The Importance of Being Earnest: Tabletop Roleplaying, Queerness, and the Therapy of the Future
Almost a year and a day ago, on a beautiful June afternoon, I was sitting cross-legged on the carpet of a friend’s apartment and creating my very first Dungeons & Dragons character.
As I flipped through his copy of the core D&D rulebook, entranced by the possibility space ensconced within its glossy pages, I came to the section describing tieflings. And despite how easy I knew it would be to just slip into the skin of yet another gnome or elf, there was something about the inherent aesthetic variety and distinct inhumanness bound up with the concept of playing an individual with infernal heritage that kept periodically dragging me back.
And my desire to explore beyond the ordinary didn’t stop there. In fact, many of the subsequent character decisions I made flew in the face of what tieflings had seemingly been built to be.
Take advantage of that built-in boost to charisma? Nope. We’re going to make a gruff ranger who grew up in the great outdoors and finds it difficult to interact with people without stepping on their proverbial toes.
Lean into and revel in the various aspects and social (pitfalls) of possessing an unconcealably monstrous nature? Nope! Not only are her tiefling tells going to be fairly easy to hide, but she’s also going to revel in hiding them (big brown cloaks ahoy) due to a healthy dose of self-loathing, which in turn was forged from a combination of the rift her heritage torn between her parents and the fact that her father was (at the very least) spirited away by a fiend to who-knows-where and potentially (at worst) killed by said fiend! In fact, she’s going to blame herself so much for her perceived faults, she’s going to supplant her given name with a new name born from a deep desire to atone for her “sins”: “Penance.”
And of course, all the while, I thought I was simply doing my duty as a writer by training and trade: take what the system wanted me to do, pinpoint the bits that felt like they’d be giving my character an easy out, and then twist them behind her back without remorse.
But unbeknownst even to myself, I was going a step beyond that: I was taking my own insecurities and fears and reflexive coping strategies concerning who I was—a queer, androgynous woman—and putting them all onto my character.
In reality, somewhere deep within my brain, the monster wasn’t Penance. No. The real monster was me.
“I know who you are boy, because you’re me!”
As a queer person, one’s relationship with the concept of monstrosity can tend to be something that is simultaneously fraught and empowering. Just like the werewolves and the vampires and the numerous other what-have-yous of legend, we know what it is to be something hunted, to be (oftentimes) an individual with a dual public and private-facing persona, the latter half of which possesses desires that run counter to the narrative of what is acceptable within the bounds of “polite society.”
And it’s this complex relationship between public-me and private-me that I found myself wrestling with at the end of my first year of graduate school, and from which Penance was born. I truly believed that I needed to cover up my sexuality and my body at all costs, that if anyone could guess I was queer, then that professional social network I’d been working on building? Yeah, no. Goodbye. Gone.
Of course, I didn’t recognize this parallel immediately. It took me months of extremely patient talk therapy (albeit with a therapist who neither shamed me for being LGBTQIA+, nor for my “nerdy” pastimes) to even get to that point, but by the time I did, I began to notice that the buck didn’t stop with Penance; there were certain themes that seemed to keep popping up again and again with each successive tabletop character I created.
Artist struggling against the numerous expectations foisted upon them by rampant productivity culture? Check. A healthy dose of body horror and dysmorphia? Check. Domineering authority figures? Check. Unknowable (and sometimes unpredictably destructive) mystical powers? Check. An equally unknowable eldritch entity camped comfortably in my character’s brain, telling them what to do and how to think? Double and triple check.
And bit by bit, as I talked through these patterns with my therapist, I began to realize that they reflected actual issues I’d been struggling with in my day-to-day life.
Difficulty in reconciling my desire to just make weird crap for the rest of my life with my desire to be able to live? Yep. Hangups about being an androgynous individual in a (oftentimes) reductive world? Yep. Feelings of anxiety so seemingly large and incomprehensible that they felt beyond my own control?
But it didn’t end there. Not only had I been unconsciously pumping my characters full of the fears and insecurities I was dealing with at any one time, but I was also unconsciously inserting them into situations and arcs through which they could confront those issues, work through them, and—ultimately—overcome them, sometimes in ways I originally never thought possible for myself.
Again, I wasn’t just playing the “good writer” here; I was playing me.
For instance, consider Penelope Loomgazer, my character for the Changeling: The Lost Second Edition (a revamp of the original White Wolf Chronicles of Darkness system) campaign I’m currently playing in. Hailing from the late 80’s, she was kidnapped from our world by an god-like spider-esque entity known only as the Nurse of the Decadent Cradle, who promptly decided to rear her as her own. Transformed into a brown and grey orb weaver spider, Penelope wove webs for her Mother’s magical machinations, only vaguely aware that something was not as it should be, until one day, she learned of her mundane past (through harnessing some of the Nurse’s oracular powers for herself ) and fled back to the mortal realm. Now, although Penelope’s return trip has reverted her to a mostly-human shape, she still possesses the tells of her prior arachnid state: grey skin, six arms, six pure black eyes, and a horrendous mouth comprised of fangs and mandibles and sharpened teeth that she keeps under wraps with a white surgical mask for fear of frightening those around her.
