Dungeons & Dragons and Friendship

This essay speaks to one of the profound ambiguities in roleplaying: “Are we friends?”. We’ve played together, we’ve maybe spent hours on our shared hobby but would it be weird to invite you to my birthday party or expect you to accept if the social invite was not gaming-related? To what extent can we share personal matters, how close are we really?

The essay uses Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics as the guide as to what friendship is and whether our roleplaying relationships count as friendships.

Roleplaying is a social activity, while there has been an explosion of solo gaming options from 2019 onwards the core experience is still a social one with a group of people coming together to share an experience.

This is a friendship of utility in that people are coming together to achieve something that benefits them mutually. Fortunately Aristotle agrees that this is a form of friendship but the type that is least like true friendship. What is interesting about this type of friendship is that it is fragile because its basis is thin. If you are not enjoying the game or the experience then you are likely to simply leave the group and cease your interactions with those involved.

One interesting aspect of roleplaying is that it is not like the basis for good normal relationships. For the most part you tend to present aspects of yourself that intersect with your character rather than necessarily your whole and authentic self. It’s not uncommon for people to remember your character in a particular game more than you or even your real name.

I wonder if gaming friendships are based not just on the qualities of the real person but equally so on our feelings towards the character that person portrayed in a narrative that was mutually exciting and satisfying. It’s why playing an antagonistic or difficult character can be a bit of a risk in one-shot groups as people similarly find it hard to disentangle a disagreeable player from a disagreeable character.

But in that element of performance comes the next stage of friendship where people are not just interested in a fellow gamer to make the game possible but instead enjoy their portrayal of their character or their contribution to the table chat and interaction of the group. Friends of pleasure are one step closer to true friendship. Groups that play together for extended periods of time tend to be getting pleasure out of one another’s company as well as the pure utility of completing a campaign game.

Aristotle believes that true friendship is only possible between people of equal virtue and power. In my reading of this I understand it to mean that friendship must be a choice and must be reciprocated. Jeffery Nicholas, the essay author, uses the examples of Legolas and Gimli to illustrate true friendship developing over time and Eddard Stark and Robert Baratheon as an example of a friendship that caught in the trap of pleasure, turns tragic. Robert’s pursuit of pleasure kills him, he compels Eddard to serve him in the tasks he wishes to avoid. The relationship is unequal and Robert lacks virtue, he drags Eddard into his downfall rather than the pair working together to avoid their communal dark fate and make good their vices.

Virtue is something that has troubled me at the gaming table, I’ve played with people whose social and political views are very different to mine. In general I’ve found it a useful counter-balance to the homogeneous social circles that we typically occupy. However that means I have people in my social circles that very vehemently dislike one another. As they deal with one another mostly in the abstract it is really only I who experience the tension of their views and feel the need to balance the caricatures that they have of one another.

I’ve also been worried about the callout culture that demands that you can only be friends with one side or another. Generally I prefer to pay with tolerant, open-minded people who are curious about the world. This is because it makes them easier to incorporate into my social groups. Even with people who are generally like this, personal animosities can make it hard to explain why you continue to have contact with people who are seen as dislikeable by others. This theory of utility and pleasure helped me explain some of the contradictions that are going on here. Our friendships of utility, resent the lack of deeper feelings in the relationship, evidenced by our other friendships. The call to end other friendships has little cost to the person making the request as their investment in the relationship is equally low and the utility of the friendship lessened by connections to others they dislike.

The concept of equality is also helpful, equality is a virtue of our times and no matter where we set our games most groups of player characters are bound by powerful expectations of solidarity and equality. I’ve found that in less narratively motivated groups criticising or resisting the will of another player character can be met with anger, sorrow and bewilderment; painful emotions of a betrayed social contract. The idea that companionship trumps morality is a fascinating one but one that countless fantasy groups decide in favour of companionship when it comes to murder and robbery.

Similarly equality is jarring in many of our favoured Victoriana and medieval settings; feudalism is explicitly not egalitarian. This leads Dave Morris amongst others to see most roleplaying as consisting of time travellers visiting a historic theme park. The social contract of the party is alien to that of the culture the characters are meant to belong to.

Here however we see a rebuttal of that view, a Classical idea (that may only have been intended to apply to the wealthy) that equality is important to allow friendship to grow and that any group of true friends would see them blur the social differentiators as they sought a higher virtue that social status.

And here we start to move to the conclusion of the essay, true friendship requires the basics of unconditional mutual benefit, pleasure in one another’s company; it also needs a shared commitment to virtue, equality of esteem and ideally of status; it also needs time to develop, change and be tested, a campaign rather than a series of one-shots.

Ultimately the suggestion is that the final element of friendship is the finding of another self in the other person. The only people worthy of our true friendship are good and virtuous people. This applies equally to ourselves, we cannot experience true friendship if our friends (like Eddard) have to sacrifice something of themselves in being our friends. That reciprocity is vital and grows in the testing of our mutual support and interest in one another. Equally important though our friendships are attempts to find kindred spirits that reflect and inspire our values rather than our desire or need for romance (though these are equally important!).

Our gaming friends already share some of our interests and as they invest time in our mutual gaming experience the chance for true friendship is created but this final step will only occur if we share more than our hobby. The interesting thing though is that roleplaying allows us to explore friendship and the bonds between people. Things can be ventured and tested within the fiction of the game. We can perform heroic sacrifices and bitter betrayals and at the end of the session walk away, whole and unharmed.

In this enactment or rehearsal of friendship we can also lay the foundations of true friendship outside the game but building on those foundations is rarer than we think and takes more effort than we assume. In the absence of this true friendship Aristotle allows to enjoy the other types of friendship for what they are and not be disappointed about what they are not.