Wyrmworks Publishing Can tabletop roleplaying games actually change societal norms? Welcome to Gaining Advantage. Wyrmworks Publishing Welcome to Gaining Advantage. We are using tabletop role playing games like Dungeons and Dragons to help you make lives better. Usually I start off the show talking about what's the latest thing going on here at Wyrmworks Publishing, but for a change, I've got some news that I'm super excited about, that. there's actually something that's going on over at Wizards of the Coast who make Dungeons & Dragons. Polygon just released an article saying that the new Deck of Many Things, which is going to have a an accompanying Book of Many Things, product is going to be coming out later this year. And it is going to feature the first canon autistic character in the the official Dungeons & Dragons lore. And for people that…Okay, so first of all, this character called Asteria is going to be the narrator of the book the same way that Fizban's and Tasha's and Mordenkainen's and you know all the books coming out from WotC lately have been… had some kind of narrator with little sidebars and comments and things like that throughout the book. And so this one, which the character was designed and written by Mackenzie De Armas, who also has autism, and so she basically based it on her own experiences, so I know some people have been concerned — they saw the headline, didn't read the article, and and were wondering about how it's going to be presented, but MacKenzie's an amazing person and and I've just absolute confidence that this is going to be really great. And so she created this character called Asteria who is described as "a princess turned to paladin," and it has all kinds of comments and I just want to encourage you to go read the article on Polygon. Link is in our show notes. It's just super good news. Wyrmworks Publishing Now for those of you who don't understand why this is such a big deal or for those of you, more likely for those who watch the show, those who do, but have a hard time explaining to other people why it's a big deal, I've got a great sort of parallel story, and this nicely ties in with our interview today. It ties in with what's going on here when we talk about representation. There's a story I heard a little while back about a DM that took a published adventure — I'm pretty sure it was a standard Wizards of the Coast adventure — and just went through and gender swapped all of the NPCs in the adventure. All the females were male, all the males or female. There were no nonbinary or anything like that. So none of that to be done. But just just went through and switched them all. And that's it. Just, you know, gave them sort of gender-typical names and and then and that's it, no more, and just ran the adventure normal. The players were trying to figure out what was going on. Like, "The girls are ganging up on us!" and just there was this paranoia because, "Why are there all these women?" Right? Because that just demonstrates how adventures, when they're written, tend to skew male. All right, but even more so, well, we'll hear in the interview, we'll hear about how they skew racially and the coding that goes along with that. But even more so think about the last time you saw a published adventure that included a character with a disability, neurodiversity, mental illness that was portrayed authentically and positively. Now, Ravenloft has a couple characters and you know there's a few strewn, but that's about it. And it's just super rare. But when you consider that while here in the United States, it's 25% of the population, throughout the world is 20% of the population are disabled. That's not just missing people. That's not overlooking a demographic. The term for that is "erasure." This is, "We're just going to pretend you don't exist." And we're talking about a pretend world. And we're and we can put anything in that world that we want. And somehow we decide to just pretend that a fifth of the population just doesn't exist because that's the world that we want to design. Well, here's what it comes down to. I really have to believe that for most people, and I know there's exceptions, I've met them. But for most people and myself included before I started all of this, they just don't think about it. It just doesn't enter their minds. Alright, the same way when I was growing up, I never thought to include black characters or and my games tended to skew pretty masculine too. But once you realize that, once you notice, "Oh, wow. There's a…that's strange. Why are we just not including them?" and you want to include them and and so here's an opportunity to see how that can be done well, and and so I'm really excited about that, encourage you to go check that out. And so without further ado, and just really nicely leading into the next section. Let's get on with our interview. Wyrmworks Publishing Today, we're joined by Aaron Trammell, Associate Professor of Informatics at UC Irvine, whose research explores the intricate connection between tabletop role playing games and our cultural landscape. Aaron explores how these experiences intersect with issues of privilege, identity, even positive social change. Welcome Aaron! Aaron Trammell Hi Dale! It's great to be here! Wyrmworks Publishing So what would you like us to know about you personally, specifically, speaking to the roleplaying game crowd? Aaron Trammell Yeah, so I think especially since we're gonna go into my work, which is often on identity, of the historical identity of folks in the the tabletop role playing game community and tabletop board game communities, the number one thing I want to start with is that I am a tabletop game hobbyist. I grew up playing these games. I love these games. It's what I do with my spare time and weekends and vacation and nights when I have energy and time. So I want everybody listening to know that, you know, I might be kind of critical at times, but it's important that you know that this criticism comes from a place of love, a place of understanding, and a place from probably having fallen into a lot of the things I'll criticize myself at some point in my life. Wyrmworks Publishing Sure. Yeah, absolutely. And that's a good point. You know, I think that first of all, I just have a hard time imagining someone investing themselves that much into something that they, you know, just didn't really care about. It's, it's really not a lucrative, you know, sort