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ABSTRACT
The twenty-first century has seen speculative fiction surge ever more vigorously into the mainstream, among which must be reckoned the remarkable renaissance of tabletop roleplaying games (Dungeons & Dragons especially), which generate fictional narratives through collaborative, improvisational, rule-constrained storytelling. D&D, this article argues, not only contains a remarkable array of politically and theologically implicative contents (such as agonistic cosmologies and racial hierarchies) but also entails and incentivizes theopolitically significant social practices on the part of participants – most significantly, narrating player-characters into and through moral dilemmas. Attending to players’ testimonies of personal renewal and political resistance, we find that D&D is an arena for what I theorize as edification: an enrichment of one’s subjectivity that is experienced as beneficial, transformational, or even salvific (that is, as effecting rescue or liberation from ruinous ways of life), even as it proves culturally contested and socially divisive.
Acknowledgments
Special thanks are due to the tabletop roleplaying professionals (game designers, live streamers, youth educators) who graciously agreed to speak with me about this project and have their distinctive insights represented in the article: Patricia Estabrook, Ray Estabrook, David Harmon, James Mendez Hodes, James Introcaso, and Shakeera Khan. I also owe much to the player-characters at my table who have, over the last several years, been indispensable in conceptualizing and playtesting aspects of my argument: Aiwithindil the Druid, Fargus the Paladin, Golshan the Fighter, Uli the Wizard, and Zardoz the Rogue.
Disclosure statement
No conflict of interest pertains to the research presented above.
Correction Statement
This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.
Notes
1 The acronym TRPG is also widely used, but as this can also stand for “tactical roleplaying games,” a rather different category, I avoid what would otherwise be the more elegant acronym.
2 Unlike other forms of oral storytelling such as theater, TTRPGs traditionally have no audience except the players themselves. In recent years, online broadcasts of expert players’ (and/or celebrities’) game sessions have quickly become widespread, a phenomenon which needs its own examination, as it is undoubtedly closely linked with the ever-more-expansive popularity of TTRPGs. However, the overwhelming norm is that the producers and consumers of TTRPG fictions are one and the same.
3 Laycock, Dangerous Games, 5. Laycock’s excellent book-length study of the moral panic over fantasy roleplaying is a rare example of attention to TTRPGs in the field of religious studies. I rely substantially on Laycock’s analysis in what follows, although his interpretation of the “religious functions” and “religious effects” of fantasy roleplaying games is mainly in the service of his argument about the moral panic and the “rival fantasy” constructed and inhabited by the critics of fantasy roleplaying. My own concern, by contrast, is more with the theological suppositions and political interventions of the games themselves.
4 Cf. Laycock, Dangerous Games, 165.
5 See Ibid., 51–75, on the ways that roleplaying games provide functions in many people’s lives more often associated with religion (such as interpersonal care, enchanted seeing, vicarious experience of alternate worlds, and ritual practice).
6 This article will focus on the ethical and political dynamics, leaving identity experimentation largely aside (although of course identity is deeply ethical and political). There is important work being done on the exploration of gender identity in particular via TTRPG gameplay: see, for instance, Codega, “The Power of Queer Play in Dungeons & Dragons,” and Mussett, “Berserker in a Skirt.” The boom in TTRPG subculture over the last several years has been expansive among LGBTQ+ players and designers, and the flexibility and fertility of roleplaying games as a venue for trying on new ways of being true to oneself are owed substantial attention beyond the scope of this article and the expertise of its author.
7 In previous work, I have considered edification as a psychosocial process by which value-laden understandings are digested in the lives of their consumers and experienced (and/or authoritatively promoted) as beneficial. On hagiographical edification in particular (that is, edification which is enacted by means of identifying with and appropriating media that represent holy people, places, objects, or ideals), see Hollander, “Hagiography Unbound.” The richly resonant family resemblances between hagiographical narratives and the edifying fictions produced through tabletop roleplaying certainly do not escape me, even as specific argumentation around the significance of this resonance must wait for subsequent work.
