Dungeons, Dragons, and Divine Narratives: A Deep Dive

Unknown: 00:01:46

Foreign.

Will Rose: 00:01:49

We're here to talk about D and D, the process of an adventure. So a couple things. How many of you all play D and D? There we go.

Samantha Perez: 00:01:59

Okay.

Will Rose: 00:01:59

I like it. I like it. A lot of hands out there. How many of you have never played but you're interested in D and D? Curious. Handful. Two people here.

How many of you are like super into like process philosophy and theology and really want know that D and D is very processed and that's why here, because you like the intersection of all of them.

Samantha Perez: 00:02:20

So we're mostly here for D and D. That's right.

Will Rose: 00:02:21

They're mostly here for D and D. So the other day, for our pregame event, we played a D and D. Tolkien esque. Yeah, it was in the Tolkien world.

It was in Middle Earth, not Middle Earth. It was in. Yeah, Middle Earth. I was almost said Midgard because I saw my Thor friend here. Middle Earth.

And so these are some of the quotes, just a few quotes from that game. The dice giveth and the dice taketh away after my friend rolled a NAT one a few times, screams out, this game is for nerds.

And then there was an existential question of, does an arc have a heart? Does an orc have a heart? And then, damn it, that was my fifth crit fail, I think. I think that was. And then.

And then someone had to get up and use the restroom while we were playing. And he quoted. This is a full on quote. While this is happening, Gimli heads off to water some mushrooms. I have a question about his dark gift. Yep.

And I can't remind. Right. Oh, this was. I think this was you, Eric. Right? You said it wasn't an attack. I was just perceiving with my arrow. All time favorite quote.

That was so, so good. So.

Dr. Thomas Hermans-Webster: 00:03:52

Yeah, yeah.

Will Rose: 00:03:54

Perception check. Exactly. So, you know, Father Joe Bracken asked the question, does God roll dice? And I'm not sure, but we do. And that's what we're gonna do today.

So we're gonna go down and just kind of introduce ourselves and do a quick, like two minute if that origin story of what got us into D and D or our connection to D and D. And I'll just start real fast. As a kid of the 80s, I love D and D, but I just never played it.

I just like the manuals and the monster handbook and I just love looking at the pictures and reading the profiles. I'm a comic book geek and love the Marvel character profiles and Marvel handbooks and all those things.

So I just kind of read D and D books to look at the cool art and fantasy world as of late, being a part of Systemic Ecology and other geek friends have played a few times. A real big novice when it comes to actual playing, but it's super fun and I love it and I'm hooked and can't wait to have this conversation.

Samantha Cool.

Samantha Perez: 00:04:51

Hello, everybody. I'm Samantha Perez. I have been on one episode of Systematic Geekology. I've been on a. I've dabbled around the God pod scene here.

If you listen to the bonus episodes of you have Permission and Homebrewed, I've been on at least one of those. But so my D and D history, it's been. It's relatively recent, more recent than people expect when they find out about my nerd history.

That D and D entered relatively recently in my fandom pantheon. I've been playing for. It was about 10 years. It was when I moved to D.C.

from Texas and was starting to meet new people and I met a group of people that played.

And I knew what it was, but just growing up in the, like, I don't know, Bible belt, Texas area I was from, it was not something that people I was friends with played. I played like a couple of the computer games, so I knew what it was.

But it was about 10 years ago that a friend introduced me to it and I played my first campaign.

We played Pathfinder to Begin, which is kind of a D and D offshoot, because some nerds were not happy with how D and D was going, so they made their own D and D with Blackjack Nerds.

Will Rose: 00:06:00

Not happy, what?

Samantha Perez: 00:06:02

So that was my introduction, and that's still what I played the most, but that was about 10 years ago, and I got hooked on it from there. And I have been kind of. I've been in a campaign basically ever since, especially when Covid happened and we were in quarantine.

I reconnected with a bunch of friends back home and started a couple of online campaigns of stuff. And so it's been a really important part of staying connected with people that I grew up with. And now I play it a bunch.

I taught beginners D and D at a library last summer and played games for new people. And it's been a lot of fun. It's been a really cool, cool exercise in storytelling and meaning making and just a neat community feature.

So I'm excited.

Will Rose: 00:06:39

Amen. And tell me real fast, like, systematic ecology when I think beer camp does well.

And a lot of the talks here, there's a lot of, like, you have permission Talk of we love Dan Koch, but also in terms of like, you have permission to be faith and science, you have permission to be a geek and a Christian in a person of faith, that they come together so often.

The questions that arise out of these fandoms, Star Wars, Tolkien, Alien franchise, video games, and this are deep existential questions that we wrestle with within our faith communities as well.

So that's what we've discovered and what we try to do is have a healthy conversation around these things and they're susceptive to like toxic fandom as well as the church and other things too, but trying to have healthy conversations.

And all of this is to say, yeah, we know the history behind the, the religious community's reaction to like fantasy and Dungeons and Dragons, but this is a space where, like, look, this is where we can incorporate this. And Tom has a fantastic story of how his dad incorporated it. Both yet person of faith community and fantasy Dungeon dragon.

Tom, introduce yourself, your background, who you are, and run with your paper, my friend.

Dr. Thomas Hermans-Webster: 00:07:48

Thank you. I'm Tom Herman's Webster. I'm an acquiring editor for academic Theology and Ethics at Orbis Books. You may have seen me up at the table upstairs.

I also teach Methodist studies at Memphis Theological Seminary.

I have a PhD in process Eco Sacramental Liberation Theology from Boston University and I am a Methodist pastor from the North Alabama Conference, though I live in New York because that's where the publishing house is. So, yeah, my answer to the intro, how did you get into DD? Is a long paper. So here we go.

In: 1984

o called Satanic panic of the: 1980

You may remember that and its conservative Christian undercurrents. And though it is 40 years ago, that era is still very politically consequential today.

Aware of this broader Satanic Panic context, that minister told Smith, in this country, we tend to think of spirituality as going to church and praying if things get real bad. Playing D and D teaches students that spirituality is more than going to church on Sunday.

