Gaming
Keep the Game Going
How Dungeons and Dragons Teaches Democracy
“You approach the windmill squatting on the hill, leaning with age like an old woman just trying to get by as the rain pours down,” I tell the five focused faces looking at me through the computer screen. “What do you do?”
“Is there a door or signs of life?” asks a player.
I say, “Yes, there is a large wooden door and several windows glowing with light.”
Translation: the players have several options. Do they go and look in a window to see who’s inside first? Do they sneak around the back? Do they knock politely? Or do they move on entirely?
“I go up to the door and see if it’s unlocked,” says Myron, the gentle warrior priest.
For the uninitiated, this type of call and response is par for the course in tabletop role-playing games, or TTRPGs. The players describe their characters’ actions. The game master, or GM, renders the scene around the player characters and the reactions of the imaginary world around them.
With the title of “game master” comes a misconception that they control how the story unfolds. After playing TTRPGs for more than five years, I can tell you nothing could be further from the truth.
Nobody really knows what will happen next. What emerges is a form of storytelling where every participant is a co-author.
In a word: democracy, albeit a tiny one.
The adventuring party has been traveling through a dark forest in torrential rain. Signs of witches hang in the trees. The likelihood of danger inside the windmill is high. However, per the rules of the game, they must find shelter soon or risk a mechanical penalty. I describe the dampness of their cloaks, the ache in their feet, as we all collectively imagine standing at the windmill threshold, the door opening with a creak.
“Hello? Is anyone here?” says Myron. “We don’t mean to intrude.”
A woman with a leery smile appears.
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I first began playing Dungeons and Dragons five years ago during the pandemic. Now I play and run games two to four times a week. Between the release of Stranger Things, the popularity of live-streamed games like the Critical Role web series, and the smash success of DnD-adapted video game Baldur’s Gate 3, TTRPGs are riding a cultural high.
The first formally published TTRPG in 1974, Dungeons and Dragons was released as a new iteration of wargames — an invention by Prussian mathematician Johann Christian Ludwig Hellwig. A method still used by the American military today, wargames were exercises meant to simulate the experience of battlefield command and teach military strategy. By the time Dungeons and Dragons was published, wargames had entered the commercial sector as a form of entertainment. Where DnD deviated was that instead of issuing orders to a military unit, players now created and controlled individual characters.
The characters back at the windmill elect to go inside. I play the hags inside, witchy creatures who feast on misery. The coven has no interest in fighting — they’re amused by the travelers who have shown up on their doorstep. The players ask for refuge from the storm. The hags are willing to oblige, but offer a moral dilemma: eat one of our magical pies with god-knows-what-inside, or show yourselves out the door. Deliberations begin.
A writer at Slate in 2008 accused DnD of being “little more than a collective fantasy of massacre,” criticizing design elements of the game that incentivize violence. DnD, as intellectual property owned by Wizards of the Coast, has had its controversies over the years, from wrestling with its wargame origins to addressing the racist, sexist, and hierarchical worldbuilding it inherited from Western genre fantasy. I don’t deny that problematic players and game masters exist — Elon Musk told Wizards of the Coast to “burn in hell” for publishing a critique of the misogyny in earlier rulebooks.
However, my experience has overwhelmingly been an egalitarian, collaborative form of play, evolving far beyond the hobby’s militaristic and exclusionary origins. Each edition of the DnD rulebook marks a change in cultural norms — but Wizards of the Coast is simply catching up to its player base. For example, updates in the 2024 ruleset to the creature mechanics of orcs were intended to address a history of racist tropes. Game masters and players had been playing, challenging, and experimenting with this concept for years. Two of the most visible GMs in the world right now — Brennan Lee Mulligan, an open democratic socialist, and Matthew Mercer, a vocal LGBTQ+ ally whose worlds are saturated with queer characters — are explicit about using the collective storytelling of DnD to imagine something more expansive than the status quo.
Bureaucracy is slow.
While the institution crawls forward, the micro-democracy at the table is already doing the work. Random events are simulated by the unpredictability of a dice roll. The GM arbitrates the rules and facilitates the adventure, but any seasoned GM knows this means more than reciting what happens. The qualities of a good game master are those of a community leader — effective decision-making empowered by player buy-in, agency, and consent.
Player skills aren’t so different from civic responsibilities: show up, be informed, listen, negotiate, contribute, accept outcomes, or eject the GM. The story thrives with mutually respectful, engaged participation and coalition-building to shape the shared world state.
At my table, that looks like a neurodivergent, asexual Seattle mom who likes to dress up to every session learning to cooperate with a twenty-something queer Canadian voice actor who works in a paper mill part-time, an active military Texan father who adores country music, a nerdy hetero Washington software engineer big on tech advances, an introspective non-binary artist whose face we’ve actually never seen, and an Australian man in “the future” with an abiding love of cats and cultural exchange. Strangers who just keep coming together online week after week — learning when to cede and when to roll.
Case in point: I had intended this windmill encounter to be social and non-violent. Then one of the players decided the best course of action was to throw a firebomb at the hags.
In earlier editions of the game, this action would be fairly straightforward: hags are evil, heroes slay them, the end. At our table today, violence isn’t automatically incentivized, and morality isn't so easily defined. The hags defend their home, wipe the floor with the characters, and take their gear. Violence (and hasty unilateral decision-making) was suboptimal, clumsy gameplay that compromised the group’s resources.
The instinct might be to feel annoyed or angry when plans go awry — I still have mixed feelings about certain choices that have happened at my games over the years — but above the game, we’re consciously holding space for both the player’s autonomy and the impact on the group. To keep playing requires taking the long view — and we’d rather keep playing.
As the adventuring party leaves the windmill, I’m reminded that democracy, too, depends on what story we continue to build together. If wargames began as a military strategy exercise, it comforts me to think that TTRPGs are evolving past their imperialistic and competitive origins towards a collaborative, low-risk space to practice moral quandaries, democratic participation, resource sharing, and social identities. While I don’t think nerds are going to save us, I can’t help but look at my little group of international players and feel a sense of pride at our coming together each week. Neither my plans nor the players’ plans were fully realized with the hags, and yet we said good game and moved on. This is the work of democracy too: we gather, we imagine, we strategize, we fail, we go forward — all in the name of keeping the game going.
And if it sounds trite to compare the work of civic participation to the fantasy of DnD, consider the heroic undertaking at hand: the last time modern democracy failed, it all but disappeared for over a thousand years.
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