- Hey, it's Rowan and today, along with some special guests, I'm going to be exploring
why Dungeons and Dragons has become so popular with
LGBTQ+ people in recent years. I need to give a massive thank you to Roll20 for sponsoring this video. I'll talk a bit more about them later, but if this video inspires
you to give D&D a try then Roll20 is a site
that lets you play online with people from all over the world. I leave in link in the description
for you to take a look. I'm also going to be adding the full interviews from
this video to my Patreon. in case you're interested, because there was a lot I
couldn't fit into this video. (light dramatic music) So I imagine most people watching will be at least somewhat
familiar with D&D, but here's a quick intro just in case. Dungeons and Dragons is a TTRPG, or tabletop role-playing game. Essentially a collaborative
storytelling game where you play a character
in a fantasy world. The story unfolds through a combination of improvised
narration, dialogue, and dice roles. The rest of the world
that isn't your character, or the character of your fellow players, is controlled by one person at the table known as the dungeon master. He plays all the other characters you meet and narrates the setting
and action around you. You tell the DM what you
want your character to do and they will either tell
you what effect it has, or get you to roll a dice to see if the action
you want to do succeeds. So for example, your DM might describe the
room you've just broken into. You ask to search the room and the DM has you roll to see how successful you are at investigating. You roll high, a 19. You find a secret compartment in the wall, inside which is a locked box. You ask to try to open it and as you do, the DM reveals
that the box was trapped and describes the scene as iron
bars descend across the door and windows and the room starts
to grow colder and colder. What do you do next? As well as these tasks
space back and forth. There's also the opportunity
for deeper role-play in D&D. Conversations between characters that you might act out together that don't involve rolling a dice at all. Maybe before agreeing
to break into this room your characters debate
the morality of the plan, or worry about getting caught, or trying to come up with a better way of getting what you want, or maybe your character's run out of ideas of how to stop the cold spell and realise this might
be their final moments. What do they say to each other? Now, looking at this overview there isn't anything inherently
queer about the game itself. It wasn't created by LGBTQ+ people. It doesn't focus on LGBTQ+ stories. In fact, the traditional image of a D&D player over the last few decades is a nerdy straight white
boy in his parents' basement and yet, we've undeniably seen
this boom in queer players and creators burst into this community in the last few years. There have of course, always been queer players playing the game, but it seems to have expanded out recently in this really interesting way. I myself am one of those people who joined the game within
the last couple of years. I did play one shambolic
game of D&D at university, but didn't really
understand what was going on and never played again. Then a few years later,
my brother started playing with his girlfriend and flatmates, and I ended up being the
sounding board for his ideas as a DM. What monster sounded most interesting, what hags curse would be the most emotionally
devastating for the players, that kind of thing. It sounded really cool in theory, but I hadn't really seen it in practise. So I started watching some D&D shows and quickly became hooked. The drama and spontaneity
and possibility of themes and virality was something
that really spoke to me. So I started playing about 18 months ago and it's been something I've
been obsessing over ever since. I first, like any past time, it seemed like queerness was
kind of incidental to D&D. It could be included if
a player wanted it to be, but it also wasn't necessary, but the more I thought about it and the wider, my knowledge of the D&D community online became, the more I realised that this
kind of role playing game is a perfect opportunity for
queer players in so many ways. Before I dive further into the essay I want to give a shout out to
this month's sponsor Roll20, because if you're thinking of playing D&D, or even if you already do, it
as a great site to know about. I actually use it every
week for my D&D campaign. It's this all in one
website for organising and playing tabletop games online, whether that's D&D, or
Thirsty Sword Lesbians, because yes that is in fact, a real game. It allows you to easily play online with tools like group video
calls and interactive maps. It's super quick to create a free account. I'm gonna leave the
link in the description, or you can enhance your
games with exclusive features like custom character
sheets, ad free access and more with the pro account. I'm going to talk later in this video about independent creators
making queer content for D&D. One of the great things about Roll20 is its flexibility to support this kind of independent content from creators and maybe even your own game story, or home rules as well as the
official stuff from D&D itself. So you can tell your
