The Rules for Race: Dungeons & Dragons in the Suburbs

Aaron Trammell, Guest Contributor

I remember reading the Dungeons & Dragons’ Rules Cyclopedia when I was ten years old in elementary school. While the other kids were busy practicing arithmetic and learning basic social studies, I sat with the book under my desk, learning about how nimble a thief had to be to disarm a trap and how strong a warrior had to be if they were going to bend prison bars. I poured over full color maps that seemed just as real as the Mercator map that hung on the wall aside the teacher. I weighed the differences between scale mail and plate mail, halberds and pikes in my head as I considered which tools would be most essential for slaying a hydra.

In rapt curiosity, as I sat reading about the different “classes” characters in this vivid new world, I learned that even in this fantasy world whiteness was as powerful as it was invisible. My ten year old mind believed and internalized what my adult self shudders to read today, “Demihumans [elves, dwarves, and halflings] are more limited in their options than humans are, so the entire race can be represented by a single character class.”(7)  Here it was, in hidden in plain sight, the language and logic of white supremacy—that some “races” are less than human, they can be reduced to a singular and monolithic “species,” and that these races simply have less career “options.” The designers even built in a glass ceiling and determined that no dwarf could rise above level twelve, no elf above tenth, and no halfling above eight. Of course, this all made sense to me at the time: I had read The Hobbit. Thus, the Rules Cyclopedia simply seemed like an encyclopedia, an authoritative text which confirmed that which I already knew—that even in the deepest realms of fantasy humans were central, powerful, and even invisible, marked more by their occupation (fighter, thief, cleric, wizard) than their race.

The invisibility of whiteness works by positing a formula wherein to have race is to be non-white, and to be white is to control the conversation around who is visible and who is not. To this point, I was surrounded by white friends and students in a middle class New Jersey suburb, within which whiteness was an assumed an invisible norm. Here, I rarely saw Blackness reflected back at me through the experiences of my peers. I assumed that we unified in our shared human-ness even though I know now that my friends saw my Blackness far more clearly. So while the teacher explained America’s immigration policy through the metaphor of the melting pot, I absorbed a twisted hidden curriculum from the Cyclopedia that encouraged me to internalize the opportunities granted to an invisible, idealized, and imaginary white hero.

Fig 1 - Illustration of a Black Wizard from Rules Cyclopedia. p. 20.

The illustrations in the Rules Cyclopedia even revealed this hero could be Black as long as they saw themselves as human in a system that classified others within a different species entirely (Figure 1). In other words, by depicting Black humans in the illustrations of the Rules Cyclopedia, the manual itself offered an assimilationist perspective that promised a multicultural inclusivity within a belief system that evinced the most toxic fiction of white supremacy—that some races are fundamentally inferior to an invisible white standard of humanity. The multicultural illustrations of characters from different ethnic backgrounds within the Rules Cyclopedia were clearly more diverse than those in early core sets which only featured white men in their illustrations, yet the rules were still just small iterations on the systems which had already been published. Thus, inclusivity in this context, was inclusion in a game system which reinforces the racist cultural norms of white supremacy and white privilege. But for me, the Black characters illustrated in the Cyclopedia didn’t resonate—they were exotic, prominently featuring a more traditional African garb—identifying with these illustrations meant disidentifying with the culture and icons of my white suburban friends in New Jersey.

Tragically, in this context humanity is the ideology of white supremacy. The rules of Dungeons & Dragons, in other words, show how the game’s multicultural façade is a gateway to white supremacist ideology. By producing an acute sense of hierarchical difference between the different races of the game and the invisible white standard of humanity against which these fantasy races are judged, the game captures players in the logic of racism. I’ve written elsewhere about how fans of the game have used statistical tables to infer how attractive the different races of the game might find one another (from the fair skinned elf who is universally attractive to the dark skinned half-orc who is undesirable), and how the original designers of the game went to great lengths to offer an orientalist vision for adventures in both middle-eastern and east Asian settings. For most of the 1970s, the 1980s, and even 1990s the players and designers of Dungeons & Dragons were engaged in a white supremacist feedback loop which takes for granted and centers the human experience as universal, powerful, attractive, and good, while simultaneously producing an inferior racialized other against which one’s humanity can be judged.

This was all above the mop of curly hair on top of my head. I just knew that I held in my hands an encyclopedia which literally offered a mathematical logic through charts, dice, and tables, through which I could understand the reasons why Gandalf was so much more powerful than Bilbo and the Dwarves in The Hobbit. It showed me the statistical differences between characters of different races, differences which would be mimicked in my favorite games like Rogue, Final Fantasy, Ultima, and more. And, most important of all, it helped me fit in with my small but tight circle of friends, who, saw in it also a set of rules that reinforced the norms of our white suburban worldview. Certainly white supremacy and racism all predate Dungeons & Dragons, but an open question remains: how deeply ingrained are the tropes of Dungeons & Dragons in the hearts and minds of gamers  and designers? And even today as the franchise releases core rulesets such as the anti-racist Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything, which untethers race from statistics (and thus biology), has the damage been done and has the invisible white model of humanity that was invented by Dungeons & Dragons become so popular that it has colonized the hearts and minds of designers in games across all genres?

The Games of Color Column, note from the editor, Edmond Chang:
Welcome to the Gamers with Glasses Games of Color column! The column aims to foreground, highlight, and engage with BIPOC games, gamers, scholars, designers, and artists. Given that games code and encode, render and represent social, cultural, political, even pedagogical norms, we hope to address the problems and possibilities of this medium we enjoy. Once or twice a month, we will think, talk, and play through the ways that games and gaming communities must reckon with race, difference, diversity, and equity.