D&D & ID: Dungeons & Dragons and the Exploration of Self
FEATURE | GAMES
Written & illustrated by Cameron McCurdy (she/her) | @leighapparently | Social Media Coordinator
Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) is a tabletop roleplaying game (TTRPG) originally created by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson in 1974. While initially a battle-oriented, masculinity-lathed, heteronormative power fantasy expanding on the tactical war games of the 1960s – the D&D 5e (5th Edition) of today is a collaborative storytelling framework that lets players freely explore a world of their choosing, playing characters that they’ve created, unbound by one’s personal self.
D&D has long been a hobby associated with neurodivergence, and in recent years it has also been increasingly associated with the LGBTQIA+ community. To the extent that even the 5e Player’s Handbook itself has embraced the malleability of identity. “You don’t need to be confined to binary notions of sex and gender” it states in the character creation section, followed by the classic trans allegory of “You could also play a female character who presents herself as a man [or] a man who feels trapped in a female body.” This marks a huge difference from the original Player’s Handbook, which exclusively referred to all NPCs (Non-Player Characters) as male. Your gender, sexuality, and neurochemistry have no mechanical impact on the game's many systems. And when you really think about it…why should the game care what you identify as? You can play as an anthropomorphised amorphous ball of ooze if you so choose.
There are several tropes when it comes to identity and D&D: “If you play as a Tiefling (Devil spawn) then you’re a lesbian”, and my personal favourite: “If you can’t tell which player at your table is using their character to work through their identity issues, it’s you”.
Humans often can’t work through traumatic things head-on, because of a drive to distance ourselves from things that are painful. Through the psychotherapeutic concept of “Holding and containment”, we can empathise with a third party to work through our trauma. This can take the form of reading a novel and realising we’re gay, watching a movie and coming to terms with a loss, or playing a D&D character and completely rethinking our own self-identity…
Speaking of which…
F33L - Autism & Gender Nonconformity
The first D&D character I created was a genderless robot, F33L, brought to consciousness by accidentally ingesting the heart of its wizard master. While not a conscious decision at the time, I used F33L to explore my autism and general gender nonconformity, through the lens of being a robot experiencing human emotion and socialisation for the first time. We played one session, and working through my autism was put on hold for-
Artois - ADHD (The “A” Stands for “Angry”, and the “H” Stands for “Her”)
The second D&D character I created was a young woman named Artois, she was a bard, and she was a mess. This was my first foray into being a woman, and nothing can describe the anxious joy of being referred to as “she” and as “her” by my friends while in character. She started as an androgynous character, but as the campaign went on she became more overtly fem…and overtly angry.
In a 2019 Dimension 20 interview, actor & prominent D&D player Erika Ishii says “I can say personally my D&D characters started dating girls before I did”. She speaks about it almost as if it wasn’t a conscious decision, which for me, it wasn’t. I wasn’t purposefully using this character that I had created to work through my issues – it just happened. I’m sure there are cisgender AMAB people out there who play a woman in D&D and it doesn’t spark something in them. But for me it was the first taste of a level of comfort I had never experienced, a rage I had never tapped into, and I did it all without anyone around me being able to clock the eggshell fracturing.
Amy Proudman in her 2021 Dicebreaker article, talks about D&D giving her the “freedom to explore gender” while also giving her “plausible deniability for what [she] was doing”. That’s what Artois became for me in retrospect, a chance to embody something that I had written off ever experiencing for myself, and in my case doing so before I was aware that it was what I was doing.
Maebh - A Changeling Who Isn’t From Around Here
By the time we get to my current D&D character, Maebh, a shapeshifting changeling woman flung 10,000 years through time, you can see the thread of my roleplaying. By this point, I was “she/her” to the people I was playing with, and Maebh didn’t have to carry Artois’ rage of a repressed woman trapped in a man’s body, she now had to carry the confusion of a woman trying to morph herself to fit into a strange new world. The trans allegory of a shapeshifter modelled the changes in my body and my perceived self; and Maebh being from the past modelled my confusion at the world and where I fit into it through both my identity as a trans woman and my ever-present relationship with my autism.
In a reddit thread asking about overlap between LGBTQ+ people and D&D players, there were countless stories of people playing characters with genders different from their own, who through the shared experience of collaborative storytelling with their friends, were able to realise that they were trans and feel safe enough with their fellow players to come out to them. A big part of playing D&D is making choices, taking risks, and seeing where the dice-rolls take you as you figure out where you’re going and what you’re doing. In that same Reddit thread, a user named MightyShamus commented something that I think is beautiful. “The things in Dnd that make you different tend to be the things that make you powerful.”
Are you questioning your gender identity and/or your sexuality? Do you want to collaboratively tell a compelling story while adventuring with your friends? Then I highly recommend buying a set of 7 dice, finding a group, and making yourself a character to explore the parts of yourself you wish you could. You don’t need to buy any books or know anything about the game to simply jump in and see if you can’t learn a little something about who you are.
References:
Dimension 20. (21st of Feb 2019). Playing in a Safe Space (with Erika Ishii). Adventuring Academy Episode 4, YouTube.
Miscellaneous Reddit Users. (2022). Why is there so much overlap between LGBT+ and DnD Players?. Reddit.
Proudman, Amy. (3rd of March 2021). How Dungeons & Dragons helped me discover my gender identity. Dicebreaker.
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