Women players & Women DM's • Collecting General • The Acaeum

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Women players & Women DM's
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sleepyCO
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Posted: Sat Mar 03, 2007 12:02 pm

A thought to start this thread . . . . .

Since the Acaeum deals with mostly 1e and some 2e, I've wondered why there was such a large difference in the number of male and female players. For example, I do remember the D&D club in my high school had about 30 members and only three were women (this was 1978-80).

1> Has the gap between the number of male and female players (and DM's for that matter) changed?

2> Has anyone here been in a game run by a woman DM, and do you notice a style difference in the way she runs the game--or does that depend more on the module and less on the DM? (I never have been in a game with a woman DM, by the way, and have wondered about it.)

3> Is there a noticeable difference in style between male and female module writers (i.e. men might be more "hack-n-slash" while women go toward more "role-playing")? Maybe the difference in later versions (3e/3.5e/d20) isn't as great as 1e/2e.

Thoughts anyone?

Winterwords
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Posted: Sat Mar 03, 2007 12:08 pm

Female gamer here

I've DM'ed & played. Currently just sitting & reading my books though for want of a group. :/

1) I started playing in about 91 or 92 when I was just out of primary school. I would say the gap is less now than it was because I would expect, as in my case, more gamers are teaching their children (including daughters!) how to play.

2) I think all DMs have their own "style", so can't really comment there.

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Plaag
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Posted: Sat Mar 03, 2007 12:27 pm

sleepyCO wrote:A thought to start this thread . . . . .

3> Is there a noticeable difference in style between male and female module writers (i.e. men might be more "hack-n-slash" while women go toward more "role-playing")? Maybe the difference in later versions (3e/3.5e/d20) isn't as great as 1e/2e.

Thoughts anyone?

http://www.acaeum.com/ddindexes/modpages/b3.html
http://www.acaeum.com/ddindexes/modpages/cm.html (C9)
http://www.acaeum.com/ddindexes/modpages/i.html (I3, I6 - Laura only

)
and of Course Dragonlance Series of mods from those that I can recall.

All but Jean Wells are authors (course not sure about Jean).

About C9, as I've read many of Katherine Kerr's novels, I see many of the historical/setting type elements from this in her novels. Course having read Dragonlance, that has a different feel as the early novels are mainly a recap of the play in the modules and its more forced to detail a world.

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FormCritic
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Posted: Sat Mar 03, 2007 3:01 pm

The Dragonlance modules were a deliberate attempt to recruit female players.

My un-scientific guess about the ratio of female to male players would be that the disparity has decreased in the past decade and a half.

The main reason would be that many guys who still play will have recruited their wives and daughters into the game.

The old joke about guys who get girlfriends and then give up the game has some validity...and it is also partly a load of crap.

Probably the most irritating and politically correct load of crap involving female players has been the attempt to recruit them by making the game books more difficult to read....

Specifically, I mean the removal of "he" as a standard pronoun in game publications.

In proper written and spoken English, "he" means "anyone" and "she" means "a specific person." I keep having to skip back up the page to see if I have missed a reference to a specific person in the text. Really annoying and needlessly PC. I have some female gamers in my group but I don't know anyone who was recruited to the game by a PC pronoun.

RPG's are usually violent...and violence is aways going to be more appealing to males. DNA and all that...

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Sea-to-sky-games
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Posted: Sat Mar 03, 2007 4:14 pm

In proper written and spoken English, "he" means "anyone" and "she" means "a specific person." I keep having to skip back up the page to see if I have missed a reference to a specific person in the text. Really annoying and needlessly PC. I have some female gamers in my group but I don't know anyone who was recruited to the game by a PC pronoun.

I believe Gygax always put that into the preface of his hardbacks. I suppose that wasn't good enough

mbassoc2003
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Posted: Sat Mar 03, 2007 5:20 pm

sleepyCO wrote:....a game run by a woman DM.....

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Posted: Sat Mar 03, 2007 6:21 pm

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ATOM
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Posted: Thu Mar 08, 2007 10:25 am

So if we want to meet women we need to have other hobbies apart from
D&D?Such hobbies as Ballroom dancing, tennis and Paintballing.

Years ago you would be told to meet women in librarys etc...

But we all now know that this is complete nonsence, as those kind
universally never put out.....

dcas
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Posted: Thu Mar 08, 2007 10:40 am

FormCritic wrote:Specifically, I mean the removal of "he" as a standard pronoun in game publications.

Gygax always used "he or she." Compare the 1st Edition PHB to the 2nd Edition.

Later editions alternate between the two, more PC but probably more grammatically correct than using singular "they" as is done in C&C.

I suspect that the ratio of male to female gamers is more than 10-1. It's probably more like 20-1. Gaming just doesn't appeal to women in general.

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Boreas
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Posted: Thu Mar 08, 2007 11:55 am

Dialog from a few days ago:

Me: "You always used to play RPGs with me."
She: "That was because you were playing."
Me: "Then why don't you play now?"
She: "That is because you are playing."