of field or business. If you're, if you're just really trying to grab onto something and make a lot of money on it. So clearly, it's, it's out of love and so yeah, I appreciate you mentioning that. Aaron Trammell Totally, totally. Yeah, it's you know, I, I play games because I love them, and I love the community, and I just, I want to help make it better. So, that's, that's what I do. Wyrmworks Publishing Alright, so what sparked your interest in studying how these games impact players lives? Aaron Trammell Yeah, so that's, that's kind of interesting story. You're gonna…maybe it's a boring story because it goes back to grad school on some level. It goes back to two grad school experiences I had. So the first one was that I did my Master's program in Binghamton, New York in comparative literature. And I was interested in games at this time. But if you've ever been to Binghamton, New York, you would know that this town is kind of a rust belt town. It's been falling apart for the last 10-20 years, kind of abandoned. IBM moved out of town. It was once a boom town in the 80s and the water got poisoned, actually, when they moved out of town, like literally the water was poisoned. So lots of people were kind of fleeing the town itself. And so when I got there, it was hard to make friends, meet community. It was kind of an isolating place. There just wasn't a lot going on. But there were a few game stores, and so it was just really cool to discover there was like a thriving Magic the Gathering card community. This was right when tabletop board games were starting to boom, so like, you know, there's a few shops that had like Agricola and other exciting games that you might have expected around 2005-2007 to be in your game store. So it was just kind of an early an exciting moment for tabletop gaming. And it happened when I was in a really boring, isolated location. So it was great to go buy a game and then have some weekend entertainment to play with friends and to meet friends at these community events. So that's the first experience. The second experience was trying to figure out what I was going to do my dissertation work on when I was finally a doctoral student. And I knew I wanted to do game studies. I was really interested in researching games, and I had never ever thought about thinking about the games I myself played in my spare time. I thought about like the sort of mass market AAA games that we play on our computers and our machines. And the first thing I did when I got to grad school is I wound up doing ethnography of magic card players because it seemed interesting, and it seemed relevant for a course I took on ethnography, and it was really cool. And then little by little, all my work just wound up being…having a focus on tabletop games, because I realized that not many people who are doing work on in game studies, which is the field that I do my research in, were looking at that, and so the niche was there. I was familiar with it because I had been part of the hobby community. It was like an important life point of me going back to when I was in graduate program, and it was kind of isolating, and I was just like, "Hey, maybe this stuff is also worth researching." Wyrmworks Publishing Yeah, so can you explain how games like Dungeons and Dragons and you mentioned Magic the Gathering subtly represent and promote privilege in harmful cultural tropes? Aaron Trammell Yeah, there's two answers to this question, depending on I guess which of the things I've written that you've read. And I'm going to start with the more common answer. In some of my writing, I've got an essay called the Rules for Race in Dungeons & Dragons. It's kind of autobiography biographical. It's a fun read. And it's about representation in these games. It's about how like, one of the founders, Gary Gygax, considered himself a biological essentialist, how the stat lines for different characters has historically been impacted by their identity positions. For example, there's a whole hullabaloo about like men fighting stronger than women in Dungeons & Dragons, on a fan level, of course, in the 70s, and 80s. And, and also like in the materials, you know, who was represented, how are black people represented? How are East Asian people represented? I personally am black. So that was an important thing to read it for me, but reflecting on that, thinking about how it the game itself encouraged me not to identify as black in this fantasy world, because Black was always a sort of like exotic African character, not the sort of blackness I've grown up with, and instead the white character seems familiar, seems like heroic, because that's how they are presented in some of these early sourcebooks. So that's the first kind of way that I encountered race in Dungeons & Dragons, but the other way, and this is what my recent book, The Privilege of Play, is actually about, is actually thinking more sociologically through the makeup of tabletop game communities and historically, about the makeup of tabletop game communities. And in that book, I argue that these communities have actually been predominantly white communities. They kind of grow out of the model train hobby scene and the wargaming hobby scenes throughout the 20th century. And the reason that they wind up being white communities is that white communities, at least for the beginning of the 20th Century, wound up being communities that had free time to do leisure activities with, and that means that as these games got developed, these were the communities that jumped in had time and energy to build and develop these communities and didn't really second guess the amount of privilege it would take to enter them and definitely didn't do their best to open the doors for people of color in those communities. And I'd also include women, although there's lots more examples of women who are able to kind of get in through a backdoor, you know, perhaps helping their husband publish or paint or sell things on the hobby level. So integration with women I think comes a little faster than integration with people of color and hobby game communities overall. Wyrmworks Publishing Yeah, boy, I hadn't thought about the amount of leisure time and but you know, the I've come to the realization that the the epitome of privilege is not realizing you have privilege. And and so yeah, I did not not, that I have a lot of leisure time, but um, but I can imagine how different demographics that