Spirituality is a mental attitude or a way of living in the world that shapes the whole of life.

Forty years later, I think we should approach the minister in that newspaper article with a serious care as a conversation partner for constructive theology, for spiritual formation, for theological education, for pastoral care for people of all ages. And I'm kind of lucky because, as Will mentioned, I actually can approach that minister as a serious conversation partner because he's my dad.

As D and D adventuring theologians, I think we can recognize many ethical and cosmological questions that bubble up in role playing games.

And that's what I'm going to talk about today are the cosmological and ethical questions and how we're spiritually formed when we play role playing games.

More than merely conveying and storing information, role playing encourages us to cultivate relationships that undergird the social critiques, solidarity and self determination that are necessary for us if we are able to bring about an abundant life of justice and love throughout all of creation.

Theological reflection on D and D might feel weird because, like, that's not the Bible or Jesus isn't there or something, but I think it's necessary because it can encourage abundant living in God's own adventure.

When we theologically think about the adventures we go on and when we recognize God's adventure of zest, beauty, love and peace with us, to use Whitehead language, I want us to think about theological education today in a broader way than a lot of Protestants and Catholics have talked about it in recent decades.

Justo Gonzalez is a brilliant, brilliant thinker, and he has argued that theological education today must return to its proper place, which is at the heart of the church.

It must turn into a lifelong process and develop in such a way that helps the entire church face constantly evolving circumstances and unexpected challenges.

And I think we should approach Dungeons and Dragons in the spirit of Gonzalez's claim that theological inquiry is not just for interesting pastimes of curious people. Rather, theological inquiry is an act of devotion and obedience to God, to love God with all of your heart and mind.

Role playing games can give us a vision of decoupling theological education from academic requirements for a degree.

Theological education, D and D teaches us, are more inclusive and dynamic processes of how we relate to ourselves, to each other, to our broader community, and to God. So my dad's story. He Learned to play DD when he was in seminary at Perkins at SMU in Dallas, Texas in the late 70s.

After graduating from Perkins, he was appointed to pastor a small church outside of Birmingham, Alabama, and there was a small youth group at the church with only like 10 kids. When they learned that my dad had played D and D before, Keep in mind D And d is like 7 years old at this point, right? 8 years old at this point.

When. When the kids learned that my dad had played in seminary, several of them were like, hey, we want to play too. How though?

And so they set up a time the following week to learn the game and for my dad to try to figure out how to be a dungeon master. And they then played at least once a month for the next three years. It became youth group. It became a regular act of the church.

And my dad remembers that the adventures felt really bad at first. If you've ever been. How many of you have ever DMed brave souls. I've tried it once. I'm terrible at it.

If you've ever been an ear, if you've ever been an early dm, so think about your. Some of your earliest games. You may recognize these feelings. There was no way he had taken everything into account.

He had not anticipated at all how creative the players could be in their conversation and their work and action with each other. And he felt totally inadequate because he felt out of control. Right? How familiar is that? DMs?

These early experiences of learning to play as a DM, I think, demonstrate the necessity for us as people of faith, for educators, for pastors, for spiritual mentors, to teach from curiosity or hope or empathy or honesty instead of from a desire for control. When we teach from curiosity or hope or empathy or honesty, we actually don't fear the lack of control.

We don't fear our failure to anticipate the possible events that occur in our relationships as learners and as disciples. My dad's own anxieties impacted the gameplay at the table. It also impacted his own perceptions of the players around the table. Right?

They became a competition against him. Right?

As spiritual mentors, as disciples on a path together, as pastors, as teachers, we can be really tempted to mightily hold on to the profound gifts that we've received so tightly out of a fear that we're going to mess something up, that we actually risk distorting the very relationships that can bring abundant life, that can bring creative hope, and that can bring transforming love in our communities. Loosening our grip. DMs loosening our grip is far easier said than done.

Will Rose: 00:16:23

An uncontrolled love of God.

Dr. Thomas Hermans-Webster: 00:16:24

There's an uncontrolling love of God. To quote Tom Ward, I wrote three.

Samantha Perez: 00:16:28

Pages about the people in the back room of this tavern, and they didn't want to go in the back.

Dr. Thomas Hermans-Webster: 00:16:32

They didn't want to go in the back room of the tavern.

However, take heart in the original texts, Gary Gygax wrote, advanced D and D is more than a framework around which individual DMs construct their respective milieu. Advanced D and D is above all a set of boundaries for all of the worlds devised by referees everywhere that's in Advanced D and D.

Dungeon Master's Guide Gygax contrasts these boundaries to the rules and movements and sequence that govern a game like chess.

These boundaries, Gygax writes, are broad and spacious, and there are numerous areas where they are so vague and amorphous as to make them nearly non existent, but they are there nonetheless. Close quote.

As a process theologian, this sends up every light bulb because like our own world, real limitations exist in D and D and they're cosmological limitations in which we as players can be creative and make consequential decisions.

When we actually have these real limitations, we can creatively decide and act in ways that are significant for our spiritual and ethical formation because those decisions have consequences. Role playing games blur the distinctions that we've created between theory and practice.

Role playing games break down the body mind dualism that has driven western thought because role playing games privilege aesthetic, manual emotional learning and knowing instead of rational abstract discourse. Even in a fairy world, you still are trying to perceive with your arrow. It's completely made up except that you are dead serious in that moment.

And the reason you're dead serious is because if you actually are trying to shoot with that arrow, there are going to be consequences for somebody on your team. Like in the game, things might not go as initially planned in our lives.

Within the game, players have to rely on adapting and improving to resolve a situation where the effect of their actions and other participants actions are for the most part out of their hands.

How much of a D and D game are you player actually acting and how much are you sitting there listening to taking in accounting for all of the people at the table with you? Role playing games foster a personal openness to possibility.

They also foster a more fundamental recognition that possibility is precisely that it's possible. No future event is ever set down in stone in the game. It's only possible until one of your comrades or you actually roll the nat 20. When I was 13.

