The Damsel and the Courtesan: Quantifying Consent in Early Dungeons & Dragons

Early Dungeons & Dragons fan culture, as documented in the 1975–76 fanzine Alarums & Excursions, offers a window into how gendered assumptions were built into the earliest tabletop role-playing mechanics. This study examines fan-authored "Damsel" and "Courtesan" classes, arguing that these homebrew rules encoded hegemonic masculinity into game systems and that the community's reception helped normalize it. Drawing on Foucauldian genealogy and fan-studies scholarship, the analysis contends that A&E's hybrid fan-publisher model produced a bottom-up history that complicates "great man" narratives centered on Gary Gygax. Dick Eney's Courtesan rules, which include sexualized level titles and mechanics for earning money through misrepresentation, are presented as a leading example of objectifying design, framed under the slogan of "making Love as well as War."

The analysis finds that both the Courtesan and Samuel Konkin III's Damsel class reduced female characters to sexual objects through dice-based systems that treated consent as a random outcome rather than an expression of agency. Charisma-modified saving throws and a six-point "encounter intensity" table exemplify this quantification of intimacy. Konkin's Damsel, though arguably intended as a progressive contribution, reproduced the same logic by equating female honor with chastity and by treating rape with victim-blaming rules. The authors also observe that women's participation in A&E declined during its first year, a pattern they suggest may relate to these depictions.

Correspondence in the fanzine reveals a community actively negotiating these norms. Respondents criticized the misogynistic and rape-related mechanics, often in notably civil terms, and several expressed acceptance of LGBTQ characters. The authors conclude that such exchanges reveal how a masculine power fantasy of unlimited agency was embedded in early role-playing design. Although the designs themselves are problematic, the A&E community stands as a valuable case study of players working through gender and consent ideologies in the 1970s.