Storytelling and Benevolent Transgression in Dungeons & Dragons

Behind the Material Girls Episode: D&D x Ludology

from Hannah McGregor

A fun fact about me is that I constantly want to be talking about Dungeons & Dragons. 

It wasn’t always this way. In fact, I’d never played D&D until I moved to Vancouver in 2016 and joined one of my pal Marshall’s ongoing campaigns. In Edmonton we were primarily a board game crew; group outings were often to a local board game café, where we would spend hours testing out elaborate new European games like The Beasts of the Field. But I never wanted to talk to people about board games the same way I desperately want to talk to people about D&D. Alas, it’s just not socially acceptable the way talking about prestige television (that I’ve never seen) or Oscar-nominated movies (that I’ve never seen) is socially acceptable, and that is a truth I stoically bear because I have a podcast and I can just make people listen to me talk about D&D on there. And I do!

It wasn’t until I started doing research for our episode on D&D that I began to form a theory about why I want to talk about it so badly (beyond the obvious: I am a huge nerd). The answer, I suspected, had a lot less to do with the lore than it did with the immersiveness of the gameplay. Thinking about gameplay scratched a decades-old itch in the back of my brain: hadn’t I read something about gameplay years ago? 

*Flashback Sound Effect* 

The year was 2010 and I was taking a grad seminar about Digital Textualities taught by digital humanities scholar Susan Brown, and we read something about game scholars being mad when English scholars talked about video games as though they were texts, because the key thing about video games (said game scholars wanted to argue) was the logics of their platforms and gameplay, rather than the surface narratives. It took a significant amount of digging to reverse engineer my vague memories, but eventually it led me to the work of Espen Aarseth, the discipline of game studies, and the (apparently still ongoing) debate about ludology versus narratology (tidily summed up by Greg Costikyan in this article and dismantled by Marcelle and me in this episode). 

Thinking about ludology and D&D in turn led me to the work of Curtis D. Carbonell, who argues in his book Dread Trident: Tabletop Role-Playing Games and the Modern Fantastic that tabletop role-playing games (TTRPGs) are distinct from other kinds of fantasy worlds because of how deeply realized their fantasy worlds must be. Unlike in some kinds of fantasy or sci fi media, where world-building can be less-than-airtight (in Shit, Actually, Lindy West describes the plot holes in Harry Potter as so big you could drive a truck through them), games need to be playable. That means they need to be structured by an internal logic coherent enough to be learned and operationalized by a whole bevy of players. And, unlike in video games, where the game itself might impose restrictions (that door can’t be opened, that character can’t be talked to), in a TTRPG the only limitations are the imagination of the players and the flexibility of the Dungeon Master. 

In recent editions D&D has been leaning further and further into flexibility, abandoning strict and complex rules in favour of collaborative storytelling and encouraging the Dungeon Master (the person who runs the campaign and plays all the non-player characters) to pick and choose between the rules in order to prioritize storytelling and character experience. For a game that has historically been gatekept from more diverse players in part via the structure of elaborate and hard-to-learn rules, this increasing flexibility has radical potential. If we’d had infinite time to talk about D&D, I would have taken us into the scholarship on transgressive play, particularly what Premeet Sidhu and Marcus Carter call “benevolent transgressive play,” which they define as “constructive social play that knowingly challenges player boundaries or game boundaries” in the interest of “challeng[ing] established boundaries or ideas, and critically or creatively explor[ing] alternative understandings and perspectives.” 

My favourite D&D players (YES I HAVE FAVOURITE D&D PLAYERS I TOLD YOU I AM A NERD) are the ones who push the game rules the furthest in the interest of character development and storytelling. For example, you can see what Aabria Iyengar calls the “Rule of Cool” in action here, her straight-to-camera statement that she knows what she’s doing and is breaking the rules on purpose clearly directed at the subset of gamers who use strict adherence to the rules as a gatekeeping mechanism. The clip also shows one of the pleasures of benevolent transgression in action: the players’ negotiated co-construction of the world, worked through via conversation and trust. As Sidhu and Carter summarize: 

D&D is an inherently social, collaborative, communal, and shared game space that is navigated in real-time by both the players and their characters. Players of D&D must be considerate, conscious, and consistently negotiate the trust and expectations of other players to play the game safely. This collaborative process makes benevolent transgressive play more viable, as opposed to malevolent or toxic transgressive play. Rather than challenging player boundaries or game boundaries in a way that is destructive to others, the process of collaborative (re)negotiation allows transgressive play to become constructive. 

I love the idea that by breaking rules together we can collaboratively build something new. Doesn’t that sound kind of like the start of a revolution?

Do You Like to Think About World-Making?

Me too. That’s why I launched a new monthly video podcast called Making Worlds, a show about imagining otherwise. You can hear the trailer here, watch a clip here, and become a Patreon supporter here to get access to the show.

Reading List

Aarseth, Espen. “Computer Game Studies, Year One.” Game Studies 1.1 (2001): n.pag. https://gamestudies.org/0101/editorial.html. 

Carbonell, Curtis D. Dread Trident: Tabletop Role-Playing Games and the Modern Fantastic. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2019. https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv12pntt4 

Costikyan, Greg. “Games, Storytelling, and Breaking the String.” Electronic Book Review 28 Dec 2007: https://electronicbookreview.com/essay/games-storytelling-and-breaking-the-string/. 

McElroy, Griffin. “Here’s how Dungeons & Dragons is changing for its new edition.” Polygon 9 July 2014: https://www.polygon.com/2014/7/9/5882143/roll-for-initiative-understanding-the-next-edition-of-dungeons-dragons. 

Sidhu, Premeet and Marcus Carter. “Benevolent Transgressive Play in Dungeons & Dragons [D&D].” Simulation & Gaming 54.6: 2023. 708-729. https://doi.org/10.1177/10468781231199824.