probably very queer story exactly the way you want to. If you're just starting out with D&D, they have a completely free adventure called The Master's Vault
written specifically for Roll20 that includes handouts to walk you through how
to run the adventure which is perfect for new
DMS and players alike. I want to acknowledge that D&D isn't the only role
playing game out there. There are literally hundreds of TTRPGs. Titles like Monsterhearts and the aforementioned
Thirsty Sword Lesbians aim to give a specifically
queer role playing experience. So with these games it's obvious why it appeals
to LGBTQ+ audiences, but D&D doesn't have these kind of baked in queer mechanics. Queer people who are flocked to D&D are doing it for some less obvious reason, something fundamental to D&D or more likely fundamental to
tabletop role-playing itself. So what is it? When I did a call out on
Twitter asking people's stories about D&D and queerness, the
response was overwhelming. So many people wanted to talk to me, not just about how much they enjoy D&D and why it appealed, but also how fundamental it
had been to their own journeys. - I probably wouldn't have
come out if it wasn't for D&D. D&D and LARP became a way
of exploring my identity, even when I didn't know
that I was doing it. I remember distinctly I was
playing a tabletop game. I was playing World of Darkness, actually and I decided to play a female character and around that time, it was becoming very apparent
that something was different. So it definitely became a way
of exploring who I actually am and who I wanted to be and definitely played a
huge role in my transition. (light dramatic music) - One of the reasons why I think D&D resonates so
well with queer people is that the concept of identity is so important to the game itself, especially because it's an identity that you can fully create
and customise yourself. Other games might focus more on a collective creation of
setting, like The Quiet Year, or relationships and plot like Fiasco above individual identities
in the way D&D does. There are different choices you can make while creating your character that may have an effect on
your character's strengths and weaknesses, give a sense
of their goals and morals, or start to fill in their backstory. First, you choose a species,
or race like dwarf, elf, or half hog. Then your class like wizardry, or rogue which defines your abilities. Next you pick which background
suits your character best, like noble, folk hero, or soldier and finally, your ability
score in six main areas, essentially how good you are
at strength, intelligence charisma, dexterity,
constitution, and wisdom. Combined these let you create
an entirely unique character that you can then add
alliances and rivalries, family ties or guilty secrets to. You can also be any gender
or sexuality you choose. The D&D fifth addition
player's handbook states, your character sexual
orientation is for you to decide and you don't need to be confined to binary notions of sex and gender. As a queer person, if you're having to
perform in everyday life to keep yourself safe, there is potentially an appeal in a world which celebrates this ability
to become a human chameleon, a world in which instead
of performing as a cis or heterosexual version of yourself, you're able to inhabit a
version of the real you that you haven't been able to explore yet. This aspect of TTRPGs is
fundamentally different to other role-playing a
performance-based outlets. In video and computer games you're limited to the playable characters other people chose to
programme in for you. The choices you make
are inherently limited. You might be able to choose
between certain options, but can't invent your own, if they happen to be something that the programme has failed to imagine. There might be limits to the
genders, races, sexualities, or disabilities you can choose
from with your character. Although there are open-world games where players can explore
what has been created, seemingly pretty freely, in actuality you're of
course constrained by coding. You can't gather materials that haven't already been
programmed in, for example. There was a time in TTRPGs, sandbox games, which refer to games in which players can explore whatever they want in a world and the story will follow them, rather than following a linear adventure that the DM has chosen or created. The limit is only what you can imagine. When it comes to that stereotypically queer
arena of the theatre, you're still bound by the
role you've been cast as. The physical reality of
the audience looking at you and your body occupying that space will place expectations on the character. With D&D you don't have
to be seven foot tall to play a Goliath warrior, or be able to sing in perfect falsetto to pay an operatic bard. - D&D was really instrumental in me getting to play around
with the ideas of gender and bodies in a way that it's, outside of playing in like video game, and then video games have its own issues with well, I can make this character. This character doesn't look
exactly like how I want it to in a way that the
tabletop be super can do. - Theatre over the years has often had links with the status quo, whether or not they
would like to admit it. All the world's a stage and money makes the world go round. The stage has been no
stranger to censorship and when you look at reports from across the last hundred years, despite popular belief, the theatre wasn't a
