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Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour felt like forever.
When it launched in 2023, Becca Bix leaned on livestreams of the shows to help her cope through a time of grief — until the illustrious tour came to a close near the end of 2024.
That’s when she stumbled upon Dimension 20, an anthology series often surrounding tabletop role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons.
“It’s a team of very diverse millennials and it really leads with kindness and compassion for the players,” Becca says. “I thought, ‘Well, if DND is like this, then I want in.’”
As it turns out, it actually is not that easy.
“I got a couple friends together and said, ‘Let’s get a table going’ and immediately found out it’s insanely hard to learn to play DND,” Becca says. “It’s really hard to learn, it’s really hard to get a group together. My work after that has become, ‘What can I do to lower the barrier to entry, increase accessibility and make it welcoming for people?’ That starts with women but expands outwards towards basically anyone who hasn’t been included.”
Though the number of female DND players has certainly increased throughout the years, men remain the majority — generally around 60%, according to online media and anecdotes posted on forums.
Becca started Women Play DND late last year — a third space that teaches women, queer and transgender people how to play and normalizes femmes taking part in what’s traditionally a male-dominated game. She emphasizes safety, inclusivity and grace.
“If you haven’t found a place in traditional DND culture where you’re safe, accepted and held with worth and value, you’re welcome here. I love you and I want to play DND with you,” she says on social media. “This account always uses an inclusive definition of women. If you’re a woman, I believe you, you’re welcome here. If you’re something else, but you’re cool with this space being about women, welcome too.”
Creating a space of safety — and power
Dungeons & Dragons is a fantasy tabletop role-playing game.
“It’s very similar to when you were a kid playing ‘house’ with your friend and one’s the mom and one’s the dad and one’s the baby — except this time, maybe one’s an elf with a bow and one’s a dwarf with an axe and we’re going to fight a monster,” Becca says.
Every game has a Dungeon Master (DM) — Becca prefers the term “moderator” — who leads the story. In one example, Becca might have you imagine you’re in a dungeon — it’s pitch black and you can’t see anything around you, but you start to hear scuffles. That’s when you might roll the die to receive a perception check — if you roll low, you still don’t have any clue what’s happening in the dungeon.
As the game continues, Becca — or whoever your DM is — will present scenarios to the players. (At some point, she took me into the woods where a cutie hedgehog presented me with a flower. Of course, I took it — but it was actually a flower that made me fall asleep. Had I rolled higher during that turn, I probably would have had enough intuition to reject the flower.)
Becca played DND for the first time last November, starting with a friend who has been playing DND for decades. From there, Becca has spent countless hours learning how to play through books, through articles, through experiences.
“It’s a great creative endeavor for anyone who loves storytelling. There’s no winner — the whole point is to tell a story and spend time together,” Becca says. “It’s different than almost every other game in that it’s collaborative, not competitive. All of the adventurers are working together to go somewhere, to do something. But as you can see, there’s a lot to it, especially if you don’t have a guide.”
Though the game is built around collaboration, the environment doesn’t always feel that way. While she hasn’t had an outright negative experience, she’s heard hundreds of stories from women who have. She’s also trusted her own gut about spaces that didn’t appear to be friendly, especially for beginners, women or queer people.
Since starting Women Play DND, Becca now has more than 8,000 followers on Instagram, 6,000-plus on Threads and 300-plus on Discord where members can chat about DND and take a class or watch tutorials.
“I’ve gotten so many comments saying, ‘I’m so glad you’re doing this work,’” Becca says. “One of my favorite things is when I get a post on Threads and someone tags me and says, ‘I’m running my first game tonight. Thanks, Women Play DND, you gave me the tools.’ And I just cry forever that tables are now forming around the country, around the world, because I’m saying there’s a different way to do it.”
Last spring, Becca hosted her first in-person class at Celestia Collective and she’s hosting another round this spring. The people seated at her tables usually have mixed levels of DND abilities — sometimes it’s people who are brand-new to DND, sometimes it’s people who know how to play but haven’t found a safe space to do so.
“I also spend a lot of time setting up norms. I talk about how we’re going to be kind, we’re going to be brave, we’re going to be compassionate, we’re going to take turns. My table is one that I always make welcoming for beginners,” Becca says. “The thing is, when you show up to a DND game, you’re never going to know all the rules. There are thousands of pages of rules and most of them don’t matter. But the biggest rule is the DM is in charge of the table, so that’s where you need to look when joining a table. Are they safe? Are they welcoming? Are they inclusive? That’s what I’m trying to do.”
One of Becca’s safety tools is a set of cards that players can use if they need to pause, stop, ask a question or share an idea.
