Necromancer Pride Flag

 Like me, you may be part of a gaming group, but that’s not all you are. You’re part of a whole host of co-cultures. You’re part of a group of people who share a gender identity, an ethnic identity, perhaps a religious or spiritual identity. Crucially for understanding Social Identity Theory are the positive and negative feelings you have about those group memberships. Frequently, our social groups are great sources of our pride and self-esteem. They provide a sense of belonging and place in the larger social world. According to Henri Tajfel, most people have an inherent desire to identify as part of some group (e.g., an adventuring party, a sports team fan, a citizen of Borovia, a woman) and to distinguish oneself from other groups. 

According to Social Identity Theory, I’m likely to think a few things about my adventuring party are true: 1) since we’re part of the same group, we’re all pretty similar.  2) other groups are fairly different from us. This makes our adventuring party (or baseball team, or gender) our “in-group” and everyone else an “out-group”. We may even be willing to sacrifice a greater level of reward for our in-group if it means that we maintain perceived superiority over out-groups. Consequently, our desire to feel good about our own groups can naturally lead to developing more negative beliefs about out-goups, resulting in prejudice and discrimination. 

When a roleplaying adventure begins, one task the players and dungeonmaster often have is establishing the party as a unit working together. Are the players all stuck on the same ship? Are they mercenaries hired for a job? Are they family members on their way to a Feywild reunion? Regardless of the reason, the goal at this stage is one of categorization. Players need to categorize themselves as at least similar enough to cooperate in facing the challenges ahead of them. Once we recognize ourselves as members of a particular category, we know better which behaviors are appropriate for that group. Knowing how to behave helps us know how best to maintain belonging in that group. Being a member of one group (e.g., halflings, mercenaries, bards, or baseball players) doesn’t exclude us from all the other groups of which we’re a part. 

Once individual players have been socially categorized, the second mental process is one of identification. Players adopt a shared identity with members of the same group. In my current campaign, my character had grown up without any other members of her race. On an island alone, she was the only gnome. After the campaign started, in one of the first tavern scenes, she encountered another gnome. As a player, I was immediately intrigued, and as my character I thought “Finally, someone like me!” I wanted to know all about this new gnome. What was her name? What was she like? I had a lot of emotions tied up in that mysterious new gnome NPC. Much like Miranda in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, upon seeing another young person, I was enthralled by the presence of a wondrous thing so much like me. Perhaps in traveling abroad, moving to a new city, or going to college in a far-away state, you’ve felt the longing for someone like you, and feeling the joy at finding other members of your group.(That gnome NPC turned out to be a bit of a jerk, by the way.)

The third, and final, mental process in social identity formation is that of social comparison. After we have categorized and identified, we tend to compare. If our self-esteem is tied in with our group membership, then we want our group to compare favorably to others. We want our adventuring party to be the best, our baseball team to win the pennant, our country to thrive and have better education, healthcare, and infrastructure than our neighbors. In the real world, this social comparison can have dire consequences for individuals, groups, and nations. At the gaming table, it can be a powerful gamemater’s tool for generating player involvement, motivation, and competition. 

For example, perhaps your adventuring party has just come into town on the trail of a high-reward bounty. How would they respond to know that another group (or two) is also on the trail of the same quarry? What if they were to learn the other party has a sterling, unimpeached reputation for bounty-hunting? Rivalry requires groups to compete in order to maintain their sense of pride and group-esteem. A lot of fun can be developed by creating rivalries and competitions for scarce resources (like bounties) but also from the potential conflict of group identity.

So far I have considered group identification as solely a source of pride and esteem. However, both in the real world and in your fantasy realms such pride can be constrained by social prejudices, ethnocentrism, and racism. In a fantasy world where certain arcane practitioners are suspicious, discriminated against, or banned, it might be hard to openly identify as the proud necromancer you are. As a result, members of a discriminated minority (e.g., necromancers) might take up a number of social strategies to respond to that discrimination. 

The first is termed social mobility. This is, in essence, abandoning one social group in order to adopt another. If I am a necromancer with little love for the practice (or low social identification with other necromancers), and it’s relatively easy for me to develop my other arcane skills, and therefore “pass” as an abjuration or evocation wizard, I might find that strategy socially beneficial.

However, if abandoning my much-beloved necromancy is something I could never imagine doing, and hiding it also feels shameful or disingenuous, I could adopt a strategy of social change. In this response to discrimination, I would perhaps organize every corpse-raising, dead-calling, soul-caging practitioner of the necromantic arts I could find to challenge our status in the world. I could make strides to elevate our position in the social world, raising our in-group in the eyes of others. Perhaps we would make a necromancy pride flag, stage an all-necromancers boycott of prejudiced businesses, or refuse to use any of our life-giving spells until we were no longer treated as second-class casters. Instead of abandoning our group membership as necromancers, we would attempt to make that identity seen as more valuable and desirable. 

Third, if neither of these extreme responses appeals, socially creative strategies take a more middle-group approach. The necromancers might say, “Sure, we’re not as well-respected as evocation wizards, but at least we’re not warlocks!” They might also find methods of positive comparison within themselves, “Working with dead bodies is still better than praying for some aloof goddess to step in and help us. We may have rotting meat as the components of our spells, but it’s better than having to serve some deity. We’re our own masters.” This strategy explains why some marginalized groups compete with one another, rather than the dominant group.

Both in-game and at your gaming table, group membership is keenly important to characters and players. We naturally desire to hold a positive self-concept and that can spur on prejudices and discrimination. Such practices help us to feel distinctive in the selective process of finding positive traits of our in-groups.