universally accepting place for LGBTQ+ people either. In 1965 psychologist Donald M Kaplan wrote about what he saw as the issue of homosexuals in the theatre and their corruption of spirit and vision which imposes certain
inevitable limitations on the expressiveness of
homosexual performers. Similarly, Stanley Kaufman
wrote, just a year later, I like many others am wary of disguised
homosexual influence on theatre and those quotes are both from, honestly some quite sympathetic leaning articles of the time. Kaufman especially seems
to be kind of criticising gay writers for writing about
heterosexual relationships, but also acknowledging the fact that they don't really have
an alternative at that point and when it came to writers trying to write about
their own experiences, there were also issues there too. Writing about the Seminole queer
play, The Boys in the Band, Jesse Green wrote, no one wanted to touch the
boys in the band at first, no producers, no theatre owners no actors. When Luckinbill, then
33 agreed to play Hank, the straightest of the gay men, who'd left his wife and children, his agent said he might as
well bid goodbye to his career. She was, mind you, the place
agent too and lesbian herself. (light dramatic music) Any representation that
is created by the people, however similar it might
be to your own experiences, still holds a distance to the
kind of freedom of creation with characters that
you invent for yourself and if we're being honest, there's a significant amount
of LGBT representation which is not that close to
our reality at all anyway. It's not just the creation
of an identity in D&D that holds appeal to queer players, but the ways in which the game allows you to explore that persona. The game allows a delicate
balance of free exploration and control at the same time. You can have your character
try anything, do anything, and you may or may not succeed, but there's nothing lost in
the real world for doing it. It allows you to maintain
a distance from dangers, or fears that might come with openly exploring
your gender expression, or sexuality in your
real life environment. Sometimes that exploration can have very significant
impacts on players. In the 2020 article, Using RPG Characters to
Express Gender and Sexuality, Rory Bristol wrote, many groups refer to the players
by their characters names. So you can get a feel for
what it's like to be called by a new name. That's actually how I settled on Rory when I changed my name. I had a character named Rory Gallowglass and while we played, people
referred to me as Rory, rather than Robert,
which was my given name. Rory felt right and the longer I used it, the surer I became that I was Rory and it wasn't just a name
I was trying on anymore. - As a queer person,
when you're growing up you're living inside of your imagination trying to reconcile your inner experience with the outer world and so I think there's a lot of queer kids who are drawn to fantasy
and science fiction, to games, to theatre, to
the arts, to dance, to art, any kind of that sort of allows you to wrestle
with your inner experience and the outer experience not
necessarily always matching up. So it feels like something like D&D, where then you can also be empowered to become anything that you say you are, would have a particular
appeal to queer folks who don't always feel like they're so empowered in their lives. (light dramatic music) - When we look at the portrayal
of D&D in popular culture we often see the potential
psychological power of the game to help real life issues
and relationships. The TV show Community has two episodes that find the gang playing D&D. Both games helping tertiary characters with issues of self-confidence, or friction between them and someone else. The IT crowd has a similar
storyline in its fourth season hoping to alleviate the
depression Roy is feeling. These shows combine a surface level humour at the concept of the game based on popular perception of error, but ended up ultimately
supporting the idea that the D&D has a much deeper potential. Drama therapy in general is a type of therapy with wide usage, but it's specific
effectiveness for queer people has been suggested to be potentially diminished
for a number of reasons. In the article Drama
Therapy With Queer Adults, Identity Reflection, and Expression. Emily Leonardi observed that the body is a tool for queer
people to express who they are, but it's simultaneously it
can be the part of the self that creates the most discord. Drama, dance and performance therapies rely on a consciousness of your physicals presence in the world. Although for many, this is
an affirming experience, it can also be a block to
therapy for some LGBTQ+ people. However, if you can find a way to put aside the physical
side of performance and focus on the mental aspects witnessing one story as an
embodied and vocalise piece can lead to empowerment of identity and feelings of validation and D&D is a perfect balance
between physical presence, the focus on psychological performance. There are individual
therapist and organisations like Game to Grow which use the games specifically
for therapeutic needs. They might run a group session and have the characters
face their deepest fears in a magician's tower. While this is happening, the