So I've been playing D&D for like 23 years now.

When I was 13 we were coming around a bend on a mountain path and I love to play half half elf rangers and we're coming around a bend on a mountain path and my dad just says roll for initiative. He doesn't give any Context. He really, he does this a lot. It's a problem. And so we roll for initiative.

And my brother and I and our friend who we were playing with, all poor, poor, poor rolls. So a purple worm comes up out of the ground real fast and had like a 19 on the initiative. Purple worm very much clearly in charge of the scenario.

And as they tend to be. Yeah, as they tend to be. What you need to know is earlier in this campaign, I had attempted to lasso a brown dragon.

Will Rose: 00:20:48

As one does.

Dr. Thomas Hermans-Webster: 00:20:49

As one does. And I rolled a 19.

Will Rose: 00:20:52

The crowd's like, oh, no.

Dr. Thomas Hermans-Webster: 00:20:54

Yeah. And I rolled a 19. And my dad, not happy that the half elf 13 year old had just rolled a 19 to lasso a brown dragon, was like, here we go.

Purple worm for the kill. Purple worm misses on attack. My brother who was running a thief gets away. He was really good at running away.

He who fights and runs away lives to fight another day, right? And I was not. And so I pull out my bow and I said, I fire. And my dad says, okay, roll. It's only possible in that moment, right?

dvanced D and D. This is like: 2003

5e does not exist to my father in advanced D and D. A nat 20 does what? Kill dead. That's not an automatic hit. That's not bonuses. That's.

You're a level two ranger and you just ended the entire encounter with the purple worm in one shot. Right? Aside from inflating ego when the future itself is overflowing with possibilities, but no possible event in our future is fixed.

We actually have to act in ways that instantiate hope for particular outcomes. Right? Hope's not. Hope is never a thing that we have our own. You understand this, right? Like, none of us have hope. Hope is not a substance.

If it was, substances aren't real. Welcome to process thought. Hope is something we enact. Hope is something that we. Because the future is only possible, because the future is rad open.

Hope is something that we identify among the possibilities with the lure of God. And we say that, God, let's go. And we move. We make choices now that have consequences to move us toward the better world that's possible.

D and D teaches on a real basic level that every future event is only possible. And this is baked into the cosmology the way that Gygax writes it.

But when everything is only possible, and then I want to open this Back up to all of us. That unfixedness can be a tremendous source of anxiety.

Incorporating this anxiety and unfixedness into the cosmology D and D fosters opportunities for us to encounter the real impact of our choices and other people's choices that they make in the dynamic game world. For my dad, being a DM and a pastor interwove and interweaves to this day.

His pastoral care professor regularly repeated the phrase that pastors are to be non anxious presences. DMs. How many times have you had to be the non anxious presence at the table? Not because you knew that it was going to be all right, right?

But because you knew in that moment the anxiety toward the unfixedness of the future was not good for the well being of your players as people of faith.

In confronting a radically open future, as people of faith for whom there's nothing a set thing ahead of us, we can descend into an anxiety that really is debilitating. But none of us can adventure alone.

And so when we're adventuring as people of faith, we have responsibilities to be non anxious presences with one another. Not ignoring the anxiety, but identifying that you can be a sacramentally life giving, hope filled presence for someone else.

You can actually mediate the presence of God who calls forth love and peaceableness and adventure in the face of anxiety. For God journeys with us, the future is radically unfixed even for God in process thought, right?

So when God is journeying with us, calling forth the love and the peace and the beauty in the face of our anxiety, we have a non anxious presence that we can reveal and mediate with one another. This is the beauty of playing, I think.

This is a framework that Dungeons and Dragons, I think can challenge us to practice in our own spiritual lives with each other. The good dm, like the good teacher, like the good pastor, frames their work through nurture.

The good DMs job is to nurture the relationships at the table so that the relationships around the table can be life giving.

Play clears space then play nurtures us because it clears space to think new thoughts, to engage new practices, to develop new forms of expression, and to practice new ways of being than we have been in the past. Play is for us an imaginative engagement in an otherwise unimaginative world.

It's often multi sensory, incorporating miniature figurines, ambient sounds. I've even been around costumed DMs or DMs that have themed menus for the adventure.

Samantha Perez: 00:27:25

I love the themed food. I do that.

Dr. Thomas Hermans-Webster: 00:27:26

The themed food is incredible. We can, as it were, because of our play, we can try on values and activities that amplify, introduce, or transform our own lives beyond the game.

This is, I think, really important when we think about inclusive gameplay and I want to talk about that. This is really important when we think about inclusive gameplay.

This is really important when we think about outside of the game, when we think about journeying together and who journeys with us and how do we protect ourselves, but how do we also be caring and open toward other journeyers adventurers? I don't want to leave us on the cliffhanger, though, of a random newspaper article in Decatur, Alabama. It's a short but interesting article.

Dad got a little blowback from it. He was an associate pastor at a big steeple church in town.

The senior pastor got more of the blowback than the associate pastor who hung out with the youth got. Isn't that how that always goes? So my dad forgot about the article and he continued to play at the church. This is a second church now.

He continued to play at the church with a group of students. A couple of months after that article was published, the church secretary buzzed his office to let him know that he had a phone call.

And he said, okay, who's it from? He said, gary something. So my dad picked up the phone and a man on the other end said, hi, Reverend Webster, this is Gary Gygax.

Instead of a cease and desist order that would aim squarely at the many changes that he and his players made to the cosmology and the ethical construction of the game, which we can also talk about, Gygax actually wanted to talk about how they were playing. He thought it was one of the coolest things he'd ever heard. He was excited about the variations.

He told my dad several times about how the rules of the game are meant to be malleable and broad enough to allow for unique expressions of gameplay. And I think for us, 40 years later, as models of theological education and spiritual formation undergo tremendous change.

Role playing games like D and D, because of that malleability, because of that broadness, because of that inclusive and encouraging gameplay, they will continue to cultivate creativity, nurture life, and inspire imagination for the life of the world. So people of faith, people of spirit tend to dungeons for you can find vibrant allies there. Players, DMs.

