Over the past five years, Dungeons & Dragons has experienced not only a revival, but a renaissance. With more cultural connections, digital assets, and online gameplay opportunities, the barrier for entry into the tabletop game is lower than ever. Within this revival, D&D has found a large, outspoken following among queer and gender non-conforming people.
While queer people have always been nerdy as hell, the vocal contingent of gay-mers and queer roleplayers has created a new facet of appreciation and understanding for D&D. Because of the way that the game is set up, D&D allows for new methods of play as identity and queerness intersect and are explored. The power of queer people to interact with a game that does not question their existence, but molds itself to support it, is a hugely emancipating and rewarding experience. Dungeons & Dragons is an open sandbox in which queer folk can enact their fantasies of power and gender without consequence or question.
Back to the basics. How did this happen? After enduring a few decades of faltering sales, Dungeons & Dragons has come back into vogue following the 2014 release of Fifth Edition (5E). 5E simplified the rules of the game, created more direct lines of character advancement, and separated itself from its main competitor, Pathfinder, by reducing conversion tables and implementing a more user-friendly magic system. If this sounds ridiculous to you, don’t worry. It’s absurd for those of us who play Dungeons & Dragons too.
Now, these changes weren’t the only things that spurred a renewed interest in the tabletop game. Fifth Edition was the book that finally made good on Wizards of the Coast’s promises to diversify their marketing and representation, creating a book full of art that showed an incredible diversity of races, bodies, and genders. Wizards is also the publisher of the ubiquitous card game, Magic the Gathering, and in between these two properties, Wizards is the largest commissioner of fantasy art in the world. Because of this, Wizards holds a controlling share of the cultural exposure people have to fantasy games, and it was only a matter of time before they realized that inclusion had to become a priority rather than an assumption. People saw this change and responded, as representation within the canon of the book had been (somewhat) removed from stereotypes and cliches, attempting to rectify the previous fantasy universe of racially charged assumptions. (This was not always successful, but WotC has acknowledged its canon is problematic, and they are taking small steps forward.)
The popularity of Dungeons & Dragons was also spurred on by mainstream media exposure, which facilitated a lower barrier of entry to a game that previously appeared impenetrable to many. Wizards of the Coast, which has always embraced fan-made hacks, ‘homebrews,’ and personal adventure creation using their products as a foundation, also fully embraced digital streaming and Twitch plays. Podcasts like The Adventure Zone also took off in 2014, the same year that 5E was released. This improv comedy actual play audio drama combined the well-known talk show personalities of the McElroy brothers with active gameplay and rules explanations, starting the trend of producing tabletop roleplaying game stories for the masses.
Queer people, in particular, flocked to the system. From the start of the game, Dungeons & Dragons offered an equalizing method of roleplay that many other games don’t have. Video games, for example, when they even allow for character creation, usually have very specific and very limited parameters for the shape, size, race, and colorways you can choose for your characters, and rarely (if ever) has customizable gender options. It’s limited because the rules are written in the code of the game, and are, by and large, immutable.
The character creation structure for Dungeons & Dragons, (like many tabletop roleplaying games,) simply operates differently. When creating your characters, one isn’t limited by a codified set of rules regarding gender, identity, or any kind of familiar social dynamics. A basic example is that a female Dwarf Fighter will have the exact same strength statistics as that of a male Dwarf Fighter. A non-binary tiefling will have the same advantages and disadvantages applied to their character as any cisgendered tiefling. If your character is disabled, you can still participate in the game to the same degree as any other character. It’s a fantasy game, and while wheelchairs and trans people exist through a different lens, they still exist, and the rules of the game do not change for them.
In D&D there is absolutely no rules-as-written, mechanical difference between any gender, sexuality, or ability. It’s all treated the same. The rules become an equalizer. Besides the fact that there are no “hard-coded” settings for players is the premise that at your table you make the rules. It’s actually written in the Player’s Handbook that even though Dungeons & Dragons is a game with rules and play expectations, those are all suggestions. Within this framework of fun, adventure, and cooperation, you have all the narrative power.
