Dungeon Theory

  I identify as male, with he/him pronouns, a big ole beard, hetero-appearing, with a cross-gender marriage. The little necromancer gnome that I play, she’s a little lady. So, if I want to play her well, how do I do it? If I want her to read as feminine, with a more feminine communication style, language choices, gestures, and performance, how can I best accomplish that to make for a convincing character for my DM and my fellow PCs? Theorist and scholar Deborah Tannen might suggest that I think about the differences between my typically masculine communication style and the style of my female gnome as essentially different cultures of communication. To Tannen, and other subscribers of the theory of Genderlect Styles , male and female communication is perhaps best understood as cross-cultural communication. (“Genderlect” is wordplay based on a linguistic dialect.) The gender differences Tannen observed in her studies pointed her toward very early socialization of masculine and fe...

  Imagine you’re the leader of a mid-sized fantasy town. It has a central market and church square where most of the town’s gathering takes place. A series of reports have reached your desk about blighted crops in the immediate vicinity. In your daily meeting with the town crier, do you ask that he:  a) make no mention of blight b) mention that scattered reports have come in, but that evidence is questionable. Folks should remain calm. c) confirm blight reports and encourage customers to stock up on food (especially from the stalls who are current on their taxes) d) direct folks to the band of performers who will take stage later tonight Congratulations, no matter what you chose, you’re an agenda-setter. Or, at least, you’re attempting to be. Agenda-setting theory concerns itself with the power and manner in which media shape public conversations and sentiments. We can’t possibly be expected to know what’s going on with everything in the whole world, or even our whole town. T...

  Let’s hope that your D&D world is more violent than your real world. Let’s hope that you have many more opportunities to hack, slash, burn, bash, banish, crush, chill, dismember, electrocute, and eviscerate the baddies in your roleplay game than you ever have in your day-to-day real life. The modern world around you at school, work and at home hopefully bears only a passing resemblance to the fantasy realm of mythic monsters, wilderness exploration, and medieval intrigue that your dungeonmaster has dreamed up for you. But, is it possible that, if you were to spend hour after hour, day after day immersed in roleplay fantasy realms that you would begin to think the real world is slightly more like that D&D world than would someone who spent their free time watching, say, baseball and sports news? Could heavy roleplay gaming cultivate in you a perception of a world more akin to Baldur’s Gate, Neverwinter, and the Tribor Trail? To my chagrin, D&D has not become the prim...

  Playing Dungeons and Dragons isn’t a medium. While not media itself, there is a long list of media about roleplay gaming: actual play podcasts, documentary and dramatic films, and even a short-lived Dungeons and Dragons Saturday morning cartoon . It ran for three seasons from 1983-1985. In this installment of Dungeon Theory, we are concerned not with the effects of media on people, but rather, what people do with the media they choose. To my chagrin at times, my wife doesn’t listen to or watch Critical Role , one of the forms of D&D media I probably spend the most amount of time consuming each week. But, even if she did, this week’s theory would draw our attention to the likelihood that we would both be consuming that media for different reasons. Because of that, we’d likely get something different out of that consumption. We’d be using the program for different purposes and, therefore, gaining different pleasures from it.  Different uses. Different gratifications. Uses ...