Embrace your responsibility to explore profound depths of meaning in your game world. For our world will journey with you. And with that adventure on. Nice work.

Samantha Perez: 00:30:28

All right, all right. Thank you so much. That's so cool.

So I Don't know if you were at all of the sessions that have been going on at beer camp so far, but this brought to mind Iliadilio's session that she did yesterday. And I was struck when she mentioned even in pre human mammals, she identified playing as a form of proto religion.

She said entities have always played as a way to temporarily invite each other into a different inclusive, low stakes space where we can figure out who we are.

Dr. Thomas Hermans-Webster: 00:31:11

Yeah, man.

Samantha Perez: 00:31:13

And I was texting our group chat instantly. I said we should get Dilio to play Dungeons and Dragons. And we started a conversation about what class she would be. And it was very fun.

But I'm curious, as artificer, my argument was that she's a sorcerer, but her patron is like the quantum omni being.

Dr. Thomas Hermans-Webster: 00:31:32

Oh yeah, that one turned too. That one.

Samantha Perez: 00:31:35

So I'm curious how you respond to this.

And just as you think of that concept of play as a space where we invite each other to make meaning, how does role playing, how would you, I guess compare and contrast that to saying playing like we're just wrestling or we're playing hopscotch or we're playing basketball or we're playing Call of Duty?

Like how does, how does, what does this form of play have kind of better or worse than other forms of play for this sort of religious meaning making that she identified.

Dr. Thomas Hermans-Webster: 00:32:14

Competition. So I played baseball for 16 years. I played a lot. Played a lot. And I love the game and I still love to play.

And I was a college ultimate Frisbee player. And all of those playing forms had a single goal, had a closed system, if you will, right.

There was a closedness to the game that with referees, with referees that one of us was going to win, one of us was going to lose, or even if you're playing soccer and you end in a tie, there's a struggle for supremacy. I think the difference in role play, gaming play is the open cosmology that. Yes, the open cosmology. Any teachers in the room?

So there's a form of pedagogy called gamification pedagogy where you turn lots of things into games in the classroom. And a really simple example of this closed kind of play or open play, closed play would be like CPR practice, right?

Like I'm playing winners and losers, right. Like I'm playing me either way. I love that I'm playing on this mannequin, right? And the CPR is a role play. Like I'm role playing as the lifesaver.

But really it's not. There are no consequences. Like it's a plastic mannequin with a, with a little bladder inside. Right.

But for this kind of like open, open cosmology, non competitive play, there actually are a lot of consequences here and there are consequences in the game world, but there are also consequences at the table.

Like if I'm constantly trying to undermine every action will takes in the game world, not only is that going to have an outcome in the game, it could actually really redefine our relationship to each other outside of the game and the play that we get.

I think in, in a lot of other forms of play, because it is closed toward one single particular goal, it doesn't have that kind of formative aspect to it.

Samantha Perez: 00:34:58

Can I do it? Can I follow up? Absolutely. So one thing that I think about, because I've been, because I've played a lot of D and D, I branched out.

I go to like a meetup that plays indie RPGs. We play a bunch of stuff.

In your theory of role playing as pedagogy of role playing as theological education, you have kind of a baked in assumption of a game master as the primary like teacher. There's a pedagogy centered on the dungeon master who is teaching and nurturing the players.

There are other systems, I think of things like, of stuff like Powered by the Apocalypse type games where there is still a game master, but there is systems for the players to interact with the universe itself way more directly than Dungeons and Dragons have. And then I think of stuff like Fiasco or Microscope where there is no dungeon master.

Everybody is collectively creating this story and refereeing together. How do you like, how does that change? How does this interact with your idea of role playing?

And do you think that makes it a better or worse or different kind of mapping onto the theological education that you're talking about with role playing?

Dr. Thomas Hermans-Webster: 00:36:15

Yeah, that's a fantastic question.

So one of the reasons why I'm so DM centric, of course, is this paper comes out of a chapter that my dad and I wrote together for a book that's coming out in December on theology, religions and Dungeons and Dragons in honor of the 50th anniversary of Dungeons and Dragons. And so we were very dnd focused and really wanted to do some auto ethnography reflection for my dad on being a dm.

That said, I think it actually translates to the other games pretty flawlessly because the DM in their best, in their best work is not actually different from the players.

The DM is a part of the co creative relationships at the TABLE and there are other game mechanics and other game structures that just lean into that co creativity more.

But what is key is they maintain the cosmological openness, they maintain the possibility of the future, they maintain the consequential action in the present. And so I think the reliance on DMs in this is D and D specific. Yeah, but I don't think it loses in translation to other games.

Yeah, it's a great question.

Will Rose: 00:37:45

I love your paper.

And as a pastor entrusted with taking care of a community, shepherding community, what intrigues me with of course I resonate with the non anxious presence. And when I'm flying, I'm keeping my eye on the flight attendant. If they're freaking out, I'm going to freak out.

But if they're like cool during this turbulence, I'm going to be cool too.

But the words that I associate with D and D, where I've really been kind of resonating with and collecting or thinking through with beer camp, is this idea of play, of improv, of collaborative storytelling, imagination, us telling a story, theater of the mind, of us telling a story together. And you don't know what's going to happen. The DMA knows some things but.

But yeah, like you said, it's an open ended story that could go in different directions, different timelines, alternate time, multiverse, whatever, but there's these possibilities and so I really resonate with the story of your dad getting a call from Gary, which is a freaking cool story but I can imagine getting a call from like my bishop who's like will, we need to talk. And I'm like what did I do wrong?

We had theology beer camp or we're talking faith and science, or you're doing this like God Loves Geeks club, like what I need to. But instead of like shutting me down, cease and desist. But open like tell me more. What is happening? What new life is emerging?

How, how is this helping you? I give you permission to keep going with this because who knows what could happen and what the spirit could do in these things.

