Queer TTRPGs' Visibility, Safety, and Allegory as Resistance

Utilizing feminist standpoint theory, we recognize that data collected and analyzed is always influenced by the perspective of the researchers, and that in fact this is a strength of research when properly disclosed and reflected on. Before describing the tools and methods we used to conduct our research, we will briefly disclose aspects of our position relative to the subject matter that may have shaped our observations and analysis. This statement of positionality is intended to enable readers and future researchers to place the research in context and interpret the results accordingly [31].

We are HCI and games researchers who utilize queer and feminist theory. This study originates within the queer gaming community. The writers of this paper and many of the developers of the games identify as queer as well. The games and this paper interact with real-life queer experiences. Since some of the writers are also people of color, we may mention other aspects of identity, as we believe these findings impact identity exploration intersectionally (i.e., that gender and sexuality cannot be easily discussed separated from their co-occurrence with race, body, citizenship, etc.).

Our use of queer theory is grounded in Balzer Carr [3]’s description, which puts forward three central pillars. First, “dismantling of the sex/gender dichotomy”—we understand that we must decouple gender, which is related to identity and is socially constructed, from biological sex. Second, “destabilizing binaries of gender and sexuality” – we understand that it is unproductive and inaccurate to understand gender as “male vs. female’’ and sexuality as “straight vs. gay” and that there are a range of experiences and identities that exist on and outside of those spectrums. We also understand that gender and sexuality are fluid and may change over both short and long time scales and contexts. Finally, “a fluid understanding of power” —we understand that because gender and sexuality are socially constructed, they are influenced by power dynamics. Our understanding of power is that, like identity, it morphs and shifts depending on context as individuals interact with each other in different times and spaces [26, 30]. In this research, we acknowledge that the game designers from our ludography may not all hold these same perceptions of queerness and queer theory, but we use them to approach our deductive analysis of the game content.

Game studies scholars have long studied the role of sexuality and gender in games, but in the past decade have moved to formalize queer game studies as a recognized subdiscipline [24]. Queer game studies applies tools derived from queer theory to the study of games. Like video game studies, queer game studies often focuses on digital games and has largely centered around the presence/representation of LGBTQ content in games [7, 15, 28, 33]. However, queerness is not just about LGBTQ content, and recent research has turned towards queerness as a way of play rather than just an in-game identity category [6, 16, 23]. In fact, several queer play strategies have been identified, including “imaginative play (queer reading of unspecified or heterosexual characters), stylized performance (the use of gay stereotypes to mark one as queer) and role-playing of an LGBT character” [16]. These strategies, while under-researched, have long been used by players to “queer” their gaming experiences. Prominent queer game scholars Bo Ruberg and Adrienne Shaw define queer game studies as “imagining game studies otherwise, by studying games queerly in addition to studying queer game subjects” [24].

Tabletop roleplaying games vary in their mechanics, but the key characteristics are collaborative storytelling, roleplay, and some element of randomness. The most famous example is Dungeons & Dragons, in which a dungeon master acts as the narrator and creates a world and plot for the players to explore. Players roll dice to determine the outcome of their in-game actions, with their successes and failures shaping the story as play progresses. Dice are the most common element of randomness, but some TTRPGs use cards, coin flips, or more esoteric methods to add uncertainty to the plot. The game master (GM, the generic title when playing a game other than D&D) is typically responsible for developing and playing the non-player characters (NPCs) whom the player characters interact with in-game.

The type of roleplay involved in a TTRPG is dependent on both the game in question and the players. Characters in D&D have two main aspects that determine their strengths, weaknesses, and skills: a “race” (e.g. elf, human, dwarf) and a “class” (e.g. wizard, bard, fighter). Race, class, and other character aspects that add dimension and detail to a character determine their modifiers, which represent the character's strengths and weaknesses. These are added to or subtracted from dice rolls depending on how skilled the character is at the task they are attempting, and the results are woven into the narrative that the players build and enact collaboratively. Sometimes a player will narrate what they attempt to do, roll some dice, and then allow the GM to narrate what happens based on the result. In other cases, a player will decide what they want to do, roll some dice, and then use the roll to determine the action their player takes. For example, if a player wants to lie to an NPC, they might narrate what their character says and then roll, allowing the GM to determine whether the lie was convincing to the NPC. Alternatively, the player might say they want to lie to the NPC, roll the dice, and then use that information to determine what their character says. Narrative control is continuously exchanged between the players, the dice, and the GM in this way.

