I appreciate each and every one of you who read my story last week, hopefully it gave some entertainment or provoked some thought. As was likely obvious after reading the whole thing, Nat was my character in the most recent game of DIE I ran; the story itself both tied in to some events that happened in-game as well as attempted to give some background that explained the game’s conceit and gave Nat an impetus for getting everyone into DIE. And while I have already meditated on why the DIE RPG seems to inspire fiction more than any other game, there’s another reason which aligns with me on a personal level; the character creation in DIE provokes you into writing a self-insert, and that already aligns with a lot of the fiction I’ve written.

While the term ‘Mary Sue’ made its way into the vernacular decades ago to describe a specific brand of noxious, self-aggrandizing self-insert, the self-insert character on a broad level has always been part of fiction, often as the writer grapples with something from real life in the confines of a narrative or as an audience viewpoint character that provides a springboard for exposition. For me, my writing has been wrapped up in me asking questions about myself and, appropriately, the stories I tell myself about how I got to where I am. RPG characters in particular are opportunities to write versions of yourself where your strengths are more impactful than you feel like they are in the real world, or even where your real weaknesses are in fact strengths. We’ve all seen the trope of a lonely nerd writing themselves a promiscuous bard, or more blatantly, someone confined to a wheelchair writing themselves as an acrobat or parkour master. DIE inverts this a bit, making the self-inserts, well, hurt more, but also introducing more nuance as you’re forced to think.

So what of my self-inserts? My DIE playthroughs have been shared with the world, and two of the characters were at least partially self-inserts (Jay, my Master from the Cannibal Halfling Radio Now Playing was not, but that’s a story for another time). Donnie and Nat represent, whether I like it or not, differing sides of my high school experience. Donnie is the most like me, with being a social floater and a GPA floater directly aligning with who I was in high school. His DIE story, where he hit a wall and dropped out of college, was an extreme version of my exact college story, where I hit a hard wall in sophomore year. The difference was that I cleaned up my act and graduated with an acceptable GPA instead of dropping out and going to become a roustabout somewhere. It is still all too appropriate that Donnie became the Fear Knight, exactly modeling the anxiety I struggled with in high school and beyond and apparently striking a chord that even that game’s Master could hear.

Nat is the fantasy self-insert. She has the things I wanted in high school: being a recognized writer, social attention, and a general feeling of drive and purpose. It is wild to say looking back, but I had absolutely no idea what I wanted my life to look like in high school, and knowing that I made some incredibly intense decisions. One of the stories I tell most from that era in my life is what happened when I told my Dad I decided I wanted to go to school for engineering. He nodded thoughtfully, looked me in the eye, and said ‘are you sure?’ As much as I now look back on my education and understand how it was one of the best decisions I could make for the way my brain works and my need for personal growth, none of those things were cemented or even understood by the time I was 17. That’s one of the fantasies of Nat, right there: She kind of did the same thing that I did when it came to charting her life, but she actually thought she knew what she was doing.

There is of course the flashing sign of an unanswered question when I write a gender-swapped self-insert character. To be perfectly honest, I think a lot of that comes from resentment of where I was in high school. I don’t typically write gender-swapped characters for RPGs, and when I do it tends to be in RPGs where the characters are teenagers. The more I think about it, the more I realize it has a lot to do with how noxious the environment I went to high school in was. I was in a mostly white, mostly wealthy, mostly conservative (albeit New England conservative) town in Massachusetts and in 2003 or thereabouts the world simply wasn’t as welcoming a place for the full range of identity and expression as it is now. One stark reminder of this came at my tenth high school reunion when an old friend told me just how many people we knew stayed closeted until long after high school. Combine this with me, a late blooming skinny awkward kid; the one thing I wanted to be more than anything else was comfortable in my own skin. I got there, eventually; while I’d call myself lightly non-normative I’m still broadly a nerd with a beard on a bicycle and I’m very happy with that. In high school, though, the one group of my friends who seemed to have it all together and know exactly who they wanted to be were the goth girls. And yes, I know the truth of it all was usually very much not that, but that was the sort of self-projection I looked up to and was jealous of in high school. Ergo, I’ve since written two characters who fit that mold; Nat for DIE and Julia (or Prototype) for a Masks campaign, who luckily ended up driven much more by her built-in plot arc of being The Doomed than of my high school regrets and resentments.

I figure it’s also worth discussing my two biggest self-inserts. Although I wrote a lot in one of my earlier blogs about it, the novel I started writing after college has never really been shared with the world, despite me hacking at it for almost fifteen years now. It started out ridiculous and slowly got more grounded, but the underlying story is one that I think says a lot about me and my nature of continuously thinking back to how I grew up and how I eventually got to the person I am now. The story is that of a recent college grad, stuck before his next stage of life, getting caught up in a scandal involving the Greek Life at his school which he used to participate in. It’s partly based on real events and largely based on me (for lack of a better term) processing what it meant to be part of a fraternity in college. The core, though, is an ongoing conversation between two characters who are both self-inserts. The two main characters are pretty obviously both me; Scott, the viewpoint character, is me at 22, while Lance, the supporting character, is supposed to be an older version of me commentating on what’s going on. I really do think there’s a lot of interesting thoughts in there I want to finish, but with the story facing a second rewrite I’ve slowed down again in my march towards finishing it. That said, I think you’ll probably hear more about this story or some version of this story as I keep writing; I’m still a bit messed up over how much my college experience changed everything I thought I knew about myself, which means this story probably isn’t going anywhere.

With so much of my fiction being really inward-looking, I keep pondering how fantasy (or science fiction) works its way into my writing. I did a couple sci-fi NaNoWriMo drafts which I think are worth at least discussing if not necessarily editing and rewriting, and they are very different both from each other as well as anything else I’ve written, either for straight fiction or for TTRPG material. They also, being my 2022 and 2024 drafts respectively, show a bit more maturity in how the cast of characters developed compared to my earlier works which were much more driven by self-inserts. I do think that with some consideration and world-building, those stories represent ideas I can return to (and maybe I’ll share those drafts at some point in the future).

In the interim, I’m not completely done with my self-inserts, or with fiction inspired by DIE. I have a story bubbling up that’s about Donnie, my DIE character from 2023, meeting Nat, my DIE character from 2025. It’s going to be utterly self-indulgent, but at the same time I think it’ll be a needed exercise in looking into the lives of these characters and seeing how they are their own people, and not just self-inserts representing different facets of my adolescent experience.