Playing Dungeons & Dragons was the best thing I did for my Power BI career
GOING FOR A NATURAL 20
…by developing valuable skills while enjoying your hobbies.
RUNNING D&D HAS MADE ME A BETTER DATA PROFESSIONAL
From running workshops to writing articles and designing reports, I’ve learned a great deal by simply running weekly games of Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) for the last decade. If it wasn’t for D&D, I wouldn’t even be working in business intelligence. It’s likely that I would be still working in a research laboratory, or another sector altogether. D&D has helped me grow skills in areas I use daily in my job, and also to grow my career. But how can getting together with friends and throwing polyhedral dice help you improve in skills that are very relevant and in-demand in the modern workplace?
In this article, I describe my own experience of how running tabletop roleplaying games (tRPGs) has developed skills relevant to my work, and why that’s made me a better data professional. I’ll explain what tRPGs are, why they’re fun and the skills you need to run a tRPG effectively. Then, I’ll translate all of this to a professional setting and explain how it’s improved my ability to create effective BI solutions, write articles, and advance my career.
The purpose of this article is twofold:
1. To share how passion in a hobby can translate to soft/data skill advancement that's relevant to your career.
2. If you play tRPGs, to describe how to turn that hobby into a source of professional growth and development.
Braving the Well of Dragons in pursuit of Tiamat, The Dragon Queen (2015)
A CRASH COURSE IN DUNGEONS & DRAGONS
It should come as no surprise that someone who runs a website called Data Goblins plays D&D. This game has been an integral part of my life, ever since my dad introduced it to us nearly a decade ago. It’s the most fun I’ve ever had with a consistent activity, while also being the most socially, mentally and sometimes intellectually strenuous activity that I do on a regular basis (including writing DAX).
WHAT IS D&D?
In a nutshell, D&D - or any tRPG - is a collaborative game played with friends at a table, typically by using only pencils, paper, dice, and imagination. Since 1974, D&D has gathered like-minded folks together to explore dungeons, defeat monsters, solve puzzles, and roleplay characters. All of this happens over regular sessions in an incrementally evolving story; a tapestry being woven and lengthened with every session. These stories form campaigns that can span years or even decades with the same group and world. What makes D&D unique - and so incredibly fun - is that this all happens in your imagination, orchestrated by the planning, descriptions and acting of a single storyteller - the Dungeon Master.
In D&D, you don’t just play a game. You can be anyone and do anything. There are no limits, no boundaries.
HOW DOES D&D WORK?
The infinite possibilities of D&D exist because in a tRPG, the people playing the game fill one of two roles:
Dungeon Master (DM): Responsible for creating the world and the story, and narrating the scenarios and outcomes for the players. The DM also adjudicates the game by enforcing (and sometimes creating) the rules. Essentially, the DM serves a dual role as omniscient narrator and all-powerful creator and god of the game world. If the DM says “it’s raining”, then it’s raining. If the DM says “you smell smoke”, then there’s probably a fire. If the DM says “you feel ill”, then your character had better visit a doctor. For a DM, the allure of D&D is creating your own world, story and scenarios, then seeing it evolve based upon the decisions and actions of the players. The DM leads their D&D group; they place their trust and faith in the DM to prepare fun, challenging sessions in a compelling and consistent world.
Player Character (PC): Responsible for creating and playing a single character. These characters are the main protaganists in the story. Typically, they are heroes, who work together to overcome some great adversity, but they can also be villains or anything in-between. A PC narrates their actions, makes decisions and talks as their character with the other PCs or with non-player characters (NPCs) portrayed by the DM. For a PC, the allure of the game is playing a character, defeating monsters and influencing the world and story. As a PC, you can say or do anything… the only limits are your imagination and what the DM says is possible. You continue playing this character until they either “retire” (because their story has concluded, or you want to make a new one) or because they die.
The emotional impact of D&D:
Part of what makes D&D unique is many people play the same character in the same world for years. Since they make all the decisions for this character, they decide who that character is, and how they change. This agency over your character's story and fate creates a unique experience, where you really get a strong sense of who this character is and what they've done.
Since you play this game with the same group of people, they, too know your character. Over time, your D&D group have this shared understanding of the game world. You have funny stories, dramatic moments and fond memories of things that happened in the game, but stick with you for years afterward.
The DM and PCs (usually 3-6 PCs) collaboratively build the story; they don’t play against one another. As a game, D&D has no fixed objective or endpoint; you can’t “win”. So long as the characters and world lives on, the story persists. Typically, however, these characters have specific goals they work toward in a campaign, which is a series of sessions spanning a single story arc. Within these sessions, the party (a group of PCs) and individual PCs have specific objectives they want to fulfill.