While on a panel about this topic, game designer, writer, and professor Sharang Biswas stated that the ability to play without rules is his definition of playfulness (Flame Con, August 2019.) The rules of the world are up in the air. The interactions are going to unfold at the table. Even if the Dungeon Master (the game facilitator) has the final say over rules (all of which are arbitrary anyway). Therefore the decisions that are made, no matter what, are made together.
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This idea, that you can mold the rules to the game to fit your own ideas for play, is a power fantasy that most queer people dream of. The assumption that gender and sexuality doesn’t define how the rules apply to any person is an empowering space where queer people are allowed to play, explore their identity, and perhaps learn more about who they are. The inherent play encouraged by tabletop roleplaying games is not limited to how many kobolds you can hit with your axe, but is, at its core, a tacit liberation from societal norms and expectations, allowing a freedom in gameplay that is not often allowed in the world at large.
I began experimenting in earnest with my own gender expression through roleplaying games; first by playing as a boy, then a girl, and then playing as a nonbinary character. The way that I found myself becoming more comfortable with blurring these binary lines of identity was because I had space to experiment in a consequence free container, where I could take on and take off genders in order to find the one that fit me. In the game it didn’t matter what gender my character was as long as I understood who the character was, what they wanted. I began to understand that a lot of the boundaries I set up for myself in real life were likewise arbitrary, and by extension, not what I wanted. When I allowed myself a space to play with the rules of my identity, I was able to come out with confidence, knowing that I had been able to “come out” through playing Dungeons & Dragons.
In the real world, this sort of experimentation is never completely safe. Changing names, pronouns, and appearance is never as easy as pulling out a new character sheet. When you sit down to play a roleplaying game, you invite yourself to act out a new person, act out their life. For queer people this can be monumental. It can be revolutionary. Having space to experiment is special because you can rarely find another place where it is acceptable to blur these lines.
Pulling back from Dungeons & Dragons is the fact that playfulness itself actually defines the queer experience. Queer people are constantly playing with binaries, expectations, stereotypes, culture, and societal norms, making existence itself an act of play. Queerness inherently demands that queer people reclaim, remake, and transform the world around them because the world is inherently heteronormative. Whether within the bounds of a game or just in their personal lives, queer people toy with society’s rules by simply existing within a dominant culture that is not queer. For many queer people, most of their childhood is spent repressing, ignoring, or not even realizing their queerness. Breaking out of the traditional expectations society sets on every one can be traumatic and difficult, and having a space like Dungeons & Dragons where breaking out of your everyday “role” is encouraged is a special and important experience.
Simply living authentically as queer people challenges society’s traditional expectations. Queer lives are inherently counter-cultural, and because of that, queer people are often considered a threat to society because of the ways which queer people cross and play with societal boundaries. Often queer people must live within a limited authentic experience because of the pressures of dominant (in this case, straight/cisgendered) culture. Tabletop roleplaying games specifically allow for queer playfulness without real-world consequence or commitment.
The ability to play around with expressions of queerness and identity inside of a consequence-free gaming container allows people to discover more about who they are, and who other people are. Exploring a personal identity, or a new identity, through play allows people to be more fluid and comfortable in their own lives. This gives people permission to understand different facets of themselves through play at the table and through introspection after playing, while living authentic, embodied lives.
Roleplaying games of all kinds provide an arena of expression that allows for self-determination outside of the societal norms and dominant cultures. When queer people sit down at the table they literally play by different rules. Within the game, real-world aspects of society don’t automatically apply to the characters or the game that you play. The ability to pick and choose aspects of the world, to deny or amplify voices, the container of the game is an immensely liberating and joyful experience.
