Roll for “Woke”, Land on Weird: D&D’s LGBT Problem
The Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game has been popular for decades, but the pandemic era took it to new heights. For those not in the know, the game involves one player, the dungeon master, leading other players who each create their own characters to run through a set of medieval and fantasy role-playing adventures. Players can develop characters who are wizards, knights, clerics, thieves, etc., and set about various adventures slaying evil foes, rescuing the innocent, or just looting and pillaging, depending on the tone of the campaign. And every so many years, the game undergoes an official revision, the most recent of which, released in stages over 2024 and 2025, being perhaps the most highly anticipated yet.
Getting clear sales data on the revised game system (known as “OneD&D”) is difficult — the publishers of the game, Hasbro and Wizards of the Coast, don’t appear to release transparent sales numbers — but all indications are that the initial products have been popular sellers. At the same time, the new system has sparked controversy and polarized the role-playing community. Put bluntly, the concern is that the messaging and language around the revised system is too “woke.” Critics argue that the changes seem dedicated to a particular 2020 moment, one that treats young players as emotionally fragile and promotes bizarre stereotypes of LGBT folks as strange, flouncy, and prone to mental illness and temper tantrums.
The controversy has been significant enough to garner widespread coverage from across the media landscape, with the revision coming under pointed criticism from industry insiders, prominent game designers, and fans alike. No less than Elon Musk has weighed in, denouncing OneD&D and even appearing to threaten to buy its parent company Hasbro. The company seems to be leaning into the controversy with Jason Tondro, the D&D project lead, slamming the game’s “grognards” (grumpy old-school players): “I consider those people not worth listening to.” Of course, these debates tend to fall along broader anti-DEI/pro-DEI cultural lines, where team politics take over and the two camps talk at or past one another.
If this whole debate feels very 2020 retro, it’s not you. It’s an artifact of the slow publishing process and the historical unluckiness of designing OneD&D during a period in which progressives were ascendant only to finally release it once the “vibes” had shifted. As data from The Economist shows, the prevalence of far-left cultural power rose sharply in the mid-2010s, peaked around 2020-2022, then declined sharply. But unlike other industries, such as movies or television, which can rapidly adjust with the times (see the about-face Disney is making, for instance), OneD&D will be stuck with its anachronistic language and stereotypes for another 10 years or so, given that the game is only updated roughly once a decade.
Source: The Economist.
But what exactly are people objecting to in the revised OneD&D?
The controversies over OneD&D’s cultural style have come in waves. Some relate to race, others to gender, but there is a general sense that this recent iteration has tried much too hard to be “woke.” The most recent backlash emerged after the Dungeon Master’s Guide was released in late 2024. This Guide is more than a rule book, it’s a critical resource designed to help dungeon masters design adventures and manage the game. In the “Limits in Play” section of the revised DM’s Guide, players are encouraged to both fill out a checklist of sensitive topics to avoid and to use cartoonishly exaggerated body signals to stop play whenever those subjects are broached. Players are urged to fill out an included form to report whatever might make them feel “unsafe” (the DM’s Guide’s term). Examples provided include romance, spiders, and mind control (many D&D spells can charm others), as well as “sharing dice” at the gaming table.
Should someone violate these norms by, say, mentioning spiders, players are encouraged to indulge in a goofy visual display such as crossing their arms across their chest in a big X. The DM’s Guide also uses language to imply that the triggered person can never be wrong: “The signal shouldn't trigger a debate or discussion: thank the player for being honest about their needs, set the scene right, and move on.” This seems a bit close to the “believe all victims” narrative that emerged in the 2010s.
Of course, there’s nothing wrong with players having adult conversations about any potentially upsetting content in the game. And it’s not unreasonable for players to voice concerns about some limits. For instance, in-game sexual assault, abuse of children, and so forth, may be understandably difficult topics for many players — or just not that fun to play though. Speaking personally, in my many years of playing, situations where players are psychologically uncomfortable with the subject matter of a campaign are extraordinarily rare, but they can technically happen.
But the DM’s Guide takes an approach that appears to be both overly bureaucratic (forms!) and has something of a kindergarten tone to it. Honestly, we should expect most players to bear these “sensitive” topics with some dignity and maturity. For instance, if the mere mention of snakes is traumatic, it might be more productive to seek out effective behavioral therapy than to put bumper guards around life. In this sense, the new Dungeon Master’s Guide is encouraging the kind of “safetyist” avoidance behavior that makes phobias worse. To be fair, discerning the appropriate line between what is clearly objectionable and what is a ridiculous request is a gray area. But figuring this out requires negotiation and compromise, and the DM’s Guide hamstrings Dungeon Masters by telling them never to question any player request and to treat their feelings as sacrosanct.
The whole idea of needing to engage in the kind of body signaling a five-year-old might use rather than open up an adult conversation practically lampoons itself. Inevitably, these scornful satires highlight the degree to which D&D now caters to a highly stereotyped far-left activist who plays at gender nonconformity as a kind of political performance rather than an authentic personal reality.