Outside of games studies, TTRPGs have been a subject of interest for researchers in psychology, communication theory, and pedagogy since their popularization in the 1980s, due to their utility as a creative outlet and mechanism for enhancing social skills through deeply interactive, open-ended, socially rich play [11]. Roleplay has the capacity to create or reinforce a self-concept [25, 38], and TTRPGs encourage players to embody characters of their own creation through events that challenge both player and character simultaneously, keeping the boundaries between these roles permeable. Waskul and Lust examine roleplay in TTRPGs through the lens of George Herbert Mead, whose work on social roles and play suggests that imaginative play in childhood is essential to the development of a sense of self as both subject and object [37]. Waskul and Lust argue that this relationship between roleplay and enriched selfhood is not exclusive to children and that learning to navigate the permeable boundaries between selves is a skill that TTRPG play can help build [37]. The present study builds on this prior work, highlighting the possibility that this identity interplay in TTRPGs can be specifically conducive to queer identity exploration.

To construct our ludography (a curated list of games) we adapted Shaw & Friesem's [27] method for curating the LGBTQ video game archive. This archive is the result of their research, which aimed to collect and categorize the history of LGBTQ+ identities in video games. We first broadly define queer TTRPGs as games that either have explicit queer content (i.e., queerness is in the description of the game's themes, settings, mechanics, etc.) or are played or read queerly by players (i.e., games that are interpreted to have queer meaning by the players) [27]. We then included games familiar to the authors that included explicit queer content. To expand the list, we then used Google's search engine with terms including “queer TTRPGs” and “queer TTRPGs list.” As we searched for games using those search terms, we found that most games described as “queer” contained explicitly queer content either in the game text or in statements by the game creators (e.g., in interviews, published game descriptions, and in-game materials). We intentionally do not create hard boundaries defining queerness and instead leave this to the players by examining reviews, blogs, articles, and other locations for player reactions and commentary, as definitions of queerness may vary and be personal. For our purposes, queerness in these games often referred to games that existed beyond the bounds of cis-heteronormativity (i.e., being cis-gendered and heterosexual being presented as the norm).

Due to our specific interest in identity exploration, we excluded games in which players do not customize or create their characters and games in which players do not take on a specific role at all (e.g, TTRPGs that focus on worldbuilding from an abstract vantage point). In other words, players had to be able to edit some aspects of their characters rather than playing premade characters. After a preliminary analysis of our initial ludography, we determined that to identify characteristics unique to queer games, we would need to include a game that was not queer. As a point of comparison, we included the game Good Society¹. We discuss Dungeons & Dragons several times throughout the paper due to its popularity as a mainstream TTRPG; however, Good Society is similar to the majority of the games in our ludography in that it is a more narrative and character-based TTRPG (more on this in the findings).

Our final ludography contains seven “queer” TTRPGs and one “non-queer” TTRPG (Table 1). The games we analyzed were all published within the last five years and cover six different publishers. Two games were published by Possum Creek Games and two by Buried Without Ceremony. Lichcraft defines the tone very well for most of the games in its description as “tongue-in-cheek, satirical, super queer, and intimate.” All of the games had a fantasy element, but there was a range in the type of fantasy. More specific prescribed genres include horror, mystery, and romance. All games but one were made for more than one player, with Wanderhome having the option of solo play. Seven out of eight say that sessions should take 3+ hours. Sessions widely varied from one-shots (i.e., games played in one session) like Alice is Missing to multi-session games.