So, and I guess it's not more of a question of more of you know, thing, but, but in terms of this idea of like collaborative storytelling, partnering on the journey, the process together, you know, you wrote your paper on faith formation, teaching Sunday school or youth groups, but also theological education in the seminary. But what if we did more collaborative improv, story play? How would the church be different?

How would, how would our, our communities we take care of and relationships that we're entrusted with? How would they be. Be different. Moving forward in the spirit of theology, beer camp and what that looks like for future church.

Dr. Thomas Hermans-Webster: 00:39:54

Yeah. Oh, that's a tremendous question. There are five different ways I want to go, but I'm only going to pick two.

So one is, I think one of the things that's really cool about D and D and role playing, gaming and improv is that we realize that storytelling is also play. That it's not that we play over here in a story. Then we go, that's what we forget.

Will Rose: 00:40:21

About scripture, you know, playing with scripture.

Dr. Thomas Hermans-Webster: 00:40:24

Then we go have story time, then we go play in a story. And I think that's the first direction I would go, is that it can help us re. Encounter the Bible as a library of stories, not a book. Right.

The Bible is not a book. It's a library of books. And it's a library of books that communicate stories and invite us into stories that are not our own.

I mean, what other definition of grace do you need? It invites us into stories that are not our own and gives meaning. So I think it can change our relationship to scripture.

Instead of being this cudgel and this top down book, warhammer. Fixed, unfixed. Is it an open canon, a closed canon? Is it useful in every decision you make in life or the authoritative.

That's actually not the question. Right. I think the question is how do we play well with the story and how do we play well with one another through the story?

That's the first direction I would go. The second direction I would go, and this is for those of us who are in more like mainline traditions or Catholic traditions.

It breaks down a clericalism that divides the ordained from the laity in what has needed to happen for a long time.

Will Rose: 00:42:00

Clerichood of all believers. Is that what you just said?

Dr. Thomas Hermans-Webster: 00:42:03

No, actually, still. Still Methodist enough that I'm not going that far.

Samantha Perez: 00:42:08

You can't all play clerics. That's not balanced.

Dr. Thomas Hermans-Webster: 00:42:10

We can't all play clerics. But what it actually does and process theology helps us with this.

What it actually does is it takes us out of thinking that the difference between a cleric and a layperson is a difference between the substance cleric and the substance lay. Instead, we are all journeying as a body together. And there are functions that we all are called to and gifted to fill.

And there are functions that we live into. And ordained ministry then is not ordained to a status above laity. It is ordained to a function within the laity.

Will Rose: 00:42:54

Almost like a body with different.

Dr. Thomas Hermans-Webster: 00:42:56

Almost like a body.

Will Rose: 00:42:57

And what should the. Anyway, I was Going to make some analogy about the hand to the foot, the foot to the head. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Body of Christ.

Dr. Thomas Hermans-Webster: 00:43:06

I think when we play like this, we actually do realize that, like, look, Paul might have gotten that one right.

Oh, and not only might Paul have gotten that one right, he might have gotten that one right because he's leaning into something we all recognize very well, and that's the organicness of our bodiedness. Like our bodies matter.

And we recognize that our bodies matter in the church because of how we function in relationship with each other, not because of how we're statically lifted above or pushed below others.

Will Rose: 00:43:40

I want Samantha to follow up, but also we are, in a moment, going to take some questions. If you want to share a thought question. Want to engage with that.

Kim over here has a mic, and you can walk over here and share because it's just not long enough to take out to everybody. So if you have a question, thought, those kind of things, I'll do one.

Samantha Perez: 00:43:57

More while people think, go for it. And I think we foreshadowed this a little bit, but I want to dig into it.

We mentioned at the beginning, and I mentioned in my intro, and you mentioned at the beginning of the paper, because a lot of. If you're in religious spaces, you've heard of Dungeons and Dragons at some point in the context of a thing we were once, like, real scared of.

I remember I bought the computer game Neverwinter Nights, and my mom noticed the Dungeons and Dragons logo on the back, and she's like, is this okay? And I had to make up a defense for why I should be able to play Never Winter Nights. But so I guess my.

My question to you is, as you thought through this, as you've played it at face value, the church's opposition to Dungeons and Dragons historically was there's wizards and there's devils, and that's evil. Do you take that opposition at face value?

Or if you don't, what do you think the institutional church was actually scared of when people were getting into Dungeons and Dragons?

Will Rose: 00:44:58

I love that question so much. What were they scared of?

Dr. Thomas Hermans-Webster: 00:45:05

I've got a quote.

Samantha Perez: 00:45:06

Oh, all right.

Dr. Thomas Hermans-Webster: 00:45:10

In: 1984

Those of you who may have been around in the D and d world in 84 may remember that Jack Chick wrote a tractor that claimed that Dungeons and Dragons led to suicide and Goddess worship. That's what they were afraid of, the women. But I want to make a clarification.

It wasn't the institutional church in the sense of mainline American Protestantism the way that the Satanic panic, and I'm not a scholar on the Satanic panic, though that doesn't stop most of us from saying things.

g a suburban mall rat Teen in: 1986

Samantha Perez: 00:46:49

Aren't they always?

Dr. Thomas Hermans-Webster: 00:46:50

Aren't they always?

Will Rose: 00:46:51

Yeah.

Dr. Thomas Hermans-Webster: 00:46:51

By claiming they're looking out for the safety of the children, they're able to gain a particular kind of foothold that is extremely low stakes if they're wrong. Because if they're wrong, they just go to another one. Right.

And so this is, I think one of the things that my dad encountered with this article and why the article was written the way it was, was my dad was the pastor, the associate pastor at a United Methodist church in Decatur, Alabama, which is a town at the time run by the Church of Christ. Right. And we're talking like the no instrument Church of Christ, Church of Christ.

And so that, that dichotomy, it wasn't just that it was a minister who was playing this game with the kids. It was, it was a Methodist minister. It was a, it was a main, it was a main mainline denomination minister. Right.

And so I think there's a really important divide there to make between like an institutional mainline American church and the way that the Moral Majority really did try to use protect the kids language.

