Fighting Dragons and Finding Representation: The Intersection Between Queerness and Tabletop RPGs
Being in the closet is an exceptionally bad experience. It’s stressful, confusing, you are always scared that someone is going to find out — or even worse, already knows, but most of all, it is lonely. In the couple years between first beginning to understand my sexuality and actually telling someone that I was gay, I remember wanting so desperately to have a space I could see myself in or just simply know that someone was sharing my experience. Though due to the nature of how being ‘in the closet’ works, I had no such avenue of support. Looking back I know now that I would find it eventually, but as much as I wish I could tell my younger self where to look, I know he’d never take my advice; he would never believe that it was through Dungeons and Dragons that we finally found acceptance.
So, in the search of support and community, I forced myself to come out. The eighth-grade winter formal had ended, and me and my best friend were both waiting to be picked up. I had spent all night trying to muster the courage and, in the absolute last minute, I said the two words I thought had been weighing me down: “I’m gay.”
Immediately, I felt better but soon realized one aspect had stayed the same: it was still lonely. I may have come out, but to my friend, that just meant I was gay now; the ever-present fear, loneliness, and lack of belonging fell on deaf ears. I had created a space where I was queer, not a queer space, so I still thought I was alone in this experience. Obviously, I was incorrect; many other kids my age were also starting to come out only to find that someone knowing wasn’t enough to feel seen.
In this moment I again wish I could tell my younger self to seek out Dungeons and Dragons, or at least to read the preface of the Player’s Handbook because, as the lead designer puts so simply, “Above all else, D&D is yours. … D&D is your personal corner of the universe, a place where you have free reign to do as you wish” (4). These words define what so many people in the queer community, including myself, have sought at some point in their lives. It is the promise of a space that, unlike the real world, conforms to the player and not the other way around. This, while valuable, is only part of what I needed to feel that I had a space for myself. As much as a part of my life that I could create my own representation in is valuable, it would still be created alone when I was still unsure what queer representation looked like. A survey of members of the queer community published in the book Exploring LGBT Spaces and Communities defines the aspect I would be missing when finding that “knowing that there were others ‘like them’ was important for participants and contributed to them feeling their identities were validated and understood” (Formby 182). I, like many others, did not understand what my sexual identity was for much of my adolescence, so searching for someone that could help me develop the foundation of this newly important piece of my life became vital. However, even though I felt I needed someone to fill this space, I was unable to find anybody who could even attempt it for years after coming out.
In my WP2 I explored moments that defined my experience with my sexuality through the lense of a game of Dungeons and Dragons; it is all testament to the value of finding someone ‘like oneself’ because the final chapter derives from the first moment, I felt validated in my sexuality. Her name was KB: in the game, she is a god lost to time who the players are trying to find. In reality, she worked at a summer camp I attended during high school. Each night when the entire camp would come together and do camp things, there would be an organized period of time where five members of the staff would tell part of a story about a defining experience in their life. The stories they began the first day continued every night of camp, and I found myself constantly waiting to hear what would happen next in KB’s because she was recounting her struggles with her sexuality. She may have been a black, bisexual, woman at least a decade older than me, but in her story, I felt more of a connection to her than I had felt to anyone before. I found someone ‘like me’ and it was life changing. I spoke to her after hearing her conclusion, and she ended up being the first adult I told was gay; in return, she spoke to me with an understanding I had not been gifted before that point. I chose these moments at camp to define the final chapter of my WP2, not because they concluded my journey with my sexuality, but because they establish the beginning of the next stage of my life. I told my parents very soon after I told her, and it was a scary but mostly freeing experience to finally be, what I considered for myself, openly gay.
Momentarily, my struggle with my sexuality all but disappeared. I had been given the opportunity to connect with someone over this part of my being that had been repressed for so long, but like before, the feeling of loneliness did not fade, just momentarily softened. A single instance to this experience of belonging had helped me progress more than three years of forcing myself out of safe, silent complacency, but I and many others have all come to the same realization “that belonging requires mutual ‘seeing and hearing’, i.e. recognition and/or acceptance, which in turn contributes to self-confidence, self-respect and self-esteem”(Formby 171). One experience is not enough; it can help people know that they are not alone and provide hope that a community may be found one day, but it cannot replace the mutual ‘seeing and hearing’ Formby discusses. These two actions are not stagnant, onetime events, but ongoing ideals that can only be held up with the support of a community. I came back home from that summer camp, and I still had no one to connect to, so after the high of interacting with another open member of the queer community for the first time faded, my life had not changed, save the fact that now, I was okay with the world knowing I was gay.