A typical session of D&D is a series of cascading, cause-and-effect events, as depicted below:
The example above describes a combat encounter; you use this structure for any interactions with the world.
WHAT MAKES D&D INTERESTING OR FUN?
D&D is a social game that relies on imagination and communication. It typically takes place in a fantasy world like you’d imagine with Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter, but can span any conceivable setting and genre from science fiction, alternate history, horror, surrealism, and everything in-between. There are many reasons why D&D is fun:
Infinite possibility: There is a sheer lack of boundaries and plethora of possibilities. It’s the only medium that lets you craft your own unique story, that literally no other group has ever had, before.
Unpredictability: Since D&D is a game you play with other people, and since anything can happen, each session is full of surprise. You can never fully anticipate what will happen next, as you can’t anticipate how the PCs will react to the story, or what the DM has planned for the world or its narrative.
Focus on people: For me, weekly D&D sessions are a chance to turn off screens, sit down with family and friends and engage one another, without distractions. It’s a rare moment in modern life where technology doesn’t often intrude.
Creativity and imagination: As adults, we don’t often realize how much our imaginations have dwindled since childhood. Those muscles often remain long untrained in our daily lives. Exercising them in D&D is incredibly rewarding, cathartic and nostalgic in ways that words simply can’t describe.
Creating something imaginary that feels real
When you play long enough in the same world with the same group of friends, something truly magical happens. You all have a shared knowledge and understanding of the people, places and history of that world. You understand its complexities, its nuances and its exceptions.
The world takes on a level of believability that is matched by the layered complexity of fictional worlds in movie and television series; yet you participate in it.
For me, this is D&D at its peak. Over time, you get a sense of shared ownership in the creation of a world and its persistent reality. This is the magical moment where you're no longer playing a game, but you're genuinely transported to another place to continue a story that merely paused last session. In this fictional world, you shape history with your decisions, end tyrants and raise kingdoms... or just start another bar brawl because someone made fun of your shoes.
At this point, the hobby is not just satisfying and fun, but existentially fulfilling on a deeper level; it truly matters.
Challenge: In our groups, I’m the DM. As a DM, you are responsible for the group’s fun. If the players aren’t having fun, then you aren’t having fun. As such, a DM needs to do a lot:
Organize the sessions
Create the world and its characters
Develop the story
Conceive of challenging (but fair) puzzles and combat encounters
Run the actual sessions.
During the sessions, you must:
Track everything you prepared,
Adjudicate the rules
Describe the scenarios
Act as the non-player characters (roleplaying their voices, actions and mannerisms).
All of this happens while closely monitoring and moderating the players at the table to ensure that they are engaged, having fun and understanding everything that’s going on. Every Friday night, I find myself doing all of the above, all at once. Except for being a father, these collective activities are the most challenging and rewarding things that I do, including anything I’ve done in my professional life.
So now you’ve got a good idea about what D&D is. But how can D&D develop your professional skills? What skills are honed by playing this game of dice and pretend, and how could that relate to a career in data?
The final confrontation with the Beholder Bolothamogg: He Who Watches from Beyond the Stars (2018)
WHAT RUNNING D&D TEACHES YOU
As explained in the previous section, I’m a DM. As a DM, you must effectively prepare, organize and orchestrate the people and content for your D&D sessions for them to be successful and fun. This is a lot of work, and it takes a lot of practice to get right. However, it’s also immensely rewarding, and over the last decade, I’ve found that the skills needed to do this well are the same skills that I use in my day-to-day job.
The following sections describe activities or skills that I now perform better, thanks to my experience being a DM.
ORGANIZE AND RUN STAKEHOLDER WORKSHOPS MORE EFFECTIVELY
In BI projects, you regularly should engage with stakeholders to gather requirements, understand their data needs and build relationships that foster trust and solution adoption. Often, these engagements take the form of structured workshops focused on a specific BI solution or initiative. These solutions might be anything from a report or a query, to a full-on, enterprise data architecture and reporting suite.
For me, stakeholder workshops have very few differences with a typical Friday night D&D session. You can click the following accordion menus to see why.
The soft skills required to run a D&D session are the same as the skills you need to run stakeholder workshops. They have similar input, formats and challenges despite the context differing so dramatically.
Preparation: I gather research about the context and people, preparing content in a flexible (and scaleable) framework. The tools, templates and methods I use to prepare D&D are the same those that as I use to prepare for workshops in a professional setting.
Goblin tip:
When preparing workshops, you should imagine that you're making a swiss army knife. Think about what you might need, not what you will show. A good workshop is flexible, dynamic and sometimes even partially improvised. You can never anticipate the direction conversations go, and need to focus on eliciting the right information over steering attendees in a direction.
