Dungeons and Dragons (DnD) is a well-known tabletop role-playing game (TTRPG) that has recently blown-up in popularity. The game takes place in multiple settings and is designed in a way to encourage world-building, storytelling, improvisation, and collaboration between the players (PCs) and the Dungeon Master (DM) (Dungeon Masters Manual, p.4). However, this game can also be augmented using design principles in order to stimulate more therapeutic outcomes (Connell, p.xiii). In this paper, I will discuss the design of DnD and how changing or implementing various design and human behavioural principles a DM can help encourage reparative play in the DnD game space.
Firstly, I will begin by describing how DnD is designed currently without augmentations. The game revolves around one person, the DM, helping lead the PCs through a game module (campaign), either official Wizards of the Coast Material (precon) or one designed by the DM or another, non-professional (Homebrew). The PCs create characters with different races, skills, classes, and backstories as they navigate this fictional setting. The game allows for DMs and PCs to collaboratively move through the campaign as PC’s actions, based on dice rolls and ‘stat blocks,’ change the direction of the campaign. These can be minor changes (PCs, reinventing ways to deal with challenges outside of the prescribed method) to larger scale changes (the PCs deciding to subvert the direction of the story by teaming up with the ‘bad guy,’ or focusing on another part of the campaign outside of the ‘main,’ storyline).
The game utilizes many design principles in order to achieve these goals. Like any game, DnD seeks to motivate people into continuing to participate in the game space by supporting the PC’s primary psychological needs of autonomy, competence, and relatedness: PCs express their ‘autonomy,’ as they fulfill their fantasies in the game space, ‘competence,’ as they see their progress through levelling up, and ‘relatedness,’ as they see their actions shape a larger story and world (Bucher, The Art of Designing for Behaviour Change). Understood through Actor Network Theory, the game provides a brief ‘inscription’ or outline (a few rules, action economy etc…) for the DM and PCs but largely allows both groups to provide the ‘description,’ or decide how the rules and other prescriptions will be used in the game space (Jessen & Jessen, p.4). This back and forth between the DM, PCs, and the game fulfills peoples desire for autonomy (Bucher, The Art of Designing for Behaviour Change) while facilitating a dialogue between the game and players, allowing PCs with diverse interests to maintain their intrinsic motivation and keep them within the game space (Bucher, The Art of Designing for Behaviour Change; Connell, p.18). The game further utilizes this inscription to make sure that there isn’t too much choice overload, making sure that players aren’t overwhelmed by their choices (Samson, An Introduction to Behavioral Economics). This principle regarding choice overload also takes place within character creation, which can be incredibly challenging for new players. DnD has a variety of races you can play which can be a multitude of classes that can then spec into a variety of subclasses and even multi classes. You then create the characters personality, backstory, profession etc…. Just the concept can be overwhelming; however, the Player’s Handbook includes small tables or ‘dice tables,’ that help players build characters through dice rolls, helping to demystify some of the aspects of character creation (Dungeons and Dragons, Players Handbook, p. 39). These suggestions provided through arbitrary dice rolls helps to prevent choice overload while through the character creation process (Samson, An Introduction to Behavioral Economics ). Importantly, the game subverts our general expectations of games and game theory through its collaborative design making the DM and PCs play together rather than against one another (Gustafson, 3MT SFU 2020; Connell, p.4). The game excels at creating a collaborative atmosphere wherein the goal is something that is reached by a consensus within the group, rather than individual members making decisions that prioritize their own ‘game,’ and ‘win,’ as you might expect in other games (Gustafson, 3MT SFU 2020; Connell, p.15-16).