“Sometimes you might need a pause or a stop, so you can hold (the card) up so the DM can see it. We don’t require any explanation — if we’re talking and the stop card comes up, the DM skillfully transitions to the end of the scene,” Becca says. “Another card is for players who might be shy or nervous or new and aren’t sure how to play.”
The cards are an extension of a common “X” card used in traditional games (or maybe an “X” formation with your arms), but “it can feel really uncomfortable to be the only one at the table doing that so I like to make sure the safety tools are upfront and part of the system so you don’t feel singled out for using them,” Becca says.
Before the games even begin, though, Becca sends a survey to the players, detailing the topics that could be mentioned — from gore or bugs to sexual assault or racism.
“Everybody rates the topics on a spotlight system — green, red, yellow,” Becca says. “Anything that ends up in the red column, we’re not touching in our game at all. Anything that ends up in the yellow column means that I can address it, but I would talk with my players first and say, ‘Hey, we’re going into a topic that’s uncomfortable for one of us.’ And the forms are anonymous.”
“Another good piece of advice I heard (at a recent panel at a convention) was if you’re at a table with all men and there’s no women there, how are women being discussed in that space? If it’s a space where women are being degraded or made fun of or made light of, call your friends out. Men have the power to make change in that situation,” Becca says.
Though women and people in the queer community have welcomed Becca with open arms, others — mostly men who have been lifelong gamers — haven’t been as inviting.
“They tell me it’s a good idea but that the way I’m going about it won’t work. They say there’s a way that you do it and it’s that you have to find a group and the group has to let you in and you have to learn that way,” she says.
In most games, a character sheet is filled out entirely before playing. It’s where you describe details of your character — things like strength and charisma. But when Becca teaches, she only fills out a couple lines before practicing and playing, then eventually returns to the sheet in batches to complete it.
“When I tell them I have this whole new idea where I teach people little by little and it’s all adventure from the very beginning, people who have been gaming for a long time get really uncomfortable because that’s not the norm,” Becca says. “The thing with DND is there’s a lot of implied knowledge. Even in the books, it’ll be like, ‘Choose a class.’ Well, what’s a class? There’s no definition in the book. ‘Pick your species,’ but why? What does my species matter? It doesn’t say. The reaction from people who know that that’s a problem has been nothing but enthusiastic.”
When femmes log off Discord or exit a class, Becca hopes they feel powerful.
“I think role-play is such an incredible tool because my campaign is against patriarchal religious order, so we’re practicing and pretend fighting these guys and when you’re fighting these guys and cussing them out at the table, you’re talking to me but your body is processing it in a way that makes you feel ready to do it in real life,” Becca says. “I want people to feel power in their creativity, power in their bodies, power in their words.”
A book in the works
Becca’s 2026 goal: to write a book that women can bring to girls’ night and use to play DND together. In April, she visited the Pima County Public Library’s Writer in Residence, Tom Holm and he was so intrigued he told her to start penning a letter to literacy agents.
While she wasn’t quite ready then, she’s thinking 2026 will be her year.
“I was like, ‘Tom, I’m not ready for that.’ But that day, I was like, ‘OK, this is an idea that could work,’” Becca says. “And that was the day I started the Instagram because I started searching online what you need to write a how-to book and a lot of it said you need an audience so I started building the audience.”
Before Becca started Women Play DND, she was an elementary school teacher until 2018 when she had a baby and became a stay-at-home mom.
“I did that whole — have a baby, who am I? I don’t know what my life is anymore — thing. Then the pandemic happened and I was home and lonely all the time,” she says. “When (my son) started school, that’s when I really started my healing journey and started deep-diving into, how can I take care of myself? How can I support myself? When the election happened last year, I started going to therapy. I needed something that was going to make a difference — I needed to be out there.”
When she saw how hard it was to learn to play DND and the lack of inclusivity surrounding it, she knew it was her time.
“I had the fucking energy to go to bat,” she says. “I really think it didn’t have to be DND — it could’ve been something else, but I needed something that would meet me at my place of creativity and activism. One of my favorite mantras is: ‘There’s no DND emergencies.’ Nothing bad’s going to happen to us, we’re just playing pretend. Once we take that level of gatekeeping out of it, it’s very relaxed, it’s very fun, it’s very therapeutic. You work through shit because you’re playing as a version of yourself in whatever character you create.”
✨ Join Women Play DND on Discord to join in on the conversation and sign up for a virtual class. Women Play DND is also on Instagram and Threads, where you can be in the know about in-person games in Tucson. See the website here.✨
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