Because of the way that character identities are inherently fluid and self-determined, the ability to mold and shape a new queer identity, separate from your own, within a character provides a space for both the development of personal expression and an empathetic exploration of a different spectrum of queerness. There are many examples of queer people coming out through gameplay, exploring aspects of their sexuality, and even generating real-world relationships at the game table. This exploration of queering characters also extends to video games that have an element of character creation or embodiment—how often have queer kids played as Link and imagined that they were him? How often have queer people played with a more authentic expression of themselves while worldbuilding in the Sims in order to create a version of themselves they wish were true?
Dungeons & Dragons moves beyond the structure of video games to allow a real-time and unstructured re-enactment of situations and queerness through scenarios. When you are roleplaying within a game that has created a safe space, queer play is allowed to happen, and it is this freedom that provides a framework for fluid exploration of gender, sexuality, and social constructs. The construction of a world different-yet-similar to our own often allows for a ground-up building of queerness and a new imagining of culture.
Dungeons & Dragons is especially conducive to this because of the huge, sandbox-play nature of this game. The huge rulebook that’s laid out is all arbitrary, and the game accepts that. You learn the rules so that you can break them. You keep the book on the table to help facilitate a discussion, not to slam it down like a judge’s gavel. The nature of Dungeons & Dragons is such that it can conform to anyone’s game. The world adjusts to fit around the players at the table, instead of forcing the people to change in order to fit into the rules of the game. D&D is a space for queer people to transform dominant culture into a game that not only accepts queer people, but expects queer people.
Like many pieces of speculative fiction, the creation of an inclusive culture is an act of both defiance and optimism. Many people have written about the trauma care that can happen at the gaming table, and for many queer people playing at a table where queer people affirm and uplift your cultural decisions and societies is a healing experience. The affirmation people experience while playing Dungeons & Dragons has also contributed to its popularity among the queer community, as playing the game is a form of escapism where prejudice and bigotry is replaced by hope and purpose. To look at the world while sitting with your friends and say “no, actually, it’s not like that” is an act of cultural ownership. Marginalized people rarely get to feel this powerful.
The worlds that queer gamers play in are inherently queer, inherently different, and inherently optimistic. Social circumstances within gameplay are rewritten and transformed into a space where queer people are allowed to exist and thrive. The collaborative, cooperative ownership of gameplay allows queer people to enact power fantasies of equality, understanding, family, love, and acceptance. Dungeons & Dragons, because of the cultural impact it has had over the past six years, has allowed queer people a space to play with the understanding that while sitting at the table, your rules are your own, and you have the power to create new, expansive, queer worlds with your friends.
Linda H. Codega is an avid reader, writer, and fan. They specialize in media critique and fandom and they are also a short story author and game designer. Inspired by magical realism, comic books, the silver screen, and social activism, their writing reflects an innate curiosity and a deep caring and investment in media, fandom, and the intersection of social justice and pop culture. Find them on twitter @_linfinn.
Don’t know where you were but our D&D was like that since the 70’s. But it’s hip to claim the “inclusive” title so it doesn’t matter that we had queer lady paladins in our party when I was in high school (class of 82) or the flaming illusionist/thief gnome boi who loved feather boas I ran once upon a time.
So everything you say is true, but it’s not new. Perhaps 5e is making easier for some to see it, but it’s always been there in role-playing. I found it easier to explore my bi nature and same-sex attractions by exploring them in fiction first. I imagine I’m nowhere near alone in that.
Oh and not just D&D. Other games too, especially for me, RuneQuest and Traveller.
Ever since the D&D “panics” of the 1980s, I have thought that what conservative folk find upsetting about role-playing games is not that gamers were learning “witchcraft” (as if!) but that we were learning how to analyze life experience in terms of ‘roles’ (Dwarven cleric, Elven paladin, Orc bard) whose culturally appropriate behaviors were rewarded (XPs). Which we then could turn back onto our ‘real-life’ experiences and see how similar mechanisms were in play (“dutiful child”, “loyal citizen”, gendered being) and could, like our RPG characters, be changed or altered on our initiative instead of being permanent, immobile expressions of The Way It Is. Nice to see in the 2020s that such personal choice is as much welcomed as a promise as it used to be feared as a threat.