Organization: I plan the sessions and communicate up-front with stakeholders to set expectations and align on objectives, clarifying their expectations and any preparation they might need to do.
Goblin tip:
When organizing workshops, communicate the SORTID to stakeholders:
Scope of the workshops
Objectives for the workshops (desired outcomes)
Required
time
investment of the stakeholders
Deliverables; what the stakeholders will get at the end
Running workshops: I’m comfortable engaging with people from any level of the organization, as I don’t see the people as any different from one of my D&D players. It comes natural to pay attention to notes, the time, what people say, and their subtle behavioral cues that indicate more than words let on. I approach people in workshops like I do my D&D players, seeking the fastest route to know what makes them comfortable participating and how they can get value out of the time they spend at my table. I try to strike a correct balance between making the time informative and useful, but also engaging or even entertaining. However, I admit that I rarely do voices and full-on acting in workshops.
Moderating people and having empathy: Moderating workshop discussions is a difficult skill because every group is different. Furthermore, you need to guide the group to understand and collaboratively reach common ground about complex topics and decisions. To strive for this progress and elicit the right information, I use the same approaches as I would in a D&D session with my players. As mentioned above, a key skill that facilitates this is knowing how to read and interpret subtle behavioral cues, and how to socially engineer a productive, healthy discussion among diverse (and sometimes difficult) personalities.
Goblin tip:
I cannot understate the importance of two things when running workshops:
1. Reading behavioral cues: Identifying physical signals from people that indicate they disagree, agree, are or aren't content, engaged, satisfied, etc. This takes a lot of time to get right, and is subtly different for each individual.
2. Having self awareness: Knowing how your own behaviors and statements are affecting others. It's important to pick up on the nuance of how you're being received, so you can adjust it, accordingly.
Resolving conflict: People disagree, and they can get disappointed when a situation resolves in an outcome that wasn’t optimal for them. That’s just a fact of life. But for some people, this disagreement and disappointment can quickly escalate to conflict that hurts collaboration and productivity. Nobody has a good time if the table gets flipped. Over time, I’ve found methods to detect early when this is a risk, and how to manage these people’s opinion and disagreements. When conflicts arise, I’ve had experience confronting them in a healthy but direct manner, and have different approaches of how to seek resolutions. Perhaps most importantly, I’ve learned how to not let these things affect me, personally.
Outcomes and deliverables: Once concluded, I recap the session, focusing on key decisions and outstanding actions, with additional, supplemental context for later reference. In between sessions, I develop designs or proof of concepts to help clarify or demonstrate complex topics and processes.
Getting feedback: Continuous improvement is essential for any process. Like in my D&D sessions, I have experience requesting feedback regularly in the right way, and ensuring that people are comfortable giving that feedback. Since this is something I’m used to, I can also more easily accept that feedback and incorporate it in later sessions and broader learnings, instead of taking it as personal criticism.
Goblin tip:
Different ways to provide feedback work for different people. Over a series of workshops, try multiple methods to see what works best for the group. Ensure that you ask for feedback, but also ensure that you're open to it. Don't take criticism personally. Instead, focus on understanding the person's point-of-view.
Thanks to D&D, I’ve developed methods, tools and approaches for preparing and running workshops smoothly, efficiently, and effectively. As a result, it’s easier for me to engage with stakeholders, understand their requirements and establish trust with a user community. This has been the most impactful way that D&D has influenced my professional skills and my career.
CONVEYING INFORMATION EFFECTIVELY IN WRITING OR REPORTS
A DM needs to inevitably do a lot of writing when preparing D&D. In the last decade, I’ve written over 1,200 pages of documentation, manuals, notes, and stories to support my games. This hobby has been the single most substantiative factor that contributed to my specific writing style and voice. The passion and drive to make my campiagns better has pushed me to explore new tools and methods to write more effectively and informatively. Furthermore, I’ve learned to write more concise when I need to (and in my blog posts I definitely don’t need to, so shh, quiet you 🤫).
Storytelling: D&D is about collaborative storytelling, that’s obvious. But the storytelling extends far beyond the literal story of the campaign and its characters. Storytelling is an information delivery device that permeates all levels of a D&D game, wherever information exists. Through my D&D documents, materials and reports, I’ve learned how to guide my players through information with data storytelling. This is true not only for the Power BI reports I use to enable my games, but other materials and the overall story structure.
This is relevant for creating similar experiences in BI reports. Guiding people through the information by telling a story about the specific insights they need will most effectively enable them to go from overview (3 second views) to breakdown (30 second views) to details (300 second views).