We performed a content analysis using queer and feminist theory to analyze the game guidebooks. In our analysis we used both inductive coding (i.e., bottom-up, open-ended coding) as well as deductive coding (i.e., coding for a predefined set of theories and themes) [5, 34]. For the deductive analysis, we started out with some possible categories related to theories of gender and sexuality represented in the games, and then refined the categories and the coding scheme as we analyzed the games. In our first round of coding, we collected PDF guidebooks of the TTRPGs and put basic information about them into a spreadsheet. This information included:

• Genre (e.g., Romance, Horror)
  
• Tone (e.g., Serious, Funny, Satire)
  
• Publication Year
  
• Typical Number of Players
  
• Expected length of play (sessions and session duration)
  
• Whether there is a GM or Not
  
• Source of Where the Game was found (Website, Podcast, Social Network)
  
• Customize or Creating Characters
  

Information was mostly gathered from guidebooks at this stage but we also used the games’ official websites when information was unclear. After coding some games and discussing them within the lab, we added publisher and system to the information we were tracking and focused less on the customizing vs creating category, as it did not provide any compelling insights. We did this because we wanted to make sure we were representing different systems and publishers. We decided not to track the source because the games came from either queer TTRPG game lists or our own prior knowledge.

In the next iteration of the codebook, the first and second author dove deeper into half of the games in the ludography each. The first and second author analyzed Monsterhearts 2 in order to ensure consistent use of the coding scheme. Before reading any of the guidebooks, we created rough categories to guide our analysis. These categories were collaboration, setting, rules, mechanics, NPCs, flexibility, safety, facilitation of themes, and demographics included in the character sheets (and whether they influenced the mechanics or the story being told). At this stage, we were primarily interested in the mechanics of character creation and aspects of the game that could impact character creation. During iterative rounds of analysis, we added a category to track each game's relationship to queer theory as we started to notice patterns surrounding queerness in the game texts.

The character sheets varied between games and the categories varied accordingly, but we aimed to capture demographics, gender, sexuality, species, and abilities.

Several common themes presented themselves across the games. We identified four broad categories: community, liberation, inner struggles, and healing from past trauma. For example, Wanderhome and Dream Askew both revolve around building community. Monsterhearts 2 and Thirsty Sword Lesbians explore inner struggles through the idea of monstrosity and how relationships can be impacted by unexpected changes and societal perceptions. In these settings, you can build a community and relationships that allow your character to heal and win against oppressive forces or be as free as they want to be in an alternate society.

Safety (i.e., player comfort and well-being during and after game sessions) is a fairly recent subject of discussion in the mainstream TTRPG community. TTRPG safety toolkits have been added to platforms like Roll20 and are available for players for free online (Evil Hat Productions). All of the games in our ludography included safety tools. Some of the tools we encountered were:

• Lines and Veils/Palette of Themes: “lines” if the content is excluded entirely from the fiction and “veils” if the content is okay to include “off-screen” only
  
• X-Card: remove an element from the game
  
• Check-In/Pause: say the word pause and player has a chance to state their boundaries or needs
  
• Fading to Black: Letting a scene play out without having to narrate it
  
• Plus-sign: a symbol for gentle corrections
  
• Open door: Players can leave the game whenever they want to
  

These tools often take physical form to remind players to prioritize their comfort. The presence of safety tools in these games may be more attributable to their recent publication than to their association with queerness, since all of them were published within the last five years. Good Society (also published in that time frame) also included some mentions of safety tools. However, the presentation of the tools and narrative of the game guides in our ludography indicate a stronger prioritization of player safety.

The discussion of safety extends beyond the inclusion of the tools to include the structure and narrative of the game guides. While safety tools largely aim to support emotional comfort, some games also support physical comfort by reminding players to take breaks and eat food (which players may forget during long sessions). Many of the queer TTRPGs are transparent about their stances on subjects impacting marginalized groups and player comfort so there is no ambiguity about how players should treat each other. Good Society does not do this, and while it introduces a safety tool it remains ambiguous on topics relevant to the game story. For example, when discussing gender, the game book includes the line “unless agreed otherwise, men will still wear the literal pants, if not the figurative ones.”

In Thirsty Sword Lesbians, by contrast, the game text includes a section “No fascists or bigots allowed” and includes a long list of causes the creators support (Figure 1). This figure also includes the artwork for the beast character joyously destroying a police car with the words “no justice no peace” in the background, further indicating support for intersectional issues.

