The art of inclusive storytelling
Navigating Interfaith Leadership in Dungeons & Dragons
by Claire Thielens
Faith isn’t always a comfortable topic of conversation. To navigate the waters of our individual relationships to divinity, whatever that means to us, in a collaborative setting is an incredibly vulnerable experience. The ways in which we engage with faith and religion tend to be deeply tied to our culture, family, morality, and our understanding of reality itself. The urge to protect these sacred values from external scrutiny is only natural, but we must be willing to open up these parts of ourselves to our peers if we want to create a more inclusive world.
Part of what makes these conversations so important is the historical imbalance of power between faith communities within Western culture. In the United States, Christianity serves as a cultural default of sorts. This is reflected in certain tangible benefits, such as work and school schedules that accommodate the Christian calendar. Though the potential for harm in this cultural assumption is not always so clearly identified.
When there is an assumed framework of divinity baked into the ways we engage within our own community, whether we grew up within the dominant religion or not, we are passively dismissing those who come from other religious traditions. At times, it can even lead to the blatant fetishization of certain cultures, ideas, and people.
If we want to build a healthier and more inclusive dialogue surrounding religion, we must address the ways that cultural biases affect our behavior in every part of our lives, including those we perceive as entirely secular. In the pursuit of this goal, I would like to examine leadership and the assumptions about religion contained within a hobby I devote a great deal of time and thought: the tabletop role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons.
Opening the Door for Collaborative Creativity
Dungeons and Dragons, or D&D for short, is a game heavily inspired by the fantasy writing of J.R.R. Tolkien. In it, players create characters within certain archetypes, or classes, which grant their characters a set of powers. With one person designated as a Game Master to help narrate and guide the adventure, a group of players will navigate fantastical quests and combat scenarios together to achieve a shared goal.
Matthew Mercer, the Game Master for Critical Role - Photo Critical Role Facebook
The Game Master is not necessarily the “author” or “leader” of the story. D&D is often described as a form of collaborative storytelling because the Game Master works together with all of the players to craft a single narrative in which each person has the ability to meaningfully affect the narrative. Nonetheless, they do assume a position of power and leadership in making executive decisions about how the rules will be applied, the history and lore of the game, and the central conflict of the story. As with all power, when that position is weaponized, it can be used to silence those who have a different understanding of what the game “should” be. The narrative is only truly collaborative if the Game Master makes an effort to welcome the creative contributions of everyone who has come to the table.
Inclusion at a D&D table, as in many parts of life, is a difficult undertaking. For the Game Master, the introduction of more creative voices to the storytelling process requires thought and energy. It involves quickly changing plans to accommodate new contributions, rigorous bookkeeping, and constant active listening. It also involves an acute awareness of the limitations of one’s own perspective, demanding conversations that take place away from the table to keep everyone safe and comfortable in a creative space.
For those who are willing to be an inclusive leader at the table, it is incredibly rewarding. It creates a much richer game in which all players feel truly represented, which can only heighten the investment that each contributor feels in the story. Wheneveryonefeelsthatthestoryishonestly“theirs,”theybringtheirwholeselves to the table, ready to create. The same is true in everyday society. If we engage in and encourage behaviors that allow others to show up in their full authenticity, we cultivate a richer and more meaningful world for everyone.
D&D’s Religious Undertones
With this goal in mind, let’s examine some of the core parts of the game that may alienate a player and their relationship to divinity. All players can make attempts to learn about in-game gods and religious traditions by utilizing a skill called “religion.” A character’s religion score is determined by how intelligent that character is. Already, this reflects a particular understanding of what it means to be “religious.” It is a status that requires rigorous study and a high degree of intelligence to master.
Any character can engage with this skill, but it’s an entirely impersonal pursuit. In some ways, this skill might be better termed “religious history.” The existence and mechanics of this skill are nor immediately alarming, but we must keep this understanding of religion in mind as we continue to investigate what does and does not count as “divine” in the worlds of Dungeons & Dragons.
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Some characters in D&D get their unique powers through a relationship with a god. Most D&D worlds are pantheistic, with many sources of divinity present to grant spells to their clerics. Most clerics, however, will have a relationship with a single divinity from whom they draw power in exchange for worship. Many applications of the cleric class tend to reflect a Christian relationship to divinity. The worship of deities is often highly organized and modeled after a Christian hierarchical structure.
