Dungeons and Dragons: Gender, Race, and Power in the Fantasy and Storytelling Space

Fantasy allows for the intermingling of the imagination and the physical. It creates collective spaces that can reify, reiterate, or challenge socio-economic structures and power dynamics that create inequalities in our everyday lives. Fantasy spaces create the possibility of the impossible, the unbelievable, and the extraordinary, while simultaneously being bound to the real world from which these ideas stem. The creators manufacturing characters, stories, and worlds are conditioned by the social and political context in which they exist, with their own positionality drastically changing the way that they create and interact with stories and storytelling structures, as Garcia's 2017 work "Privilege, power, and Dungeons & Dragons: How systems shape racial and gender identities in tabletop role-playing games" details. We explore the history of race, gender, and other social forces in the Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) 5e text, a gaming system that creates a framework of races, classes, and backgrounds for character creation in a roleplaying game. We grapple with our own experiences of how the game can (re)create biases that often go overlooked, creating both feelings of (un)safety for players. In this article, by documenting our experiences playing the game, we explore the ways that Dungeons and Dragons both harmfully recreates the dynamics of the White cis heteropatriarchy, as well as offers space to challenge these same forces, bringing the tumultuous clashing of social forces into the semi-private space of gameplay.