TTRPGs Made Me a Better Trial Lawyer
The Short Version
Obsessing over improvisation, spontaneity, and making prep work fun might apply equally to my Friday night game and to my Monday morning cross-examination - and it probably helps your job, too.
The Long Version
I started playing Dungeons and Dragons when a group of college friends invited me to join their 3.5e group the summer after freshman year. It was the first time I had ever experienced a TTRPG. I was hooked.
I never expected a game played with dice, a pencil, and some paper to give me such a sense of agency within a story. It scratched an itch I didn't even know I had. I loved seeing the story unfold at the table in our GM's homebrew campaign, and how one decision could impact the next six months of sessions.
We would play every Friday, for 6-8 hours, for over a year.
I was well and truly hooked. I couldn't get enough of TTRPGs. When our game ended, I wanted to get another one started as soon as I could. I wanted to learn how to be a GM and tell my own stories.
It took time to get confident enough to try GMing past a few one-shots during college. At first, it felt mystifying trying to capture the magic my first GM seemed to conjure out of thin air. But running games became more enjoyable once I stumbled upon Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master by Mike Shea. I focused on making scenes and situations that were fun for everyone at the table, and worked on being confident to improvise when things went an unexpected direction.
During law school, I worked up the confidence to try again. I ran some classmates through my own home-brew campaign. It lasted about a year. Some were brand-new TTRPG players and went on to GM their own games after we graduated and moved our separate ways. I couldn't wait to do it again.
As I got comfortable setting the stage for my friends as a GM, that sense of control and wonder only grew. Terrifying as it was to be creatively vulnerable with my friends and share things that I made up, GMing and TTRPGs gave me an escapism that books, movies, and video games could approximate, but never quite achieve. There was something about the creating and interacting that eclipsed how it felt to merely consume. The possibilities seemed endless.
Several years on from that college group, I still regularly GM physical and play-by-post (PbP) games. I've learned more about myself, what kind of GMing style I want to have, and I've found new systems to show my friends. I still chase after that sense of wonder that I first felt when I made my first character. I still worry if the worlds I create are good enough.
But now I'm a lawyer, too. In my day job I'm a defense attorney, representing clients in criminal trials. I worry whether the case I create for my client will be good enough.
I am grateful that TTRPGs are my main form of escapism outside of work. The longer I practice, the more I work with co-counsel and expert consultants to present the best case I can for my clients. The more cases I present, the more I see my hobby positively shaping my confidence in court and at the game table.
Note: The links below are just things I like; no affiliate links or anything like that. They're articles and tools that have been personally useful to me.
Flexibility
As A GM: The more I GM, the more I enjoy making world that exists separate and apart from the players - creating situations and scenarios and moving away from making plots. I love seeing how the players react to what happens in the world and how, in turn, the world reacts to them. Separating the world from the players taught me how to be flexible, especially when I started learning how to write better random encounters. When I first started, I was afraid that players would think what I made was dumb; unconsciously, that fear led me to making less for my players to do. And that led me towards robbing my players of making meaningful choices. I think that came from the fear of being creatively vulnerable, but it turned into situations where, unbeknownst to them, I was robbing all of us of consequences and impacts. With time, I've found enjoyment in trying to make situations and scenarios that aren't brittle. I've learned to enjoy improvising when my players go somewhere new that I wasn't expecting. Now, I get to be curious, along with my players - when I tell them "I have no idea what's going to happen next," I mean it and am excited for it!
As A Lawyer: Cases never turn out the way that I expect them to. When I first began practicing law as a prosecutor, I fell into the trap of adhering to the world of facts that witnesses and documents created and assuming no other alternatives (the witness is lying, the document is fake, etc.). But the testimony that comes out on the witness stand may be completely different than how the evidence first appears. I might need to improvise an entire line of questioning because a witness reveals some previously-unknown information for the very first time on the stand. As a defense attorney, training myself to begin my case investigation/preparation with flexibility in mind has made trial work more enjoyable - now, I'm looking for situations and scenarios, testing the evidence for weaknesses and credibility issues. I'm engaging my curiosity (and discovering things the other side might not know)!