players are learning to discuss and explore their own fears, are supporting and reassuring each other and learning to trust and
communicate in a group setting. There are resources
online for DMs and players wanting to tackle real
world issues at the table. Sitting with your friends is not necessarily the place
to dig into huge life trauma, but small issues and worries, or elements of yourself
often explored in D&D and it's not just your own
mind you can delve into. - By stepping into somebody else's shoes, looking through different eyes you can again, reflect back on yourself and find ways to express
things in yourself that you didn't necessarily know you have the capability of doing. - Pretty much, all the people queer people
I spoke to for this video talked about enjoying the chance to make characters of
the same gender identity, or sexuality to them, but a lot of them also talked about the kind of meta empowerment of moving past the
point of needing to play an aspirational version
of themselves in the game to be a trans man who became secure enough in
his own feelings of gender and identity, that playing a cis woman at a D&D game didn't come with the same feelings of dysphoria and anxiety that, that performance in real life had prompted not that long ago. - Only recently I've been
finding little fem accents and being like, I love this and it feels like such
a fun balance for me to be like, oh, I'm so comfortable. I feel like there are a lot of trans men that I know that are like, you watch the point that they hit when they're very comfortable and they're like, oh I'm
gonna paint my nails again and it's different now. - I think honestly, I will
play whatever at this point, not for nothing. I'm known for my voice work in games, because I have a voice
range that can go up here and talk like this and
also can talk like this. So there's this, I don't care anymore. I will play any character, of
any background, of any gender, of any race, as long as I'm jamming. I used to really just want to
be the prettiest character, the girliest character and now I'm, because I'm
at a place in my transition and in my understanding of who I am, at a point of comfort with myself. I can play whatever I want. (light dramatic music) - The idea of spending
hours with a character trying to explore your inner self might sound potentially daunting, but ultimately I think that
one of the transformative parts of this kind of tabletop
role playing is the play. D&D is a game removed
from the idea of winning. Your character can succeed
in something they attempt, but if they fail you can
just try something else. A character you've created
might even die in a game, but you can create a new character and jump back in with your friends. You aren't competing with
anyone or keeping score. I think as we get older there's less and less
opportunity for play. We do it as kids pretending
to be astronauts, or fairies, or even just normal everyday families and then at some point games become sports and playing pretend becomes narrowed to
theatre and drama lessons. Even our creative hobbies
end up being co-opted as Etsy stores or side hustles. There are dozens of blog posts and videos about the lack of
something freeing and playful and not success driven in our lives when everything feels like
it needs to be commodified. For me D&D gives me that sense
of freedom and play again. The experience feels like
it should be one of play of looking at heteronormative
and cis normative world and figuring out ways to
reclaim and reimagine it, but so often our narratives
are the opposite of them, of inherent tragedy, of
very serious thinking followed by a very serious coming out. You have to be sure before you can voice
anything or try anything. It can feel to many like
a sense of finality. D&D you can give you opportunity for this kind of identity play without the boundaries of real stakes. To say your character is a lesbian is not necessarily to say
that you are a lesbian, but it does allow you
to spend hours at a time inhabiting the actions and mind of a character who
sees themselves that way. In a lot of ways, it feels closer than traditional
acting to a sense of truth. The immediacy of improvisation, the personal creation of a character, the lack of set script, and for a lot of LGBTQ+ people it is better than acting, because type casting and physical realities of
one's body is not an issue. You can be big and strong, or small and dainty,
or bearded and delicate and no one is going to say you can't because of the way that you look. - So I just don't think that we get enough opportunities for fantasy
in our day-to-day life. I think that's why so many
queer people are like, so many of my gay guy friends are like, yes I was always a woman on Halloween and now I love drag. There's just so few
opportunities for full play and that's definitely
where a lot of people work out their gender sexuality, whatever they could see themselves doing. So I think, yeah, just
the mechanic of a game where it's like you can
be whatever you want and everyone at the table
is like, yeah, great. - I want a game where I
can be called they and them and boy, that's not a really, there's not too many other
mediums who can do that and play them in which that happens. They're are a couple of very
good video games that do that, but most of the time, if you want to really