8 See, for instance: Fine, Shared Fantasy, 13–16; Tresca, The Evolution of Role-Playing Games, 60–65; Bowman, The Functions of Role-Playing Games, 11–32; Laycock, Dangerous Games, 186–99; and the first four chapters in Zegal and Deterding, Role-Playing Game Studies. This last work is the most recent compendium aiming to represent the state of the field; notably, its substantial section on “disciplinary perspectives” includes performance studies, sociology, psychology, literary studies, education, economics, science and technology studies, game studies, and communications – but neither religious studies nor theology.
9 Fine, Shared Fantasy, 183, 153. See also Laycock, Dangerous Games, 186; Tresca, The Evolution of Role-Playing Games, 8; Bowman, The Functions of Role-Playing Games, 180; and Tolkien, “On Fairy-Stories,” 147.
10 Dyer, “Dungeonmastery as Soulcraft,” 117.
11 Crawford et al., Dungeon Master’s Guide, 9. The core assumptions appearing in this section of the manual (not the only ones at work in D&D’s game design and subculture, just those that have been rendered explicit for the benefit of new players) include: “Gods oversee the world”; “Much of the world is untamed,” “The world is ancient,” “Conflict shapes the world’s history,” and “The world is magical.” See also 38, on the key generic expectations of heroic fantasy, which tends to rely on black and white moralities in which values-driven heroes are pitted initially against local injustices and ultimately against world-threatening evils; destiny figures prominently as a dynamic for imagining the circuitous but coherent path from local nobodies to global saviors. Cf. Tresca, The Evolution of Role-Playing Games, 68–69; McGonigal, Reality is Broken, 100; and Mendlesohn, Rhetorics of Fantasy, 4–5.
12 See Laycock, Dangerous Games, xiii, 23–25, 53–54.
13 Laycock, Dangerous Games, 55; see also 243. Crawford et al., Dungeon Master’s Guide, 57–67, establishes that alignment is not only an aid for players in understanding their character or in categorizing allies or foes they meet in the course of a narrative, it is also baked into the default cosmology; cf. the 1979 pamphlet “What is Dungeons & Dragons?,” produced by Gary Gygax and his publishing company TSR, which promises that D&D “furnishes a world in which everything is categorized and labeled; there is no mistaking good and evil” (quoted in Fine, Shared Fantasy, 77). See also Littmann, “Sympathy for the Devils,” 9–12; Tresca, The Evolution of Fantasy Role-Playing Games, 79; Fine, Shared Fantasy, 16–18, 209–10; Cogburn, “Beyond Chaotic Good and Lawful Evil?”; and Cooke, “It’s Okay to be Evil in Your Head.”
14 See Laycock, Dangerous Games, xiii, 243, on how both tabletop roleplaying and its critics have been continually engaged in such a construction (for very different purposes).
15 For D&D 5e’s official discussion of “monstrous adventurers,” see Crawford, Volo’s Guide to Monsters, 118–20. For more analysis of the concept of “race” in D&D, not identical to (yet entangled with) its usage more generally, see Tresca, The Evolution of Role-Playing Games, 37, 79–82; Mitchell-Smith, “Racial Determinism and the Interlocking Economies of Power and Violence in Dungeons & Dragons,” 209–10, 216–21; and Trammell, “Representation and Discrimination in Role-Playing Games,” 441–45.
16 Hodes, “Orcs, Britons, and the Martial Race Myth,” Parts I and II. Cf. Brandon Dixon’s discussion in “Stop Codifying Racism in Your Damn Games,” 24:25 (“Fantasy races are fantasies about race”), 32:35–33:20 on in-game racism that echoes and presupposes real-world racial assumptions, and 36:10–36:50 on Orcs in particular.
17 See Trammell, “Representation and Discrimination in Role-Playing Games,” 444, on the flexibility of racial rules and their gameplay/narrative implications in TTRPGs, by contrast with digital games in which such rules are “hardwired” into the game code.
18 See Crawford et al., Player’s Handbook, 21–24; cf. comments by Brandon Dixon, Gabe Hicks, Tanya DePass, and Michael Sinclair during the “Black AF Roundtable of TTRPG Creators,” 15:30–18:45.
19 James Mendez Hodes, personal interview, 14 January 2020. See also Miller-Smith, “Racial Determinism and the Interlocking Economies of Power and Violence in Dungeons & Dragons,” and Barber, “Decolonization and Integration in D&D.”
