I've had a pot bubbling at the back of my head for a long time, a cauldron simmering with ideas around the intersection of TTRPGs (honestly, just D&D) and current issues of race and gender and culture. I really don't much know what to do with that potion/melange/brew, but the things roiling around in there are powerful ingredients. Perhaps I could do worse than to just talk about some of them.
In 2020, I wrote that D&D has moved pretty strongly into mainstream culture. From Stranger Things to YouTubers live-streaming their D&D sessions, the hobby has moved from games played in basements (that was me in the 1970s) and into shows about games played in basements. Google tells me that the list of celebs known to have played the game includes Stephen Colbert, Vin Diesel, Felicia Day, Jon Favreau, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Anderson Cooper, Kevin Smith, Mike Myers, Patton Oswalt, Wil Wheaton, Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, and Joss Whedon, among others. The game has gotten prominent mention in TV shows including The Big Bang Theory, Community, Freaks and Geeks, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Gravity Falls.
I submit that the geeks and nerds of the world have won. They were the outgroup in the Revenge-of-the-Nerds days*, mocked and abused, but now they are the heroes of the culture, from tech billionaires to media icons. This is true for geeks and nerds who were underdogs, but who now are prominent and respected ... and these folks have been reluctant to shed their underdog status. A journalist feels the need to defend Star Wars from high-brow attackers — but there are no such attackers. Star Wars IS our culture, and we are all geeks now. It is the same with D&D. I remember the satanic panic days, Dark Dungeons and Chick Tracts, the Tom Hanks anti-D&D movie Mazes and Monsters, the way my dad questioned my "D&D morality" ... in those days, you could make a case that D&D was way outside the mainstream. No more. Dungeons and Dragons has embedded itself in the culture, along with cosplay, code monkeys, comic book superheroes, anime, pocket protectors, gadgets, and thick glasses.
As late as 2005, D&D bloggers were penning heartfelt defenses of their game. How times have changed! Geeks may still treasure thinking of themselves as underdogs, may enjoy the mantle of "oppressed group" from time to time, but the truth is that geek culture is our culture, now.
And in the fair credit department, let me mention Freddie DeBoer as a journalist who written extensively on these cultural trends (the nerd stuff, not the D&D stuff), and whose thoughts have informed mine on this topic.
But before we explore the way that culture and gaming intersect now, let's look at our roots, because culture infuenced the game long before the game had any impact on the culture. And for this section, this ingredient in my cauldron, what I mean by "culture" is "elements of mainstream culture as it was in the past, but which the consensus now dismisses as "problematic." That is, D&D did not spring, de novo, from the forehead of Gary Gygax; it evolved from many cultural roots, and some of those roots did the game no favor.
Did you know that in First Edition D&D (called "Advanced Dungeons and Dragons" at the time), the strength of female characters was not allowed to be as high as the strength of male characters? Strength was capped for females. To make matters worse, strength was also capped by race (and class). Here, take a look (click to embiggen):
This is just a hot mess! You have a max strength for a female human, and a "Maximum human strength," because "human strength" and "male human strength" are of course synonyms. A female halfling can't have strength above 14, and monks can't have strength less than 15, so you Rosie Cottons of the world just can't learn kung fu. And although half-orc females can be stronger than human females, half-orc males max out below human males, because, you know, human males rule. Note that the other scores are not limited in this way. Elves are not wiser than humans, dwarves are not tougher. OTOH, intelligence is capped for a half-orc; wisdom, for a halfling; and dexterity, for a dwarf. And there is a charisma minimum for elves (8), as well as charisma maxima for half-orcs (12) and dwarves (17).
The casual sexism in Advanced Dungeons and Dragons did not stop there, alas. A quick flip through the pages of the First Edition books reveals artwork featuring a surfeit of naked breasts. Here's the 1E Lamia, for example, brilliantly parodied by Lore Sjoberg. Just one example among many. Fifty years ago, these bits of casual racism and sexism were unremarkable.