really can make a difference. So Aaron Trammell Yeah, if you got, if you think historically, this is the thing I learned about model trains, I love this. I've been telling everybody this, but if you go back to the beginning of the 20th Century, model trains were exciting for people in like the year 1900, not because there were model trains, but because people who had electricity could show off this expensive electricity they were buying. And if you think about that demographically, that's mostly white people, because this was 50 years after the Civil War. So most black people in America didn't own land, you know, were in a position where they just just didn't have that many means or quarters to rub together. And so all this stuff rolls out through white communities where there are these sort of avant garde things like electricity throughout the 20th Century, and so they reaped the benefits, and they created the communities around their hobbies. Wyrmworks Publishing Wow, that's fascinating. Alright, so after listening to you on NPR's Code Switch, I noticed the racial languages in most fantasy RPG worlds, and how Common, as it's usually called, or Basic in Star Wars and things like that, is the lingua franca, or the commerce language, in those worlds, but it's also the standard human language. And by the way, I noticed this even in the new Kobold Press's Tales of the Valiant, that is in fact the case. Alright, so do you see an implication with cultural coding and language use? Or am I just overthinking this? And is there a better way to present this without overcomplicating gameplay? Aaron Trammell I love that question. I've never actually thought of it before, but I absolutely think that I think something interesting is being coded there. There's there's the dimension of race. That's definitely happening where "human" I think is code for "whiteness" in a lot of fantasy game worlds, whereas the sort of like colorful myriad other races that are provided tend to be based sometimes on racial stereotypes, but also are presented in opposition to what's invisible, which is a human and that's how we see whiteness presented in our day to day North American society. So that's, that's an important thing. I think that's that's going on in this conversation. But then Common as human language is a kind of second dimension of that, I would think. Just kind of like running with you a little bit here. I would think that Common is kind of a standard for English, which is becoming more and more of the sort of commerce language and lingua franca of the world we live in today. And I would also think about how English has been derived and criticized in many ways for its European roots, English roots specifically, and how, one of the reasons that it's everywhere in the world is because of the legacy of colonialism that England itself has kind of wrought, you know, sending their people around the world to harvest materials and goods, sometimes other people from other cultures across the world. And so I think when you start thinking about English as being lingua franca in our world today, because of colonialism, you can come back to thinking about Common in these worlds as maybe having a similar language as being the sort of default language, perhaps not owning the same legacy of colonialism to it, but having a similar kind of history. And yeah, I don't know if there's a better way to complicate this in terms of gameplay. I designed a few very small games, none have been published before. So I don't know if I'm the right person to talk to about design, but it's such an interesting question to say like, "How would you design this?" Um, it's interesting always, I like negative design space personally. So in game design conversations, if you're someone who pays attention to these, positive design space has been really the design trend that's been happening like this last 15-20 years, where mechanics where players kind of have to take disadvantage or something like that are far less popular in game design, the mechanics and just kind of give players a bump. D&D Fifth Edition like clearly does this in a lot of ways. Like you always get a bonus to your things. You rarely get a negative modifier to your scores because it's, it's nicer just to see bonuses. People have psychological issues when they get negative modifiers. So when you have a language barrier between other cultures, and you can't always just chat with someone, that's kind of a negative modifier. And that's just not trendy in design right now, but I would love to see a game where it that the mechanics were built around having to overcome that and it took that sort of challenge more seriously, and maybe the benefits of that challenge and the ways that that creates a more unique sense of cultural expression or something a little more seriously. I think that'd be fascinating. Wyrmworks Publishing Cool. All right. So I'm gonna come around back to a couple of the things you said and I'm gonna mention to both right now, because of my ADHD I will forget if I don't bring them both up at the moment. All right. So um, so the first one is this whole concept of sort of races as the "other" because there's, you know, there's been lots of discourse online about, you know, "Are orcs racist?" And "Oh, well, what, what demographic do they represent?" and no one can agree on that. And it's like, okay, but but that doesn't mean that they're not, and so I'd like to spend a little more time talking about that. But also, I just want to throw kind of my idea as a designer at you first of all, kind of tying in with that, that "other" concept that were you mentioned, kind of coding like English. That doesn't mean that you know, if you if you happen to be all the players are native French speakers, and so you're playing in French and therefore, around your table the Common tongue is French, because that's the language you're speaking, but but rather coded, when you said coded as English is more in the sense of that it plays the same role in the world, alright, and and and yeah, you know, the most commonly celebrated holiday in the world is independence from your from British colonization, so Aaron Trammell I didn't know that. It's really, Wyrmworks Publishing I think it's like, like every day of the year. It's I mean, it's there's, you know, there's overlap, but, but there's like, there's more…it's different countries, different years, different ways that they celebrate