deal with the minutiae and nuance that comes with, I think a lot of people's relationship to their own sexuality or gender, it's going to have to
come handwritten with care and I think D&D and
tabletops are really good at giving that type of care when you have the right group with you. The first time exploring pronouns and stuff with a
character felt really good and exhilarating, to the
point I was like, Hmm, maybe this is more than just my character and that's a very comforting feeling that you just can't really get from most other sources
of like entertainment. (light dramatic music) - As I'm sure you'll know if you have watched any
of my other videos already LGBTQ+ representation has been historically
lacking shall we say. Like a lot of marginalised identities the frontline of nuanced and complex discussions
about our community is almost always way ahead
of mainstream representation. When we talk about TV shows and movies we aren't just talking
about a single queer creator making the decisions if there are even any
queer decision makers in the production team at all. The profit making capitalistic
nature of mainstream media will tend towards making decisions that they think will sell
to the heteronormative and cis normative audience. Even if a queer writer
manages to slip one, or two queer characters in, there's a pressure to have
them be everything to everyone, because we're so starved
of representation. This was something that myself and Ali talked about quite a bit. - When it comes to horrors I think those are so easily used for drama by straight writers constantly and it's like, what if this trans person
gets eaten up as a plot point? And it's just not worth it to
ever do that in my opinion. I think this like burden of representation or perfection, isn't
gonna help queer people when it comes to like making good stuff. It totally comes from this
kind of scarcity mentality. Like we will have one character and then yeah, of course
they're going to have to be a mouthpiece for all queer people and they're going to fail at that. You won't see any of those
those icky queer scenes that are in everything,
in any of our campaigns where it's kind of like, I don't know, they're a just kind of these very boring
queer tropes about coming out, or being outed. You hopefully will never see someone being outed on our show. That's so violent. Yeah, even if queer
stuff that comes out now, when someone is outed, I'm kind of like did a person write this? This is life ruining, what
are you talking about? - And so D&D can provide an escape from the kind of bad representation that relies on handholding
a straight and cis audience, or what they think will sell in China, or the idea that you can only have one
trans character in a show, because with D&D you're
playing with your friends and you are bound by these rules. Even if you take your game beyond just your friends around the table and instead stream it online for other people to a wider audience, you're still in creative control. If you already have a device
with an internet connection you have the equipment
you need to make it happen unlike the kind of gate keeping and money that's involved
in mainstream media, that keep out a lot of
marginalised communities alongside the institutionalised prejudice. You aren't paying for special effects, or costumes, or lighting. The world is just
whatever you can imagine, but it's worth noting that when I say anything
you can imagine as possible in your D&D world, we have to acknowledge that what people can and do imagine is often limited by the experiences and exposure they have
to different cultures and identities for a lot of people, Usually the fantasy
worlds of Tolkien, Peers and game of Thrones, the kind of mediaeval default might automatically come into play, but it doesn't have to be like that. - When we talk about
diversity in these settings, and actually maybe even a
better word is inclusion, you're doing that because
the world without that is, rings hollow and even for stories that I love. When I go back and read The Hobbit now. I can't help but go, there's not a single woman
in this book, not one, let alone any people of
colour or queer characters. It's just like this, it's this wild thing where there's 14 dudes
stumbling through the woods all to get, what are the fucking odds. It becomes this thing where, thankfully because of a lot of activism, online spaces and in storytelling, the weirdness of that, the hollowness of that does ring out. It does go like this is not truthful - For me as a binary trans person it's very important for me to make sure that I have non binary identified
characters in my games, because I may not be non binary which means that I may have a blind spot. So I purposely make sure that
I have non binary characters, or there are characters that come to mind that are non binary. Now it's sort of like a road action. Like if a character
comes to mind, it's like, oh they're non binary, but it's important to build
those steps in your game so that they become natural to you and then come natural for your players and I think that it's
important to recognise that there are so many
different identities other than your own and to make sure that they have a place and also remember that
including people in your games as players and as NPCs, that people of different backgrounds bring fresh new ideas to fantasy and that fantasy as a