Engaging the Players
As A GM: I've found that I love being a "forever GM" who creates games for players. But, with that enjoyment comes the responsibility of respecting the time my players took to play a game with me. It's my job to maximize engagement and not contribute to my players getting bored. It's up to me to give the players tools and toys to interact with in any scene or situation and to include everyone at the table. Discovering the "landmark, hidden, secret" approach to location design helped me train my brain on creating/describing rooms with more than just surface-level set pieces. It gave me questions to ask myself as I created situations for the players: does my dungeon have something to steal, something to kill, or something that could kill my players? Does this location give players options when exploring it, or is it unnecessarily linear? What ideas for lore do my players have that I can weave naturally into our session without ceding my role as GM (such as asking them to describe what they see when they look in a hall of statutes, or describing a unique quality about a monster)?
As A Lawyer: My "players" are the fact-finders - if I'm boring them, I'm harming my client's case. The "jury" are the people charged with deciding whether the Government has proven that my client is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. My client and I could sit still, not present a case, and it would still be the Government's job to prove that my client is guilty. However, that doesn't free me from the obligation of being engaging and respectful of their time. When I give an opening statement, I need to use descriptive language, active voice, and plain English; no prosaic "lawyer-speak". When I ask a witness questions, I need to ask simple, easy-to-understand questions. This is how I build my credibility. If the jury is bored, then I'm wasting their time. The most important skill an advocate can learn is knowing when to speak and when to shut up. The second most important skill is knowing how to say as few words as possible. It doesn't matter how well I know the facts of the case if I can't help the jury see things how I do.
Making Maps
As A GM: I love finding cool maps, whether it's a beautiful map someone made or something I made with a great guide. Maps help me see the game world more clearly. They give dimension and space to something that, otherwise, just lives inside of our heads. Maps are pretty neat!
As A Lawyer: Cases often have several moving parts: witness interviews to schedule, expert reports to read, private investigators to debrief, or case law to research. When I get a new case, I map out the charges against my client. I go through each element the Government has to prove. I think through how the Government might try to prove that element, and what would keep them from doing it. Making a case map helps me plan months' worth of work without worrying I've forgotten something.
Communication
As A GM: I like transparency with my players; it feels fun and fair. I like rolling in the open and being up-front about scheduling issues, taking breaks during the session, and what's on and off-limits at the table. I want my players to trust me and that means I need to earn their trust outside of the game, too. That looks different for every group and GM, but for me, over-communicating is a better sin to commit than under-communicating.
As A Lawyer: When possible, I want open lines of dialogue at all times between me and opposing counsel. I hate leaving issues unresolved; it just means we have to get a judge involved. That might mean that I have to have difficult conversations or disagreements, but that's okay; at the end of the day, it's not personal and I owe it to my client to be the most reasonable person in the room.
Finding Cool Resources
As A GM: TTRPGs as a hobby can mean different things to different people. Whether that's creating a d20 table, drawing a map, analyzing a Kickstarter's rewards tiers, or critically assessing a game's language and system design, enjoying TTRPGs is not a "one-size-fits-all" approach. As a result, the TTRPG space is filled with some lovely people who really care about giving back and making "it" better in different ways. Seeing other people contribute their creativity to the space inspired me to make this blog, for instance. Like a wizard amassing libraries of scrolls and tomes from every age and language, the pursuit of knowledge has become its own niche hobby for me. And there's something neat about making something for a hobby that has given so much to me, even if it's ultimately something small.
Here are some of my favorites:
The indomitable Lazy GM himself, Mike Shea (known as Sly Flourish). His tips and books on how to "prep what benefits the next session" and focus on having fun with your friends was the catalyst for my passion for GMing. I owe much of my love for the hobby to the versatility of his Lazy GM resources, his passion for bringing friends together, and Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master.
Patchwork Paladin is a thought-provoking blogger and game designer (and a lovely person if you happen to get to chat with her on a Discord server). Her weekly newsletter is one of my favorite places to find new games, resources, and blogs (and my weekly dose of poetry).
3x5 Arcana makes really cool, system-neutral ideas and resources that give me fun ways to push my creativity beyond rules-as-written. His Tolkienian Magic System is great for one-shot games.
Justin Alexander's blog The Alexandrian is a treasure-trove. I often go back to his Gamemastery 101 collection for ways to think about running my games.
As A Lawyer: I love finding tools that make me think about the law in new and unique ways and how to articulate my positions, whether in what I write or what I say. The Winning Brief is my go-to guide for legal writing; my copy has notes in the margins that continue to accumulate. I'm also a big fan of Smart Brevity for learning how to communicate the message that matters most in the simplest, most condensed format.
The End
Thank you for taking the time to read this post. I started this blog as a challenge to myself to write creatively. I hope you can see overlaps in your job, too.
I don't know what I'll write about in the future, but I'm excited to try writing about what interests me. If you have feedback, please share it with me!
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