For another example, please check out "Jester" David Gibson of Five Minute Workday, with an essay about the old 1E publication, "Oriental Adventures." (link brought back from death thanks to a resurrection spell cast by the wonderful Wayback Machine)
And if you go back even further, 100 years or so, say, attitudes were even worse. From hobbits/halflings to ents/treants to the common tongue to wizards and elves and dwarves, we have to start with Tolkien. His work has percolated through every part of our culture, and the impact on D&D (and on me) has been immeasurable. But the prejudices of his day were ingrained and commonplace. So we see in his work a sexism in which women are admirable, strong, and capable, yet all the major characters are male. He was not a racist, but Tolkien's "squint-eyed southerner," along with a few other offhand remarks, reveal an attitude foundational to the culture at the time. And then there are the actual racists, like H.P. Lovecraft, say, and H. Rider Haggard, not to mention Robert E. Howard and Edgar Rice Burroughs, none of whom were outside the mainstream of the day. The racist and sexist Lovecraft, Howard, and Burroughs were cited as influences by Gygax and recommended to readers in Appendix N of the First Edition DM Guide.
But this is the part of the story when I tell you about my deep and abiding love of Lovecraft's stories. His Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath lives in my soul, and always will, and I cannot bring myself to cast it away. Similarly, my best friend in college loved the work of Burroughs, and amassed an amazing collection of all his work.
In a more modern vein, some people find themselves in a similar position, having grown up to love the Harry Potter works, only to discover later in life that the author is a little more than somewhat transphobic. I think there is a case to be made for loving the work, even if the creator is flawed or even reprehensible. For more on that topic, check out these two video essays by Linday Ellis.
So in the end, can we dismiss and ignore an author (and that author's sins) and instead just enjoy a work on its own merits, recognizing the work's flaws as well as what makes the work great? I guess, if I were to summarize Ellis in just two words ... well ... it's complicated.
Sensitive to criticisms that the game was being created only by white guys, the makers of D&D, a company named Wizards of the Coast (WotC), set out to satisfy public opinion by hiring a black game designer. The effort backfired when WotC treated them poorly. Orion Black, a former WotC employee, talked about their feelings of being dismissed, ignored, and overlooked while working on D&D products.
"I firmly believe that I was a diversity hire. There was no expectation for me to do much of anything. I probably disrupted them by being vocal and following up."
— from this essay post by Orion Black
Orion mentions another essay on the topic of WotC: The Wizards I Know.. The essay makes compelling points suggesting that a corporate culture of callousness, bigotry, and prejudice starts at the top of the company and trickles down. Click on these links: the bias in the corporate overlords as well as some of the designers of different versions of the D&D game is impossible to deny.
So you have to ask yourself, is it okay to like the Dream-Quest, with old H.P. a-mouldering in the grave? Is it okay to support D&D, to buy the books, with the bigots who run the game still alive and taking a share of every dollar you spend on it?
It's complicated.
But nowadays D&D has moved into the cultural mainstream, and culture has moved into D&D. The game is no longer the purview of (mostly white, mostly male, mostly young) gamers alone. We players are not isolated, not insulated away from the wider cultural currents. The game changes due to cultural pressure.
Subject to a religious campaign of condemnation, the designers of Second Edition D&D took demons and devils out of the game. Well, they didn't really remove them from the game ... they filed off the serial numbers and rebranded. In 2E, devils are referred to as Baatezu, and demons are called Tanar'ri. But by Third Edition, the controversy had died down, and the old names were reinstated.
In the most recent editions of the game, the designers have chosen to remove the word "race," filing off the serial numbers and rebranding as "species" instead. They also removed the half-orc and the half-elf from the game (both were a legacy from Tolkien, in whose works both kinds of people appeared). Consider a few news and opinon articles on the subject. Rather than me recapping the pros and cons, click on these links:
So is it wrong to use the word "race" in a fantasy game, where the word relates to fictional, non-existent peoples, not to the actual recorded history of human inhumanity to other humans? Some people think so. Some people still think that the mention of "devils" and "demons" makes D&D an evil tool of Satan. The anti-race people are more numerous and culturally powerful than the anti-devil people — does that matter? Should we remove both devils and race from the game? Or should we remove neither?
Language changes. But does that mean we have to follow the current? Is it okay to swim upstream? Is it okay for Robert Frost's little horse to still think it queer, to stop without a farmhouse near? I made a joke about that once upon a time.
Dungeons and Dragons is a commercial game that makes money for corporate owner Hasbro, a publicly traded company. Perhaps the folks in the c-suite at Hasbro made a decision that the game is more likely to be profitable if race, half-orcs, and half elves were removed — or at any rate, that sales would be hurt if they were not. And of course, game designers have made public statements justifying the decision on the grounds of morality and justice. Well, if we were to ask former WotC insider Orion Black whether the company was motivated more by social justice or more by corporate greed, what would he say, I wonder?