whole can be stagnant and it's been stagnant for a
while across a lot of media, because it has been the same people and the same viewpoints
recycled over and over again. You want to bring new breath of new life, include people of different
backgrounds in your games. - And so we can see that
positive experiences don't just come from the ability to create isolated
characters at your table, but finding people to play with who will help you create a world that affirms that character. (light dramatic music) I think the found family aspect of D&D has long been part of its
appeal for many people whether or not they use
our specific wording, found family to describe it. The stereotype of the nerdy
teens unabashedly obsessed with this game that's happening
inside their own minds is not exactly untrue. A lot of people who started
playing in their childhood talk about senses of social isolation, or anxiety they felt outside of the game and that the gathering
of like minded people help them through that. There's a lot of trust that
goes into a game of D&D, because it relies on
everyone being on board to deny reality and inhabit this kind of liminal creative space
for a few hours together. That bond to people you trust, who you might grow with as a person, that emotional investment with a story you're telling together absolutely sings of
potential found family. Trusting these other and ally players to affirm the identity of
your character and yourself, it can mean a huge amount of people and this is reflected in
the inherent found family of a typical D&D party during a campaign. These characters find each other, they travel together,
they fight side-by-side, they rescue and resurrect each other. They might start a business, a romance even a family together
as a tight knit group. (light dramatic music) But it doesn't always have
to be sunshine and roses for your characters to have
an appeal for queer players. In fact, sometimes there's
a specific catharsis to be explored in creating a world in which homophobia, bi-phobia and transphobia all still exist, a world in which you can literally fight and defeat this kind of entrenched evil. The length to which real dangers and issues match up to the fictional experiences in your game is a matter for your
particular table to discuss. You might have anti-dragon
board discrimination in your setting, for example. That functions similarly
to modern day racism, or you might have modern
day racism itself, featured at the request of a player, knowing that this is a world
in which your characters can overthrow corrupt and
adjust systems of power if they say wish. Oftentimes you'll see a delicate balance. Putting enough of the bad things in to still get a sense
of what is being fought without lingering in the trauma of it at the expense of players. Ali described it during our chat as not wanting to give homophobia
a mouthpiece in a game. That wanting to allow a character
to spend time in a game, hearing these repeated arguments and words that have hurt the member of life. - So Eric Silver is the
GM for Join the Party and he has talked a lot about,
as a Jewish man game master he basically said, jokingly, but truthfully he's like listen, the only way I'll put Nazis in a game is if the point is to kill
Nazis, or to punch Nazis and the attitude there, I
think it's very real one that has to do with
there's two ways to escape. You can escape to the world
that doesn't have the problem, or you can escape to the world where you can solve the
problem with magic and swords. - So we do have characters who are still like
homophobic or transphobic, but it's less of an indicative
of how cool the world is and more of how cool that individual is. I have no problem including
that type of conflict and it is still a thing we do include, but I want it to feel a bit more earned than just we're just gonna be homophobic, 'cause that makes an easy villain. (light dramatic music) - You'll notice I've talked a lot about the decisions at the table and being able to create your own world. There's an important
part of D&D to talk about that I haven't mentioned so far. The difference between four ways of coming up with the
story you tell together. The first is using official material by D&D publisher Wizards of the Coast, including modules or pre-made adventures that provide you with a
rough story and world. The second is using material
that's similar to this, but created by independent creators not affiliated with Wizards of the Coast, but not your own tables creation either. The third is your tables DM
making up their own world and story often known as Homebrew and the fourth is a mixture
of any and all of the above. For some people the decision
between each of these options might just come down to how
much prep time they have, or a module that's been
recommended to them, but for LGBTQ+ people and
other marginalised communities this decision might be a bit
more complicated than that. For example, it's worth noting that the spread of your
character's ability scores can be entirely your choice. Meaning you can make a character
who is quite intelligent, but physically weak, or a selfie character who has no charisma. However, mechanics of the
game have been criticised for a kind of biocentrism when it comes to the idea of races. Your race will automatically
