D&D for Kids & Editing: Storytelling is Storytelling
- Star Ben
- 19 hours ago
- 3 min read
Over the last little while, I’ve been running D&D for kids at my local game store. On paper, that might sound like a side quest; something fun, a little chaotic, and totally unrelated to my day job in video editing and post-production. In practice, it’s been one of the best storytelling workouts I’ve had in years.
Running games for kids has sharpened the exact same muscles I rely on when I’m shaping a video: pacing, clarity, emotional beats, and knowing when to let a moment breathe, or when to cut.
Kids are an extremely honest audience. If something isn’t working for kids, you’ll know immediately. They don’t politely nod along. They don’t pretend to be engaged.
If the story drags, they wander. If it’s confusing, they derail it. If it’s exciting, they lean in.
Last week, they were fighting a Death Knight. I didn’t pull punches. Characters went down. At one point, things looked genuinely bleak. And instead of checking out, they got louder, more focused, more invested. The harder I pushed them, the more they cared. When two of the characters died and in their “death scene” I introduced them to a mysterious new character they were thrilled. The timing was great!
That’s a lesson I’ve learned over and over again in editing: audiences don’t disengage because something is challenging. They disengage because it’s boring or unclear.
A timeline full of clips is no different than a table full of players. You’re always asking the same questions: Where’s the momentum? What does the audience need right now?
One of the biggest surprises has been how much improvising with kids has improved my sense of structure.
When you DM for adults, you can sometimes rely on shared genre knowledge. Kids don’t have that. You have to make the stakes clear, the goals obvious, and the cause-and-effect immediate. Every scene needs a reason to exist.
In editing, the same rule applies. If a shot, a line, or a beat doesn’t serve the story, it doesn’t matter how cool it is.
DMing has made me ruthless in a good way. I’m quicker to cut or reshape because I’ve seen how fast a story improves when every moment earns its place.
The relationship goes both ways.
Years of video editing and post-production have trained me to think in beats and arcs. I naturally break sessions into scenes, look for cliffhangers, and end at moments that make players excited to come back. I think about openings that hook, midpoints that complicate things and endings that land emotionally.
That’s just storytelling; whether it’s D&D, a short documentary, or a brand video.
Editing has also taught me restraint. Not every idea needs to be on screen. Not every NPC needs a monologue. Not every shot needs to stay just because it was hard to get.
What this has reinforced for me is that storytelling skills transfer cleanly between mediums.
DMing keeps my instincts sharp. Editing gives me discipline. Together, they make me better at both.
Honestly, I didn’t expect running D&D-style games for kids to feed back into my professional video editing work this much, but it has. Turns out, telling stories around a table and telling them in an edit suite aren’t that different after all.
They’re just different ways of inviting people into a story and making sure they want to stay there.