In short, she is a sad psychic spider child with a heap of anxiety and body-related issues to sort through. Sound familiar?
Now, when I first created Penelope, I knew that I wanted a major arc of hers to be all about coming to terms with what she is and learning to overcome the self-loathing she felt with respect to her physical state, but I had no idea how I wanted that to happen. Imagine my surprise when, just last session (as of this writing), Penelope summoned up the courage to ask another player’s character out to dinner and a movie, a moment that was resolved later that session when the same character voluntarily walked up to Penelope and kissed her (despite her ridiculous maw).
Of course, this had been brewing for a while (I’d also had an out-of-game/out-of-character conversation with the player in question several weeks ago to make sure that this was a direction we were both comfortable with our characters going in), but those two moments proved to be nothing short of revelatory for both Penelope and me. Neither of us really had much experience with situations like this, and when things turned out favoribly despite our incessant worrying that there’d be no way they ever could, all of a sudden, the act of asking someone out on a date felt a touch more attainable for me; in a way, I had already done it!
Indeed, by setting up situations in which I can feel what my character is feeling, I’ve been able to benefit from their emotional growth while in a low-stakes environment built around individuals who I know and trust. And I’ve found that, by doing so (in concert with more traditional talk therapy sessions to discuss and contextualize revelations that occur during tabletop sessions), it can become immensely easier to tackle and come to terms with (or at the very least, acknowledge) the issues I’ve been dealing with, to realize that I can change and grow in ways I never thought I’d be able to.
“What kind of a pair are we?”
Now, there’s already some precedent for the use of tabletop roleplaying games (or TTRPGs, for short) as therapeutical tools and supplements, one of the most prominent examples being Wheelhouse Workshop (an organization created to help teens and young adults develop social skills through tabletop), whose founders recently jumpstarted a even larger non-profit initiative called Game to Grow (which aims to expand their practice around the globe).
But despite Wheelhouse Workshop’s efforts, tabletop gaming groups remain a fairly untapped route when it comes to therapy.
Indeed, while tabletop roleplaying has seen a steadily increasing foothold in the global consciousness through a combination of increased internet use and more mainstream exposure in juggernaut television shows like Stranger Things, the activity is still often portrayed as something made expressly for the cosumption of a certain subset of the population: white and/or male individuals who subscribe to (or simply fall under), in some manner, the label of “nerd.”
Additionally, many of these tabletop portrayals hone in only on one particular system: Dungeons & Dragons. Even Critical Role—one of the most high-profile online tabletop gaming shows to have spawned in the wake of the recent actual play boom—is likely going to heavily revolve around D&Dfor the forseeable future, and it’s this laser-like focus on the system that has propelled D&D to a status of near-synonymousness with the overarching concept of roleplaying. I cannot even begin to count the number of times I’ve attempted to initiate conversations with other individuals (both inside and outside the tabletop scene) about a new TTRPG I was getting into, only to find that I needed to couch said game within the context of D&D in order to make sure that my listener(s) even knew what I was talking about (i.e. that said game involved playing characters who my gaming group and I have created, we roll dice to see if the things those characters do work out, et cetera).
This seemingly inextriacble intertwining of tabletop and Dungeons & Dragons is something of a double-edged sword. While it has allotted the game genre a somewhat meteoric rise in public consciousness (especially as prominent actual play shows form increasingly official partnerships with companies like Wizards of the Coast), this also narrows the aforementioned perceived audience subset for TTRPGs even further. Not only does the narrative of who these games are “for” tilt heavily towards white, male, “nerdy” individuals, but it is also now tied up with the concept of being a fan of high fantasy, of stories about bands of noble adventurers who raid bandit camps and slay fell beasts and loot people’s corpses without remorse.
Now, if I were to attempt to unpack all of the nitty-gritty implications of the importance of broadening representation in media (and by extension, TTRPGs), we would be here all day, and maybe even all week. But suffice it to say that, as human beings, it’s hard for us to really get into a piece of media if we don’t feel like the people it’s “for” is us. And this is especially true for those of us who are LGBTQIA+, those of us who fly in the face of nearly everything this world is telling us we should be, those of us who simply don’t fit the numerous narratives we’ve been prescribed about who things are “for.”
Indeed, this becomes increasingly obvious with respect to D&D when you realize that the system’s character creation process is centered around mechanically incentivizing players to adhere to archetypes.
