Throw them in Dice Jail!

I had never heard of “dice jail” before Critical Role.  Roll a few Natural 1s, and those dice are banished to the “dice jail”. “Dice jail” is where dice which roll low go to gather dust and not cause any more harm. I’m generally not one for believing in luck. But, I’ve seen players perform all kinds of luck rituals: repeatedly rolling dice before the game starts to see which are “rolling well” tonight, making sure their dice (when not being used) are set “20 up” so that they get the feel of landing well, not using others’ dice (and especially not using the DM’s dice for player rolls). 

If an anthropologist were to observe your gaming table, what could they learn about the culture of your group from the behaviors, the repeated phrases, and the rituals around your D&D game? Someone like Clifford Geertz would likely find a lot of interesting meaning, shared understanding, and sense-making as part of your game. He would approach the table as a culture to understand, where the communication taking place at the table (and in the messages exchanged between sessions) helps to create the taken-for-granted aspects of your particular game’s culture. 

According to Cultural Approach (which initially began with a Western fascination with Japanese corporate culture), your culture constitutes your organization (or your gaming table). As opposed to more scientific, quantitative theories of communication, Cultural Approach is distinctly interpretive in its methodology. (Think Jane Goodall among her chimpanzees. Your DM and fellow players are the chimps. Heck, you’re a chimp.) There is no high culture, no low culture, only thickly described co-created culture. The participant-observer scholars who engage in this type of research engage in a time-consuming, five-part practice.

First, accurately describe the conversations, actions and contexts in which they occur.  What kinds of conversations go on over text to schedule a next session? How do the participants recap previous sessions? Who takes notes? How are players and DM arranged? What does the table set-up look like?

Second, record the feelings and ideas shared within the web of interpersonal interactions. Do the players seem antagonistic toward the other players and their DM? If so, how can you tell? What is said? How is it said? And, what is communicated by those messages?

Third, once you have a fairly objective set of data containing the conversations, relationships, feelings, and thoughts, you can begin to generate hypotheses as to the participants’ motivations, intentions, goals. Why does every session begin with the DM asking everyone to put their phones on silent? Why do those two players always sit beside one another? They must be behaving in that way for X reason, and the evidence I have for that hypothesis is A, B, and C.

Fourth, the Cultural Approach researcher must effectively communicate their analysis to others. The descriptions are typically narrative, immersive, detailed, and provide the reader with a sense of “being there”. The picture gets painted so that a reader might feel like they, themselves, have played the game, sat at the table, and rolled their Nat20.

The final task of the Cultural Approach ethnographer is to provide their reader with interpretation of the events. Within the culture of the table, the larger cultural context of Dungeons & Dragons, and within the even wider culture of Table-Top Roleplaying Games, what do these behaviors mean? Culture layers upon culture and interweave together. While I had never heard of “dice jail” before Critical Role, it’s familiar enough to me now to get commented upon at my tables, and sometimes enjoyed as an element of culture drawn from the wider community of D&D. 

Meanings intertwine and underlie what we see of people’s behaviors. Ethnographers prefer methodological interpretation and tend to eschew statistical analyses. And keenly, for people interested in studying D&D as culture, imaginative language choices, nonverbal rituals, and stories are often central to Cultural Approach. Metaphors and stories are taken very seriously, as well as figurative and descriptive communication. 

As Cultural Approach is often considered in studies of organizations, rather than small groups, research has frequently directed its attention to stories organizations tell about themselves. Michael Pacanowsky writes of three types of organizational stories. Corporate stories communicate (and attempt to reinforce) ideals. Personal stories define how they would like to be seen (within the group/organization). Last, collegial stories anecdotally communicate about how things really work.

I remember working on a short course on D&D History once and hunting credible information about the Satanic Panic, Mazes & Monsters, and the tragic story of James Dallas Egbert III. Going to (the publisher of Dungeons & Dragons) Wizards of the Coast, yielded me nothing in this particular quest. At the time it seemed a glaring oversight in the history of the game. Certainly there are many players who have never even heard of these cultural touchpoints, but in an article detailing the game’s history and cultural reception, to me it clanged in its absence. But, according to Cultural Approach, the story WOTC writes about itself is a story meant to reinforce its ideology, policy, and focus.  Naturally, it’s a limited construction. But, to someone who considers himself to be a critical reader (as we all should be), not to include even a mention of this era is an oversight in my judgment.

In one game I used to play, we would begin each session with a shot of liquor and a previous session recap. Low rolls may have even had to take the more foul-tasting shots. This kind of ritual would probably be very interesting to a Cultural Approach scholar studying our group. What did that ritual mean to us? What did it communicate about us? Was it indicative of a focus on drinking more than sober gameplay? Only the party could say for certain.  

And that is a DM tip: the meaning for any given behavior naturally emerges from the players, and is not delivered from on high by you. Shared meanings can’t be consciously engineered. Culture grown in organizations becomes difficult to change, less so with smaller groups. Finally, there remains a significant ethical consideration (and reminder) when it comes to the Cultural Approach study of organizations: strive to understand, never to evaluate or judge.