@2: I never thought about it that way, but yes!
@1: It depends on the players; I was stuck with some gender-normative types, including one who assumed that I must be playing a super sexy lingerie kitten because I was the DM’s girlfriend. (I wasn’t; I was the wiry, broken-nosed, taciturn, plainly dressed mercenary who was nursing a secret crush on the party meat shield.) To do the usual DM credit, that one wasn’t invited back. On the other hand, I was also the first DM that I know of in our town, also in the ’70s, and nobody blinked.
Did your party ever go questing for one of those girdles of permanent sex change? I’ve seen that one. (“But wait, why? That’s a cursed item!” “Sure, from your perspective.”)
It’s a little amusing to me that D&D is being touted as a space for free expression because the rules can be set aside — from a game design perspective, the exploratory space existing only when the rules are removed sounds like bad game design.
It certainly is, and session-0 worldbuilding talks have been some of the most fun I’ve ever had. But as a game designer, the fact that we so often have to reclaim D&D from its assumptions (sure, the rules don’t care if you’re gay, but try playing one of the humanoids traditionally pushed to the margins of fantasy society in 5th Edition) makes me wildly dissatisfied with D&D as a game. Cultural ownership is all well and good — but D&D doesn’t deserve any special praise for being somewhat easier to remix than static works.
As Codega acknowledges, D&D dominates the market — and that leaves a lot of tabletop roleplaying games explicitly designed to enable queer storylines pushed to the sidelines. Some of the games that come to mind are Avery Alder’s Monsterhearts* (highschool romance between queer teenagers and other monsters) and Dream Askew (post-apocalyptic queer community), Remiel Garreau’s Feathers** (fallen angels as dysphoria metaphor), Grant Howitt’s Big Gay Orcs (stolen moments of orc romance during a siege), Anna Kreider and Andrew Medeiros’ The Watch (the psychological costs of war against a sorcerous incarnation of toxic masculinity), and Kira Magrann’s A Cozy Den* (slice-of-life drama about hibernating lesbisnakes).
Even games not explicitly designed to focus on queer content provide narrative space that directly enables queerness. Keith Baker and Dan Garrison’s Phoenix: Dawn Command, while it focuses more on war as cosmic horror, makes clear that its resurrected heroes physically resemble their self-image and are not bound by the bodies they had in life. Thorny Games’ Dialect is primarily about linguistics, but it focuses on languages in socially or physically isolated communities.
I’ve found an incredible amount of queer community through D&D, but it’s been in opposition to the assumptions of the game. The way D&D enables queer play is no different from any other TTRPG, and it in no way makes full use of the medium to do so.
*These games discuss sex and intimacy and are recommended for 18+ audiences.
**I helped playtest and contributed a playbook to Feathers.
Being able to play queer character is also useful for non-queer people to better understand the experience of queer people. For instance, I was once invited to play a Star Wars game, and I thought it would be great for that. Well, it seems that among a galaxy worth of species, almost all of them just happens to have a binary gender, and more generally, are just weird-looking humans. Even the droids tend to be gendered. The only species I found that wasn’t gendered was the verpines, and wherever they have been usedin canon, I would bet that they were just treated as male. Even if the people who create the world are not interested in gender, they should at least try to make their aliens and extraplanar weird, rather that apply a human template of culture and behaviour on beings for which those don’t make any sense. And when you are queer, it must really feel invalidating to see that the gender binary is inescapable even in other species…
@@.-@: Is Monsterhearts really for 18+? It’s about high school drama; of course you want to make sure that everyone around the table is comfortable with this sort of material, but it seems like it would be a shame to prevent from playing the people who would benefit the most from it.
