Dungeons and Dragons and the LGBTQA+ Community

This study focuses on the connection between identity formation, particularly for the LGBTQA+ community, and tabletop roleplaying games (TTRPGs), such as Dungeons & Dragons. The goal of this research is to find whether there is a difference between the experiences of the people that identify as LGBTQA+ compared to those that identify as heterosexual and cis gendered while playing the roles of characters in TTRPG’s. This study was conducted via interviews with ten students on the IMSA campus, all of whom had experience playing TTRPGs. Participants in this research were split into two groups of five each of those within and outside of the LGBTQA+ community. The results of this study are inconclusive, due to the sample size, but there were some trends among those interviewed. While those that identified as straight/cis mostly answered that their gender/sexual identity was unimportant to their experiences playing TTRPGs, participants who identified on the LGBTQA+ spectrum all answered that their gender/sexuality was important to their experiences playing TTRPGs. The most important takeaways are the questions that can be further researched, such as seeing if a larger sample size could provide better results, or if the age group of participants (15-18) affected the answers in a significant manner