The Incidental Queerness of Dungeons and Dragons
Since the inception of Dungeon and Dragon’s fifth edition in 2014, the game has garnered an incredible following with Wizards of the Coast, the company that owns and produces Dungeons and Dragon, claiming 40 million D&D fans in 2019 alone. In 2020, with the benefit of the Covid-19 pandemic and lockdown, Wizards of the Coast saw a sale spike of 33% in Dungeon’s and Dragons material, with many people teaching friends or using the time to get into the game.
With the spike in popularity, the standard stereotype of D&D being a game made up of straight, white boys sitting in their parent’s basement has been challenged. As Isabelle Lichtenstein states: “Since its launch in 1974, Dungeons & Dragons has garnered the reputation of a tabletop roleplaying game primarily for straight, cisgender men — a stereotype derived from a bit of truth”. While that might’ve been the case, and the game is still proportionally more popular with men according to the 2019 statistics provided by Wizards of the Coast, the demographics have begun to change, and increasingly queer voices have started to take root within the system.
With the release of D&D fifth edition (or 5e), there seems to be a concerted effort by Wizards to make the game much more inclusive, especially for the LGBTQA+ community. One aspect of 5e that many queer players laud is the freedom presented in the game rules in the Players Handbook when it comes to character creation. It reads: “You don’t need to be confined to binary notions of sex and gender. Likewise, your character’s sexual orientation is for you to decide.” In essence, the game gives players the freedom to make characters they are comfortable playing as, and the game encourages such behaviour. With the release of Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything in 2020, the game has even shed much of its racial-based benefits and hindrances, allowing players to customize even further. Much of the game leaves the world-building to Dungeon Master’s and players, which only further encourages freedom of expression.
While much is left up to players and dungeon master’s within respective games, Wizards has also moved towards including queer representation in their modules — modules being the pre-published stories written by game designers hired by Wizards. In their 2016 module Curse of Strahd, there are two male characters written into the game, Vladimir Horngaard and Godfrey Gwilym, who are both gay, married characters (albeit undead ones). 2018’s Waterdeep: Dragon Heist also includes queer representation with a character identifying a non-binary and using they/them pronouns. As a result, there has been a concerted effort to make the game more inclusive beyond tokenism. These characters are well-rounded and robust. Their identities are not their sole identities but a part of these character’s relationship to their respective worlds.
As Rowen Ellis describes in their 2021 video, Why is D&D so popular with LGBT Nerds, queerness has always been incidental to D&D because identity has always been an essential part of the game. This focus on identity has made this game attractive to queer players, especially in recent years. The game encourages the assumption of identity, and whether it be halfling rogue or drow wizard, there is a level of identity-based buy-in. The game encourages you to play whatever you want, to explore, to find out what works best for you and what you’re most comfortable with. According to an account by Isi, a trans man who’s been playing D&D since High School, describes that the game is an opportunity to play with identity before coming out.
It (D&D) gave me the opportunity to fiddle around with my identity and test out different things before settling on them for myself, and without the anxiety of testing them out with friends explicitly. Like before I even told people I was questioning my gender, I started playing as a guy, which let me test out a name and he/him pronouns without having to worry about asking someone to use different pronouns and a different name for me and then backtracking if I was wrong.
The system creates an opportunity to explore and play with identity. It removes the anxieties of reality and provides a space where someone can explore their gender or sexual identity without fear of rejection from other player characters. It’s all part of the buy-in. With the right group, no one will tell you not to play a character who is different from who you are and in essence, it seems counter-intuitive to do so. No one at the table is a half-orc fighter themselves, so criticizing someone for the perceived disconnection between player and character identity rarely, if ever, comes up.
When asked about what attracted her to D&D, Katheryne, a bisexual woman, explained that:
I think it was honestly the interaction and comedic bits between players. It felt like an arena where you could be as bold as you wish while still holding onto the other players and the team because consequences are built in. Like you are untethered but still on Earth, so it feels freeing yet not fully dreamlike […] Like one of our sessions we ended up in a pub and Olive (my character) randomly decided to get a tattoo during a fight sequence… it is not that I can’t go out into the real world and do the same thing but there are more steps involved.
Herein lies one of the major attractions of the game, that things are a lot easier in D&D than in the real world. There are more steps in reality, while in D&D, the impact of impulsive decisions is mitigated to the game’s world. “It’s a fantasy game,” begins Linda Cogeda in their article, The Power of Queer Play in Dungeons and Dragons, “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.” Much like Katheryne describes, the game provides this free space to play with ideas, whether about gender or sexuality because the rules are built-in. As Cogeda explains, they don’t change based on the identity of your character. The sexual and gender identity of your character is incidental to the game at large. It normalizes queer identities. Cogeda continues:
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.
D&D presents an opportunity to control narratives and create the stories you want to see in the world, as it is a big part of the attraction by queer players of the game. You see this kind of queer representation in the game that you don’t see otherwise. Even actual play D&D shows and podcasts like The Adventure Zone, Critical Role, and Dimension20 better depict inclusivity and diversity in their work than most mainstream media.
“Honestly there’s not enough representation or personal connectedness in the world of video games,” Isi explains,
Look at what happens to the few video games that promise us representation or that give us representation by accident/through customization (Sims, Dream Daddy, Stardew, 2077, etc). Sims, Dream Daddy, and Stardew became community cult classics. 2077 was desperately awaited by the trans community (until it decided to be a huge disappointment lol). We’re so starved for rep (sic) that most of us will sort of play anything that has it, even if the rep (sic) is bad or if the genre isn’t our usual one. So D&D feels like an easy transition from that. No rules on sexualities or genders other than the ones you set for yourself, which means you get to create your own representation, making it as specific or as nebulous as you want it to be. I’m trans, bi, Latino, and disabled so the chances of me finding full representation are low at best. But if I wanted full representation in D&D, I could make it for myself.
D&D allows queer players to create the representation they want to see in the world to put it in a tongue-in-cheek kind of way. The character can be what you want it to be, and no one is going to question it. There is a level of acceptance to the game that isn’t always seen in video games or mainstream, Hollywood-produced media. “I think it is due to acceptance and community. The game has you love your fellow characters as they are,” Katheryne describes.
While incidental in the game’s design, queerness in a D&D game is a powerful and impactful concept that has ushered in a new generation of D&D players. The stereotype of the white boys playing in the basement doesn’t necessarily fit anymore. The game is much more diverse and has garnered a strong following of people who just want to see themselves represented in some form of media. The fifth edition has created a space where sexuality and gender can be explored without question and frequently, acceptance is assumed and openly given. D&D has become a queer power fantasy that gives the narrative back to the LGBTQA+ community when presenting their desired narrative. As Isi describes, “D&D lets you still see the community and participate but also in a way that feels safe and without pressure.” It’s one of the game’s strengths, the opportunity to explore safely and productively and remain involved and participate in the queer community that you are a part of.