and stuff. But yeah, it really says something. But, um, I saw that recently. It really hit me. Yeah. But so so the way that I as I've been building my world and really focusing on accessibility in both sort of when it comes to disabilities and things like that, but also cultural accessibility and and, and so, in my world, the Common tongue is sort of inspired by street speak in cyberpunk. So it's kind of this amalgamation of of just, it's not any one sort of native cultural language. But but rather is this amalgamation of different cultures interacting with each other and, and so you have aspects of all of them. Now, when people play, they're still just going to speak whatever the the players prefer to speak, but this as far as the kind of lore of the world, that's how it's represented. And so that's kind of my my overall thought on how to represent it, and then but then I also don't base languages on species where you're gonna have, you know, certain groups that tend to, you know, people that are like each other tend to group together and things like that. And so you're going to have stronger…more of certain kinds of people in different areas, but um, but you but you're not just going to have one dwarf language and one elf language and one human language, that it's more cultural. And so, you know, there's a, you have a culture where it's you know, might be like humans, orcs and dwarves and minotaurs tend to make up this culture and, and so that culture has their language and then another culture that has a mix of other species, you know, has their language and stuff and so it kind of eliminates that tying, This is what you look like, and therefore this is how you talk." Aaron Trammell Yeah, I think that that makes a ton of sense. I love that idea of making it sort of like, like its own mosaic and each culture contributing to the language like culture and race being separated is really important in that regard. The other thing I'd say is the street speak. i A big shout out to Mike Pondsmith, who I just think is absolutely brilliant in all the right ways. And so like reminding me of that mechanic is awesome because when you have street speak, one of the things that it's also doing is it's taking the common tongue, and it's not elevating it, it's actually lowering it and saying that, you know, this is this is what the common people speak. It's finding that sort of point of solidarity, almost like grassroots solidarity, in the sense of that language. And it's not kind of coming at it from a perspective of purity, which I think is the danger of, sort of, you know, like the tribal languages that you're talking about and thinking about language as directly correlated with race. And I think both of them get around that problem of purity in really clever ways. Wyrmworks Publishing All right, cool. You know, I have these, I have all kinds of ideas and you know, and and sometimes they're really bad ideas. And so yeah, obviously, it's important to bounce those ideas off of people that are more affected by it than I am. And that's why we hire a lot of sensitivity readers for our projects and things like that. But it was just kind of listening to you sort of inspired that. And so I thought well, nice to bounce the idea right off the person who inspired the idea in the first place. Aaron Trammell No, I'm glad. I'm glad you brought it up because I had not thought of language in that concept and it's really interesting. So Wyrmworks Publishing Cool. Alright, so then, let's talk a little bit about, "Are orcs racist?" Aaron Trammell Okay. Orcs are racially coded. They're not racist. That's That's my stance on that. So orcs are absolutely drawing on a lot of racial tropes. And I think a lot of writers who have used orcs have deployed them in a somewhat racist way, right? Like when you go back to sort of Sword and Sorcery fiction that a lot of these fantasy races are drawing on. Tolkien, for example, is also cribbing on some of this material. He's definitely using orcs in a racially coded way and of course, you know, he's making them evil, which might be a little bit racist. Especially considering you know, that's being written in the time of World War One where especially amongst white people, racism was a very common and normal thing. So I don't think that's a controversial thing to suggest or imagine that, you know, thinking about orcs in that regard as racist would be a flash forward today with like something like Fifth Edition Dungeons and Dragons where you have a more sophisticated player-based half-orc at least, you know, players can just jump into in the Player's Handbook. It is racially coded, but it's they're trying hard in these ways to not make the racial code a negative one. Far less racist, I'd say even like the Tolkien's orcs that we've experienced in the past, you know, maybe still some some questions of racism happening insofar as orc society might be depicted as more primitive than human society in a variety of ways. Definitely something happening there around sort of like what is civilized and not civilized, these are terms that have often been deployed in racial contexts to denigrate races that are non-white, as barbaric or uncivilized. Far less racist, I would say than the Tolkienish example, but you know, for me, racism is a spectrum in that regard where things can be very racist, and they can be relatively, you know, inoffensive on the other end of the spectrum, but I don't think if you have an orc you can get away from saying it's been racially coded, and I think that's the important difference in language I would use is that you know, all orcs are going to be racially coded. And so if you're a game designer considering including orcs in your game, I think that you should be conscientious that people of color reading that, especially black people, for whom many of these racial codes resonate, might be upset by some of the assumptions that you're baking into that race, especially if you're just cribbing in from the tradition of fantasy fiction that has often been very uncritical of how these things are racially coded. So I think that's the important question is, "How are these things racially coded?" When we start talking about racism and throwing things around regarding the word racism, I just want to kind of put this out there too, because I differentiate in my work between white supremacist and white supremacy. White supremacists are actually people out there, you