‘How Do You Want to Do This?’: Dungeons & Dragons as transformative fantasy

French, Emma (2024) ‘How Do You Want to Do This?’: Dungeons & Dragons as transformative fantasy. PhD thesis, University of Glasgow.

Abstract

This thesis examines Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) as a source of transformative fantasy. It explores the processes by which D&D players creatively revise, reimagine, and rebel against the conventions of fantasy that are condensed and handed to them by the D&D game text. Approaching fantasy as both a literary and transmedial phenomenon using Helen Young’s term, ‘fantasy genre-culture’, which places fantasy’s ‘textual practices within a wider set of social processes that include not only Fantasy conventions, but the behaviours of authors and audiences, the ideological arguments that circulate around the texts, and the meaning and location of Fantasy within a political economy’, this thesis argues that D&D is capable of encompassing many of the above aspects of genre-culture. It also allows players to react to these different discursive aspects of fantasy through play. Utilising Jessica Hammer’s framework of primary, secondary, and tertiary authorship in her work ‘Agency and Authority in Role-playing ‘Texts’’, this thesis examines how each of D&D’s author figures – the game designers, the Dungeon Master/Game Master, and the player – interact and respond to fantasy genre-culture, working to preserve and/or contribute new meanings to the communal definitions and conventions of fantasy. I examine examples taken from actual play media, to demonstrate instances where D&D gameplay has either reacted to canonical fantasy texts such as The Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter, or produced revisionist approaches to fantasy’s prevalent textual conventions, such as race. It is often through a direct confrontation with rules – generic convention preserved and reduced down into inflexible game rubric – that a challenge to fantasy’s ‘stereotypical’ mould occurs.

In particular, I argue that the contemporary context of D&D – that is, the advent of D&D actual play as a form of fantasy media, in which D&D games are broadcast and consumed as their own fictional fantasy narratives – means that the texts and meanings produced by DMs and players, as secondary and tertiary authors, have a greater sway over fantasy genre-culture than ever before. These once fannish, amateur, and often private contributions to genre-culture are now public and professional, while often retaining their transformative approach to fantasy. My chapters close-read examples from D&D paratexts and tie-in novels published by Wizards of the Coast, alongside actual play texts such as Critical Role, Dimension 20, and The Black Dice Society.

• Item Type: Thesis (PhD)
• Qualification Level: Doctoral
• Subjects: P Language and Literature > PR English literature
• Colleges/Schools: College of Arts & Humanities > School of Critical Studies > English Literature
• Supervisor's Name: Sangster, Professor Matthew and Barker, Professor Timothy
• Date of Award: 2024
• Depositing User: Theses Team
• Unique ID: glathesis:2024-84805
• Copyright: Copyright of this thesis is held by the author.
• Date Deposited: 18 Dec 2024 16:00
• Last Modified: 20 Dec 2024 10:19
• Thesis DOI: 10.5525/gla.thesis.84805
• URI: https://theses.gla.ac.uk/id/eprint/84805