To the Grognard player, this is the blue-haired they/them who plays the game as if it were genderqueer Barbie, rather than anything recognizably D&D. There’s nothing really wrong with that, aside from the tendency to use accusations of racism/sexism/homophobia/transphobia to bully anyone (including Hasbro) who plays the game differently. But this doesn’t describe the majority of LGBT players, or straight players who want to explore LGBT characters. The Grognard stereotype can itself be overdone and used as a cudgel to bully and browbeat legitimate dissent.
Dungeons & Dragons project lead Tondro’s own words appear to confirm which audience Hasbro had in mind when designing the revised system:
“Early in the book’s development, the marketing team asked me what sort of critiques we should expect and prepare for. And I and the editors agreed the problem was going to be from progressives and people from underrepresented groups who justly took offense at the language of [the original edition of] D&D.”
Other controversies between grognards and left-wing activists erupted over the new 2024 Players’ Handbook (PHB), specifically the artwork. After years of progressive complaints about orcs being depicted as racial minorities, a claim largely discredited via research, the new PHB presented orcs as… stereotypically Mexican. However, these Mexicans came complete with anachronistic fade haircuts, purple hair, and a general fusion of Mexican ranchero/charro culture with a 21st-century gender studies class. Other images in the PHB tended to portray characters with methamphetamine-like smiles, pastel skin colors, and strangely ultramodern clothes, hair, and makeup (it’s hard to imagine people spending a lot of time dolling up to march into battle). As for sexual stereotypes, the pictures include two dwarves who are presumably gay or bi (they have tattoos of each other’s beards on their arms, as we all know gay men do). Are they fighting heroically against overwhelming odds, perhaps sharing a last loving touch as they fight back-to-back? Nope, they’re baking.
Undoubtedly, there were good intentions behind these changes. There are others, such as the decision to remove half-races like half-elves from the game out of the convoluted notion that biracial characters are “racist” somehow. This ties into the unexpected segregationist attitudes the cultural far-left has adopted in recent years, in areas such as racially segregated university dorms, racial affinity groups, or questioning the value of interracial marriage or friendships between white and black children. The original designers of D&D like Gary Gygax were straight white dudes from the American Midwest, so it’s no shocker the early game reflected their sensibilities and life experiences. That doesn’t make Gygax or the early game racist or sexist. Most people simply start from what they know personally.
Including more representations of women, LGBT, and non-white characters is great! The player base has widened out from its original appeal, and besides, many straight white male players want to play as women, non-white, and LGBT characters anyway! After all, it’s a role-playing fantasy game. Yet Hasbro seems to have made the decision not to listen to normie women, LGBT, or non-white folks, but cater to a specific cohort of very online (and largely straight white) progressives. As such, the game ultimately looks like and sounds like them.
So everyone in the artwork has multicolored hair, wild makeup, and the kind of crazed grin you’ll rarely see outside of Coachella. We know the dwarves are gay because they have matching tattoos and are baking. We know the one orc with an axe is probably lesbian because she’s got a manly figure with a fade haircut. These seem to invite further stereotypes in future products. Will we see lesbian NPCs with reflexive anti-male attitudes? Or duplicitous bisexual villains? Or trans characters that talk obsessively about “social justice” (the progressive academic concept of “restorative justice” slipped its way into the recent D&D Radiant Citadel product already)? Or finger-snapping “Go, girl!” campy gay orcs?
We are told that players should develop a list of triggers and be able to stop play with cringeworthy arm gestures and that the dungeon master must unquestioningly defer to their feelings, however infantile. The whole tone of OneD&D is just so very, very safe.
That’s too bad, because the new system has some good mechanical ideas. It just got packaged with a lot of regressive stereotypes of LGBT folks and various ethnic groups, and language likely to appeal to only the most neurotic players, rendering the game a kind of laughingstock.
The reality is that most players just don’t care about this culture war stuff. They’re going to roll up characters, kill evil orcs, free slaves, plunder gold, and collect magical items, just as they’ve done in the past. The good news is that the sillier aspects of OneD&D are cosmetic and easily ignored. The bad news is that they’ve created a grognard-versus-progressive split in the community that is likely to fester for the foreseeable future. What’s most depressing is that D&D, like other games and sports, is an excellent way to bring people from different walks of life together — a place to bridge divides and bond. Is that a potentially fraught process that carries risk? Sure. But by ostensibly picking sides in the culture war, Hasbro has only made that more difficult.
Unfortunately, we’re stuck with this iteration of D&D for a while. Fateful decisions to listen to a fringe group of very vocal complainers will be stamped on Dungeons & Dragons products for years to come, deepening social cracks instead of healing them with the timeless medicine of old-fashioned, apolitical fun.
Published Feb 21, 2025
