To the Dungeons & Dragons Community, at Large
I often say that I have an unpopular opinion about the D&D Renaissance that has been happening since the lockdown and now I am here to state that opinion and why I have it.
This surge in popularity for D&D has been a wonder to behold. When I learned how to play when I was 11, I was learning in a social landscape still healing from the Satanic Panic (if we ever did is debatable, yes, but we're not talking about that). When I used to play D&D with my fellow geeks at school, there were very few of us and we were relentlessly bullied for it. My books were often taken when I wasn't looking and thrown in the trash; my friends and I were physically shoved and hit by other kids; we were verbally assaulted by an endless litany of insults that children invent specifically to belittle, ostracize, and other.
As I got older I realized that there was a strong undercurrent within my beloved community of a white, male dominated patriarchy. I, as a woman and as a Jew, was not welcome unless the character I made was a walking stereotype. And playing meant a lot of mansplaining. I had the dumb luck to have a home-made group in my uncles and their friends, and will forever be grateful that they always shielded me from the worst of that aspect of the community. Nevertheless, once I saw it, I always knew it was there.
Fast forward a decade or two, through an on-again-off-again relationship with the hobby - I have opinions on all the editions that have been released through 5.5 - I am now an adult married woman and getting back into the game with 5e. What glory, what excitement I felt when I realized how popular the game is now! I mean, who wouldn't feel good? This game I had been made fun of for playing was now a game that so many people were playing that there was no way I could be made fun of for it now! It's part of the cultural zeitgeist!
But my excitement was quickly tempered when I realized that the cis white male patriarchy problem hadn't gone away. Even more so when I realized that while the amount of people playing had increased, so had the quantity of socially acceptable antisemitism, sexism, homophobia, and racism. Even self-described liberals were participating in these things. Maybe not all of them, but the above mentioned list is not exclusive to only those -isms, and reads as a choose your own hate-filled adventure within a D&D setting.
And there's the problem: Everyone plays D&D now but...everyone plays D&D now. The people that used to bully me and my friends? They play. The people that believe that I as a Jew am always the oppressor and never the oppressed? They play. A lot of them play. The men who would see women treated as property worth nothing more than making sandwiches and babies? Yeah, they play too. And on the tail end of this election, take a hard look at these statistics that are being passed around. White Gen Z men, they play. A lot of them play. These hard-core Christo-Fascists? They play, too. These people that would see everyone's rights diminished, twisted, and ended entirely...I hate to break it to you, but they play too. And not in small numbers.
These folks use D&D as a playground to live out their fantasy where they get to treat people like garbage. I will admit I do not have vetted statistics to support this. But I do have a group playing trough Goldenvault that has a guy in it that negates everything I say. He often refers to my character as a bitch, and takes every opportunity he can to take away from my successes in a session as a player. In a game I DM on Sundays, there is a guy who has a backstory for his character that is basically "I am a cis white male being discriminated against by everyone." The last session we had, he spent the entire session on his phone and roughly every ten minutes I would hear him grumble "jesus christ..." I left a group that had a Hispanic male in it that told me that I as a woman do not deserve to have a right to my body because all I would do with it is have "irresponsible sex." Again, I do not have the statistics to support the demographics of D&D. But I do have horror stories from 27 years of playing this game.
Yes, I do think it is wonderful that more people are playing. D&D is a wonderful place to explore your own identity as an artist and as a person. I will always embrace people trying new things if it brings about positive change for them. But never in a million years did I ever think that D&D would be used so blatantly as a tool to uphold white supremacy, to be supplicant to a system of hate. And yet, because we as a community have not stepped up to say "NO!", here we are. If you don't believe me, I can't change your mind. But take a look around your tables. What have you been ignoring in the name of being able to have a game?
D&D is not a safe community anymore. What are we going to do about it?