It seems to me that Paizo, the creators of Pathfinder, should be credited in some part for embracing queer roles in their game lore before D&D 5E. Gay NPCs and iconic characters were well established early on, and by 2014 they published the first explicitly trans icon (https://paizo.com/community/blog/v5748dyo5lgcn?Meet-the-Iconics-Shardra-Geltl). Pathfinder will likely always be a side branch of the greater D&D universe, but Paizo has done some good work on inclusivity.
@@.-@ You make some great points, and I’m definitely going to have to research all of those things
what great responses! a few notes for clarity –
– D&D is absolutely the “Disney of RPGs” (thanks Lucian) there are so many amazing stories built by and for queer people! I use D&D because it’s the easiest to understand for people who don’t know much about RPGs.
– @@@@@ 4 – i have a ton of those games you listed! and you’re right – D&D isn’t built for queerness. however, D&D is what’s bringing the most new people into the RPG hobby, which is why I chose to focus on it. but seriously – you’re right, and you should say it. D&D is an open sandbox, but it’s not explicitly inclusive, and every game can be hacked. you’re right!!! you should say it!!! also, A+ shout on all those games. (gonna plug a few more like Night Witches, Bluebeard’s Bride, and For the Honor.)
– @@@@@5 – monsterhearts is a hard game to play with teenagers because it’s very specifically about sexuality and turning people on. you would have to be careful mixing minors and 18+ people at the table because it is, by it’s very nature, a roleplaying game about sexuality, sex, and intimacy. it cannot be played without embracing and interacting with these subjects.
– @@@@@6 – I actually had crystal on a panel last year! she’s great, and you’re right, paizo did include trans npcs early, but that’s because they had trans writers and players on staff. it happened because amazing women like crystal made it happen!
@1 SO true, class of 85, been playing D&D off and on since about 81/82 with one campaign running 9 years, every sunday night with the same players.
We had characters and players from all walks. Tired of the hip “inclusiveness,” just be yourself and lets game.
I see a correlation to the early times of RPGs, and D&D in particular, where the marginalized group finds acceptance as well as an outlet for experimentation and socialization. In the 80s, before being a geek was cool, that group used RPGs as a solution to its social struggles. And, the activity was pilloried as subversive by more conservative groups.
Now that the social tent has for the most part expanded to accept geek culture as acceptable, it seems natural that other groups, ones still working through the crucible of the slow march to social acceptance, continue to use role-playing as a tool to connect with others that are trusted and accepting while shielding against condemnations from outside the group. And honestly, it seems to me those groups were always there and that it’s more that they are still using RPGs in this way, than that they just now see the benefits. The march has simply and lamentably been longer and the changes slower to come.
I’m (relatively) new to D&D and love how flexible fifth edition is! It’s been an amazing time dungeoneering with different players and characters.
While I’m glad that some commenters seem to have had inclusive groups back in the 70s and 80s, I don’t think it’s fair (or welcoming) to suggest that being “inclusive” is just hype now. We’ve made great strides for human rights and queer rights since the 70s. D&D’s art design, rules language, and corporate culture is more tolerant and diverse. Maybe not perfect, but progress has been made. That’s a good thing. If you were super progressive in the 70s, great, but please try saying “just be yourself and game” in a way that’s not denigrating of people being happy that they’ve found a community of their own today.
@@.-@ I love other roleplaying games that focus on more intimate or different aspects of play as well, that doesn’t mean people don’t enjoy playing as fantasy heroes! Sometimes you just want to swing a sword or throw around some magic, and the fact that 5e is more inclusive (in design and company values) is a GOOD THING. There’s plenty of room for all types of games!
My sister recently got me into D&D, and I’m liking the diversity of this!
Interesting.
I am miffed that your only mention of Pathfinder is in a less than positive light. Pathfinder has been queer friendly from the ground up. It’s stated that all NPCs should be assumed to be bi/pan unless otherwise stated. I can bring 3 trans characters to mind without searching.
There is a emyperal lord who is all about gender exploration and sexuality. There are both magical and alchemical gender affiriming items. It’s not just an option with little baked into the the canon world. It’s there, 100%.