Roll Initiative: The Invitational Rhetoric of Dungeons & Dragons

Board Game Academics, March 2026
Published in Vol 3. Issue I.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.70380/n5x7c2q9r4d6t

Jimmy Hamill
Stockton University

INTRODUCTION

Rushing in after losing time to a mind-numbing traffic jam exiting the City of Brotherly Love, a wiry junior faculty member enters his sparse, barely decorated office to finalize a lesson plan twenty minutes before class begins. Staying up late the night before to play a session of Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) with friends, the professor has two levels of exhaustion. He needs a short writing sample to demonstrate how students can perform autoethnographic research on a community to which they belong. Roll history for examples, which he’ll roll with disadvantage, as the professor recalls he’s being observed in this class. 

This was the dilemma I found myself in on a cold February morning, preparing for my first-year writing course. With nothing but coffee in my veins, I quickly thought back to any unique communities I belong to, but all I could think about was playing D&D the night before. What dawned on me was that this community is full of choices influenced by audiences, discourses, and rhetoric. History check: dirty 20. 

This paper reflects on the rhetorical work that comprises the hit tabletop roleplaying game (TTRPG) Dungeons & Dragons, and it posits how bringing the game into composition classrooms might encourage alternative forms of rhetorical theory and praxis to emerge. Specifically, I argue that D&D enables instructors to center invitational rhetoric, a feminist rhetorical approach that emphasizes collaboration and understanding over traditional conceptions of rhetoric as solely persuasion, in the first-year writing classroom.

BACKGROUND

Working at a mid-size public university in Southern New Jersey, I primarily teach a one-semester first-year writing course titled “College Writing.” This course provides students with ways to theoretically and practically engage the writing process through composing texts with rhetorical awareness in mind, paying particular attention to audience, genre, modality, and exigence in any given rhetorical situation. Additionally, the course supports students in the research process as they learn to locate, evaluate, incorporate, and cite outside sources in their writing. 

Students enter with varying levels of preparedness, confidence, and enthusiasm for writing; often, I try to identify where they are already writing and using rhetoric in their day-to-day lives. Instructors, while guided by learning outcomes, are largely given the freedom to choose their assignments and readings for the course, which allows me to draw from a range of canonical and popular texts and contexts. 

The idea of incorporating D&D in the first-year writing classroom first came when I introduced my students to their research assignment: the autoethnography. An autoethnography mixes the genres of autobiography and ethnography to use our own stories and experiences “to examine and/or critique cultural experience.” Four characteristics distinguish this genre from other forms of expressivist writing: commenting/critiquing on cultures and their practices, adding to a scholarly conversation, recognizing vulnerability for its rhetorical value and purpose, and building a relationship with audiences that invites response (Jones et al. 22). I needed to change the way I approached researched-based writing, as students struggled to move beyond reductive, binary “pro/con” arguments or “us/them” logics around big issues. I recognized that I put so much stock in the rhetorical purpose of persuasion that I set my students up not to listen but rather, to debate, antagonize, or shut down other ways of thinking. In the autoethnography, I reframed students more as ambassadors and connectors between a subculture in which they belonged and an outside audience. Rather than persuading or compelling the audience to do, think, or feel a certain way, I asked students to note something of value, interest, or concern within their own communities. I invited students to invite audiences into a moment of sharing and learning.

To provide an example of a subculture, I used my background in the D&D community to explain why the game had seen a resurgence of popularity since the COVID-19 pandemic (Whitten). As I described the nuances of this community to my students, I noticed that they asked questions both about autoethnographies and D&D in ways I never expected. Students who hadn’t spoken once in almost nine weeks were volunteering multiple times to add their experiences of the game to the classroom while others noted how much they secretly wanted to participate in a game like D&D. What I thought would be a minor detail in a lesson became a conceptual linkage I hadn’t considered. Much like autoethnographies, D&D invites players into a rhetorical experience of creation, collaboration, and contemplation. While there are certainly moments where characters quite literally roll to persuade others to act and think in their preference, the game is ultimately an improvised, co-created story woven through intersecting and conflicting goals. I wondered how D&D might be a tool for other forms of rhetoric that emphasize invitation and collaboration rather than solely persuasion.