It would still be years before I felt that I was actually part of the queer community, but fortunately, I could stop wishing that my younger self would find Dungeons and Dragons. It was a few months after the summer camp ended that I found The Adventure Zone: a comedy D&D podcast, and I fell in love with it immediately. I devoured the 100+ hours of already available content in less than a month, and as I listened intently to the story being told, I eventually began to feel something I had not experienced for a while. Belonging.
A side plot emerged about halfway through the series that watched as an elven wizard named Takko fell in love with the grim reaper. I had seen queer relationships in media before, but struggled to connect to them because they felt disconnected from real life; however, in this world completely unhinged from reality that only existed in words, I was able to find a story that I felt represented in. I should not have been surprised by this revelation because tabletop rpgs have, in a way, been a home for the people who’ve felt outcast by society since their conception.
Dungeons and Dragons was not developed with queer identity in mind. It was a game developed in the midwestern United States by a straight, cisgender, white man in 1974 for straight, cisgender, white men. It was not made with the intention of being a space for queer people to find affirmation and representation; however, against all odds, it has one key factor that gives it the opportunity to intersect with queer spaces. The game was created to offer a sense of escapism; as the creator Gary Gygax put it, “All of us at times feel a little inadequate in dealing with the modern world. It would feel much better if we knew we were a superhero or a mighty wizard” (New York Times, 00:03:00–00:03:12). The tabletop rpg genre was developed with the initial philosophy of allowing players to be someone they could never be in real life, so those who first ended up finding community within the game were those that real life was not treating kindly: the kids who didn’t fit in, the ones who felt they could not relate to others. I remember that when I first became interested in Dungeons and Dragons, my mother told me that as a kid, her friend’s older brother and his friends would always be playing it in the basement. She was sure to mention that she thought they were kinda weird.
At first, this community of outcasts looking to find themselves within the games they played was mostly devoid of minorities, but as the tabletop rpg scene has evolved, so have the players and stories they are able to tell. The source book for a tabletop rpg released in 2017 called Monsterhearts 2 begins with the following description that defines a through line of all characters a player might create:
Monsterhearts 2 is about the messy lives of teenagers who are secretly monsters. It explores the terror and confusion of having a body that is changing without your permission. The monstrosity of these characters is literal: they are vampires, werewolves, witches, and more. But their monstrosity is also allegorical, standing in for experiences of alienation, shame, queerness, and self-destruction (7).
This acknowledgement of difficulty redefines this sense of escapism as not a tool to avoid the struggles of real life, but to explore them in a safe space parallel to its players live while explicitly being a space for queer youth. The games creator Avery Alder narrows in, with almost surgical precision, on the aspects of adolescence, both queer and otherwise, that have led people to join the tabletop rpg community in the four decades since their conception. This type of play that focuses on the alienation and shame that many players may come into either the queer or tabletop rpg community feeling, allows for a more constructive space while still upholding the aspects of escapism and fantasy so intrinsic to tabletop rpgs. Playing the role of an axe swinging barbarian or spell slinging warlock still has an important part in the tabletop rpg community, but these more narratively focused games create a channel where challenging emotions that many players may struggle to deal with alone are addressed in ways that encourage safer and more constructive group conversation.
I have considered myself to be part of the tabletop rpg community for a few years now, but it was only a couple months ago that I played for the first time in-person. The tabletop rpg community, like the queer community were in a relatively unique position when the world had to transfer online, because both already had the experience dealing with active online space. Formby found in her studies about queer youth that “For those who could not easily meet people in person, online spaces provided a way to connect with people, and therefore helped combat isolation. A number of participants felt such virtual communities contributed to their confidence and wellbeing” (181). This quote so unique because while it is about queer communities, it could just as easily be about the tabletop rpg community. The internet has provided queer people with a space like no other: it allows for access to resources, communities, and friends that have been available for to no other generation. This unparalleled access has made understanding oneself and their sexuality much easier for many, especially when living in areas that have little to no active queer community. The tabletop rpg community has made use of the internet in largely similar ways; there are many people who want to play, but a lack of resources and other people interested in playing make them unable to. In reaction to this, websites such as D&DBeyond and Roll20 have emerged to offer players a space to find others interested in the game and the resources to play online when playing in person is not an option.
The journey both the queer and tabletop rpg communities have taken and the growth and recognition they have seen in the past few years have been very similar, so it is no surprise that there has already been a lot of overlap between their members. However, due to the fact that the tabletop rpg community began as a space largely populated by non-queer people; there is implicit bias that must be overcome for the relation between these communities to reach their fullest potential. Developing this more inclusive space is a job that falls on the shoulders of every group within the community. All people, from the heads of companies that lead the community itself, to the game masters who sit down every week to tell a story, must be aware of the accessibility to the space they provide.