It is this last point which makes the game a great starting point to discuss reparative play (Femia, p.80). However, just because the game can be collaborative, doesn’t mean it always will be. It is this variability that I want to discuss in regard to how we can make DnD a better environment through which to facilitate reparative play. Before beginning discussion on how we can make DnD better suited to reparative play, we need to discuss what exactly reparative play is. Reparative play, inspired by Sedgwick’s notion of reparative reading, is the concept that we can imagine new worlds, futures, and possibilities, through play that can help us reframe our experiences as we ‘move around in them,’ and use this opportunity to ‘imagine a hopeful future,’ (Femia, p.80). For instance, as a transwoman, I experienced reparative play in DnD by playing as female characters and living as these characters for brief moments, experiencing a different world as I, in Femia’s words, ‘imagine a hopeful future,’ (Femia, p.80). Another instance of this is Femia’s own, wherein they play an asexual character whose sexuality is celebrated through the campaign (Femia, p 84). So, this leads us to ask, why DnD? For me, this is mostly personal as DnD feels to me to be a relatively simple system in comparison to other TTRPGs I’ve played. . Furthermore, as Femia argues, its popularity and ubiquity as a ‘mainstream source,’ allows it to reach a wider audience (Femia, p. 81). Additionally, as an artist, I have begun researching and creating a campaign titled, “Goblina and the Magic Ribbon,” meant to facilitate reparative play through a transnormative lens. This reparative play takes place within a world that is transnormative, meaning that the goblin inhabitants of the plane live in a place without established gender roles and are largely gender queer in some way. This queerness is a key part of their identity and is celebrated in their world, creating the reparative environment for the players to explore. In my endeavour to develop this campaign, I’ve seen research on how TTRPGs, with DnD as the main focus, can be used for a variety of things, such as therapy (Connell) and even as a classroom tool (Gustafson, 3MT SFU 2020; Li, p.2), showing the extensive reach DnD has behind it. Additionally, I have endeavoured to take a ‘casual,’ survey of my friends who have played DnD to inquire about their own experience in game and what made them feel ‘immersed,’ in a character which I will refer to herein as my ‘immersion case study.’
Having discussed what reparative play is and why I want to use DnD as an avenue for this, we can now move onto how we can implement different design principles in order to cultivate this reparative experience. I will be approaching this using academic research as well as my own experience within the reparative campaign I have created. Through this research, I have found that in order to facilitate reparative play, the main thing we need to focus on is keeping players motivated (Connell, p.19; Bucher, The Art of Designing for Behaviour Change). Motivation helps us to continue doing a task or behaviour and keep us engaged; however, it is important that this motivation is coming from a place within ourselves and a genuine desire to continue rather being forced to participate (Bucher, The Art of Designing for Behaviour Change). This is important because motivation encourages immersion which encourages bleed (Connell, p.12), the mechanism through which experiences within the game can be extrapolated to the outside experience of the player (Connell, p.13). Without this bleed, reparative play isn’t possible, and it is therefore paramount as DMs that we help facilitate a player’s motivation which will lead to increased immersion and bleed (Connell, p.13). To encourage this motivation, I believe there are two aspects of the game we as DMs can augment to better facilitate reparative play: session 0 and character creation.
In order to facilitate this motivation-immersion-bleed process in reparative play, it’s important to make sure that this motivation exists at the onset. Although there are many tools we can use to increase motivation -the autonomy, competence, and relatedness principles discussed earlier are excellent examples (Bucher, The Art of Designing for Behaviour Change) – we can only encourage something if it exists prior to. As Connell discusses in “Tabletop Role-Playing Therapy: A Guide for the Clinician Game Master,” it is important that people participating in therapeutic -or in this case reparative- play be willing to engage (Connell, p.19). To make sure that players are motivated from the onset, DMs can use ‘session 0,’ (Femia, p.82). Session 0 has become a popular tool in role-playing circles in recent years and is frequently used in order to establish boundaries, set expectations, and discuss what gameplay may involve (Femia, p.82). In my immersion case study, I asked respondents about their experience with session 0 and whether or not they felt it did anything to effect the campaign (Kefalas, How Goblina Helped me Heal Survey). The open-ended question garnered a variety of responses from the 11 respondents, although the players largely agreed that session 0 tends to be useful to set expectations within the group, discuss the content and nature of the campaign, set boundaries on “what content people are comfortable with,” and help give new players an introduction to the game (Kefalas, How Goblina Helped me Heal Survey). In reparative play, this is particularly important as our goal is to live within a world that discusses gender norms and their subversion which can be uncomfortable. As Connell points out, if someone isn’t able to deal with certain subject matter, they shouldn’t be forced to (Connell, p.19). Furthermore, because DnD is a collaborative experience, immersion requires that the group all ‘buy into,’ the game (Connell, p.10). To create immersion, players agree to ‘buy into,’ the game, the environment, and the story wherein their choices can shift the world around them, encouraging a sense of autonomy which in turn leads to immersion (Connell, p.10). If players aren’t interested in a campaign that focuses on a particular game style – in my instance, the campaign is focused on transnormative worlds expressed primarily through fantasy-based storytelling and social interaction – then those players may not be able to maintain their motivation (Dungeon Master’s Manual, p.6). As DMs, we can use session 0 to establish what kind of gameplay we have begun creating as DMs (social interaction vs combat based for instance) and to discuss what kind of gameplay players are interested in. DnD’s flexibility and collaborative nature in its worldbuilding gives us the ability to enmesh several worlds, styles, and gameplay scenarios (Connell, p.18). By trying to engage each player with something that interests them we can maintain their motivation, which in turn will increase their own immersion, and help to facilitate the immersion of other players, which will lead to bleed, making the reparative nature of a campaign more likely to affect their lives once the game is done(Connell, p.28-29).