20 For more on improvisation, vulnerability, and ethical formation, see Wells, Improvisation.
21 This latter episode appears as an anecdote in Hodes, “Orcs, Britons, and the Martial Race Myth, Part II,” but it evokes a reliable pattern of divergent moral perceptions of “monstrous races” among players, as attested also by game designers and youth educators Patricia and Ray Estabrook (personal interview, 23 January 2020). The former episode is from a game in which I played – I admit to having been suckered by the DM’s clever subversion of the monstrous-race assumption, thereafter experiencing vicarious remorse for the unjust goblin deaths due to my character’s unquestioned prejudice. Systemic racism, it turns out, was the real monster all along.
22 Patricia Estabrook, personal interview, 31 January 2020. Cf. Laycock, Dangerous Games, 198; and Cogburn, “Beyond Chaotic Good and Lawful Evil?,” 46. Wright et al. indicate through social-scientific methods that the “embedded social/moral dilemmas” in D&D games “can function as an engaging, interactive ‘moral training ground,’ a medium that promotes moral development, and highlights the difference between antisocial and prosocial violence” (“Imaginative Role-Playing as a Medium for Moral Development,” 99).
23 Wizards of the Coast issued a press release to this effect on 17 June 2020: “Diversity and Dungeons & Dragons,” https://dnd.wizards.com/articles/features/diversity-and-dnd, accessed 21 January 2021.
24 James Introcaso, personal interview, 4 May 2020. No DM is ever prevented from building a world in which (for instance) Orcs are universally and irredeemably evil, Introcaso explains, but when the game design assumes such a world, the responsibility of players – that which the game attempts to cultivate by giving players hard and consequential choices, which in turn drive its dynamic of moral experimentation – is displaced.
25 See Fine, Shared Fantasy, 123, 136–37, 236–40, on the “idioculture” of a given gaming table – more particular and autonomous than the diverse but shared “subculture” of tabletop roleplaying more generally. See also Delfino and Hillock, “Imagination as Creation,” 100–02, on the DM’s responsibility to manage the fictional world’s responses to the player-characters’ moral experimentation; and Dyer, “Dungeonmastery as Soulcraft,” 114–16, on “worldbuilding as moral expression.”
26 On the difference and interrelation of these “various orders of reality,” see again Fine, Shared Fantasy, 181–204.
27 Several such testimonies appear in a short documentary by Fandom Entertainment dedicated to the subject, “Defeat Your Demons with Dungeons & Dragons.” See also D&D Beyond’s short but startling video, “Dungeons & Dragons as Part of Therapy.”
28 Cf. Laycock, Dangerous Games, 13–17. Especially vivid in this respect is the testimony of the young man in “Defeat Your Demons with Dungeons & Dragons” (24:24–25:28) who attributes his survival to D&D, along with the affirming response to this testimony by Matthew Mercer (25:50–26:32) – the roleplaying virtuoso, celebrity, and ambassador whose live-streamed D&D campaign was first experienced by the other man as returning a sense of purpose to his broken frame of meaning.
29 Such a real-time, communal integration of events as a meaningful (rather than arbitrary) whole was suggested to me as a defining feature of TTRPG narrative by Dave Harmon, co-creator and DM of the Australian comedy roleplaying series Dragon Friends (personal conversation, 8 December 2019).
30 Bowman, “Bleed,” paragraph 1; cf. Bowman’s more thorough discussion of a variety of psychosocial dynamics regularly experienced as edifying or cathartic in “Immersion and Shared Imagination in Role-Playing Games.” See also Tresca, The Evolution of Role-Playing Games, 77–78, on the “player-character” as the basic unit of TTRPG participation; Bowman, The Functions of Role-Playing Games, 180, on the “suspension of one’s primary identity and immersion into an alternate mental framework”; Waskul, “The Role-Playing Game and the Game of Role-Playing,” 26–30, on the porous boundaries between players’ ordinary lives, their in-game characters, and the distinctive “persona” of the role-player; Mendlesohn, Rhetorics of Fantasy, xviii, on the two-way dynamic of “metaphoric participation” in fiction (including in ways unanticipated and unauthorized by that fiction’s authors); and Gottschall, The Storytelling Animal, 153, on “the way stories are working on us all the time, reshaping us in the way that flowing water gradually reshapes a rock.”