Will Rose: 00:48:00

Quick, quick follow up. And just as like a pastor of a church and things, most of the times. I see.

And when our, with our work with faith and science or faith and geek stuff, most of the time when churches react. Yeah. What are they scared of? The loss of influence and power.

So if they see something that's more popular than me or getting more attention than me, I'm going to get defensive and like, we got to tear that down. So same way, like, I'm going to lose funding, I'm going to lose power and influence. And so is that the way of Christ? No.

So, like, to think through deeply, what am I really scared of is the question that we should ask whenever we have like a defensive response to anything that we're going on. Yeah. So, yeah. Like that's. Yeah. Resonate with that a lot. Cool questions. Let's go for it.

Unknown: 00:48:44

Hi. So I guess my question is I've been in Role playing game spaces for a little while.

At this point, a big thing that comes up about D and D in particular, at least when it comes to questions of inclusion and progressiveness, is that it's a game that kind of wants you to encourage sort of a pseudo colonialist approach to adventure. I, you know, raiding tombs of people that belong to you, etc.

Unknown: 00:49:11

Etc.

Unknown: 00:49:12

So I was just kind of curious about, like, what does, what does a playgroup build on in that kind of situation or with this text or if it's better to kind of work their way around it? I guess that's kind of the question I'm coming from.

Dr. Thomas Hermans-Webster: 00:49:29

That's a fantastic question.

And in Dungeons and Dragons in particular, as some of you who've played earlier editions may remember, Gygax and the other editors were really committed to biological essentialism and really committed to racial essentialism, that there were particular traits that particular races had, like evil or not, well, being evil or not, or even advantage disadvantage, right? Like elves and dwarves. What do they have in common that humans can't do? See in the dark, right? But the, the norm was always the human, right?

The human. If you played a human, all of your modifiers in the early stage were zero, right?

Your advantages did not exist also, though your disadvantages didn't exist. So that is being expunged in subsequent editions, right, in the formal literature, but it's also being worked out in gaming groups themselves.

And this is, I think, what's really important for playing as a practice of nurture of who's at.

Of your relationships with the people at the table is as long as playing these games is an attempt to exercise some strongman fantasy, we're not actually going to understand the game. We're not actually going to understand the spiritual growth. We're not actually going to live into a better relationship with each other.

And just quite frankly, the freedom and the creativity that are at the core of this game have no room for biological essentialism. It actually doesn't work metaphysically, and that's been admitted.

So I think one of the things that's really important then is with storytelling, taking other gaming communities stories seriously, listening to other gaming communities, and learning from other gaming communities and how they tell their stories. And like y'all, high fantasy. Nick and I have talked about this with the Rings of Power stuff.

High fantasy fandoms have real toxic elements, but high fantasy fandoms also have really cool, creative, integrative spaces.

And when we read the stories and take the stories seriously and try to learn from them, it can expand us in really, I think, inclusive and creative ways. But we have to do that with that attention to nurture and we have to do that with that priority for life. Affirmation. Yeah.

Will Rose: 00:52:17

Cool. Joshua.

Unknown: 00:52:25

So I really haven't played a lot of D and D. So mine's more of like a general role playing game kind of stuff. I played some like post apocalyptic Doctor who champions, some of those.

Whenever I get into these kind of games, one of the things that I like to be is like the most opposite me that I can be. So I tend to be like chaotic evil female. Because like I like that's a solid.

Dr. Thomas Hermans-Webster: 00:52:49

Brag, by the way.

Will Rose: 00:52:50

Mostly strange.

Unknown: 00:52:54

I'm like more vanilla than vanilla. Yeah, I memorize rules so I make sure I don't accidentally maybe bend one, you know, Like I am the most vanilla.

So like when I get into this, I'm like, I want to be chaotic. I want to be like, you know, like just stretch my gender, stretch all the bounds I can. Which usually ends up, I'm getting to her, I promise.

Usually ends up with like.

Dr. Thomas Hermans-Webster: 00:53:18

Like.

Unknown: 00:53:18

Because we're talking a lot about this, like the collaborative effort of these games, like what it means to like play together. And I'm like, well, I'm playing this character.

And what my character would do as Chaotic Evil is if you're gonna pick up that treasure, I'm gonna shoot my teammate in the back and take it from them. Cause fuck em, you know?

Dr. Thomas Hermans-Webster: 00:53:33

Yeah.

Unknown: 00:53:34

So how does playing characters that necessarily aren't very collaborative in these collaborative games really, how does that play a part in these conversations?

Dr. Thomas Hermans-Webster: 00:53:45

You can go for that you want.

Samantha Perez: 00:53:46

So I can. Yeah, I have this conversation with my players. So I am currently running a campaign in Pathfinder with several evil characters.

And it's been a very interesting exercise and I think.

Will Rose: 00:53:58

Interesting exercise, yes, there you go.

Samantha Perez: 00:54:00

No, like being a story because in the actions we're taking, there is an extent to which you are doing things, but ultimately you are creating a story that we're all witnessing. And there are good stories about bad people doing stuff and the consequences being something we learn from or we learn about ourselves.

We learn about the world as we see the consequences of these stories. So my players were in this city and there was a problem that they had and there was the.

If you're into Pathfinder lore, they decided to go recruit the Hell Knights, which are a fundamentalist evil group about. They're kind of Nazis. Not really, but they're like, we're going to go find the strong. We're going to help. We're going to get their help.

And so these are real powerful people. So they went and found them and they got the help.

And then basically the way that we kind of dealt with the consequences of that was next time they were back in town, the Hell Knights had gotten super popular and they had seen the Hell Knight captain that helped them up on a stage giving a speech about how these are the heroes that helped us root out savagery from this city. And we all need to be wary because savagery is in each one of us. It is next to you, it is in our walls. And basically that town's getting real bad.

And so the players were into like, the characters were into it, but the players are witnessing it and feeling weird about it. And so it's a way to. Let's push on this system in this way and witness what happens.

