Tabletop Gaming

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Trans at the Table: Queer Oral Histories of Actual Play Podcast Fandom

Tabletop Gaming

The games in queer games studies has overwhelming referred to video games, where the system and rules that constrain and shape play are out of reach of the average gamer. However, tabletop games have a fundamentally different level of engagement with the game system and rules. Tabletop rules are visible and designed to be understood by a person, not a computer. The system does not instantiate itself on start-up and sustain itself without direct input from the players, as a typical video game does. Instead, tabletop systems require sustained input to instantiate the world and structure of the games. Rules in tabletop games can take a wide variety of forms, focusing on a huge span of topics. On the traditional side, games like Dungeons & Dragons contain rules for combat, specifying the conditions under which player characters are able successfully cast spells, swing axes, or charm non-player characters. Success and failure are decided by the rolls of the dice. On the indie side, games like The Quiet Year, a roleplaying and map-drawing game about rebuilding community by Avery Alder, uses a deck of cards as the main mechanic to ask the players to contribute answers to questions like “There is a disquieting legend about this place. What is it?” or to prompt the introduction of new narrative elements via instructions like “Introduce a mystery at the edge of the map.” No success or fail states are given. Instead, the goal of the game is to tell a compelling story.

Tabletop gaming has recently entered greatly public consciousness, in large part due to the mainstreaming of certain kinds of fandom and fannish activities. Netflix’s Stranger Things (dir. Matt and Ross Duffer, 2016–) uses Dungeons & Dragons as a framing device and set piece, cementing the main characters’ outcast friendship and foreshadowing the show’s dark twists. Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) itself has ridden the wave of nostalgia, and as lockdowns from the COVID-19 pandemic took effect, old and new players flocked to online services for tabletop roleplaying games. Despite the outgrowth of independent games, D&D continues to be a popular gateway to TTRPGs and the public face of the genre. Scholarship on tabletop roleplaying games reflects this, focusing primarily on D&D and games with similar themes, mechanics, and templates of player agency: aspects like dungeon masters (DMs) that arbiter the world of the game and a focus on combat in a fantasy world. Tabletop gaming intersects with fandom on multiple levels: TTRPGs as a fannish activity, where games draw the sorts of people who participate in TV or film fandom, as well as TTRPGs as a fandom space, where players remix and transform the mechanics and premade settings of commercial TTRPGs and design and distribute their own content when what’s commercially available does not suffice.

In line with the intertwining of tabletop roleplaying game culture and fan culture, many studies of tabletop roleplaying games are rooted fan studies. Michael Robert Underwood coins the term “genre farming” to describe the recontextualization process of TTRPGs, in which players draw themes and motifs from a wide variety of shared media referents with original characters. Underwood frames tabletop gaming as a space of fannish reinterpretation (1). He also addresses the layered nature of roleplaying games, describing how participants are “simultaneously actors embodying a character, players rolling dice and consulting character sheets, storytellers working with one another to craft a narrative, and people cracking jokes, eating food, and socializing" (2). The connection between fan studies and roleplaying games continues in two histories of Dungeons & Dragons (3). Both authors frame Dungeons & Dragons as a set of rules, mechanics, and canon with which players can engage as they see fit. Like fan studies, these histories are invested in positioning modern RPG fandom as subcultural and anticorporate—they simply disagree on the starting point.

Some TTRPGs can be described as self-reflexive. Evan Torner defines the self-reflexive TTRPG as “one that, in the written text or play-as-text, renders conscious and unfamiliar these performances and the mechanisms that produce them. They expose the machinery, whilst keeping it running" (4). Self-reflexive TTRPGs draw attention to metatext and extant social relationships and systems. Torner describes how TTRPGs that foster explicit oscillation between stances “…allow players to see human interaction for what it is, and our stories as instrumental means to an end that can be beautiful in their own right" (5). Such self-reflexivity is essential to some of the most profound indie TTRPG work happening today and to the form of actual play podcasts. Many of the games played on Friends at the Table allow for this kind of self-reflexivity; if the reflexivity is not built in, the podcast’s attention to mechanics and form certainly adds it.

Studies of tabletop roleplaying games touch on questions of fandom and creativity, capitalism and politics, and the ability of games to reflect on themselves. Tabletop games provide a fascinating ground for examining questions of queerness in rules, in emergent play, in community, and in player experience. If Edmond Chang concludes that video games can never reach the horizon of queerness (6), perhaps tabletop games and the actual play podcasts that spring from them offer a longer reach.

1. Michael Robert Underwood, “The Friends That Game Together: A Folkloric Expansion of Textual Poaching to Genre Farming for Socialization in Tabletop Role-Playing Games,” Transformative Works and Cultures 2 (March 15, 2009): para. 3.4, https://doi.org/10.3983/twc.2009.087.

2. Underwood, para. 3.13.

3. Rebecca Bryant, “‘Dungeons & Dragons’: The Gamers Are Revolting!,” Transformative Works and Cultures 2 (March 15, 2009), https://doi.org/10.3983/twc.2009.083; Paul Mason, “A History of RPGs: Made by Fans; Played by Fans,” Transformative Works and Cultures 11 (September 15, 2012), https://doi.org/10.3983/twc.2012.0444.

4. Evan Torner, “The Self-Reflexive Tabletop Role-Playing Game,” G|A|M|E The Italian Journal of Game Studies, November 1, 2016, 89, https://doaj.org.

5. Torner, 92.

6. Edmond Y. Chang, “A Game Chooses, a Player Obeys: BioShock, Posthumanism, and the Limits of Queerness,” in Gaming Representation: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Video Games, ed. Jennifer Malkowski and TreaAndrea M. Russworm (Indiana University Press, 2017), 227–44.

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