These topics, these questions, have a special relevance for me. I'm creating my own tabletop roleplay game, called Labyrinths & Liontaurs. The game, using 3E D&D and 1E Pathfinder as central sources, plus a number of other games and media and ideas as influences, is a labor of love, to be distributed freely at no cost. I'm not making any money from it. I'm not worried overmuch about marketing and public perception. I'm authoring it in the way that satisfies me. And it uses devils, demons, race, half-orcs, and half-elves.
But should it? Am I offending potential fans? Am I pushing pain out into the world, am I being insensitive? Is it wrong to be a lower-case c conservative, a person who resists change? In my heart, I think the foo-foo-rah over language, "race," "devils," and the rest, is, ultimately, silly. "Queer" does not have to apply only to modern ideas about gender expression. "Devil" does not mean RPG players worship Satan. "Race" does not have to refer to bigotry and prejudice in the real world (though it may reflect those things in fantasy world). If we reject the death of the author, if authorial intent matters, can I say that I do not intend any Earth-side culture war issues to intrude into my game? That I want to offend nobody, because my work is intended as a way for people to get together and have fun? Does it make things better for me to make such declarations of intent?
But once again ... it's complicated. I divide all creatures in my game into "people" and "monsters." Only people can gain levels and classes. And "people" here means the sum of all the races, elves, gnomes, humans, liontaurs. But just because they are all people does not mean that they live together in harmony. I've retained traditional fantasy race tropes, ones that go back to Tolkien -- people tend to live with others of their own kind, though that's a rule often broken in some communities, in some cities. And L&L races have animosities towards each other ... elves vs dwarves is one that goes back to Tolkien. Also, humans in L&L are the young upstart race, dominating in many places, and the other races resent them for that. And some human cultures see liontaurs as beasts, enslaving them when they can. So my world has chattel slavery based on race. Does it matter that liontaurs are in many ways the "best" race? The one I named my game after, the one that never has evil NPCs, the one that inspires the lionheart point mechanic in my game, a mechanic that is designed to bring fairness to die rolls?
I'm keeping half-orcs and half-elves in my game, and just calling them that would "normatize" humans as the dominant race, for sure. But I mention that among elves half-elves are referred to as "half-humans" — does that make it better? And in my world, orcs are all gone, killed in a genocidal war that they lost. The few that survived were taken in by humans long ago, and after many generations, half-orcs simply think of themselves as another kind of human.
While traditional RPGs take the point of view that humans are the default race, in L&L, the central point of view is from the liontaur perspective. It has to be, in my game, the one I'm calling "Labyrinths & Liontaurs." Thus, half-elves are called "humelves" as the default name (which is what liontaurs call them), and it is mentioned that elves call them "half-humans," and humans call them "half-elves." And liontaurs name my half-orcs wildlings.
It is time for the moral of the story, I suppose, but I am not sure I have one. "Be excellent to each other," comes to mind. Or maybe less flippantly, that a vital element of good roleplay game design is to try to bring people together, not to drive them apart. RPGs are communal games, cooperative games, famous for not actually being games in which one player can "beat" the other players. There's no winning in D&D, or at least, the game is "won" when everybody at the table has fun.
More specifically, a game is more likely to be fun when the real world does not intrude on it, because in the real world, our real world in the year 2025, it is increasingly difficult for groups of people to have fun together without culture and politics getting in the way. Let RPGs be refuges from all that, fantasy worlds in which we can escape the issues of the day, leaving them behind. Let all gamers play characters that make them feel satisfied and happy. Yes, let there be queer heroes and female heroes and human heroes and liontaur heroes. In my game, there are strong incentives to play good-aligned heroes, to find ways other than killing to resolve conflicts. Some people won't enjoy my game, and that's natural, but I hope that for the ones who do (if any do), they'll have fun and happy sessions, battling demons and devils while they are at it.
*Regarding Revenge of the Nerds, Of course, that film ends with the nerds winning, so let's say the mid-1980s marked the beginning of the rise of geek culture. As a smart geeky kid attending elementary and secondary school in the 1970s, well before the culture shifted, before "nerd" had any positive connotations, let me assure you that "egghead" and "poindexter" were not compliments.