know, like Neo Nazis. They have beliefs about other races — they believe that they're lesser than their own race, and they believe strongly that they do have a race as white people and it is the white race or you know, a variety of Aryan races that they'll describe themselves as being descended from. And white supremacy is something that we just have in our society where white people tend to have great jobs. Not all white people, obviously, but they tend to make more than black people; they tend to make more than other brown people. And we also see more representations of white people more in representations of white people in heroic positions, as central characters and narratives etc. And I think that sense of white supremacy is more ubiquitous. But in some ways, it's less scary than actual white supremacists who are going out to make propaganda for their their perceived race. And actual white supremacists did at times, make games for Avalon Hill, make games for TSR hobbies, and also wrote a lot of Sword and Sorcery fiction, so that's, that's where I think it gets a little dodgy. I don't think Tolkien was a white supremacist. I think a lot of his contemporaries may have been. Wyrmworks Publishing Do you have suggestions on how some of the harmful approaches in representation could be handled better? Aaron Trammell That's a big question to answer and so, I think though, I want to start at a place with that question, that kind of requests that people listening first recognize that we're all always historically situated in a bunch of moments, and then these moments demand different things from us. So, what might be good today might be terrible in five years, and what might have been really great five years ago might be completely backwards today. So better is always a relative term, and I want people who are trying their best and listening. right now to understand that when we talk about what better could be today, it's not an indictment of decisions that they may have made in the past or anything like that so much that it's just trying to push for what the next big thing is. And then, I'm just having all these caveats. I gotta add this too. I actually think people should be gentle with each other. I do think one of the amazing things about the hobby game community is that you have people from lots of radically different backgrounds coming together to break bread and play games together. And that is really special in today's world where we've seen, increasing political polarization all over the place. So, even though I definitely am part of, “Let's make games a more equitable and inclusive space,” I want people to think about this and not judge themselves too harshly for the place that they’re starting at, especially because that means it's harder to make those changes that I think might actually improve the lives of others of the table. So that said, I've been a fan of approaches to representation that pull out some of the mechanics of quantification that roleplaying games have been built on having grown up with these games, as I said, I think these mechanics are a lot of fun. They're definitely flavorful to think this race gets bonus to this and minus to this. There's a reason they've been popular for such a long time. But I do think that approaches that can be more flexible insofar as they think through those quantified mechanics get us away from a sort of biological determinism and biological essentialism, that's really important. You might lose something in flavor, but you do start getting a more nuanced imagery of different fantasy races and so that's one of the ways I absolutely think things can be done better. Also, we were talking about how great I think Mike Pondsmith is, the designer, earlier. I think also creating other statistical categories, as a designer, for the characters in your games, is really interesting. I like that “Cool” is quantified in cyberpunk. I think that's an awesome stat to give players. And I don't necessarily think it carries the same racial connotations and eugenic baggage. It's something like strength or intelligence, right, where we used to have phrenology tests that said, “This person's cranium is shaped different, so they must be less intelligent.” So, a lot of the stat systems that we have in games right now, are really coded with sort of eugenic baggage that makes me uncomfortable. So that's a place that I encourage people to kind of look away from. I’ll also say I've been playing the new Baldur's Gate 3, of course, because that's out on computer and it's exciting and it's good. I think that they completely took away. It's completely flexible with your stat buffs. You can be any race and take any stat bonuses. So, that's kind of cool. But then they leaned into some of the other flavorful bonuses like infravision, for example, for elves and stuff. So you still have a lot of the flavors and other bonuses that they give different races, and I think for a fantasy world that those can be more interesting and also be more interesting set pieces for players to play around. Taking darkness, more seriously as a mechanic in a game, for example, than maybe strength that creates a more textured space for player characters to inhabit and navigate and might even lead to a more interesting story. Wyrmworks Publishing Yeah. No absolutely. That makes a lot of sense. Appreciate that. I mean, yeah, just adding or subtracting a plus or minuses while's definitely, in D&D, it's definitely a part of the game. It doesn't really make things real interesting unless you're really, attaching it to something. and I say that with having developed resources that use a lot of pluses and minuses, with things but, I'm always looking for better ways to represent it too. So, Aaron Trammell Totally. And, I think part of it is also that when you buy a role-playing game. you open it up, you read the book and one of the first things a lot of people want to do is make a few kind of characters to see what it feels like, maybe not characters you'll play with, but you want to see what those characters look like, and that is one of the reasons that I think these things have kind of stuck around, these stats have stuck around for such a long time, because it's fun to play around with what these different builds could look like, and people like to do that. And so I think that's an important joy that as we move forward to find games, that we find ways to still embrace the things