Other games like Wanderhome and Alice is Missing offer a structured alternative for player comfort by allowing them to alter content that may make them uncomfortable. For example, to respect people that may be uncomfortable with abuse towards women, the game book explicitly tells players the easiest way to remove content related to violence towards Alice. Players with those sensitivities are able to join the game seamlessly rather than having to create or alter existing game content on their own.

Common across the TTRPGs in our ludography is a tendency to candidly explain the allegories for queerness that are present in the games. For example, in Monsterhearts 2, the guidebook states that “the monstrosity of these characters is literal: they are vampires, werewolves, witches, and more. But their monstrosity is also allegorical, standing in for experiences of alienation, shame, queerness, and self-destruction.” Rather than letting the allegory speak for itself, the authors leave no room for the queerness of the game to be erased or ignored. In Lichcraft, lichdom is described as an allegory for unrelenting queerness in which the player character will go so far as to become immortal if it means they will eventually receive their gender affirming care. Lichcraft is directly about the injustices of healthcare and the creator states that it reflects their own experience trying to get trans healthcare in Britain. In Sleepaway, the Lindworm is said to represent "the trauma of history, the collective pain of a cruel society, and the violence inflicted upon the marginalized and the vulnerable." While the allegories create some distance between player character experience and player experience in order to roleplay safely and effectively, the frankness of the guidebooks resists the erasure of queerness.

While the guidebooks are deliberate in describing their intentions, they all acknowledge that because the players have such an active role in this genre, it's ultimately their choice whether or not to engage with those intentions. Sleepaway makes its perspective on gender explicit: “Your Character might be a man, sure, but is he more Rusted Blade or Campfire? …Sleepaway cares how your gender shapes you.” The game offers ways of thinking about gender (Figure 2), but at the end of the day, a player may choose to play a cis hetero camper and ignore the queer elements of play. However, they would need to warp or homebrew certain elements of the game to truly reject the inherent queerness (e.g., the gender mechanics as described earlier). In addition to these clear descriptors of the game's core themes, the guidebooks offer increasingly optional and gentle guidance on how to think about and engage with queerness. Other queer TTRPGs prompt characters to think about oppression in their game world and to talk to each other about what they want their story to say about oppression. See this example from Wanderhome: “while you may occasionally notice options that use gendered language, these are chances to either embrace, reject, or ignore the presence of that gender. Journeys, as liminal and complicated environments, are spaces for queer self-reflection.” In Thirsty Sword Lesbians,while the provided settings have no base in oppression, players can choose toxic powers for their player characters to go up against.

None of the queer games in our ludography are combat-based, meaning that physical violence is not a central game mechanic. This has a downstream impact on the way characters are created in queer games; rather than mechanizing their bodies and their physical abilities, instructions for creating characters focus on emotions, relationships with player and non-player characters, and inner conflicts.

We found three main types of character creation in queer TTRPGs. Player characters are defined by: 1) a difference in ability, 2) different interpersonal relationships, and/or 3) central conflict. For example, in Thirsty Sword Lesbians, players are asked to choose a “skin” (similar to an ability class, defining possible moves characters can make), an identity (name, eyes, looks, and origin), and a backstory (their initial relationships) (Figure 3). While “fighting” is something players can do in Thirsty Sword Lesbians (for example, the “Frightened” condition impacts the character's fighting ability (Figure 3)), it is not central to the way characters are developed or evolved.

In Alice is Missing, players are asked to choose a character who is defined by their relationship with Alice (e.g., Alice's sibling, Alice's secret girlfriend) and are invited to invent some background information and a secret based on a pre-written prompt (Figure 4). Players can determine and/or alter anything about the character's identity and description. In these examples from Alice in Missing and Thirsty Sword Lesbians, identity (in reference to gender and sexuality) and looks have no mechanical impact on what the player character is able to do; instead, mechanics are influenced by the way previous relationships or experiences impact the character's interaction with the world.