And so I think for the dungeon master and for the player, just observing what happens, well, is how you make that fun. Right. Because if you just let the players indulge in the power fantasy, you're just kind of doing a feedback loop on the worst part of yourselves.

But if you're narrating it well, you see the cost. And if everybody is, if your table's mature about it, that can be, that can be life giving in its own way. And that like, wow.

Yeah, that real dark thing happened and it like, it made you think about, like, why did I want to do that? And like it was, it's. It can be informative and thought provoking.

Dr. Thomas Hermans-Webster: 00:56:09

Yeah. So I think we can get really, we can get really myopic in our everyday routines. Right.

Like, we're just real comfortable in what we're in right now in life. And so roleplay gaming like this gives us a chance to cross boundaries that we may or may not actually get to cross in our day to day life.

And Mary Elizabeth Moore is a brilliant process theologian, super compassionate religious educator.

Mary Elizabeth Moore wrote that boundary crossing like this in our storytelling, like when we, in gaming like this, when we are able to lean into the storytelling to such an extent that we are comfortable crossing boundaries in the game that we might not actually be able to cross in our daily lives.

That this kind of boundary crossing nurtures empathy toward others and raises important existential questions in encounters with similarity and difference. It does not matter if the boundary you crossed is cutting off your teammate's head or not. Right.

The fact that you had the space to cross that boundary and to actually live into the character and have to process the feelings and emotions and choices to do that is a practice of empathy that can shape your everyday life for a better sense of understanding. This is the beauty of fiction writing. Right.

Will Rose: 00:57:45

I can't wait to perceive with my arrow.

Samantha Perez: 00:57:49

I'm perceiving these boundaries.

Will Rose: 00:57:50

Perceiving these boundaries. Nick is going to ask the next question. Nick was our DM for the pre game for the target and, and ruled it and I.

It was so much fun and so yeah, I can't wait to hear what your conversation is because you had to like manage and deal with us and like partying campaign.

Unknown: 00:58:09

Well, I'm probably a little too loose. Like I'm, I'm kind of on the opposite where I'm like the rule.

Samantha Perez: 00:58:14

Like what do you. Yeah, that's fine.

Unknown: 00:58:16

That's fine. So I'm very. I like, I like, I like narrative and like to give controls to the players, probably to a fault.

But anyway, so my question is actually related to multi religious belonging and so how dnd, like even in its. In the world itself has that.

And then of course even with how your dad was doing pedagogy is very multi religious in the sense because he wasn't using traditional Methodist Christian education, he's using D and D which is crazy. Not crazy. And it's just awesome. It's fantastic.

And so I, you know, especially as a Tolkien person who all of us are very many of us have experienced trauma, are very skeptical of the church, but also want to be here and we find community in D and D or Tolkien. And I have probably had mystical religious experiences.

I know I have in and well, I've read Tolkien's legendarium and even in DND sessions while I've DMed or just participated as a player.

And so I'd love to hear your thoughts on just like how maybe your own experiences from multi religious experience in whatever role playing games you've played and maybe even if you see that as important or even just whatever, whatever that is, like what does that mean for the future of theology in our lives generally and also your own experience, how that's been like a comfort for y'all real, real quick.

Will Rose: 00:59:38

I'll just say like we have like, let's see, 10 minutes. We have two more questions I want to get to so we'll go quick. But I'll just say like I am just like a story junkie.

Is there any anywhere you can get like a cool story that I could be immersed in that that can expand my imagination and be into then I'm a part of it. So like the collaborative Storytelling, part of it with others, being entangled in a party, moving forward, adventure. I'm like, I'm all for it.

So I think healthy communities, faith communities, even churches, understand that they're part of a collaborative, entangled, storytelling adventure together is what brings hope and energy and zest to a community. So that that's where I want to encourage and be a part of and try to like, facilitate and spread the good news of I'm a story junkie and let's do it.

That's kind of thing.

Dr. Thomas Hermans-Webster: 01:00:30

Whitehead in Religion in the Making Alfred North Whitehead says religion is what one does with his solitariness. And that gets misread all the time as the most hyper individualistic definition of religion that's ever been written in the English language.

Instead, knowing Whitehead, knowing process, metaphysics and the breadth of how Whitehead thought about the individual and solitariness.

To say that religion is what one does with their solitariness is to say religion is what you do when you, as you realize that you are only you because of all of the relationships that knit the cosmos together. Religion then is what you do with the fact that you are you because of your relationships.

Multi religious belonging, I think, and role playing, gaming in this way can really help us think through the doing of that storytelling and play and taking stock of how our relationships constitute all of us.

How our relationships contribute to who we understand ourselves to be, but also how we, because of our relationships, contribute to who other people actually are. Right. Like you realize all of us are becoming new people right now because we have been in this conversation, right?

How we incorporate that into our own story of ourselves may or may not incorporate the nine traditional loci of Christian theology.

It may in fact bring in, in the case of my dad, it may in fact bring in a radically open, monotheistic, unnamed, apophatic cosmology in which there was an unnamed God and the unnamed God was the deity of the cosmos. And the unnamed God, like the one recognized in Acts, the Apostles, the unnamed God was journeying along with the adventurers into an unknown future.

Right?

That storytelling can stick in your craw the exact same way as the best Bonhoeffer Christology you got, if it helps us make sense of how each one of us contribute to who I understand myself to be.

So I think role playing, gaming and storytelling really helps broaden our opportunities to account for our own, all of our relationships and to account for who we're responsible to who, who we can be grateful to, who we can thank. Because without you, I couldn't be me. Hello.

Unknown: 01:03:44

Hi, my name is Nathan. I'm a middle school teacher and also I DM my middle school kids sometimes.

Samantha Perez: 01:03:50

Like.

Unknown: 01:03:53

I teach history, he teaches Dungeons and Dragons. Yeah, that's what I really try to teach. So I'm coming at it from a few angles.

I also gave a talk, not to my middle schoolers a few months ago called David Bowie versus the Puritans. And. And what. What I found when I was researching for it is an answer, I think, to the question that was earlier about what did the. The Satanic.