that are really pleasurable and joyful about role-playing games is a key part of design moving forward. So Wyrmworks Publishing Yeah, how have you seen lives changed because of your work? Aaron Trammell I don't know if I can think that big. I haven't seen that many people. So on I guess what is now called X, which is social media, people often shout out some of my writing and say that it's been important for them to read it, or it's made sense of their research or the world they live in a different way. So that's always exciting. as an author it's always great to see someone read this and thought it was poignant. So I love it when I get feedback like that. The other kind of material way I'd say. I've seen lives change is I work as a cultural consultant for Gen Con. And so I'm helping them think through some of the policies that they have and some of the initiatives they have. They don't take all of my advice. They do take a good amount of it, and it's been exciting to see them change things little by little, year after year, because I do think that their community is getting more diverse and absolutely getting more accessible and inclusive as a result to it. One of the big recommendations that we had made—It's not just me, but I work with some other people on the team—that we had made last year, was fighting for better accessibility spaces at the con, and to see the amount of people this year who are kind of using scooters which were now readily available or talking about how much easier it was to navigate some of the rooms because of the spacing that was important to see. And also they have a lounge, which is for BIPoC gamers there. It's been cool to see the people in that lounge say, “I didn't think this community was for me, but I came there. I saw a bunch of other people who look like me, and I realized that maybe I had judgmental about it without knowing what the community was in the first place.” And these are things I wish had been around when I was in my teens, during my 20s, trying to find gaming spaces, I just never quite felt like I clicked on the con scene when I was younger and it's cool to go now and see a bunch of people feeling like things are getting better for them. Wyrmworks Publishing Cool, that's great. And, the one thing that a lot of the kind of work that you're doing, you're not going to get a lot of feedback on, but I mean, I know just from the little bit of your work that I've read and I'm looking forward to reading more, for me, it opens my eyes to things that I was just never aware of before that, that didn't click that. just because my own privileges, guy that really checks all the privilege boxes, so I'm just being able to get perspectives from people whose lives are affected by all of these things a whole lot more than mine. It helps me develop empathy. and to recognize, I could do things a little bit differently and that will make my actions less harmful and so just becoming aware of some of those things and making those little course corrections along the way, it can make a huge difference. Aaron Trammell That's all I'm so happy and I just love hearing stuff like that. And thank you for reading and, I've said this in other things I've written, but I actually think that the more people can just read, not just my work, but any work by people of color and people from marginalized sexualities that speaks to their own interests, the better a world we're going to live in, because I do think that ultimately, it's about creating empathy and bonds between other people, not necessarily changing the world from the top down but changing the world from the bottom up. Wyrmworks Publishing Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So You have just rescued a genie from the hands of an efreeti, and it offers you three wishes to achieve your goals to make the world better. What do you wish for? Aaron Trammell I am clever enough to know that I shouldn't wish for anything. And in fact I should probably destroy the genie lamp. If I wish for world peace or something, then I'm gonna live in a fascist dictatorship where there's one country and that's it. Genies are clever, and solutions to problems are never easy. And I think that is the story of the genie. Wyrmworks Publishing Okay, that's fair. All right. what one message would you like to give gamers, both players in DMs, to improve cultural representation at their game tables? Aaron Trammell There's a few things But you're asking for one message. Wyrmworks Publishing It's fine. It can be more than one. Aaron Trammell No actually I think I like limits in design. So I like the idea for one message and I'm just gonna give you I think the message that came to my mind when you said this. Aaron Trammell So again no offence to anyone listening, but as sort of like a geek community, I think that we're not always the best with interpersonal skills. And so I think the best thing that anyone can do at their table if they want it to be a more inclusive space is to have an extra seat ready for people, and if that extra person does come and decide to sit down at your table to kind of just greet them with hospitality. Don't assume they know what's going on. Explain some of the in-jokes that are going on. “Yeah, we're laughing because last week, this character, this happened.” These are things that are really intimidating for people who are entering a new space. I went with my wife to a Lorcana tournament this weekend. It was her first collectible card game tournament ever, and we were talking a lot at it, and she said, “I was really intimidated the entire time by the space. I was afraid I was going to play someone and they were gonna judge me for not knowing the rules. I was afraid walking around that I was gonna bump into somebody and they'd say I shouldn't be walking there.” And really, we take these spaces so much for granted that we don't realize how important it can be for a new player or someone who's new to the community, to feel that they're welcome there and to just feel like they understand what's going on there. And that when people are laughing, they're not laughing at them. And so I think making sure that there's an extra seat at the table, making sure that someone's talking to that person and kind of orienting them to what's happening in the room, what those procedures are, what would go next, why people are doing certain things that might be taken for granted. I think that would go a long way in making