Can We Read A Tabletop RPG As A Text About Nature?  

In Video Games As Environmental Texts, Alenda Chang suggests a framework for “reading”  video games as texts which teach and reveal our beliefs about nature. Chang argues that “almost by  definition, all computer and console games are environments” – that is, video games are only playable  because they simulate environments for the player to interact with. She draws on a reading of  Adventure, an early dungeon-crawl style game in which a player uses text-based commands to explore  a fantastical cave in order to argue that even the most low-fi video games create immersive “virtual  realities” and represent fictional “natural” worlds. 

However, Chang also notes that even when video games use rich visuals to immersively depict  natural environments, many games’ mechanics depict nature superficially, and as secondary to human  actions: “game designers [tend to treat] game environments as mere scenery…rather than attempting to  plumb their biogeographical complexity.” Furthermore, video games often fall into a limited set of  extractivist tropes, rewarding players for exploiting natural resources, and eliding the ecological  consequences of these actions. In the past ten years, Chang’s paper and following works have kicked  off a flourishing of ecocritical readings of video games and environmentally motivated video game  design, asking what other stories about nature video games could be used to tell.  

Despite their often-cited parallels with video games, there has been relatively little scholarly  work on the topic of Tabletop Role-playing Games as texts about nature. The lineage of Tabletop Role playing Games (henceforth Tabletop RPGs or TTRPGs) is deeply intertwined with that of video games. In fact, the game designers who created some of the earliest text-based-adventure games, like  Adventure in the 1970s and 80s were heavily influenced by early tabletop RPGs like Dungeons &  Dragons. Both early TTRPGs and early video games shared ecological tropes of players crawling  through “twisty little passages” or “Multi-User Dungeons,” discovering monsters and magical artifacts  along the way. Given this relationship, we might expect that much of the environmental study of video games is also applicable to their close cousin, TTRPGs. 

While scholarly analysis of TTRPGs often focuses on player’s experiences of role playing as human-like agents, scholars of TTRPGs recognize that role-playing games simulate  “worlds” or “places”  – or, alternately, though TTRPG scholars rarely use this language, “nature” or  “environments.” Tabletop RPGs may not be “virtual” worlds in the sense of a highly-realistic, highly visual, high-polygon representation of the natural world. Nature in a tabletop RPG is not created  through visual computer graphics, but through verbal descriptions of the world, and occasionally  supplemented by rulebook illustrations, reference pictures, or maps. However, tabletop RPGs  environments are “virtual” in Janet Murray or Marie-Laure Ryan’s broad use of “narrative as virtual  reality” – they create shared imagined environments which players collectively inhabit, interact with,  and manipulate objects within. As Chang reasons in Video Games As Environmental Texts: 

“Edward Castronova suggests that immersion does not spring from verisimilitude but rather  from “selective fidelity” to chosen particulars…realism is never purely the domain of the  visual and that immersion requires little more than the “magic circle” provided by games or  game-like scenarios.”  

Therefore, while TTRPGs are not necessarily visual, the environments they create may feel just  as immersive and real to players as video game worlds do – not too different from a low-graphics video games like Adventure.  

While Tabletop RPGs and video games both simulate environments, a major difference, which  must inform our environmental readings of TTRPGs, is that whereas a video game uses a computer to  simulate the environment, TTRPGs use human players as their game engines. Though a game  designer might encode some details in the game’s rulebook, the same way a video game designer might code them into the mechanics of a simulation, the players of the TTRPG themselves, not a  computer, are the machine that runs that code – “The power to define the game world is allocated to  participants of the game,” Markus Montola writes. A TTRPG’s rules are subjectively enforced  by the human players, rather than rigidly enforced by a nonhuman computer system – “subjective” both in the sense that players are the subjects who “define the game world through personified character  constructs,” and in the sense that rules may be enforced flexibly and selectively, in line with player’s  own beliefs. Aspects of the setting of a TTRPG cannot exist without human awareness of them,  since is only through the players themselves describing these parts of the environment that they come  into being – every rock, river, or tree has to be intentionally placed. Thus, when reading TTRPGs as environmental texts, our analysis should be shaped by an awareness of greater player subjectivity in  the medium – while a rulebook may make one statement about the environment, it is always possible  that the storyworlds players actually construct will make another. And furthermore, players may have  different empathetic or emotional reactions to interacting with an environment simulated by other  players, or interacting as a part of an environmental simulation, than they might have interacting with  an environment simulated by a computer.  