INVITATIONAL RHETORIC

In their seminal work “Beyond Persuasion: A Proposal for an Invitational Rhetoric,” Sonja K. Foss and Cindy L. Griffin highlight the “patriarchal bias” of the broader history and theory of rhetoric, namely, its emphasis on rhetoric as a means of persuasion, “One manifestation of the patriarchal bias that characterizes much of rhetorical theorizing is the definition of rhetoric as persuasion. As far back as the Western discipline of rhetoric has been explored, rhetoric has been defined as the conscious intent to change others” (2). Foss and Griffin identify how this persuasive logic always centers desires for power and control in ways that embolden the power of the rhetor while devaluing the experiences and insights of audiences being persuaded (3). In the field of political rhetoric, other concerns highlight how rhetoric as persuasion assumes a consistent presence of rationality among audiences while missing the ways other rhetorical forms, such as motivational rhetorics, also move in the world (Hawley 934). Ultimately, this patriarchal type of rhetorical presentation speaks to a larger climate of coercion and competition in education. Susan L. Gabriel and Isaiah Smithson note in Gender in the Classroom that a ‘‘university education thrives on competition and separation, encouraging students to learn by competing with one another’’ (16). 

For Foss and Griffin, a feminist ethos is necessary to respond to this issue. They conceptualized invitational rhetoric as an alternative to the rhetoric-as-persuasion model:

…invitational rhetoric constitutes an invitation to the audience to enter the rhetor’s world and to see it as the rhetor does. In presenting a particular perspective, the invitational rhetor does not judge or denigrate others’ perspectives but is open to and tries to appreciate and validate those perspectives, even if they differ dramatically from the rhetor’s own. Ideally, audience members accept the invitation offered by the rhetor by listening to and trying to understand the rhetor’s perspective and then presenting their own. (5)

Invitational rhetoric presents the audience with an opportunity, a choice through rhetorical invitation. The rhetor provides audiences the chance to step into the worldview of the rhetor as they simultaneously attempt to understand others’ worldviews without judgment. The function of invitational rhetoric is to inspire dialogue where audiences can speak back and with rhetors to come to a new layer of understanding in a conversation, but this understanding does not have to be measured in terms of persuasion. 

In fact, Foss and Griffin seem committed to the idea that persuasion is as little a focus in this type of rhetoric as possible. They offer the example of Adrienne Rich’s National Book Awards speech for the 1974 prize for poetry; here, Rich read a statement co-authored by her and her fellow nominees, Alice Walker and Audre Lorde, who announced they would be accepting this award together to give voice to countless unnamed women artists in the world. The speech, more a strategy of “re-sourcement” rather than argument, allowed Rich, Lorde, and Walker to name their disagreement with the competitive structure of the National Book Award without forcing it to remove its process, even affirming the judges for their work in choosing a winner (13). This example highlights how rhetors could still speak to specific audiences within a purpose and genre while not defaulting to persuasion as how rhetoric exclusively functions.

For invitational rhetoric to be possible, Foss and Griffin identify three conditions that must be established between the rhetor and audience: safety, value, and freedom. Rhetors can make audiences feel safe by helping them see that their ideas and perspectives will be treated with affirmation and care. Value is enacted when rhetors can help audiences feel like agent participants in a conversation where their unique positions and identities are respected rather than usurped for specific roles chosen by the rhetor. Freedom occurs when rhetors allow for audiences to bring any facet of an issue or conversation to the table and empower audiences to help set the terms and conditions of how the discourse may evolve (10-13). The thread tying these conditions together is the recognition that rhetors and audiences co-create the discourses that emerge from rhetorical situations without rhetors being the arbiters of power. While rhetors may come with advanced context, knowledge, or insight, this does not preclude audiences from adding to meaningful conversations. 

While a fruitful alternative to rhetoric as persuasion, invitational rhetoric has its critics. Some have critiqued Foss and Griffin’s claim that persuasion is always linked with violence and the ways it flattens the nuances of feminist structural analysis (Dow 113). Others have pushed back against the seeming “moral relativism” of invitational rhetoric’s call to suspend one’s beliefs and make space for all viewpoints (Fulkerson 206). Furthermore, invitational rhetoric runs the risk of policing women and BIPOC communities into a game of civility politics, one that focuses more on understanding than systemic transformation (Lozano-Reich & Cloud 223 & 224). Each critique identifies, ironically, a potential violence in invitational rhetoric through its flattening of nuance or context in experiences of rhetorical exchange. If any persuasion contains violence, for example, then how might anyone try to encourage people to see things from a new vantage point or behave differently? There is a difference between coercion, an intentional limiting or erasure of agency, and persuasion, which utilizes various rhetorical appeals to help audiences hear a rhetor more clearly and consider their viewpoint. Part of D&D itself relies upon persuasion as a means for characters to create allies, access new items, or avoid harm.

Acknowledging the potential limits of discourse surrounding invitational rhetoric, scholars have highlighted the facet of invitational rhetoric most advantageous for students and players: its ability to separate persuasion from antagonism and its ability to encourage curiosity: “…the turn away from antagonistic models of rhetoric is helpful in prompting students to inquire, instead of immediately critiquing and attacking, deep stories that differ from theirs” (Yam, “Deep Story”). Yam frames invitational rhetoric to help change students’ gut instincts regarding research in ways that foster a spirit of curiosity through narratives and stories. Just as writing instructors want their students to approach any rhetorical situation with a mixture of curiosity and preparation, so, too, do Dungeon Masters want their D&D players to help co-create a story that is a mixture of improvisation and strategic thinking. 