that person want to come back and play another game. Wyrmworks Publishing But I love that, that just really resonates with me as someone who, social stuff is hard for me, I'm an introvert, which a lot of people would think that here’s a guy running a podcast and all this kind of stuff and a lot of years in public speaking, but social situations are hard for me. And anytime I get invited to. Yeah, but because of that when a space is inviting and it's just like, “Hey, you're welcome here, no matter who you are, no matter, it's beautiful,” and I expect a lot of it kind of fits the stereotype, but I think there's probably still some truth to a large segment of the gaming community that. we struggle in social situations at least sometimes, and giving that and treating people the way you'd want to be treated and being aware that when you have the advantage of being the in-crowd and making sure that no one feels left out or that barrier for entry is too strong. Yeah, that really makes a big difference. Really appreciate that. Aaron Trammell Yeah, Totally! Totally and you're right. It is a stereotype to say that all tabletop gamers do this and if you're not one of the tabletop gamers who does this, that's awesome, but also I feel like I've been to enough events to know that many of us are introverts, and many of us don't feel comfortable in social situations, and so pushing yourself to meet the challenge of helping someone else get through that, I think can make the event better for everyone involved. Wyrmworks Publishing Yeah, yeah, I've realized that's actually what I like about tabletop games. Is that it gives you a framework for social interaction. Aaron Trammell Mmm. Wyrmworks Publishing That there’s rules for it and stuff and you have a specific topic to address and there's ways you address it and all that kind of stuff and yeah, then it's not like, I don't know what to say. it makes huge difference but Aaron Trammell Total totally. Wyrmworks Publishing Alright, what one message would you like to give to creators and publishers to improve cultural representation in their projects and products? Aaron Trammell Yeah. Creators and publishers. I think diversifying your team is the wisest thing that creators and publishers can do to improve cultural representation in their products and projects. And I don't just mean this in terms of race. I don't just mean this in terms of gender. I don't just mean this In terms of all these things, not, as I was saying earlier, our community really does rely on sort of networks of people who know each other. And because of that, product teams can often be very homogenous because it's a lot of people who know each other might, each other belong to the same culture with each other. And that often means that they have come from the same background. This happens also in the tech industry today, and it's a problem that they're dealing with as well as they can. And so finding that way to diversify your team, and I don't just mean hire diversity, but pull diverse people into the leadership. I think the more you can do that with the products that you're putting out, the better off you're going to be. The tricky thing here is that it's also a cottage industry. And so when I say diversify your team, a lot of people listening might say that its just me and that's okay if it's just you and a loved one that you work with or your best friend or something like that. I don't think anyone's gonna judge you and say, “You need to fire yourself and you shouldn't do this.” That's a wrong-headed approach to the problem. What I would say then is you should find other people to show your work to that aren't just your close circle of friends and get their feedback on the work that you're putting out there and take it seriously and find people from different places in society to show your work to, because they'll show you stuff that you wouldn't have seen in a thousand years just because they're coming from it from a totally different place, and that's kind of diversifying your team. It's diversifying the perspectives, eyeballs that you're putting on the product that you ship. Wyrmworks Publishing Yeah, absolutely. I would say that Wyrmworks Publishing is not just me and my wife who run the company, it's not just the people that we hire, it's our entire community. It's our customers. It's our fans, whoever you are. Your voice is important, and you are part of our big giant team. and we care about every voice. Yeah. Aaron Trammell Totally totally. And yeah that absolutely was not critique of Wyrmworks. I more yeah. Wyrmworks Publishing No, I didn't take it that way. I'm constantly self evaluating and so yeah. Aaron Trammell yeah. Wyrmworks Publishing All what projects are you working on now that you can talk about? Aaron Trammell Yeah, I've got a bun in the oven right now, so I written it's kind of a collection of all of my writings on Dungeons and Dragons, so it's very much about roleplaying games. It's also very much about Gary Gagax and the way that he created mechanics that quantify the world and put them into his roleplaying games. And so it's sort of like a cultural take on Dungeons and Dragons, or roleplaying game design. That book is under review right now because academic books go through a review process. But I'm hoping that I'll be able to get it out in the next year or so. So that's a big project I'm working on. That's the next thing that I hope will come out. But I've been thinking about steps. What is the project I'm going to work on after that when it comes out, and I think I really want to do something on retro gamers, specifically video games. I'm kind of interested in retro gaming communities with video games, I think they're fascinating but also to some extent the ways that we create sort of retro game vibes and ideas in the tabletop community, why certain things auction for more than money at gaming auctions and stuff. I think the Gygax auction is a bunch of things are being auctioned right now from the Gail Gygax collection that are interesting and expensive. And it's really fascinating for me to think through value in those communities. And also the people who are able to assign value, how they create a culture and create the clout to do that amongst each other. So I'm really interested in that as a sort of lead for that story. So I've been thinking a lot about that but I haven't sat down start researching or writing quite yet but it's the next