Roll with Advantage: Creative, Collaborative, and Critical Responses to Dungeons & Dragons

In 2020, in the midst of the pandemic, I came across a call for submissions looking for academic and creative writing about Dungeons & Dragons; the initial CFP was for an edited collection called Roll 4 Initiative. I decided to write something for the collection and submitted a poem entitled “Dice.” The poem offered brief vignettes of playing D&D for the first time as a high schooler, what those initial experiences meant to me, and how they would shape me in the years to follow. Luckily, the poem was accepted. Unfortunately, the collection would suffer a few challenges and stalls and stumbles, and years would go by. In 2023, I reached out to Suzanne Richardson, who was then heading the project solo, and asked if I could help. After a few discussions, she agreed to bring me on as co-editor, and we were off to the races. We worked diligently over the past two years, and now I am proud to present the finished book retitled Roll with Advantage: Creative, Collaborative, and Critical Responses to Dungeons & Dragons (Play Story Press, 2025).

Thank you to Suzanne for being such a great collaborator and partner. Thank you for the opportunity to contribute a Coda to the whole book, in which I muse on why playing tabletop games like D&D creates conviviality, connection, and possibility:

This book is for you, for me, for us, and sometimes not.  That’s okay.  This is the enduring spirit of the collectives and communities we call D&D gamers, party members, game masters, tables, clubs, home brews, all-nighters, rules lawyers, storytellers, one-shotters, dice hoarders, lorekeepers, explorers, mapmakers, mini painters, artists, crafters, actors, dancers, singers, streamers, fans, forums, conventions, cosplayers, larpers, watchers, significant others, collaborators, experimenters, thinkers, critics, and even edited collections.  Let us focus on playing together, playing for one another, playing reciprocally.  In other words, it’s about playing reparatively, and according to Trammell, repairing play is “play that remembers, play that speaks truth to power, and play that is conscientious of its own debts.”[1]  Reparative play is hopeful play, and I hope to live in a world where D&D is reparative and restitutive. 

Thank you to Play Story Press for giving a home to the book. And thank you to all of the contributors for their ideas, words, and worlds. Here’s the table of contents:

     Foreword
     I Look Good in Fish Scales
     A Letter from Former Co-Editor Daniel Shank Cruz

     Introduction
     What It Means to Play
     Suzanne Richardson

     Dice
     Edmond Y. Chang

     An Introvert’s Spellbook for Playing D&D
     Shelly Jones

     Streamers and Kids: An Interview with Jim Zub about Dungeons & Dragons 
     and Comic Books
     Toben Racicot and Jim Zub

     What D&D Teaches Us About Story
     Samantha Tetangco

     Roleplaying or Rule Playing? Experiences in Early Dungeons & Dragons
     Graham Head

     Original Dungeons & Dragons: 0e
     Gary Charles Wilkens

     The Ranger
     Emily Rose Cole

     Monster Manual, First Edition
     Laura Bandy

     Goblematic: Problematizing the Goblin, Edition to Edition
     E.C. McGregor Boyle III

     Save vs. Nostalgia: Dungeons & Dragons, Race, Gender, and 
     the Imaginary Past
     Michelle E. Parsons-Powell

     Rol(l)ing Up Characters: Conceptual Blending Theory, Casting, and 
     Character Construction in Dungeons and Dragons
     Jessica Hautsch

     Rot Grubs as Artistic Experience
     Jason Cox

     An Uncozy Burrow 
     Jason Cox

     The Books with the Orange Spines
     Deb Fuller

     The Artificer
     Emily Rose Cole

     In Defense of the Dice: Chance, Free Will, and Quantitative Storytelling
     Jacqueline Patz DiPiero

     The Monstrous Races of Dungeons & Dragons
     Christopher LeCluyse

     D&D as Transmedia, Subcreational Phenomenon
     Stephen J.N. Bauhart

     Lost Initiative
     Mordecai Martin

     RP
     Crystal Odelle

     Song of the Nameless One
     Megan Condis

     Smilla the Relentless
     Laura Bandy and Sarah Bandy-Norris

     No Change of Death (A Journey into Animal Crossing and D&D) 
     Jocelyn Heath

     Reparative Play in Dungeons & Dragons
     Giuseppe Femia

     Anything Can Be Attempted
     Evan Torner

     Why Am I Talking to a Sword Shaped Like Waves?
     Andrea Clausen

     The Cleric
     Emily Rose Cole

     Campaign
     Suzanne Richardson

     Coda
     Help Action
     Edmond Y. Chang

The book is open access and downloadable for free as a PDF. But, I encourage everyone to get a hardcopy–it’s very pretty (I think so myself since I did the layout) and the cover by Hannah Carr-Murphy is gorgeous.


[1] Trammell, Repairing Play, 103.