WRITING AS ROLEPLAYING 

My students often roll their eyes at me when I say to them that writing is a social act. They hear this idea so often in my class, and I repeat it precisely because of how my students conceptualize the composition process. They’ll tell me how they write without anyone around them, or how they struggle to find the “spark” of inspiration, or how their job as writers is solely to “force” people to hear their individual idea. What I find is that my students struggle to see how community is essential to the work of composing texts. Early in my semesters, I take a lot of time to emphasize the various roles we occupy in rhetorical situations. Sometimes we’re the writers of texts, sometimes we’re the audiences of texts, and sometimes we may even be the exigence or subject of a text. Regardless, I stress to my students how texts are composed socially through careful considerations of other people in differing contexts. This means that texts interact with the world and are interacted with by the world, constantly shifting and revising to become evolved forms of themselves.

In defense of students’ messy and disjointed “fragmentary” compositions, James Seitz considers the value of roleplay in writing classrooms:

One of the benefits of writing-in-role is its recognition of this preexistent ‘intelligibility’ which confronts each individual who arrives, so to speak, on the scene; for roles take shape, are played and identified, within a social dynamic… one can hardly conceive of roleplay apart from cultural conventions, from anticipation of reader reactions, in short from the rhetorical dimension of language. (820 & 821)

Building off the works of Roland Barthes and David Bartholomea, Seitz pinpoints the tension of writers in any given context as they deploy the conventions of a given space while pushing against language in ways that flatten the unique voice of the writer to sound like everyone else. Writing-as-roleplay enables students to try on various conventions, positions, and strategies in ways that both limit and expand their choices. Since “roleplay is but a fiction” (823), Seitz argues that students are less emotionally encumbered by saying something perfectly in their own voice and, instead, work within the limits of their role while finding ways to push their own ideas and experiences into these roles. In this social exchange, students create more fragmented texts that help them develop innovative and dynamic processes for creating texts, processes that push back against a broader goal within first-year writing courses that often prioritize coherence and stability. 

If part of the issue of rhetoric as persuasion, then, is its assumption of the fixedness of audiences’ identities or logical capacities, it follows that thinking about writing as a form of roleplay allows students to conceptualize in explorative ways that highlights the malleability and locality of various audiences’ needs. In other words, employing the metaphor of writing as roleplaying offers a framework through which students can engage in invitational rhetoric. One of the potential issues in this strategy, however, is the potential for students to misunderstand the metaphor. Thus, exposing students to concrete role-playing games might further illustrate and underscore the value of this conceptual lens.

COMPOSING WITH DUNGEONS & DRAGONS

D&D, which first emerged in 1974, is the primordial tabletop roleplaying game (TTRPG). TTRPGs are “a type of game/game system that involves collaboration between a small group of players and a gamemaster through face-to-face social activity with the purpose of creating a narrative experience” (Cover 168). In D&D, players, guided by a “Dungeon Master” (DM), create characters with species and class abilities that will help them navigate the mechanics of the world in which they’ll play. Simultaneously, they co-narrate the backgrounds and choices of these characters while rolling dice to determine the effectiveness (or lack thereof) of their actions. Many players follow the adage that “the dice tell the story.” The allure of D&D is wide-ranging, from improvisational acting to co-creating emotionally meaningful narratives to gambling with chance through the dice mechanic. Regardless of one’s motivation to enter D&D, it becomes quickly apparent that the only way to successfully navigate a one-shot episode or an ongoing campaign is to work in tandem with other players and characters at the table. While each character may have their own goals and special abilities, they will often be placed in conversations, puzzles, dilemmas, or battles that require a plethora of skills and approaches to a problem. It is here in this co-creation that I see invitational rhetoric at play.

Here, I want to revisit the three conditions necessary for invitational rhetoric to occur: safety, value, and freedom. In recent years, scholarship around the therapeutic benefits of roleplaying games like D&D has blossomed, much of which emphasizes the ways that TTRPGs can enable participants to navigate complex problems from everyday life through the lens of a fictional landscape in community with others, creating a healthy distance to explore problems in communal settings (Atherton et al.; Rosenblad et al.; Abbott et al.). Narrative therapist Luke Kalaf underscores the value of D&D’s ability to give players the chance “to explore and interact in the game world, choosing where they go and what they do, creating openings for all kinds of conversation located in landscapes of identity and action” (28). 