What does it look like to read a TTRPG as an ecological text? In the next section, I attempt an  ecocritical reading of the 5th edition of Dungeons & Dragons (2014), paralleling Chang’s critiques of  the extractivist tropes common to many Triple-A video games. I then go on to detail a variety of  techniques that designers might employ for constructing more environmentally conscious TTRPGs, and catalog several moves towards “green” TTRPGs that independent game designers are  already making.

An Ecological Survey of Dungeons & Dragons 

Mass-market tabletop RPGs, similar to mainstream video games, often depict players in an antagonistic relationship with an environment which they must conquer and mine for resources  in order to advance in the game. Dungeons & Dragons, an RPG in which players level-up by fighting  monsters and “looting” their treasure, is a classic and influential example of these tropes in TTRPGs. In this section, I inquire into what it means to simulate a world mostly composed of “Dungeons”  (hazardous environments to explore) and “Dragons” (dangerous beasts to be conquered).  

I choose to focus on Dungeons & Dragons (also known as D&D) because it is currently the  most widely played TTRPG, and because it has historically played an important role in the  development of North American role-playing games. Whether as satanic panic or cameos in Freaks  and Geeks, D&D’s central role in American popular culture is unrivaled by any other TTRPG – if an American only knows of one TTRPG, chances are, it’s Dungeons & Dragons. D&D has been  an influential force in game design since the 1970s and, with the help of RPG podcasts like The  Adventure Zone or Critical Role, the game’s 5th edition remains popular among Millennial and Gen-Z  audiences.  In the following analysis, I draw on a close reading of the three core rulebooks of Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition – The Player’s Handbook (PH), The Dungeon Master’s Guide  (DMG), and The Monster Manual (MM). While, as previously discussed, these rulebooks do not fully  dictate how players interact with the game, these texts nonetheless constitute the designer’s official  stances on nature, and make up an important part of how players are taught to think about the  environment in their play.  

As in many RPGs, narrative agency over the gameworld in Dungeons & Dragons is split  between “Player Characters” (or PCs) and a “Dungeon Master” (or DM). Following the formula laid  out by Montola in his 2008 comparative analysis of mainstream Tabletop RPGs, PCs in D&D take  actions in the world through anthropomorphic avatars, and whatever “decisive defining power that is  not restricted by character constructs is… given to people participating in game master roles.”. This means, among other things, that the Dungeon Master takes on the responsibility of representing the  natural world. The Introduction to the Player’s Handbook describes the basic flow of play in D&D like  so: “the Dungeon Master is the authority on the campaign and its setting…The DM describes the  environment…[then] the players describe what they want to do.”  The Dungeon Master’s Guide further expands on the DM’s role: “it’s good to be the Dungeon Master! Not only do you get to tell  fantastic stories about heroes, villains, monsters, and magic, but you also get to create the world in  which those stories live.” In addition to representing the natural surroundings of the  campaign such as the landscape and the weather conditions, “the DM plays the roles of monsters and  supporting characters, breathing life into them.”

While the language of the rulebooks underscore the Dungeon Master’s freedom of choice, the  D&D rulebooks also guide and constrain the DM’s choices. The D&D rulebooks prescribe  environments in two ways: flavor text and images, which players are supposed to take as inspiration,  and mechanics, which governs how the environment interacts with the rules of the game. Dungeon  Masters are nudged towards depicting certain sorts of environments by the pictures and descriptions in  the rulebooks. The D&D rulebooks provide example descriptions of environments for DMs to draw on, and a basic cosmology of the D&D universe. Optional supplemental rulebooks such as the Forgotten  Realms, Eberron, or Dark Sun “campaign settings” depict specific details of environments – for  instance, Dark Sun provides special rules sets for representing a desert or jungle biome. Pre-written  D&D adventures may further define environments, down to maps of specific settings. And then,  Dungeon Masters are also constrained in what environments they can depict by what mechanics the  rulebooks provide – what sorts of terrain have what mechanical effects, which stats are assigned to  which creatures. Nonetheless, the Dungeon Master has the ultimate last word in representing the game  environment to the players. They get to decide what suggestions to include or exclude, and what rules  to enforce when.  

