Dungeons and Dragons is theatre. The tabletop game by Wizards of The Coast involves a performance of communal storytelling based in roleplay, narrative character development, and improvisation. The game provides players with the freedom to choose the skills, backstory elements, and personality traits of their character. This can lead to pedagogic dramatic fulfilment and self-reflection from investment, as characters often become deeply personal to the player. Players feel joy when the character they have invested time to create succeeds and often cry when their character dies. In this sense, the character becomes an extension or reflection of self to the participant. The pedagogy of 5e D&D is creative prodigality; empowerment through the imaginative freedom of performance and understanding the moral responsibility of decision making in a narrative open-world story with social implications. Dungeons and Dragons clearly relates to the study of using dramatic performance as a form of social pedagogy known as Applied Theatre. However, there is a lack of research regarding how this game is understood to the academia of Applied Theatre. There is no mention of Dungeons and Dragons in the eleven book Bloomsbury series on the topic (Balfour and Preston et al, 2015-2021), nor Nicholson’s overview of the theoretical concepts underpinning practice in Applied Drama: The Gift of Theatre (2015). This dissertation is an analysis of such; an understanding of how Dungeons and Dragons should be viewed in relation to Applied Theatre. In specific, how “Theatre in Education” established as a form of Applied Theatre by Nicholson (2015, 4) relates to Dungeons and Dragons. The theory of Theatre in Education practitioner Dorothy Heathcote resonates a clear connection to the game. Heathcote’s practice of “The mantle of the expert” in Drama for Learning (Heathcote and Bolton, 1995) explored similar ideals to Dungeons and Dragons of empowerment through participant creative freedom and responsibility. By analysing the similarities between Heathcote’s concept of Theatre in Education (henceforth TIE) to Dungeons and Dragons, introspective can be made into how the game should be viewed in academic discourse of Applied Theatre.
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