While designing our adventures it can be tempting to add in some more diverse characters (various real world races, orientations, and physical ability) but in doing so we want to avoid simply tokenizing them. As a writer then, how do we avoid creating token characters in our adventures while still freely expressing the diversity of experience.

The first answer we usually find in a corporate environment is via a graph like the one above. This graph gives each cultural background, race, sexual orientation, ect. a number to dictate how diverse the character is. The character Ana from the game Overwatch (2016) is a woman which is worth 5 diversity points, with one eye which is worth 4 more.

It should go without saying that this is a bad way of avoiding tokenization. It literally forces us to look at characters as a diversity score which is exactly what tokenism is.

We can also go in the opposite direction and create a needlessly indirect aspect to the character. A good example of why this method also doesn’t work can be seen in the Harry Potter series and its representation of Dumbledore’s homosexuality. By removing any mention of the characters sexual orientation from the text of the books/movies and instead leaving it what is essentially an authors note it removes any actual representation from the character while still making the writer feel like they are being inclusive.

Let’s see this applied to a TTRPG.

Storm King’s Thunder (2016) tries to include queer representation through the characters of Thelbin and Brynn Osstra. This almost works but falls short by quite a lot. Mostly because, of the books 256 pages only 3 sentences are used to describe the family. During that time we only learn 2 things about each character Thelbin is a wheat farmer, Brynn lost his sister and mother to the current goblin raid, and they are married. We know nothing of their personality, appearance, or beliefs. These two are pefect examples of tokenization in TTRPG adventure.

So how do we do better?

While not perfect, the characters of Sir Vladimir and Sir Godfrey in Curse of Strahd (2016) are examples of a non-tokenized queer couple. Their queerness is part of their identity and informs their actions but isn’t the sole determiner in their personalities. Sir Godfrey is a loyal and honourable man who fights for his beliefs and against the corruption of Barovia. The fact that the corruption has gotten to the one he loves only fuels his passion to kill Strahd. The fact that the person he loves is a man is part of the text, but not what defines him.

The downside of Sir Godfrey however is that he highlights how homogenous the other characters in most large adventures are. Even in Curse of Strahd itself, of the 121 named characters (from my count) there are only 2 explicitly non-white characters, and 2 non-straight characters. Aside from that every other character in the story is an able bodied, implicitly straight, white person.

So lets use Sir Godfrey as a guideline rather than a rule. Approximately 3%-4% of the world is queer, so if the average adventure has a new character every 200 words we should expect to see a queer character every 5,000 words, so that’s one or two every 4 hour adventure. Remember as well that queerness is not the only aspect of society tokenized in games. It says a lot that, in a medieval inspired setting, I can only think of one wheelchair bound character (Dagen Underthorn) in any D&D books.

So let’s use these aspects to enhance our characters. Just ensure we use them to further realise the character and not to define them.