Dimension 20, Dungeons and Dragons, and Exploring Life That Could Have Been
By Akira Albar-Kluck
Dungeons and Dragons has grown in popularity, especially over the pandemic. It is a way to experiment with different versions of yourself. As I stated in a recent post, gaming offers one of the most unique versions of gender expressions with low risk and high reward. Tabletop role-playing games or TTRPGs offer a more advanced form of that experimentation. Rather than just online friends or strangers, to play a TTRPG one must create a character with their friends. You get called another name so frequently you respond to it, you get to experiment and see how your friends would respond to you in a different form.
Recently Dungeons and Dragons have become a haven for queer and transgender people, especially during the pandemic. This is for a multitude of reasons. It is fairly easy to run a game of DND online with things like Zoom and Discord. In a time when social connection was incredibly difficult Dungeons and Dragons offered a structured way to hang out. As well, actual-play podcasts and web series exploded in popularity. Critical Role has become one of the biggest names in entertainment with an immensely successful crowdfunding campaign for an animated show based on the actual play podcast. Dimension 20 is a web series produced by College Humor, it has been growing in popularity over the last few years. It is far more accessible than the big names in Dungeons and Dragons actual play series. Critical Role and The Adventure Zone both have seasons with hundreds of episodes, which are several hours long. In contrast, the longest seasons of Dimension 20 never have more than 20 episodes and the episodes rarely exceed 2 hours.
The popularity of Dimension 20 is also due to its inclusivity and representation. In a field that is overwhelmingly white, the main cast having players of color and all of the miniseries having players of color is very important for many people. As well as racial diversity, the gender representation is incredibly unique in Dimension 20. The experimentation with gender I have described can be very much seen in nonbinary player Aly Beardsley’s characters. In the main series Fantasy High, they play Kristen Applebees, a deeply religious teenage cleric who is attending adventuring high school where she begins to question her religion and the cult she grew up in. This provides Aly with incredible opportunities to explore their character’s backstory by connecting her to their personal biography, as well as to look at those experiences through a fantasy lens and tell an interesting story. Aly themselves grew up in a very conservative Christian religion and left the church after their queer awakening.
In The Unsleeping City, the players are in a magical realism setting of New York City, Beardsley plays a transgender man who is a drug dealer who has a complicated relationship with his father. In A Crown of Candy they play a cisgender male asexual teenager, who is from a war obssessed family despite he himself being quiet soft spoken and sensitive. It is incredibly interesting to look at this back catalog of content after seeing how Aly Beardsley has changed. They have come out as nonbinary, gotten top surgery, and now even changed careers. Everyone who plays DnD’s characters have little traces of themself in them, but usually there is not an audience to see how someone changes and how their characters change with them.
Beardsley is leaving acting but is still playing on Dimension 20, they are now going to trade school and planning on changing their career. This makes their newest character on the show’s current and ongoing season A Starstruck Odyssey incredibly interesting. They play Margret Encino, a master of the office job and manager, now on a pirate ship dedicated to revolution. Dungeons and Dragons offers players a chance to explore the lives they could never get to live and all the possibilities that never got to be, with their friends. You can explore transmasculine experiences, religious trauma, middle management, and everything in between. The only real limit to the story you tell is your own imagination. The rules and settings of the game are fast and loose, with every group deciding which rules work best for them and getting rid of the ones they feel inhibit game play.