For the last couple
years, my entertainment obsession has been skewing toward watching people play
D&D on the interwebs. I’ve never
played D&D, or any table-top role-playing games, really, because I’m basically
a hermit and have no friends that I really want to spend hours with every week.
Or the desire to commit to such a schedule, actually (where I have no problem
arranging my life around watching other people do it, apparently).
I was also thinking
about a smallish meltdown I saw recently, of a smallish kid playing a game,
something not going quite her way and her crying ‘no fair’. I’ve actually seen
this kind of thing with kids. I’m fine
with being upset when things don’t go your way. I have a little trouble with
‘no fair’. Which I realize to kid’s doesn’t mean ‘the game is stacked against
me’ so much as ‘this didn’t go the way I wanted’. Which got me started thinking about how you
talk to kids about fairness, and empathy, and luck, and so on, and it came into
the back of my head that I know there are people using D&D to teach and
practice this kind of thing, especially with socially vulnerable kids, with ASD
and so on.
But that got me
thinking about other exchanges I’ve seen recently, about race and racism,
wealth inequality, and all kinds of social ills, and that got me thinking about
privilege. And D&D provides a nice
little analogy that I’m working out and am going to try to share here.
In D&D, your
player-character has some base statistics: Strength, Constitution, Charisma,
Intelligence, and so on. At the start of
the game you ‘roll’ you character, using dice to set up your base
statistics. So you roll a bunch of
numbers and can distribute them among your statistics. My character is a fighter so needs a ton of strength
and constitution, so I’ll use my top two rolls for those stats, she needs less
wisdom or charisma, so I’ll use the bottom stats for those. And so on. A stat of 10 or 11 is ‘average for a human
character’. The stats govern a bunch of
skills, like ‘athletics’ and ‘persuasion’.
If you have high strength, you get a bonus to ‘athletics checks’—in the
game, you have to lift a boulder, or hold back a horde, or whatever, and you
have to roll a die to see if you succeed or not, against some attribute or roll
of your ‘opponent’. So let’s say you’re arm wrestling in a bar against another
character. You roll a 9 but your high
Strength stat gives you a +3 bonus to that for a ‘check’ of 12. Your opponent rolls an 12, but their low
Strength gives them a -2 penalty to their check, so they have 10. You win. But they might have rolled a 16, so even with
their penalty and your superior Strength, they’d have won.
Certain ‘races’ (aha!),
which in the D&D context and ‘human’ and ‘dwarf’ and ‘elf’ and so on, and ‘classes’, which are ‘fighter’ and ‘thief’
and ‘wizard’ and so forth, have additional bonuses or penalties to certain
kinds of checks, and certain items, spells and so on impose bonuses and
penalties as well. So, making stuff up
because I don’t know D&D that well really, a dwarf might have a bonus to
Strength-based checks, where an elf might have a penalty. A warrior might have a bonus to
Strength-based attacks, but a goblin might have a penalty. Plus or minus
whatever their base rolled statistics provide them.
In D&D it is
totally clear that some races, classes, or holding certain items or positions
in society, come with certain advantages or disadvantages. There’s also a game mechanic called
‘advantage’ (or ‘disadvantage’) that requires you to sometimes roll twice, and
take the higher (or lower) roll for your check.
This is imposed by conditions (“you’ve been hit with a blindness spell,
roll for attack with disadvantage”, “you are on your favored terrain, roll an
acrobatics check with advantage” etc.
And no one is
particularly disturbed when someone with an intrinsic disadvantage (e.g. a low
charisma score) nonetheless gets ‘advantage’ on a charisma check because their
opponent is drunk or something. And certainly no one is miffed if they roll
high enough to just pass the check, with or without their individual bonuses or
disadvantages. Because that’s The Game.
So here’s where the
privilege thing comes in. Sometimes in
Real Life™, people for whatever reason have bonuses or penalties. Not a lot
they can do about it. Tall people have
an advantage (for a lot of things) over short people. Strong people over weak
people. Healthy people over sick
people. Rich people over poor
people. And yes, that’s just The Game. But think about this. Sometimes people have advantage
or disadvantage, not because of their own stats or skills, or others, but just
because of who they are.
So imagine you’re a
sick person trying to get health insurance.
You can’t help being sick, but it’s going to cost you more than a
healthy person. That’s The Game. (We can argue about The Game and its rules,
but this is what we have.) But in the
interest of Fairness™, maybe we want everyone to have better health care, which
means getting more people insurance. So
maybe in game, to keep everyone alive, we create a system where anyone who
rolls below 6 on a health check gets another roll. They get advantage.
Is that giving them an
unfair advantage over healthy people? Is
this taking anything away from healthy people?
Is this making it harder for healthy people? Or is it just addressing an
intrinsic imbalance in the system for the benefit of everyone (since presumably
not having to lug around a dead body in your party, or having to stop in the
middle of every fight to waste healing spells and potions on them is in everybody’s
interest)?
Female Humans® may be
at a disadvantage for, for instance, salary rolls. They may have to do more
(roll higher) to compensate, relative to Male Humans®. Is this The Way Things Are™? Maybe. Is this fair? Probably not.
Humans of Color™ may
be at an intrinsic disadvantage, having to roll higher to avoid Suspicion™, Confrontation™,
and Brutality™. Is it fair? Is it right? No.
So if we address it, are we penalizing anyone? Are we providing an
unfair advantage, or are we attempting to address an intrinsic imbalance?
Humans of Ambiguous
Gender and Color® may be particularly vulnerable to all sorts of things for all
sorts of stupid reasons.
This is not to say
that individually, one may not have an astronomically high Charisma or Strength
stat, or happen to roll high a bunch of times in a row. But that doesn’t mean that they (and anyone
else in their Class) didn’t start out with, or continue to experience, a
disadvantage or an intrinsic penalty.
So don’t point at the
disadvantaged person who happened to roll two 20s on a check and say ‘well,
obviously this Class of people don’t need and don’t deserve a small bonus
‘because’ it means it puts you at a disadvantage. It doesn’t.
It just means your advantage isn’t as meaningful as it might be.
And people Don’t Like
It™ when privileges they are used to having Just Because®, or maybe have never
even thought about, are called into question.
But they may get up in arms if a disadvantage someone else experiences
all the time gets redressed.
Which is just
silly.