For instance, let’s take another look at tielfings. According to the D&D core rulebook, when you create a tiefling character, you immediately get to up their charisma stat by 2, as well as up their intelligence stat by 1. However, there are only a couple of character classes that really care about boosts to those stats, the most prominent of them being the “Warlock” class (which harnesses a character’s charisma stat in order to cast offensive spells). If I were to pick a class that didn’t similarly put those starting bonuses to “good use,” that utilize a different set of stats for attacking things (like, say, the “Ranger” class), then I would essentially be shooting myself in the foot. In a system that’s all about getting as powerful as possible as quickly as possible so that you don’t immediately die, in a system that’s all about making sure your ragtag band of adventurers is reasonably balanced and that you’re serving your own little niche role to the best of your ability so that the party doesn’t immediately die, there really isn’t much room for playing against archetype.
This is why you have so many brutalistic Half-Orc Barbarians, so many lionhearted Human Fighters, so many devious Tiefling Warlocks, so many snooty Elf Rangers: in order to get anywhere in a D&D campaign, you must play to archetype.
It’s this mechanics-level compulsion to play to archetype that counters, at a fundamental level, what it means to play tabletop queerly. Indeed, to play tabletop queerly means to play against archetype, to twist and break stereotypes about who characters are and what they’re capable of, to reform them into something new and beautiful, just as we do in the real world.
And it’s this concept of playing tabletop queerly, of deliberately countering archetypes within the character creation process (and beyond), that render TTRPGs such powerfully therapeutic attributes. By crafting characters who start off in situations that are not perfect for them, that they are not competent or comfortable in, and then by helping them navigate those situations to get to a place where they do feel more comfortable and competent and whole, we become empowered as well.
By playing queerly, we show that these games are for everyone, that the transformative experiences they have the potential to provide are for everyone.
Luckily, there are other TTRPG systems out there that mechnically encourage players to structure and play characters in this manner, that insist on creating characters with internal tensions and reward players for addressing, meeting, and/or overcoming those tensions (at least in part).
For instance, Changeling: The Lost Second Edition (or CtL 2E for short)—in which you play as individuals who were taken by fae creatures, twisted into forms that fitted their abductors fancies, and who subsequently escaped back to the real world—is all about living and coming to terms with the aftermath of being subjected to a traumatic experience, of coming out on the other side of that experience and figuring out how to heal and how to move on. And this, I’d argue, is a fundamentally (at the very least) queer-coded system: for LGBTQIA+ folk, even if you haven’t experienced trauma directly, simply existing in a world that—at almost every opportunity given—attempts to tell you that you aren’t what you say you are is something that requires constant deliberate attention and emotional processing, and this is something that Changeling captures with flying colors.
And on the indie-er side of things, the game Masks—which puts players in the collective role of a team of teenage superheroes à la Teen Titans—frames pieces of its character creation process by drawing on the various conflicts (both external and internal, physical and emotional) that players’ characters (or PCs) are embroiled in. Additionally, the game mechanically punishes PCs for refusing to or not making the effort to either express their hurt to other characters or check in with their fellow superhero teammates.
This is elegantly embodied within the game’s conditions-related mechanics. When a PC fails to handle something well, they gain an appropriate condition, which then functions as a significant penalty to a cooresponding set of moves PCs have their disposal (for instance, gaining the “Afraid” condition makes it a lot harder to embody the steel-hearted bravery that comes with the territory of directly engaging a threat). And when a PC gains a condition, while they can clear it on their own by acting out in (oftentimes emotionally destructive) ways that recapitulate a cycle of loneliness and self-isolation, literally the only way to stop the hurt and to stop that cycle is for PCs to talk to each other, to figure out what they’re all about, to seek out their teammates when they can’t deal anymore and when they want to make sure their cohorts are okay, just like we need to do in our waking lives. Indeed, this was a lesson that I learned the hard way, as my Maskscharacter’s Raven-esque inability to discuss what was consuming her soul resulted in her accruing penalties to nearly every action I could roll for; literally and metaphorically, before learning the value of finding and leaning on people who could help her weather trying times, she came to the verge of utter (physical and emotional) collapse.
It’s systems like these—systems that actively push playing against archetype—that we need to see more of, and especially in the public eye.
If tabletop RPGs are—as a game genre—ever to become the widespread tools for personal healing and social good that I believe they can be, we need to radically redfine who these games are for and what they have the potential to accomplish.
Like any healing process, the first step is realizing that there’s a problem one needs to work through in the first place. And it’s time to do the work.
Just last week, on a beautiful June day, I was sitting cross-legged at a friend’s dining room table and creating my very first Vampire: The Masqueradecharacter. And as she began to take tangible form within the confines of my phone’s Notes app, I realized that she was becoming everything my D&Dcharacter Penance— whom I’d brought into the world what feels like a lifetime ago—was not. Where Penance hid the parts of her that society deemed monstrous at any and every opportunity, Gozer unapologetically flaunted her androgyny and reveled in every second of every stare from every straight white Southern boy she ran across down in the Big Easy. Where Penance toed the line and did what she had to do in order to get by under the radar, Gozer was unapologetically punk and loud-mouthed and subversive.
And I smiled.
I knew what I was doing. She was me, and I was her.
I leaned back in my chair with a slow creak and exhaled a deep breath.
No doubt about it. We were both the monster.