give you a bonus to a certain ability score regardless of the specifics of
the character you've created. Some races, have also had
inherent alignments to evil, or chaos over the years of the game. This reflects the fact that many Tolkienesque fantasy species have links to implicit racism based on stereotypes around
real life, race, ethnicity, and religion and its troubling
implications for many players. Even though there've
been LGBTQ+ characters scattered throughout D&D
his official published works there is still a huge number of Reddit and message board posts
asking if it's even allowed. There arguably hasn't been enough of an inclusion in the
original source material for people to feel confident in knowing that they can play a queer
character let alone how to do so. - I think so much of what's happening in the last couple years is like waking up to things that were just unseen. I don't think it was, I don't know but I'm not sure if it was purposefully like we can't have that. It's just like, oh maybe we should find more ways that we can make sure and ensure that we are being
as inclusionary as possible. - Although there have been some canonical LGBTQ+ figures in D&D
materials over the years it often becomes clear when you dig into exact
quotes from the books, or the writers, that it probably isn't coming from LGBTQ+
creators most of the time. For example creator of The Forgotten Realms official
D&D Setting at Greenwood has said, in regards to LGBTQ+
characters in his setting, it has always been there and
is integral part of the realms, but in the same interview, we have this mix of good intentions with some less than great comments about LGBTQ+ representation, saying, for example, it
was always soft peddled, because D&D wasn't a sex game and we generally don't rub
the readers nose in sex unless there's a good
enough story reason for it. If trans, LGBT, or sexual matters at all
don't suit your tastes and needs in your gaming sessions, leave it out or change it. This equating representation
of queer characters with sex is a longstanding and
troubling trope in media. There are dozens of ways
to include these characters with no reference to sex at all. We also have things like this quote from the D&D fifth edition basic rules. The elf god Corellon Larethian is often seen as androgynous
or hermaphroditic and some elves at the multiverse are made in Corellon's image. A clear attempt at inclusion, but when would you use the word hermaphrodite
in place of intersex, an identity that very much exists and has talked at length
about which wording may prefer and again, smacks of good intentions, but not necessarily the input from different people across our community who would make the representation
accurate and meaningful. - There is a direct need for Wizards of the Coast to
do something about it and I say that because, Wizards of the Coast
writes the core material and thus has the most
influence over players. So I think that honestly, them being more inclusive both in race and in gender and sexuality
will go a long way. - In 2017, Jeremy Crawford,
D&D's lead rules designer was quoted as saying, all of our new adventures
contain LGBTQ+ characters. This is true of our next adventure and it will be true of
our stories after that, but it's a huge step forwards. It feels that Wizards of the Coast is at the start of a journey
that I hope will continue where they're starting to improve on isolated ideas of
identity as they raise, but this sort of laying the track right before the train method prevents from engaging with things like the intersections of
identities that are part of these conversations
in real life communities. For example, having a willingness to include different sexualities, but not having the same
pledge for disability. As far as I can tell, the only real mention of
disability as an option within these core rules is this, you choose your character's age and the colour of his or
her hair, eyes and skin. To add a touch of distinctiveness you might want to give you a character and unusual or memorable
physical characteristics such as a scar, a limp, or a tattoo and that feels lacking to say the least. Ironically, however, one of
the strengths of D&D I think is it's encouragement of Homebrew content and interpreting the basic rules in a way that works for your group. (light dramatic music) Where the official
publications might fall short, there's always smaller
creators filling in the gaps. A creator I love, Gabe James created a class
modify option, for example, that you can use in your game to replace those racial modifiers. A combat wheelchair
designed by Sarah Thompson allows players and DMs
to create characters that use a wheelchair complete
with its own types of attacks and abilities and battle. Homebrew is what allows
DMS to re-imagine culture and society in the ways we talked about earlier in this video. To help their game serve
they're specific players, they can take the pieces
of gameplay structure, or law that serve them
from the official books, but ultimately other than
the role of storytelling DM, acting player characters and
using dice to measure success the rest of D&D is pretty changeable. People play games in modern day settings. They include classes and magic
items of their own design. Some choose purely chaotic
comedy as their play style where others revel in this