Dr. Thomas Hermans-Webster: 01:04:17

Satanic panic.

Unknown: 01:04:18

The Satanic panic. What were they really?

And I, I totally agree with your power thing, but I think, and this is underneath a lot of it is a real fear of the same reason that they didn't like David bowie or like 16th century British plays, which is where the Puritans originally lashed out against. Because of the sense of play that they brought. Because they fundamentally don't understand the image of God. And they think all of it is just.

They think if your salvation is at risk every moment, you don't have time to play, you don't have time to risk, you don't have to. So all that together. The quote that I thought was really cool that I found doing it was from W.H.

auden in the Age of Anxiety play where he says, human beings are necessarily actors who cannot become something before they have first pretended to be it.

And they can be divided not into the hypocritical and the sincere, but into the sane who know that they are acting and the mad who know that they are not.

Dr. Thomas Hermans-Webster: 01:05:21

Yes.

Unknown: 01:05:22

So that, that gave me a lot of like. Because I also changed jobs to go to a more religious school. And anyway, that gave me a lot of the reason to carry the D and D thing on.

And so I just have a. There's one question that I have because I also teach. So the big question is this that I want you to answer.

Do you have resources to help do what you're talking about, to help DMs do this more effectively. So, side note, I also teach. I've also always taught, like, I don't know, like, it's called roadmap.

It's like a roadmap course to help kids figure out, like, it's what guidance counselors should do but never get around to. And they just try and the whole goal is to help a kid figure out how they're wired up. And like my whole goal is like.

And then you go with you figure out how God dealt you the cards. And then Go with your best version of that. Like, that's what you do, right? And so for that, I always kind of found.

I never heard the term before the biological essentialism actually sort of helpful for a lot of kids because middle school is the classic place where you get the kid that they're still convinced, like, half my boys are going to be NBA and NFL players. And I'm like, okay, maybe, but let's just think about these.

Dr. Thomas Hermans-Webster: 01:06:41

The greatest middle school football team ever assembled.

Unknown: 01:06:45

Let's consider some of these stats. Let's consider. Let's consider some of your stats. Let's consider what the hand that you've been. So anyway, I just wondered.

I really want to know the resources, but I also wonder your thoughts on that, because I think there's a good part of like accepting sort of like, like how you've been wired up that can actually lead to. Because otherwise I found in my. Sometimes this is not related.

But in your DM games, you get a bunch of middle school kids together, everybody wants to be a Dragonborn or a Tiefling. They all just want to be like, I'm stat master of everything, right?

Dr. Thomas Hermans-Webster: 01:07:23

So to answer the second one, because the first one, I'm happy to share my bibliography with you, but a lot of it actually comes out of just like pedagogy stuff like content gamification, pedagogy, and like Antonio Ruiz Esquero and like education theory people. But to answer the second one, I think one of the things and how I think about boundaries and limitations is helpful here.

The difference between biological essentialism and like, just factual boundaries of the cosmos is that, like, it's just a factual boundary that 99% of your middle school football players are not going to play in the NFL, right?

Like, that actually has nothing to do with like, claims about their value or potential or fixedness as who they are as a living biotic creature, right? And so the narratives that we can share that do give some kind of stability and nurture the creativity from the stability are what are so important.

It's when we take what we think is essential to us. My racial essentialism is the most common one here. You know, nose size, ear size, skin color.

When we take these things and say that because of these particular biological traits, therefore the relational capacity is only ever xyz.

That is, instead of nurturing movement toward life and right relationship, that's shutting off possibilities before they're even available to the kid. So I think there's real value and stability. There's real value in stable narratives.

But Those stable narratives have to be engaged with intentional nurture for the student as for the person as a co creative partner of the cosmos with God.

Samantha Perez: 01:09:50

And if I can just add a little bit, you talked about stable narratives and I think this is the, to me, this is the value, this is the fun part of role playing as a communal storytelling activity.

Because for as long as we've been telling each other stories as a species, the go to way to make a new story was to take a story everyone knows and then change something. And the thing you changed is the point you're making that is the new story.

So you can tell us, you know this, you know, you can play as an orc who is stronger and you know, like we know the story of the orc that is stronger and dumber and scarier. There's not value really to telling that story completely straightforward.

Telling that story completely straightforward is what the worst people on the Internet want to happen because they like these really stable biological narratives.

Dungeons and Dragons, the way it works is a lot of, I know people who are like higher minded about wanting to improvise cool stories sometimes don't like how basic some of these stories are. They don't like that Curse of Strahd is just Dracula. But there is value to starting from, we're starting from just Dracula.

And then everyone in here, in this party is going to do something a little different to Dracula and that's going to make a think.

And so that's, you know, that's where like, you know, the biological imperatives at the beginning of Dungeons and Dragons, they're kind of, they're baked in. And even if you call them ancestries instead of races, they're still baked in. You can move your plus two somewhere else, but it's still.

We all know what's going on here, but I think that's like, like you said, engage with it intentionally. Don't let them tell a story about themselves, about how they're destined to only be one thing.

Let them change one, one thing and feel pushing against the narratives we know how to do. And that role playing is easier when you start from that, because improv is hard. And so it's valuable to start from. We're doing Dracula.

You are an orc. You are a have orc. So you kind of know what's going to happen if you don't change anything. And then that lets you swoop in and change something.

And now you've told the story, now you've learned something about yourself, now you've thought critically about this thing.

Will Rose: 01:11:57

We're doing great. Final word? I. Yeah, I think. Yeah. There's no more to say other than there's ways to find us to keep this conversation going.

We've talked for, like, an hour and 10 minutes, and we could probably go another two hours. But that's what's fun about beer camp.

You hear these things, something resonates with you, a question rises to the surface, and you meditate on it, you reflect on it. Reach out to us on the Internet or DM us, Find us, and we'll be happy to keep the conversation going.

Thank you all for being here and being a part of our story, and we'll keep adventuring together moving forward. Thanks, y'all. Peace. Come up.