D&D invites players earnestly to its worlds and entrusts them with the difficult task of navigating local and global problems within the fictional world they’re a part of; as a result, players are taken seriously to make decisions (safety), consider how their characters’ identities and positions influenced and are influenced by those decisions (value), and create unexpected ways to respond to issues as they arise in the game (freedom). While therapeutic contexts are by no means equivalent to first-year writing classrooms, I contend that students’ emotional, spiritual, intellectual, and mental well-being are directly tied to the process of composing and education in general. The ongoing impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on student learning directly translates into the dispositions and attitudes of writers coming into our classes; Jillian Kinzie and James Cole discovered that students enter college with higher expectations of experiencing academic difficulty, and they begin their writing courses with lower confidence and higher anxiety (38). Thus, the research emerging on the therapeutic benefits of D&D provides findings that can help first-year writing instructors to support their students’ growth as writers and as people. Seeing the essential conditions of invitational rhetoric play out in therapeutic contexts only further underscores the power that D&D could have in a first-year writing classroom to illustrate alternative rhetorical approaches.

Foss and Griffin note the importance of a rhetor’s ‘‘openness’’ toward their audiences in invitational rhetoric (6). This openness is a particularly valuable disposition for young writers in college, especially in the context of a country more politically polarized by the ongoing threat of fascist regimes, the disappearance of the middle class, the ever-looming apocalyptic anxiety of climate disaster, and the ease of accessing echo chambers in digital spaces. As one of my students aptly identified in a class discussion on discourse, “I don’t know if most of us actually hear each other, and I don’t know if most of us care to try.” 

D&D’s structure is inherently a rhetorical exchange rooted primarily in collaborative invitation. D&D necessitates an openness on the part of the DM and the players to hear differing perspectives, negotiate tensions in character development, and accept the ambiguity of choices that may or may not implicate the entire party. As DMs offer plot points for characters to respond to, they must be open and ready for characters to hyperfixate on surprisingly minute details, to forget essential plot points, or to make potentially deadly decisions that could have easily been avoided. In turn, characters must be open to new and emerging details offered by DMs or other players, quickly change plans of action when the dice don’t roll in their favor, and consider the possibility that today’s enemies may become tomorrow’s allies and vice versa. While persuasion is one element of the game, collaborative creation is the fundamental process that makes the game possible.

TTRPGs in the first-year writing classroom also encourage metacognitive thinking about the writing process. Stephanie Hedge details a first-year writing course sequence that culminated in her students creating a “one-pager” TTRPG to help them write a research paper. In reflecting on the genre of the TTRPG, she notes:

This intersection of role-play and game system/structure, coupled with the idea of creating a legible narrative, makes TTRPGs a unique genre for exploring writing process and identity formation, as the writing process becomes the structure of the gameplay, and the writerly identity is shaped via character creation and the role-play aspects of the game. (“Writer as Character:”)

Hedge’s assignment gamified the writing process itself, making the research paper the goal or “prize” of the TTRPG while also drawing attention to the importance of roles and roleplaying in constructing a writerly persona. Much like the character creation process of D&D, writers in Hedge’s class had to consider how personas changed based on their relationship to their own text and their classmates’ texts. One of the most striking features of this assignment is that students, rather than debating each other on a particular “correct” approach to research, quite literally stepped into other rhetors’ worlds by playing each other’s games. In trying on the gamified world of a classmate’s approach to the research paper, students lived out the key principle of invitational rhetoric while also developing greater rhetorical savviness around the value of being aware of different writerly roles one can take on.

ROLLING THE DICE: CONCLUDING THOUGHTS

Having established the value of bringing invitational rhetoric into the first-year writing classroom through the TTRPG Dungeons & Dragons, I will briefly posit strategies I plan on trying for future research:

• Early in the class, making explicit the difference in workload and expectations between the instructor-as-DM and student-as-player to ensure equitable and consistent labor for student-players.
• Borrowing from Stephanie Hedge’s work, implementing a “one-pager TTRPG” assignment that may or may not center the writing process explicitly. 
• Designing “questing groups” that allow students to work in semester-long small groups towards a final collaborative project, whether that be a TTRPG packet, a co-written narrative about a potential D&D setting, or some other co-created text.
• Creating low-stakes “persona” assignments where students must write from the vantage point of a character created by one of their classmates.
• Implementing a “town forum” portion of the class where students, in the personas of their created characters, come together to codesign a solution to an issue facing their fictional community. 
• Offering a “final exam” where students come together, using artifacts they’ve created throughout the semester, to play a D&D one-shot episode.

Ultimately, D&D is a powerful tool that underscores the value of collaborative creative processes that lie at the heart of invitational rhetoric. It often names and enacts the conditions that make invitational rhetoric possible. For first-year writing students who enter our classrooms from the context of an increasingly polarized world, the chance to help them see that language can do more than merely persuade others seems a crucial tool for both their creative development as writers and also for their moral and ethical development as citizens in this world. 

WORKS CITED

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