Session 0 and character creation can happen simultaneously and for many groups they do. DMs can utilize different design principles to help make character creation easier for new players, and more conducive to reparative play. Firstly, as discussed before, session 0 helps to discuss boundaries, the game world, expectations etc… In therapeutic or reparative settings, session 0 helps to establish the goals of the world, and the story of the world (Li, p.14). In my own experience and through my survey, I’ve found that players are able to use session 0 in order to create characters that are better enmeshed in the world, fit the ‘vibe,’ of the party, and helped to get the player thinking about their character’s backstory (Kefalas, How Goblina Helped Me Heal). By creating a character whose motivations exist within the game space, the player is able to use that character’s motivation as their own (Connell, p.35) becoming immersed into that character, creating a fuller experience (Connell, p.9) which will in turn lead to a higher chance of bleed (Connell, p.12) in the reparative play space.
Furthermore, we can utilize character creation to help reduce choice overload and facilitate characters that further promote immersion. I think this is important in gameplay, as character creation is a key component of the motivation-immersion-bleed process. DMs can help PCs create immersive characters for reparative play (Femia, p.83) that prevent choice overload by using Bowman’s 9 character archetypes. Bowman’s 9 character categories describe categories of ‘character types,’ as they relate to the people who create them (Femia, p. 83; Diakolambrianou and Bowman, p.8). As Femia argues, these archetypes can be conducive for reparative play for many reasons, primarily that they allow players to better immerse themselves in a character that is familiar (Femia, p.83), making the character and their motivations more relatable, leading to bleed (Connell, p.9). These 9 archetypes also help to prevent choice overload for the PCs, who may find the sheer nature of character building overwhelming (Samson, An Introduction to Behavioral Economics ). These 9 archetypes describe a method to create a character that is similar to the player with small variations (Femia, p. 83; Diakolambrianou and Bowman, p.8). This decreases choice overload by creating a scope within which to create the character, while still allowing for creative freedom. For instance, one of these 9 archetypes is the “Fragmented self,” which describes a character that is based on the self, but with one aspect magnified to become a key component of that character’s personality. For instance, if I were to create a ‘fragmented self,’ I might take an aspect of myself, like my anxiety, and magnify it to create a character that is like me, but expresses their anxiety as a larger part of their personality. In my own survey, many players reported that some of their favourite characters allowed them to ‘express,’ something that they didn’t get to before in themselves: for instance, players reported some of their favourite characters allowed them to be their creative self as a bard (augmented/fragmented/experimental self) or as a ‘shit disturbing,’ or ‘insidious,’ character – the taboo self. This ‘self,’ eventually evolves with the players as they get more experienced. For instance, my current character, Goblina, a dirty, ditzy, anxious, transexual goblin, is different from me, but fits into many of Bowman’s categories (taboo, augmented, fragmented, experimental) making her easy to empathize with and become immersed in. Although this character is in her infancy, she has allowed me to feel more focused and immersed in the game, feeling the fear of meeting the Demonlords in the abyss, the anxiety of being in a new plane, and the comradery of new friends.
In conclusion, although DnD utilizes many design principles on its own to enhance game play, I believe more can be done in order to tap into its reparative abilities. As DMs, we can utilize and encourage a PC’s motivation to create immersion leading to the bleed we need to create reparative play. We can do this by firstly making sure that motivation exists through session 0, as we establish the nature of a reparative campaign, our expectations of one another, our eventual goals, and the lore of the world. Session 0 allows us to gauge our PCs interests and tap into those to make sure their motivation is maintained throughout the campaign, furthering their immersion and bleed as a group. DMs must also utilize the character creation process in order to help PCs create characters that are enmeshed into the world while not creating any choice overload or confusion with the exhaustive process of character building. This will result in characters that PCs can easily empathize with to encourage the growth of the motivation-immersion-bleed pipeline. Further research might investigate how interacting with the campaign outside of gameplay (for instance, artmaking, storywriting, etc…) can help cultivate motivation-immersion-bleed.
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Galateia Kefalas: Artist Portfolio 