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Here is an image: three college students sit sprawled on couches in a dormitory common room. Papers cover the coffee table stationed between them. One of them says, “My name is Always, my gender is predestined, and the looming threat I alone truly understand is that the psychic maelstrom sends wolves to devour us.”
We’re playing a tabletop role-playing game, and the questions being answered in this statement are ones the game has asked directly. From here, it’s a conversation, a mutual give-and-take of collaborative, improvisational storytelling, sometimes wandering away from the narrative entirely and sometimes focusing in on the tiniest detail of a particular scene. There’s a structure to it, but there is no dice rolling, no figurines on a map, no one person with authority over the story.
In any conversation about tabletop roleplay, Dungeons & Dragons is kind of the elephant in the room. If you’ve never played a roleplaying game, it’s likely the one that you’ve heard of; if you have, odds are it’s the one that you’ve played.
Here’s what the current edition of D&D, published in 2014, has to be say about gender:
You don’t need to be confined to binary notions of sex and gender. The elf god Corellon Larethian is often seen as androgynous, for example, and some elves in the multiverse are made in Corellon’s image. You could also play as a female character who presents herself as a man, a...