I’ll plan something fun for the next one.’ Even when players wanted competing things, he could still find balance.
***
Clowning principle #9: Have an emotional reaction and invite the audience to join in your experience.
I miss Ricky’s Twitch streams. Especially his tier lists, made mostly by him but with significant input – and outrage – from the audience. I still think about his fruit tier list, his vehement (and correct) assertion that cantaloupe and honeydew are the worst. And I remember there being a lot of tension around where kiwis should sit; a top tier fruit in my books, but Ricky felt differently, placing it in the B tier.
Whether he was ranking fruits and vegetables, Arnott’s biscuits or Pokémon characters, Ricky would ham it up for the audience…
(‘It may surprise you, I’m not that invested in fruits outside the tier list’, he confides.)
…and the audience would be ludicrously passionate in reply.
***
I haven’t seen a short story, poem or script from Ricky since our university days. But when he hosted the Waterdeep: Dragon Heist campaign, he wrote a news clipping about each player’s character, and the effect their presence had on the city. Some of us were on WANTED posters, others graced the society columns. They were good, gossipy fun. We loved them.
***
I forget that writing can be fun. It so frequently makes me miserable.
Maybe it’s because, for me, writing is a solitary act. I do it in the stolen hours between work and dinner. I am learning to write to entertain myself, but finishing a piece makes me crave something else. I like to think I’m in the business of paper boats. Messages in bottles. Secrets whispered through the gaps in walls. When I put something out into the world, I want someone else to see it. I think writers can experience a special type of amnesia; we write something – maybe it even gets published – and then we forget about it. We rarely know who read our work, or what they thought of it.
I realise I’m a bit jealous of Ricky; his creative projects have a guaranteed audience.
***
Clowning principle #2: Be interested, not interesting.
In the real world, Ricky is a lawyer. A field universally recognised as dry, technical, tedious, esoteric, boring…
(it’s here Ricky informs me that the best lawyers are creative – or at least abstract thinkers. ‘It’s all about interpreting the legislation,’ he says. ‘Some of the most surprising legal outcomes happened because some smart-arse said, “well, what if we read it like this?” There are no tangible facts in law; only language that we created a long time ago.’)
…arduous, tiresome, jejune, convoluted, impenetrable and dull.
Something that amazes me: Ricky can work a nine-to-five – probably more, as law is a profession known for its overtime culture – and still come home to make things. Creativity seems to slot neatly into his life. It feels effortless. I know this isn’t really the case; making things takes time, effort and sustained focus. But coming home from work and diving into this fictional world, like plunging into a cool lake, and having that feel natural, not forced…I aspire to feel like that about writing.
I admire his attitude to creativity too. He tries things for the fun of it, without putting pressure on himself to do things perfectly. I’ve heard legend told that he paints and draws, but I haven’t seen the results (this is fair: it’s good to practice a craft in private, just for your own pleasure). And once, he hosted a mega trivia night. In between each regular round of trivia was a minigame; Mario Party meets Trivial Pursuit. It went for hours, but it was magnificent.
Ricky doesn’t think of himself as a Creative with a capital ‘c’. He simply is a creative person. I love this about him. And I love that he has a higher creative output than me. It makes me want to make things. Not because I’m a Writer with a capital ‘w’; I want to make things for the joy of it.
***
‘I love telling stories,’ Ricky tells me. ‘I try to be creative in my day-to-day demeanour. It’s part of my character!’
***
Clowning principle #13: Don't leave your comfort zone. Make your comfort zone bigger.
‘You’re up first, Mac. What’s the play?’
I study my character sheet. Mac Balmoral, my Mountain Dwarf Monk, is armed with only a dagger. He nearly lost it in the last fight. At this stage in the game, he has a maximum of 10 health points. And because he’s a Mountain Dwarf, he runs half as quickly as the other characters.
Fortunately, I don’t need weapons, brawn or speed for my special attack.
I turn to Ricky. ‘Are all the bandits facing me?’
He quickly rolls a smaller dice, four-sided this time. I’m not supposed to look, but I see it land on 1.
‘Three can see you, one can’t. Let’s say he’s the one closest to you.’
I rub my hands together.
‘Okay, I approach the nearest bandit. And then, when he’s not looking, I dack him.’
Giggles ripple across the table. Ricky keeps laughing long after the others have stopped. I love him for it.
‘Roll for success.’
It passes, barely. The bandit is dacked.
‘Let’s chalk that one up to psychological damage,’ Ricky says. And after rolling the four-sided dice once more, he deducts 4 health points from my opponent.
*Not his real name.