dark and difficult drama. You could create a world in
which everyone is LGBTQ+, or a world where no colonial
powers ever existed, or where the economic and class system is entirely different to
those in our world today and that all works within the
basic structure of the game. (light dramatic music) It's vital to acknowledge
in this discussion that although there is
huge potential for D&D and other TTRPGs to be a force of empowerment
for LGBTQ+ players, it isn't necessarily a safe space when it's with unsafe players or DMs. Exploring an aspect of queer trauma might be fortifying for some,
but devastating for others and so for everyone involved
at the table, consent is vital. Consent needs to be freely and enthusiastically given by someone with full knowledge of
what they're agreeing to. So it needs to be actively sought and discussed by the DM
and players at the table. Community methods like lines and veils, or content warning checklists
are to my mind, essential, even in a game that
seems innocuous to most. I've left the link in the description if you want to read more about it. Even if you aren't aiming
to explore deeper issues a player or DM might be
going through privately, you may well end up
hitting up against that unless it's flagged in advance. - A lot of my world building is also very collaborative
with my friends. It is a thing of like, all right, well you have your character. Are there any sort of things you would like to see in this world to help reflect that character's journey, or the things they've done, or the things you would like
to see them do down the line? - One of the great things about how many are
playing online right now is that you don't necessarily have to play with people you already know in real life. In fact, you might prefer to
play with LGBTQ+ strangers, maybe so as not to out yourself
to people you already know, or just because sometimes these
things are easier to explore subconsciously away from your friends. - I just got to plug in these values about larger representation
issues into the instinct that already existed there as a DM which is to serve your players and it becomes very easy
when your table is inclusive and diverse and welcoming to go, okay, Allie's asking for this storyline, plug that into the instinct you have to let your players live out
their dreams at the table, boom and now you have that more welcoming and inclusive space. - I would say it's probably lends itself to the queer experience or feeling just kind of
colourless or trapped or unsure if you can
like really show yourself for fear of being rejected, or worse, hurt and I think, yeah, it just
is such a cool springboard. No one at the table it's going to be like, well you don't look like that,
or you don't sound like that. It's just like, you're
starting from a place of, oh yeah, anything is possible. What are you gonna do with that? - Ultimately, I think that this interest from queer players in
D&D and other the TTRPGs is kind of like a self
powering machine at this point. It feels like it's kind of snowballing. You have this game which is
inherently got these aspects that might appeal to queer players of things like exploration and freedom and identity and play and so those people start playing and then they notice the gaps that are in the official media and so they start making their own which are more specifically
geared towards queer people and then they get found by more people and they realise that there's
an appeal in this game and it kind of just feels
like it's snowballing and this like tumbling spiralling snowball has definitely been given an
extra push by the pandemic. We are much more used to, now having like online communication be our way of socially interacting and so if you're a queer person who previously might have
been interested in the hobby, but has like no way of playing
with other people around you, especially not in a way where you're openly able to
talk about your gender identity, or your sexuality at the table then it's way easier
to find people online. There are so many people playing the game in a way that you can now join in with. Thank you so much for watching. In the comments I would love to hear about your queer D&D characters. It turns out the majority
of my Patreon supporters either play or want to play D&D. So I'm thinking of
setting up some one shots so my Patreons play together. So if that might be of interest to you I will leave a link to my Patreon below along with all my social media links so you can find me all over the internet and until I see you next time, bye.
Interesting watch. Never considered that for some people the escapism is partly in being someone else, but for some the escapism is in being yourself.
Wasn't a major designer for DnD guilty of doxxing LGBTQ people and the the company said he was fired when secretly they tucked him away?
Because you can do LGBT+ representation yourself as a player, without the higher ups in the company making the game having to do it for you or it being jury-rigged into qusai-existence by third-parties.
And the higher ups still allow some actual representation to slip into official material (such as the gender-fluid elf culture thing).
Because DnD rocks and DnD players rock (not always but still)
Don't DnD players usually role play as their own gender though?
What else will they play? Football.