While it is easy to confuse D&D’s Dungeon Master with the role of a video game player in a  “god game” like The Sims or Rollercoaster Tycoon, the D&D rulebooks suggest that the DM’s  enjoyment of the game should come not from the thrill of their absolute mastery over the setting, but from the satisfaction of creating an environment for other players to enjoy. While players of video  games such as The Sims or Rollercoaster Tycoon might delight in the godlike power to arbitrarily dictate  the lives of the hapless humans that inhabit them like ants in an ant farm, in D&D, it is  generally considered in poor taste for DMs to create environments that are fun to them, but are not fun  for the players. For instance, the classic D&D joke about the DM announcing “rocks  fall, everyone dies” is funny because the DM is not supposed to play this way. It would be considered  “spoilsport” behavior, against the “invisible rules” of D&D for the DM to delight in using the  environment for their own enjoyment at the expense of the player characters – whereas it is much more  acceptable for players to delight in using their characters as avatars to gleefully destroy aspects of the  environment the DM creates. The other side of the coin being the long running D&D joke about players always killing plot central NPCs and derailing the DMs plans, which is funny precisely for the opposite reason as the “rocks fall” joke – that players do play this way. While D&D players often do become  emotionally attached to the characters they play, it is considered more unusual for DMs to feel  significant “bleed” from playing “as” the environment. The rulebook, and social norms around the  game specify that the DM’s role is to craft a world for players to interact with, not to try and experience what it is like to role-play as a monster or a mountain. Montola’s  phrasing of the GM and player roles, which define the GM’s territory as anything “not restricted by character constructs” is telling – rather  than defining the DM’s territory, and thus, the environment, positively, D&D defines the environment  as a negative space. Like the scrolling backgrounds of Super Mario, nature in D&D is supposed to  frame the character’s story like a theatrical set, to step back and let them take the spotlight. The D&D rulebooks encourage DMs to create environments which exist primarily for the other players’ pleasure.  

What presentation of nature do the designers of Dungeons & Dragons expect players to delight in? Though D&D does not explicitly depict homesteaders, covered wagons, or  cowboys, the game’s rulebooks often frame the relationship between players and the environment in a  “frontier” narrative of exploration and conquest. The DMG states as a “core  assumption” of the D&D world that “much of the world is untamed” – a phrasing that implies both  a romanticization of an “untamed” wilderness and a manifest destiny calling the players to “tame” it.  In Dungeons & Dragons, players play “adventurers” who venture into a natural landscape, full of  fearsome monsters and abundant natural resources – the Dungeons & Dragons rulebook again and  again stresses “exploration” as one of the main selling-points of the game. Like tourists on a fantastical  safari, Dungeons & Dragons characters are mostly meant to “explore” the diverse and exotic species  that inhabit the fantasy world by killing them. As in Nardi’s critique of fantasy video games like World  of Warcraft, D&D promises an escapist narrative in which people from a modern, industrial society can travel to a virtual, de-technologized, natural landscape, and test their mettle against the “untamed”  environment and its creatures, earning trophies and points for exerting mastery over them. 

Most of the mechanics that do heavy lifting in defining the world of D&D are primarily useful  for putting players in direct conflict with nature. Players are encouraged to fight natural creatures they  encounter because they gain levels and treasure from defeating these creatures. And nature, playing its  part, is in turn hostile to players. “The wilderness can be just as dangerous as any dungeon,” warns the  Monster Manual. In D&D, there is actually no classification for a non-human  being, other than “monster” – the stats for all creatures are indiscriminately listed in the Monster Manual, which describes itself on the cover as “a menagerie of deadly monsters.” “Harmless” natural  creatures like toads and cats appear in an appendix tacked on at the end of the Monster Manual – the  main attraction of the rulebook is hostile or “evil” creatures designed for players to fight. And even  benign creatures like housecats and dolphins are defined in the Monster Manual by a “challenge rating” – a level indicating how hard a creature would be to fight, and how many experience points a player  would gain for killing it. The same implicit antagonism is represented in D&D’s depiction of the  inanimate natural world too. Dungeon Master’s Guide rarely provides rules for representing the  positive effects of a beautiful landscape or clean source of water, but it does provide rules representing  the negative effects of extreme weather, toxic mold, or impassable terrain.  

The rulebooks of Dungeons & Dragons consistently encourage players to think of the creatures  that inhabit their fantasy world as a natural resource for exploitation. Mechanics representing animals  appear in three places in the Dungeons & Dragons core rulebooks: in the items section (as property), in the player class abilities section (as special abilities related to pets, familiars, or animal companions),  and in the Monster Manual (as beasts). In each case, creatures are defined through their usefulness to  humans: as equipment that can perform tasks, as companions who can provide stat bonuses, and as  monsters that can be killed for treasure and experience points. D&D players often forget about or  intentionally choose not to keep track of the presence of their animal companions or pack animals,  when it’s not convenient to the plot (Figure 1). Even in cases where D&D seems to nod towards a more symbiotic relationship between players and nature – for instance, the Druid class, who are are expected  to act as magical stewards of nature – the mechanics still primarily define animals through their utility  to human-like agents. Spells with names like “animal friendship” or “commune with nature” have  mechanical effects only stated in terms of what stat bonuses they can convey to the druid, how they can coerce animals to work for the caster…rarely in terms of what the caster can do for the environment. 