Over the years, tabletop rpgs have evolved significantly in regards to the accessibility, storytelling, and inclusivity put forth by the community, and Dungeons and Dragons is probably the best example of this change. The strength table taken out of the Advanced Dungeons and Dragons Player’s Handbook from 1978 exemplifies how problematic these games can become when inclusivity is not properly addressed. In a game where players can literally call on the aid of gods, it was decided to enforce realism on the player by giving hard cutoffs for a players strength ability score (a number used in game to determine one’s aptitude in regards to feats involving physical strength) based on the race and gender they are playing.
This mechanic was fortunately removed in all following editions of Dungeons and Dragons, and greater freedom has been given to players. In the fifth edition Player’s Handbook, the creators write that “You could play a female character who presents herself as a man, a man who feels trapped in a female body, or a bearded female dwarf who hates being mistaken for a man. Likewise, your character’s sexual orientation is for you to decide” (PHB 121). This phrasing is incredibly awkward as it almost seems that designers were trying to express a queer identity without using any words or labels that those in the queer community would identify with. However, it shows that the writers and creators are at least acknowledging their shortcomings in the past. These books were released at points where inclusivity was not something needed to be emphasized; they were the centers of relatively small and not very diverse communities. But with the release of the most recent edition in 2014 and popular celebrities like Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson making their enjoyment of the game known, the fan base has grown immensely. With this new influx, the designers have worked hard to combat questionable decisions published earlier in the game’s life cycle with the release of supplemental materials. These actions have made their games more inclusive, but there is no end goal these companies can reach and simply stop. They must continue to uphold the standards they have set for themselves and their communities not only to help create a more inclusive space for those who belong to marginalized groups, but to teach the part of the player base that is still uneducated on these other communities.
As much as these leaders can instigate change, implementing it and creating tolerance must fall to those whose role it is to lead the experience: the game master. When playing any tabletop rpg, there are two distinct roles that a player can embody: the game master or a character; the game master is the more difficult and largely, more important of the two. It is up to them to develop the worlds that the characters interact with; however, play is at its best and the most valuable to everyone involved when the story being told is not a series of calls and responses but instead an open conversation between the two roles.
This sounds easy in theory, but it must be understood that any game master, no matter how experienced, is opening themselves into a vulnerable state when they take on this role: game masters must not only share their creations with a group but allow their players to make it their own. This can be difficult if a game master has become particularly attached to the story they want to tell and a player’s attempts to make it more representative of their own experiences push the story in a different direction. The open conversation needed between all players is very similar to the dialogue that Freire explores in Pedagogy of the Oppressed. He writes that
Dialogue cannot exist without humility. The naming of the world, through which people constantly re-create that world, cannot be an act of arrogance. Dialogue, as the encounter of those addressed to the common task of learning and acting, is broken if the parties (or one of them) lack humility (90).
The game master does, quite literally, name the world that any game is played in, but it is the humility that Freire suggests that they must embody to make their world an inclusive space. The world a game master defines must be malleable because if a player is placed into it without the freedoms, they need to recreate it for themselves being acknowledged, then this dialogue is lost. If the game master become possessive of a world their players are unable to see themselves in, then the work the designers have done to create a set of rules that foster a place for the queer community is completely put to waste.
A year ago, I was given the opportunity to be a game master and create a world like this for my players. It is fitting that it was through this action that I finally found the community I had spent so much of my life looking for. A random post on the USC fall admits page led me to a newly created discord server for people interested in Dungeons and Dragons, and on a whim, I agreed to take on the role of a game master. That one decision spiraled out of control; this once new discord is now an official club with hundreds of members, and I sit on the board as one of the founders. This space I found is not just part of the tabletop rpg community or part of the queer community, it is an intersection of the two I have been able to develop for myself and others, and for the first time in a long time, I feel seen.
Work Cited
Addison, Louis. “LGBTQIAD&D+.” Medium, 11 Nov, 2021. https://medium.com/@laddison_7240/wp2-lgbtqiad-d-3fe5f0931af8
Alder, Avery. Monsterhearts 2. 2017.
“Dungeons & Dragons: Satanic Panic | Retro Report | The New York Times.” Youtube, uploaded by The New York Times, 7 Jun, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ATUpSPj0x-c
Formby, Eleanor (2019). Consequences of Wellbeing. In Exploring LGBT Spaces and Communities: Contrasting Identities, Belongings and Wellbeing (pp. 170–193). essay, Routledge.
Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York NY, Continuum, 2005.
Gygax, Gary. Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Player’s Handbook. Lake Geneva, WI, TRS Games, 1978.
Mearls, Mike, and Jeremy Crawford. Dungeons & Dragons Player’s Handbook. Renton, WA, Wizards of the Coast, 2014.