Collaboration was also a significant element of character creation in the games. In some cases, the player simply asks the other players some questions to define relationships. In others, collaboration is used to determine various qualities about the characters. For example, in Dream Askew, each player asks the person on their left a question that helps define a feature of their character.

Queer TTPRGs allow players to make characters that embody queer understandings of gender and sexuality. However, each game has a different queer lens and therefore presents gender and sexuality in a different way. This section will examine how these games support players in exploring gender and sexuality through character creation.

One thing that is particularly salient in the queer TTRPGs is that they are often for and about queer people. The primary difference between queer TTRPGs and non-queer TTRPGs is that they have a relationship to queerness built into their narratives, mechanics, and characters so no guesswork is necessary about where the game stands in its relationship to queerness. Games like Good Society that invite you to “be whoever you want” lack clear stories about what gender and sexuality mean. Often, the reason is that queer TTRPGs, made by queer people, naturally weave queer allegories into their storytelling. For example, in Monsterhearts 2 and Thirsty Sword Lesbians, the flexibility of sexual orientation makes a clear statement regarding the fluidity of sex and sexuality. Even if players do not intend to play the game queerly, the game mechanics carry players past the idea that sexuality is rigid or chosen. Games like Sleepaway and Dream Askew challenge binary definitions of gender by allowing player characters to identify as things like “robin” or “void”. Players with a conception that gender exists on a binary from woman to man are challenged to think of gender as a constructed performance. Gender is not what makes a character unique in any of these games; what makes them unique is their role within the group and their emotions. Most identity elements impact the story of the game, which allows a lot of character freedom, but the game manuals still provide a structure for characters to explore gender and sexuality. This means queer players don't have to do additional work to have player characters with diverse stories. This ease of queer play makes these a good platform for exploring different aspects of queer identities.

Often, these games contain allegories that allow players to interact with queerness and explore its boundaries and implications in a way that may not be possible, or easy, in real life. In Monsterhearts 2, the monstrosity of the player characters is an allegory for queerness. The game text states that “part of your agenda is keeping the story feral, and that means letting your character's sexuality emerge in all of its confusing and unexpected glory.” In the section on queer content, the text advises players to “explore what it means to be betrayed by your body, whether it's becoming a flesh-eating monster that stalks the night, or being trans and experiencing the wrong puberty, or both.” The section on Belonging and Difference draws a parallel between characters struggling to belong because of their monstrosity and people struggling to belong for other reasons, identifying queerness as the obvious analog. The game provides a clear vehicle for queer people to explore an aspect of themselves in the game's narrative and the game mechanics support this.

The queer TTRPGs we analyzed directly communicate with otherness. Otherness can be queerness, but it is also something experienced by other marginalized groups. Games like D&D often exist in a fantasy setting; these settings are frequently based on the oppressive structures that exist in the real world (Fine 2002). Historically, in games like D&D, there have been issues with operationalizing identifiers. For example, choosing a “female” gender would make a character weaker but more charismatic through beauty (D&D 2nd Edition). In many of the queer TTRPGs, the character backstories are often allegories for queerness and marginalization in general, so characters are direct reflections of real queer people and their struggles. In these games, the authors are explicit about their views on marginalization as well which clearly defines the culture of play. A problem that we often see in TTRPGs is game creators creating a game world that reflects the marginalization of the real world. For example, researchers have often critiqued how character race (often represented by species) becomes a direct reflection of our real-world problems with race [4, 18, 20]. Queer TTRPGs provide structure for dealing with these realities and often confront how the play world reflects our real world.