31 See Fine, Shared Fantasy, 181–228. Of course, the level of identification or attachment or permeability between player and character varies widely from player to player (see 222–24).
32 See Bowman, The Functions of Role-Playing Games, 37, 74, 114, 138–42. See also the case studies in Blackmon, “Dungeons and Dragons,” and D&D Beyond, “Dungeons & Dragons as Part of Therapy.”
33 Personal interview cited in Fine, Shared Fantasy, 88.
34 Gottschall, The Storytelling Animal, 56–59.
35 See Marsh, “Vicarious Experience,” 199–205; Bowman, The Functions of Role-Playing Games, 59–72; Gottschall, The Storytelling Animal, 64–67, 190; and McGonigal, Reality is Broken, 100–08, 235, 267–68.
36 Gottschall draws on ample neuroscientific research in suggesting that “To simulate is to do” (The Storytelling Animal, 59). Ray Estabrook points to this dynamic as key to the value of roleplaying in history education (Estabrook et al., “Finding Your Place in History,” 12–13). Cf. Marsham et al., The World of Critical Role, 282–83, on the “kind of memory-dream” that persists following roleplay and fuels real self-understanding.
37 Gygax, Master of the Game, 150; cf. Tresca, The Evolution of Role-Playing Games, 68.
38 See Bowman, The Functions of Role-Playing Games, 21; cf. Laycock, Dangerous Games, 35–39.
39 See Ibid., 33, 40, 52; cf. Tresca, The Evolution of Role-Playing Games, 65–67, on D&D’s variably successful modeling of different kinds of cooperation, and 24, 30, 45–46, on the influence of the Tolkienian paradigm of fellowship on TTRPG design and subculture.
40 See, for instance: Wright et al., “Imaginative Role-Playing as a Medium for Moral Development”; Blackmon, “Dungeons and Dragons”; Cooke, “It’s Okay to Be Evil in Your Head”; Cogburn, “Beyond Chaotic Good and Lawful Evil”; Samman and Porzenheim, “Why D&D Is a Popular Form of Communal Therapy”; Delfino and Hillock, “Imagination and Creation”; and Estabrook, “Finding Your Place in History.”
41 Cf. Nicholas, “Eucharist and Dragon Fighting as Resistance,” 100–04.
42 Hodes, “Best Practices for Religious Representation,” Part I.
43 See Hodes, “Orcs, Britons, and the Martial Race Myth,” Part II. In a personal interview (14 January 2020), Hodes described the “emancipatory” quality of such game environments in terms of the “fundamentally controlled” and “opt-in” quality of the opportunity – not obligation – to work through and experiment around real or adopted experiences of systemic marginalization: “Sometimes we want to wrestle with these things, sometimes we just need to step aside for some fresh air.” Cf. Laycock’s sense of the fantasy world as an “annex that allows players a mental space from which to reassess their world” (Dangerous Games, 27).
44 Kemper, “The Battle of Primrose Park.”
45 Stableford, The Dedalus Book of British Fantasy, 14, interpreting Tolkien, “On Fairy-Stories,” 145–54; cf. Bowman, The Functions of Role-Playing Games, 55–56, 180.
46 Tolkien, “On Fairy-Stories,” 153.
47 See Gottschall, The Storytelling Animal, 49; and Marsham et al., The World of Critical Role, 310–16.
48 From Tolkien, “Mythopoeia.”
49 Wright et al., “Imaginative Role-Playing as a Medium for Moral Development,” 99.
50 These are paraphrases rather than quotations, being synthesized from numerous comments and memes (on Twitter, Reddit, and Twitch in particular) relating or in direct response to concerns being raised around D&D’s racial representation, colonialist mentalities, and zero-sum ethos of kill-or-be-killed.
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Aaron T. Hollander
Aaron T. Hollander is Associate Director of Graymoor Ecumenical & Interreligious Institute (New York City), Associate Editor of Ecumenical Trends, and Vice President of the North American Academy of Ecumenists. He is a scholar of theology and culture, with a PhD from the University of Chicago Divinity School, whose current research concerns the dynamics of interreligious conflict and coexistence, the aesthetic textures and political functions of holiness, and the circulation of theological understanding beyond explicitly religious settings.