Bleed in Dungeons & Dragons: A Study on the Impact of Personality Design and Character Similarity

Abstract

Recently, Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) has surged in popularity. Particularly during COVID-19, more people started playing D&D, which has been shown to have a positive effect on the players’ wellbeing, underscoring the potential mental health benefits of the game. These effects of role-playing on the players’ real-life mental state can be explained by emotions, behavior and beliefs bleeding from the player into their character and vice versa.

While existing research has explored how physical customization possibilities of game characters can affect players or strengthen the bond between players and their characters, little attention has been paid to how different character personality designs affect the player. Moreover, there is a notable lack of research examining how bleed develops over an extended period of play. This study addresses these gaps by developing and testing a conceptual model for bleed and examining how different designs for D&D characters (similar, dissimilar, idealized self in terms of personality) affect the player over an extended period through a qualitative, exploratory experiment. Novel measures for bleed were developed and tested for this purpose.

Furthermore, a Myers-Briggs-based, gamified personality test was used as a simplified way of operationalizing similarity between a player and their character. Findings indicate that playing a character similar in personality to the player fosters greater bleed-in than bleed-out, while a character representing desired traits evokes both bleed-in and bleed-out. Notably, playing a dissimilar character induces more bleed-out than playing a similar character. This study provides further insights into the complex nature of bleed and paves the way for future research, with the aim of discovering how RPGs like D&D and character creation can be leveraged to impact one’s self-development.