Explaining things well: As a DM, your players will only understand your game (including the world, story and circumstances) if you explain it sufficiently well. This can be particularly difficult when they encounter new things that don’t fit their frame-of-reference or prior experiences. The same goes for engaging with different people in an organization. Now more than ever, people are continuously bombarded with complex information and jargon that they don’t understand. This prevents effective decision-making and people taking the right actions at the right time.
Thanks to D&D, I’ve learned to convey information in different ways, including by using literary techniques such as anecdotes, similes and metaphors to aid in understanding. Every week I get to test new ways of communicating complex concepts in a safe environment, with immediate feedback from players. These techniques help me communicate with peers and stakeholders and more quickly bridge gaps in understanding.
Simple example of designing a document with a low-fidelity markdown tool
HTML, CSS and Markdown: In both my blog and technical documentation, these languages are necessary to format and decorate text for organization and readability. I started learning these languages to create more elegant documents and recaps for my players. In fact, this very website started as a blog for one of my D&D campaigns. Many of those pages are still active and can be visited if you know where to click in the Data Goblins navigation menu (I get emails about this about once a month, which is always amusing).
The result of using these languages made it easier for me to write more effective and elegant documentation, as well as style my website.
Keep up with information inflation: As a D&D campaign presses on, it gets harder for players (and the DM) to remember everything that happened in the past. Finding elegant ways to introduce new information, while reminding people of relevant, actionable past information is essential. The same holds true for business users, particularly when it comes to training, mentorship and user enablement.
For example, having a high-level summary with links out to relevant, structured context and details can be very helpful. Furthermore, starting each session (or training) with a review of the essentials and an opportunity to ask questions is very valuable.
Goblin tip:
We're in a constant arms race for people's attention. When creating reports or anything intended to get someone's attention, spend time thinking, "how can I incentivize someone to look at this? Why should they care?"
D&D has helped me develop communication skills that I need to be a better writer and overall communicator. As a result, I feel enabled to better explain complex concepts to others.
DESIGN BETTER REPORTS, DATA MODELS AND OVERALL BI SOLUTIONS
Over the years, I’ve created dozens of BI solutions to support and enable my D&D games. From Power BI and Tableau reports to automation flows and designing full, end-to-end architectures… I even spent 2 years simulating the D&D economy and creating a fictitious order-to-cash data model. I create these tools to address common data problems.
Both business users and my D&D players need information to make decisions and take actions to achieve their objectives. Getting the right information at the right time is essential if they want to experience success.
The below are examples of skills I’ve improved through my D&D campagins:
Photoshop and design tools: I spend at least one to three hours weekly in graphic design tools to make maps, diagrams and illustrations. These can be as simple as a fake, hand-written note, or an elabourate political or geographical map. These handouts are invaluable for making my games more engaging and for the players to inform their decisions about where they go, what they do, and why.
These skills have proven invaluable when making presentations and designing reports, particularly during the requirements gathering phase, when I produce solution mock-ups and wireframes. Some parts of the original assets I’ve created from scratch for a D&D campaign have actually ended up in customer production solutions, which are still used to this day.
Report and dashboard design: My D&D players don’t join my campaigns to use Power BI reports. Similarly, business users don’t go to work simply to open and use Power BI. BI solutions like reports and dashboards are tools with a means to an end. People don’t want to use them, they need to use them to be effective at what they do. That’s why an effective report and dashboard design should optimize the time-to-insight and time-to-action as much as possible. The user should spend the absolute minimum amount of time with the report so they can move on to their actual work and the tasks at hand.
I regularly create reports to automate and simplify processes in D&D that are otherwise tedious and manual. This allows our games to explore mechanics that would otherwise be boring and dense. For example, we did basic simulations of magic item pricing and supply so that players could sell their magic items and buy new ones, progressing their character.
Exposing these reports to my players gives me immediate feedback about the design. I can monitor usage and see them use the reports during the game, which gives me a clear indication of what works and what doesn’t. This literal play testing of the reports has helped me iterate to find effective designs and functionalities so the report fluidly enables the game, instead of requiring excessive time from the players.
I’ve created Power BI reports for a number of use-cases:
Helping players track key decisions, people and events.
Serving out a shop inventory with basic writeback to log when players buy items to reduce the stock.
Helping players dynamically track and log their assets, from property to ships
Creating these reports is an excellent way for me to practice data modeling, DAX, report design and even governance. Since they’re used weekly, I have the motivation and feedback to improve them. Several times, I have even used these D&D reports in pre-sales discussions to demonstrate certain designs and functionalities.