Nature in Dungeons & Dragons is meant to shape itself around human narratives. To use  Nicholas Mizer’s words, D&D is often prioritizes “bending [nature] to meet [player’s] goals” rather  than “cultivating the concreteness of the natural world.” The DM’s job defined in the Dungeon  Master’s Guide is to “plac[e] monsters, traps, and treasures for the player characters…improvis[e]  when the adventurers do something or go somewhere unexpected…[and] create a campaign world that  revolves around their actions and decisions.” That is to say, nature should literally re-form  itself depending on what players want to do and where they want to go. Even ecology should be thrown out the window in the name of player enjoyment: “regardless of which environment a monster  traditionally calls home, you can place it wherever you want….it’s fun to surprise players.”  When ecological realism is to be maintained, it is to make the world comprehensible to players, rather  than for the sake of realism itself: “an inhabited dungeon has its own ecosystem…if the dungeon doesn’t have some internal logic to it, players will find it difficult to make reasonable decisions within that  environment.” Even physical space in D&D is literally defined in terms of how anthropic  agents can interact with it – the maps in D&D rulebooks and pre-made adventures, for instance, are divided into squares based on how far a player can travel in one round of play, and objects like rock  walls or doors are assigned “hit points” based on how much “damage” a player would need to do to  break them.  

However, despite the D&D environment’s fluidity and responsiveness to human action, the D&D rulebooks provide very few rules for modeling player’s potentially deleterious effects on the  environments they may trample through. Despite its simulationist rule set for combat, D&D has no  rules describing pollution, deforestation, environmental collapse, or species extinction. While The DMG does provide some guidelines for depicting natural disasters, the game provides no mechanics for modeling long-term climate collapse. No matter how many dragons players slay, there will always be more.  

I don’t mean to say here that D&D in particular is an atypically anti environmentalist RPG, but rather, to illuminate the assumptions about the relationship between humans and the environment which are embedded in D&D, and the many other mass-market TTRPGs which  share similar mechanical foundations. I also don’t mean my analysis as a condemnation. As Chloe Germaine has argued, with regards to ecological horror RPGs, portraying the environment accurately  needn’t be the main job of every escapist fantasy, and, under the right conditions, encountering a hostile environment in a game can be a valuable cathartic processing experience for denizens of the  anthropocene. But I am more interested in what it says about our conceptions of nature as a society  and as a game-playing community when most popular TTRPGs fit into one narrow and  antagonistic set of tropes for representing nature, and games depicting any other sort of environmental  counter-narrative are so scarce. In the next section, I explore a series of games which do take up those  counter narratives, exploring how wide a range of modes of engaging with the environment TTRPGs  are able to facilitate, once we move past the extractivist and anthropocentric assumptions which Chang  (2011) has argued also burden mainstream video games.  

Imagining “Green” Tabletop RPGs 

How can we create tabletop RPGs which promote more caring and ecologically-conscious  understandings of the environment? My aim here is not a comprehensive set of instructions – I leave  the task of actually imagining these games to designers more skilled than me. But in order to help us all get started on this endeavor, I briefly catalog here, using Chang and Parham’s taxonomy of “green”  games, a few ways that game designers are already creating games, that “defamiliarize accustomed  [anthropocentric] modes of control”.

Most of the existing academic work on “green RPGs” focuses on explicitly educational  environmentalist RPGs. Mostly, these games are created by environmentalist organizations, to spread  awareness about environmental issues or teach earth science. Some are designed to be played in  classrooms by children, whereas others are intended to be train policymakers and crisis responders. These games are designed to educate, or sometimes to move players to actually take political action as  a part of gameplay. These games are “green” in the sense that their content is green – they explicitly  focus on the environment and espouse environmentalist attitudes. While these games play an important  educational role, I also ask, what other, more aesthetic environmentalist interventions could Tabletop  RPGs create? How could “green” attitudes be incorporated into more recreational gameplay?