We found that our comparison game Good Society did not provide this structure. In Good Society, as in many TTRPGs, players are told that they can do whatever they want in the game; however, a commitment to historical accuracy or staying true to the source material presented with the game restricts the freedom it provides for the players. For example, in Good Society the game text provides ways to be more historically accurate or faithful to the source material by choosing a patriarchal system; otherwise, players can choose “no historical accuracy” or “reverse historical accuracy”. In order for the game to be “historically accurate,”it must to a certain extent be played within the confines of a gender binary. The game mechanics also center around reputation, scandal, and rumor, which in a “historically accurate” setting automatically disadvantages queerness. As a person of color, this also impacts how comfortable I may be with playing a non-White race. The game text allows characters to be any race because they assert that Jane Austen's work does not confront race. While the aim here is to respect the source material, racism is a large part of this historical background. If characters of other races are not mentioned in the writing, that itself is a statement that these people do not matter enough to be the main focus. In the book, reputation and scandal are highly tied to facets of identity like race, gender, sexuality, and status, which makes it hard to disconnect those things from real-life oppressive structures. This differs from the other games in our ludography in that it remains ambiguous rather than providing the structure that the queer TTRPGs provide to confront similar systems of oppression.

Our analysis suggests that queer-friendly games are more focused on storytelling than combat. These two elements of TTRPGs are not mutually exclusive, but many games favor one or the other. Many of the mechanics in the games we analyzed are tied to narrative elements, such as the strings representing relationships between characters in Monsterhearts 2 and Thirsty Sword Lesbians. The translation of narrative structure into mechanical structure provides a window into the underlying inferences about the queer experience, and the contrasting allegorical structures in different games allow players to explore different perspectives on queerness.

One example of this in Monsterhearts 2 is “The Darkest Self,” which is a mechanical and narrative state that a player can enter as a result of various triggers in-game. A character's Darkest Self is “no longer conflicted about who they really are - they have embraced real, overt monstrosity”. Each type of character in the game has its own version of the Darkest Self corresponding to a type of monstrosity (e.g. violence for the werewolf, flesh-eating for the ghoul, etc), but all of them are characterized by the character entertaining their “suppressed wants”. A player using this game to explore queerness might experience this aspect of the game as a representation of how it might feel to break under the pressure of secrecy and oppression, to lean into bigoted misrepresentations of queerness, or otherwise embrace the darker aspects of queer life.

Sometimes the narrative-mechanical structure is less allegorical. Monsterhearts 2 contains a “Turn Someone On” move, which the text says “leave[s] desire and arousal as contested terrain during play.” Players are not in control of what turns them on, although they are in control of how they react. The avenue for queer exploration here is obvious—players experience a lack of control over their fictional sexual orientation that mirrors their lack of control over their real sexual orientation.

Character creation in Monsterhearts 2 is rooted in the primary allegory of the game, with each class (or “skin”) based on a different paranormal creature that can also be read as a particular angle on queerness or response to oppression. For example, the Fae seeks security in promises and becomes obsessive about it at their darkest, seeking vengeance when promises are broken. Sex for the Fae is fraught with emotional power—the Fae always gains a promise or two strings from someone they sleep with. The Ghost, on the other hand, “has experienced intense trauma, and now seeks validation and intimacy,” but is “without social power.” The Ghost's moves allow them to be emotional support for other players at their own expense, and they become invisible at their darkest, hiding while also badly wanting to be acknowledged. The Hollow is desperately seeking an identity, will cling to anything that feels like a sense of self, and feels like their body is a prison. The Infernal is essentially trapped in an unhealthy relationship with a Dark Power. The choice of which character to play is not just about stats and modifiers; it's a choice between various stories about being different, conflicted, and marginalized.

While the structure of Monsterhearts 2 primarily reflects the secrecy and lack of control associated with the queer experience, Wanderhome is about found family and belonging. The world of Wanderhome is filled with people who are “fundamentally good.” The characters have recently experienced a war, but crucially, it is over. Wanderhome is a game of communal healing from a difficult past, rather than experiencing a difficult present. As a result, the types of characters in Wanderhome (called “playbooks”) are differentiated by their relationship to their community and the emotional support they can provide to others.

All the games we studied were published recently so some of the things we have identified in these games such as the inclusion of safety tools may be impacted by the fact that safety has been a more popular discussion in recent years. Also, these games were sourced using internet searches so the games we selected may be representative of the popularity of these games as well as their explicit queerness. In our ludography, we also had overlapping authors/publishers/systems and while our findings were present in all of the games some games like Wanderhome and Sleepaway may contain similarities due to having the same publisher and using the same system.