Less traditional sources of divine power often take the form of deities with an evil alignment who reside on a plane of existence known as the Nine Hells. Given that this source of evil energy in D&D is plainly modeled after Dante’s Inferno, which has Christian origins, we can gather that the understanding of morality upon which D&D stands is a Christian one.
Another class that often has connections to this mainstream understanding of divinity is the paladin class. These characters draw their power from their dedication to an oath. Frequently, they take an oath of devotion to a deity, which grants them strength in battle and other powers with which they can serve their oath.
The most standard paladin in a fantasy game such as D&D is modeled after a religious crusader. At this point, one must consider the historical foundations upon which this game was designed more closely. The historical crusades with which most of us are acquainted were complicated in both their motivations and their consequences. They were, at least nominally, a Christian pursuit, and they led to unbelievable violence against various religious and ethnic groups, including Muslim and Jewish communities throughout the Middle East and Europe.
Avoiding Alienation and Appropriation
When modeling a character after the perpetrators of this violence, even implicitly, one must take care to closely examine the motivations and methods of that character in order to avoid normalizing undertones of violence against marginalized religious communities in America. Of course, part of the power of a collaborative role-playing game is that these themes can be navigated meaningfully with care and consent. Cavalier treatment of these historical acts of violence and the ways that they have informed American Christian culture should not be permitted at the table, and the Game Master’s role, leading by example, is to address this carefully if it does.
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The exclusivity of what counts as “divine” is perhaps the most alienating part of standard D&D for those with diverse religious backgrounds. Those who take the aforementioned paths and choose to become a cleric or take an oath of devotion are often recognized for their relationship to the divine. These are the classes that reflect the most standard assumption of what religion looks like in American society. Other players may choose to select a different class, many of which draw inspiration from non-Abrahamic religious traditions.
These characters have a relationship with divinity that echoes the beliefs and traditions of countless people in the real world. In-game, we often don’t call these alternative sources of power “divine.” We reserve religious terminology for characters who worship like we do. When we do this, we further invalidate the core values and beliefs of people who are often already marginalized in American society, and we communicate to them that they are not welcome at our table.
Sources of magic are myriad in the lore of D&D. Druids, for example, practice magic that comes from their relationships with the spirits of nature. As a genre, fantasy has a tendency to neglect traditions and cultures from outside of Europe, and this class is largely based on the practices of Germanic tribes.
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However, there are clear similarities between the magic practiced by druids in D&D and the traditions of indigenous peoples in the Americas, Scandinavia, Africa, and beyond. The categorization of these practices as something entirely separate from the religious has the potential to be profoundly alienating to those who hold them dear. A more explicit incorporation of a multiplicity of cultural beliefs and an acknowledgment of the use of their traditions in-game could only serve to enrich the experience of play for everyone at the table.
The incorporation of beliefs that don’t belong to us at the D&D table must be done with intentionality to avoid turning into flagrant fetishization. The class of monks has been criticized for being built around an Orientalist philosophy, appropriating and mysticizing a Buddhist aesthetic without incorporating the accompanying philosophy. The mystic elements of the class have been divorced from the people who continue to practice these traditions today.
Even the broadly non-magical barbarian class has the opportunity to specialize by following the path of the totem warrior. This blatantly appropriates a sacred religious practice of indigenous communities in the Pacific Northwest by neglecting its cultural origins and associating the totem with a class of fantasy warriors fueled primarily by mindless rage, devoid of rationality.
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A responsible Game Master may minimize these harms by removing loaded language from these character builds or incorporating more culturally appreciative elements into them. Doing so is an act of adaptive leadership that lets players from all backgrounds know that they are welcome. The game can change to accommodate marginalized religious communities so that they can bring their whole selves to the table, ready to create.
D&D can be wielded with intentionality to explore complex themes and share diverse perspectives, particularly regarding participants’ ever-evolving relationships to divinity, religion, and faith. Like any medium, though, it’s deeply flawed, and it bears the weight of historical religious oppression.
A leader at the D&D table, taking the form of a Game Master or an outspoken player, has the responsibility of navigating the pitfalls in the game design through open communication and an emphasis on consent in exploring difficult topics. The creativity that springs from such an environment lends itself to interpersonal growth, challenging the harmful cultural assumptions within which we operate.
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