BI solution design: Preparing and running D&D demands a lot of my time, and I’m always looking for ways to make the process more efficient. To support my preparation, I’ve developed full solutions that I use in professional presentations, demonstrations and trainings. These solutions have taught me new skills and exposed me to new ideas that I would’ve not considered in other contexts. The result of this learning is a wider base of experience, with direct applications that I can show if necessary.
To give a concrete example of something that I’m currently working on:
After every D&D session, I need to write a recap of what happened to the group.
Writing this recap takes a lot of time, and it’s sometimes hard to remember everything if it was an eventful session with a lot of key decisions and actions.
I want to automate this process to free up time I need for other things and make recaps more accurate.
To address this problem, we’re in the process of designing a solution to:
Record the sessions
Pass the recordings through several AI models to transcribe the audio and extract key data
Generate a recap with the transcribed script, using generative AI (maybe an image too)
Surface that recap to me and the group for initial reading and validation
After testing, transferring that recap to an output that recaps all sessions
During the transcription, one (or more) of the AI models extract key details into a semi-structured format.
This data is analyzed by using Notebooks in Fabric, and later transformed into structured, transactional data loaded to a Lakehouse.
A Power BI dataset collects that transactional data and enriches it with other (meta) data. It surfaces aggregate insights in several reports to the group for fun, but also for me to drive decision-making during campaign planning and preparation.
This solution provides me with a concrete use-case to use AI models, Fabric and governance/management of audio data.
Through my D&D campaigns, I’ve developed my own visual style and had many opportunities to practice with both design and data tools. I’ve even been able to create full BI solutions that enable our campaigns and help me be more productive in my preparation and planning of the sessions. These solutions are not only fun and practically useful, but also serve as excellent demonstrations for organizations and presentations.
To summarize, D&D has helped me develop skills that are useful for workshops, writing and solution design, among other, smaller things not listed, here. As a result, this hobby has had a tremendous positive impact on my career.
HOW THIS ADVANCED MY CAREER
Planning, preparing and playing weekly D&D games has helped me develop skills that advanced my career. It’s led to opportunities that brought me to where I am, today.
VISUAL COMMUNICATION
To most effectively engage my players, I’ve adopted a visual communication style that has now bled into everything that I do. My presentations, articles, even documentation and report designs are influenced by styles and techniques that I tried first in a D&D campaign. This preference for visual communication helped me drive the first year of my career working with data visualization.
ENGAGING STAKEHOLDERS
Because of the weekly soft skills training that D&D provides, running meetings, workshops and engaging stakeholders in general is something that came naturally, to me. It put me in a position where I was leading projects and engaging with business stakeholders higher in the organization, more regularly. Since I just saw these people like I would my players, it was easier for me to empathise with and connect to them. As a result, I was able to make a bigger impact with my work and grew into areas that keenly interested me, like data literacy, adoption and governance.
DATA GOBLINS
Data Goblins started as a narrative device to deliver a single presentation. I wanted to ensure that if I worked on “data stuff” in my spare time, it would remain connected with something intrinsically fun, for me. Several of the BI solutions I’ve made for D&D have directly influenced the impact I can make for other organizations, even though that has never been my intent. Fast-forward three years later, and I’ve now evolved Data Goblins into a company, where my main goals are to enjoy what I do and help people do cool stuff in Power BI (and Fabric).
NETWORKING
Many people play D&D; it’s a popular hobby that continues to grow. This makes it easy to connect with people who share this interest, even if they hold important, prestigious positons. Numerous times, I’ve connected with both business and data professionals about this shared hobby. This provides unique networking opportunities which, while they are not the goal of the interaction (swapping campaign stories isn’t very goal-driven), ultimately have led me to new opportunities. Most importantly, they’ve led to new social connections and friendships.
WHY SHOULD YOU CARE?
So if you’ve made it this far, you might be thinking “Well, what am I supposed to do with this information?”
Run D&D. You should run D&D. If anything in this post triggered or intrigued you, I implore you to follow that gut urge onward into a brave new world of imagination. If you want to start playing D&D, the best place I can recommend that you start are the following two YouTube videos from Matt Colville’s (MCDM) YouTube channel.
On a less facetious note, partaking in socially creative hobbies that flex muscles like improvisation, argumentation and imagination can be both fun and beneficial. The skills that you develop with these hobbies are not only useful for that hobby, but potentially also your career.
TO CONCLUDE
If you have time, investing in creative, social hobbies like playing D&D can improve skills you use in your professional life. These hobbies give you opportunities to learn new things, meet new people and find new, interesting ways to apply your data knowledge. By exploring these novel avenues for learning and personal development, you can simultaneously have fun while you advance your career and find new, interesting opportunities.
