Session Zero

Dungeons & Dragons in the Quaker Community

I started playing Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) in the late 1970s. A few years later, I started attending a Quaker church. For most of my life, my identity has been formed by these two communities.

Dungeons & Dragons is a fantasy tabletop role-playing game that involves elaborate storytelling. In Quaker meeting, people often tell a story in order to communicate how the Spirit has stirred their hearts, whether for ministry during worship or in business meeting. Both Quakers and D&D players practice the art of good storytelling. Both groups are also collaborative.

Although I’ve long felt a connection between these two communities, I’ve rarely talked about it. When I started playing D&D, the game was an object of scorn. It was a popular topic for educators, TV preachers, law enforcement officers, and talk show hosts. The so-called experts warned that D&D was a gateway to sinister occult practices. In 1979 it was widely reported that a D&D player went insane and disappeared into the utility tunnels beneath his college campus.

In those days, there was a cultural divide between people of faith and the people who played D&D. At one point, I invited the youth pastor from my Quaker church to play D&D with my friends and me. I remember that he played a gnome named Julius Jadewing. I think he had fun, but he also made it clear that he wasn’t showing up as a “church person.” There seemed to be a tacit understanding that we shouldn’t mix D&D with anything overtly spiritual. People like me might have had a stake in both sides of this divide, but that didn’t make the divide any less real.

As a matter of history, we Quakers aren’t exactly renowned for the playful exercise of our imaginations. As a young Quaker, I learned about Robert Barclay, who expressed thrilling, radical ideas when he defended the authority of spiritual experience. But he sounded just like his Puritan contemporaries in his Apology for the True Christian Divinity when he condemned all games and recreations as incompatible with “Christian silence, gravity, and sobriety.” In seventeenth-century Britain, religious thinkers made more allowances for racism and land theft than they did for a deck of playing cards.

By the 1980s, the Quakers I knew were willing to accept card games at youth-oriented events. However, most of them were still very suspicious of computer games. And they certainly didn’t like games that simulated violence. It might be all right for young Friends in the church basement to bloody their knuckles trying to grab the last spoon as part of a card game, but drawing an imaginary sword to combat an imaginary ogre seemed beyond the scope of Quaker tolerance.

For all these reasons, I’ve mostly navigated my love for Quakers and my love for D&D as two separate worlds. Lately, however, there are signs of rapprochement.

Session Zero works best when the conversation is centered on the story we want to tell and the commitment we want to make to one another about creating a shared experience. We can follow, bend, or invent rules to serve the goals of the group.

A couple of years ago, youth from my yearly meeting announced that they would be playing D&D before the annual sessions of Sierra-Cascades Yearly Meeting. They’ve done so more than once. More recently, on the opposite side of the country, I saw that young adults from New York Yearly Meeting were gathering around queries like “why do we love Dungeons & Dragons and other role-playing games?” and “who might be down to start a Quaker D&D campaign?”

It’s exciting and a little mystifying to me to see the words “D&D campaign” in a Quaker communique. I think it’s worth noticing that the enthusiasm for D&D is coming from younger people in Quaker spaces. For at least some young people, D&D has become a refuge.

As it has grown and evolved over the years, the D&D community has developed some valuable tools for collaborative storytelling. I want to emphasize that the community has done this work, not necessarily the corporation that holds the trademark. The D&D community wants people to feel welcome around the table. We want everyone to feel that they have a say in how the story develops, and we want to create a shared experience that’s fun for everyone. These days, a lot of organizations want more people to feel welcome. The D&D community has actually found some success in this regard.

When a group of people gets together to play D&D for the first time, they often follow an unofficial practice called “Session Zero,” which has grown in popularity in recent years. This is a time set aside for all the players to talk about the kind of characters they’d like to play and the kind of story they’d like to tell. The overall story is never scripted in advance; there are sure to be surprises ahead for everyone! Before the story even begins, however, Session Zero creates a structure for talking about the assumptions, goals, and boundaries that exist within the group.

For example, at a Session Zero, one player may say something like this: “I want to make sure that our story doesn’t have any scenes that focus on harm being done to animals. That would really disturb me, and the game would stop being fun for me if that happened.”