A first step might be to think about games with more ecologically affective, but not explicitly  environmentalist, narratives. Jenna Moran’s games Nobilis(1999) and Glitch (2020)  present one  compelling example. In Nobilis players take on the role of humans entrusted with stewarding a  particular aspect of reality. Rather than sidelining the natural world, these games take place in what  Moran calls an explicitly “animist” world, where player’s magical powers are intimately tied together  with the setting. In Moran’s games, which she has said are influenced by Hayao Miyazaki’s  contemplative, nonviolent, environmentalist films, players level up by coexisting with nature, rather  than conquering it – for instance, in Glitch, players can gain experience points from contemplative  moments like “[seeing] sight of quintessential natural beauty and majesty.” Without ditching the  character-centered, high-action narrative structure of a classic tabletop RPG, Moran’s games are  narratively structured to steer players towards representing a more amiable relationship with nature in  the game world – these games may not come off as “environmentalist” to most players, but they  nonetheless encode more environmental empathy into gameplay.  

We could also consider TTRPGs which encourage players to consider the subjectivities of  natural objects – as Chang might say, which “can give us an insight into what it means to be other-than human.” Worldbuilding games, like Avery Alder’s The Quiet Year (2013) or Caro Ascerion’s i’m sorry did you say street magic (2020) are one way to do this. Rather than pushing the environment to the  background and focusing on human actors, these games make the environment the main focus of play,  asking all players, and not just the Game Master, to take up responsibility for natural forces, terrain, or  geography. Unlike D&D, where representing nature is seen as a non-player role, these games call on all players to to develop an empathetic relationships with the game’s setting and all of its residents.  

We can think about how the TTRPG medium could be used to create “tactical” or “dissonant”  games – that is, thought-experiment games which might startle players into viewing their relationship with the environment in a new way. Caitlynn Belle and Ben Lehman’s The Tragedy of GJ 237b (2017), which tells the  story of human explorers landing on a planet inhabited by a microscopic civilization invisible to them,  is on example. This game de-centers human players – the human players are meant to leave character  sheets, pens, pencils, and dice, in an empty room, behind a shut door. “The game, being played in the  room,” the rulebook tells us, “is about the history, societies and cultures of GJ 237b. It is not something that you can play, or even understand.” The only action that human players can take is to open the  door – when they do, “they are the human explorers that have arrived on GJ 237b [and] the game  immediately ends,” as the microbe civilization is accidentally destroyed by humanity’s intrusion.  Though some might even question if The Tragedy of GJ 237b can properly be called a TTRPG,  just reading the game’s rulebook can unsettle readers’ accustomed anthropocentric notions, and remind  them of human exploration’s dangerous potential for even accidental ecological destruction.  

Finally, it is crucial to not discount the possibly for players, rather than game designers, to create  “green” modes of play. Like the players described by Bo Ruberg who “queer” even overtly  homophobic games by using them as tools to tell queer stories, players can construct ecologically conscious gameplay, even using colonialist or extractivist rulebooks. D&D already has a strong history  of players house-ruling out the game’s racial ideology, penciling in queer characters where no positive representation existed, “house ruling” out mechanics that are deemed too complex, or writing their  own “homebrew” rules supplements. In my time as a D&D player and DM, I have encountered many  players who, despite what the game’s rulebooks say, would rather befriend monsters than slaughter  them, write plots about ecological conservation, or take time to narrate stopping to smell the flowers.  Of course, players may also invent less-ecologically conscious models of play – such as the infamous  “munchkin” players who indiscriminately kill NPCs, trampling over the gameworld and the DM’s plans  in order to maximally exploit the game environment and level up as quickly as possible. The point  stands though, that while many RPG rulebooks bring colonialist or extractivist views to the table, these  rulebooks are not the be-all and end-all of how nature is represented in actual play – players, as well as  game designers, can imagine new ways of relating to the environment.  

I don’t intend this paper to be a comprehensive list of existing green tabletop RPGs, or methods of play. But I do hope that future scholars and game designers alike will take note that the frameworks which Chang and Parham provide for thinking about “green games” or “games as environmental texts” can,  with a bit of modification, be extended to the analysis and criticism of TTRPGs. Let us go on  thinking: What narratives about nature can we read in TTRPGs? What possibilities for  understanding nature are opened up by a medium where every detail of nature is represented through  collaborative human description and re-enactment? And how can we use the power of co-created oral  virtual realities in tabletop gaming to cultivate greater empathy for and understanding of the  environment?  

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 Featured Image is Forest Floor Fantasy Hat by Hauke Musicaloris @ Flicker CC BY 2.0

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Mehitabel Glenhaber is a comic artist, RPG designer, and independent scholar based in Somerville, Massachusetts. They are the author and artist of the environmentalist comic strip Greenhouse Affect, and upcoming comics collection Carbon Fingerprints (from Stelliform Press). Their work as a Tabletop RPG and LARP writer can be found at @hittiebelle on itch.io.