When the habit makes the monk roll with advantage: TTRPG players and clothing, intersecting real and game worlds

At the first session in a campaign of Ulitmate Werewolf, which adds roleplaying and legacy elements to the classic game of social deduction, I arrived to find that my assigned teammate was wearing the exact same jacket as me. We built on that kismet each time we returned to the game table, and as the fictional generations of our New England Puritan family took on the role of religious hardliners, we adopted the somber speech patterns of Nathaniel Hawthorne antagonists and added wide-brimmed hats to our team uniform. This demi-costumed performative playstyle culminated in a round of the game when no player was allowed to speak. My silent defense against a rival family’s accusations of lycanthropy was simply to gesture – first to my wardrobe and then upward to Providence – after which the other players naturally voted me innocent. This episode illustrates an interesting phenomenon, not limited to games of (pseudo-)historical fiction. Incorporating real-world physical attributes into roleplaying game participation impacts players’ access to their characters’ experiences of the fictional game worlds. Practices like wearing clothes or accessories that gesture to the character bridge gaps between the real and game worlds, especially when they operationalize player assumptions and experiences of real-world systems, objects, and ideas. Clothing with religious significance attached to the game world, the real world, or both, translates the intensity of feeling between character and player, and increases the player’s immersion in the game world and the game world’s capacity to alter the player.

The power of clothing to communicate and even form individual and collective identities is the subject of substantial psychological, anthropological, and other research on contemporary and historical societies.(1) Performance studies similarly seek to understand the functions and meanings of costume in drama, as well as performances of identity in the “real” world.(2) Within the field of religious studies, these topics have guided deep analyses of how ancient and contemporary religious communities create and convey virtues, values, identities, and affects.(3) Affect is especially useful as a lens for making sense of clothing in religious and social contexts, as it provides a framework and terminology for the way that the feeling body interacts with its parts and environment to form emotion and even cognition. 

A close relative of performance studies, the field of ludology examines how people create and enact meaning through play, within and beyond games. While many ludologists focus on digital games, a sub-field focusing on tabletop roleplaying games (TTRPGs) has blossomed alongside their rapid growth as a set of industries and play-cultures over the past decade, introducing questions and analyses of their unique affects and experiences.(4) This paper braids together strands from religious, clothing, costume, play, and performance studies to analyze the religious use – simulated, imagined, and real – of clothing and accessories worn by the players of TTRPGs.

Many TTRPG players are anxious to define clear boundaries between their hobby and Live Action Role Play (LARP). Within many circles, this anxiety extends a social expectation against costuming. Nevertheless, many players wear items at the table that refer to characters they play or their role in the game. Jane Douglas wears horns and a subtle stripe of red makeup in reference to her character’s devilish lineage for the “Oxventure” actual play, and many game-masters and story-keepers in streamed and home games alike don articles of clothing on a spectrum from hoodie to Ren-Faire cloak as a badge of their office. With the emergent popularity the “story game” genre and actual-play media that blend traditional narrative entertainment with improvisational gameplay, voices across the varied and splintered TTRPG community note that new and old players alike increasingly ascribe primacy to the performance/roleplay aspects of TTRPGs at their own tables. Players operating with assumptions informed by these norms often perform their characters to the other players at the table, but also to an imaginary “audience.” One manifestation of this performative, character-driven play that reflects trends from actual-play video media is the wearing of clothing and accessories that reflect the appearance or other aspects of their characters, and sometimes even outright costuming.

While early claims that TTRPGs produced harmful or antisocial real-world behavior have been largely discounted as overblown, many of the most celebrated TTRPGs harness the blurring of real- and game-world boundaries inherent in roleplay for other purposes. In the blog post, “d4 Responses to Accidental Fascism,” Sidney Icarus remarks on roleplaying games’ capacity to confront players with the ramifications of their characters’ actions in ways that can impact how they think about their own society.(5) In a post analyzing TTRPGs through a Bookchinian lens, DJ of the Planets & Monsters blog notes that prop-elements – like clothing and accessories –  fortify the bridge between game and real world to such a degree that “the line between the biological and non-biological components of play is not clear.”(6) Bearing these possibilities in mind, as well as the various research approaches mentioned above, this paper interrogates how and why TTRPG players wear religiously-charged clothing. When an atheist plays a cleric, what religious work occurs when they wear their fantasy god’s colors to the table? What about when a roleplayer wears the full vestments of a Catholic priest to play a vampire-hunter of the Second Inquisition in an actual-play of Vampire: The Masquerade? In either case, worn items allow players to make meaning and imerse themselves in the world of their games by enacting and engaging with the affective dimensions of religion, absent and parallel to commonly understood characteristics of religion like belief and ritual practice.

1. Schauer, Religious Clothing in Public Spaces (2018); Filippello and Parkins, Fashion and Feeling (2023)

2. Barbieri, Costume in Performance (2017); Shukla, Costume: Performing Identities Through Dress (2015)

3. Gilhus, Clothes and Monasticism in Ancient Christian Egypt (2021); Schauer, Religious Clothing in Public Spaces (2018)

4. Deterding and Zagal, Role-Playing Game Studies: Transmedia Foundations (2018); Waskul and Lust, “Role-Playing and Playing Roles: The Person, Player, and Persona in Fantasy Role-Playing” Symbolic Interaction 27 (2004) 

5. https://mailchi.mp/64adfb343f55/d4-explorations-of-accidental-fascism-in-games?e=7d05bb5e2a

6. https://planetsandmonsters.blogspot.com/2025/01/ecological-ttrpgs.html?m=1