Another player might respond with a question like, “Is it okay to say something like ‘the dog outside the inn looks underfed and neglected’ or ‘the knight’s horse looks injured,’ if we don’t dwell on how the harm was done?”

A third player might say, “Hmm. I wanted my character to be a hunter—someone who lived in the forest for many years before joining the quest. How can I tell that story in a way that keeps you engaged?” By talking openly about boundaries and asking sincere questions about what would make the story work for everyone, the group can develop a sense of confidence that they’re supporting one another in the process of creating a shared experience.

The overall tone of the story is another topic for Session Zero. Will this be a funny story of madcap shenanigans? Will this be a scary story of things that go bump in the night? Or do people want to tell an epic story that moves characters back and forth between two cultures on the brink of war? Again, the story may shift over time or bounce between genres, but talking about expectations in advance makes it more likely that all players are showing up for the same flavor of fun.

Session Zero recognizes that there’s no one right way to play Dungeons & Dragons. It supports a collaborative approach by recognizing that we don’t all start with the same assumptions.

In the D&D community, I’ve found a high level of tolerance for bending the rules. In my D&D group, for example, we’ve played with characters that aren’t in any rule book (like a swashbuckling mouse and a fashionably dressed person with the head of an anglerfish). In the imaginary world where our story takes place, coins have a different value than what’s described in the official rules. Because we spend a lot of time aboard ships, we’ve adopted nautical rules that aren’t in the official rule books.

Especially in online forums, you will find individuals who are eager to point out when something is against the rules. However, most people who play Dungeons & Dragons understand that the game encourages players to attempt anything they can imagine in a magical world. Inevitably, groups will find themselves in a situation that isn’t perfectly covered by the existing rules. Finding a creative way to navigate the unexpected is part of the fun.

Having a flexible approach to the rules opens up a lot of possibilities for what is discussed at a Session Zero. Players can talk frankly about their goals and boundaries without worrying too much that the final outcome will somehow fall outside the bounds of officially sanctioned Dungeons & Dragons. Session Zero works best, in other words, when the conversation is centered on the story we want to tell, the fun we want to have, and the commitment we want to make to one another about creating a shared experience. We can follow, bend, or invent rules to serve the goals of the group.

Wouldn’t it be amazing if we encouraged young Friends to incorporate Quaker tools into the framework of Session Zero? I can imagine the process working like a meeting for clearness with the clerk proposing a minute:

We approve sending our characters on a quest to discover why lizardfolk are raiding coastal villages. We will avoid gruesome details, but we accept that armed conflict may be part of the story. We also want to reward creative thinking that avoids violence altogether. Are hearts clear?

In this way, I view the process of careful listening and collective discernment at the start of a D&D game as a wonderful laboratory for honing Quaker skills.

I also believe the experience of Session Zero may in turn lead some young Friends to ask difficult, fruitful questions about the life of our Quaker communities. What structures encourage us to hold a frank and open discussion about the assumptions, goals, and boundaries that we hold for our time together as Friends? For example, do we assume that stillness is a necessary framework for deep listening? Does anyone feel excluded by this assumption? Can we create structures that make a shared experience more accessible to everyone?

How do we create a unified story about who we are and where we’re going, even if some of the characters are a little strange? I think the people who play D&D may have some insights to share.

As Quakers, I think we often feel anxious about preserving our legacy. We worry that too many changes will make us less Quaker than we were. Of course, the Society of Friends has experienced plenty of change over the last 350 years. Robert Barclay would probably disapprove of young Friends playing spoons in the church basement. Maybe the phrase “Quaker church” is enough to cause trouble. As our culture changes, it’s inevitable that we will come to Quaker practice with different questions and assumptions.

As someone whose identity has been formed by both communities, I’d love to see Quakers experiment with something like Session Zero. I’d love to see us begin with a commitment to creating a shared experience, then talk openly and courageously about our goals and boundaries. What would it look like to bend the rules in order to create an experience that works for everyone?

If we can agree there’s no one right way to be a Quaker, how can we create a collaborative process of mutual support? How do we create a unified story about who we are and where we’re going, even if some of the characters are a little strange? I think the people who play Dungeons & Dragons may have some insights to share.

I hope you’ll seek out the D&D players in your community. And if you’re looking for someone to help you get started, please let me know. I already have the dice.