big thing I want to tackle. Wyrmworks Publishing Cool, that sounds great. And I wish that when I had to go to the university bookstore those are the kind of books that I was pouring my money into. So, alright, so we will have all your contact information in our show notes, but where is the one best place that you would like people to start to learn more about you or to contact you? Aaron Trammell So I have a website, it's called AaronTrammell.com. And what I try to do when I can on that website is put my writing up there for free so when I can get a copy of a book chapter or something I've done that you'd have to pay $50 for the book, I try to kind of sneak it onto the website and then kind of keep it hush hush. I guess I'm announcing it here, but it's a list of most of my writing things that I think have been better or more interesting to write. So if you're interested in my writing, I would say come out to my website. AaronTrammell.com and check out. Now, I will want, one big exclamation point here is that you might misspell my name because people always do, and it's because there are two As in Aaron, two Ms in Trammell, and two Ls in Trammell. And I think when people start thinking, it's like doubles and when you get three doubles, they're like it couldn't possibly be three doubles. So it'd be Aaron with 1 A, Trammell with one m or Trammell with 1 L are all the permutations I see, and sometimes Aaron with two r's, which is a variant of Aaron that I’ve seen some people have but it's Aaron Trammell. All the double letters are deliberate. Wyrmworks Publishing All right, and it's in our show notes, and I will make sure that we spell it right in the show notes so that we have that all good, and people can find it and so yeah, everyone go there and download everything before the publishers go, “Hey you need to pull that.” Aaron Trammell Yeah, do it. Wyrmworks Publishing Alright Aaron, thank you so much for coming on the show. Everyone check out those links in the show notes. Aaron Trammell Thanks Thank you so much for having me. This has been absolute delight. Wyrmworks Publishing This show is made possible by the patrons that support Wyrmworks Publishing on a monthly basis or also we have annual options available as well for a 10% discount. Alright, and so a huge welcome and thanks this month to Marie McCarthy and Jooj and Elya O'Bryan. I hope I pronounced that right. For our new patrons. I thank you so much for supporting us. That gives us the encouragement to keep up this work. It tells us that, Yeah, you think this is important, and we should keep going. Alright, and so for those who are patrons, we offer all kinds of things, and we're planning on adding more real soon. All right. Just one thing that I mentioned, you heard me mention in the interview, that we're playing around with languages a little bit in the new campaign world we're developing. And and so we have in our new campaign world, a Mer language for for merfolk and it's also used by Tritons and in other undersea creatures instead of just Aquan. And so that language is actually based on sounds that would travel well underwater, like like dolphin and whale sounds. And so we developed a whole language. It's got about 4 or 5000 words, and and its own grammar and everything in including a just a real basic sort of Google Translate style translator, so that you can translate things back and forth between that and English. We've also developed… we have another character ancestry that's going to be a part of our new world and you're hearing about it here first, called the AbaloI, and they are humanoid abalone. They have shells that have, if you've ever seen abalone shells, they're iridescent, and and so they have those kind of shells on them, and they started underwater. And then where they were living dried up. And so they transitioned, managed to adapt to their new environment. And so consequently, while they used to speak Mer, their the language changed to adapt to their new environment. They didn't need language that would travel well underwater anymore. And so the language changes and so we actually have what is essentially a dialect of the Mer language that's, it's different. It's a different language but it it harkens back to Mer and, and so they have their own language that's based on that. We also have a full language for that with the with the translator there, and that's just the start—got a lot of different ideas, how we'd like to do that. And the reason we're doing that is then so that as we develop this world, that the names of the people and places can reflect the cultures, and everything doesn't sound quite so European, although there will still be translations of different names and places available, so that people don't have to struggle with pronunciations, but it will just give it that much more sense of, of authenticity, of depth, and things like that. And so if you would like full access to those languages, and to just a whole bunch of things that we are developing for that, you can go check out the link in the show notes to access the Dragon's Lair. That's our online compendium where we have that; we have all of our published work, and more and all kinds of exclusives and it's just super easy to access. It's easy to use, and it's just really quick, like a reference, a lot like D&D Beyond, and so I encourage you to check that out. Wyrmworks Publishing Now if you see the show being helpful, if you're watching this on YouTube, hit the "like" button, and if you'd like to see more like this, please subscribe. If you know people that need to hear this, please pass it on to them. And if you, like me, think that everybody should see this, then pass it on to your social media friends. If you're listening to this as a podcast, like most of the people consuming this, go to wherever you get your podcasts from and find the entry for this, and please post a review or even a rating even if you don't have time for a review. I understand that, "Boy, that takes time to think," and stuff but if you just go and click the rating, hope it's five stars, if it's not, we'd love to hear what is it that you'd like to see changed. But if you could do that for us, that will help more people find out about this. So thank you so much for joining us to make lives better with D&D. Wyrmworks Publishing And so now given what we've learned today, what one change can you make in your game next time you play to make it more inclusive?