:?:

Winterwords
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Posted: Thu Mar 08, 2007 12:10 pm

ATOM wrote:Years ago you would be told to meet women in librarys etc...

LOL. I was discussing this only last week in work with someone and said to her "Look at this company. Most women meet their partners at work or when they're out at the pub... and think about the kind of pubs we go to... and we wonder why we're single? No wonder we can't find anyone with any intelligence who is nice - we need to start trying to pull in book shops or libraries."

Badmike
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Posted: Thu Mar 08, 2007 12:16 pm

sleepyCO wrote:A thought to start this thread . . . . .

Since the Acaeum deals with mostly 1e and some 2e, I've wondered why there was such a large difference in the number of male and female players. For example, I do remember the D&D club in my high school had about 30 members and only three were women (this was 1978-80).

1> Has the gap between the number of male and female players (and DM's for that matter) changed?

2> Has anyone here been in a game run by a woman DM, and do you notice a style difference in the way she runs the game--or does that depend more on the module and less on the DM? (I never have been in a game with a woman DM, by the way, and have wondered about it.)

3> Is there a noticeable difference in style between male and female module writers (i.e. men might be more "hack-n-slash" while women go toward more "role-playing")? Maybe the difference in later versions (3e/3.5e/d20) isn't as great as 1e/2e.

Thoughts anyone?

I think there are more female players now, for the reasons given: it's become more an accepted game, and daughters have grown up seeing "daddy and his friends" play. I've never had woman DM, never even heard of one in my experienced...I have played with female players, and every single one of them was MUCH better at roleplaying than their male counterparts. As a matter of fact, a lot of them were just flat better players. One group I ran with the kids of a fellow player and a couple of adults. His daughter (14)was the youngest one there, and on SEVERAL occasions she had a solution to a problem or was able to see a way out of a dilemma before either her brother or any of the other players (some with 20 years of gaming experience...!)

Mike B.

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ATOM
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Posted: Thu Mar 08, 2007 12:22 pm

Winterwords wrote:
LOL. I was discussing this only last week in work with someone and said to her "Look at this company. Most women meet their partners at work or when they're out at the pub... and think about the kind of pubs we go to... and we wonder why we're single? No wonder we can't find anyone with any intelligence who is nice - we need to start trying to pull in book shops or libraries."

It is funny man...you will meet a much finer upstanding and socially superior type of woman in a library!

Ha Ha.Maybe the fifty year old bepectacled librarian and then you can take
her to a rave party.

jasonw1239
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Posted: Thu Mar 08, 2007 12:50 pm

Great Youtube clip...March of the Librarians...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Td922l0NoDQ

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ATOM
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Posted: Thu Mar 08, 2007 1:15 pm

jasonw1239 wrote:Great Youtube clip...March of the Librarians...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Td922l0NoDQ

Excellent stuff.I love the way the narrator thinks he is in a nature programme.
"There are the male librarians often sporting fabulous facial plumage
perhaps in an attempt to attract a mate?".

deimos3428
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Posted: Thu Mar 08, 2007 1:40 pm

I think the women that are at a gaming table now, on average, actually want to play the game.

In my experience, the women at the table in decades past were there for other reasons. They were somewhat curious and wanted to hang out and/or humor their brothers, boyfriends or husbands, but most didn't possess a genuine interest in playing and often didn't stick around. True female "gamers" were rather rare.

bbarsh
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Posted: Thu Mar 08, 2007 1:51 pm

While there are certainly more females in gaming today (percentage-based) than in the 80s, let say, the numbers are never going to be huge.

As already mentioned, gaming is a "male" hobby. While rpgs will attact some females - most likely wives, kids, etc of existing gamers, many other games will never attact females i.e. war games.

On the other hand, CCGs probably have a larger percentage of female players, and that might draw them to rpgs.

But simply, females, in general, are not travelling the circles that make them play rpgs, let alone make them aware of them.

And I could've bought these damn modules off the 1$ rack!!!

New modules for your Old School game http://pacesettergames.com/

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Keith the Thief
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Posted: Thu Mar 08, 2007 7:23 pm

My college fraternity (1982-1986) had a large number of D&D players, and we also had quite a few girls around the house at any given time, but the girls never played the game.

Some girls found our dialog amusing ("you just got a spear up the arse"), but generally they'd just hang out at the poker table for a while before wandering off to another part of the frat house to get a beer (and for those of us smart enough to realize that girls in the house drinking beer had many advantages over killing imaginary beasts called beholders got ... well, you get the picture).

The same thing would happen when we'd watch "The Three Stooges" or Monty Python.

Oddly enough, though, these same girls would sit with us guys, drink beer and watch college football obsessively (analyzing the X's and O's of every play) ... but maybe that's because we're in the South and college football is like a religion down here.

I met my wife in college, and to this day, 21 years later, she and her friends from school still have no interest in D&D. My wife knows I collect the stuff, and she politely listens when I describe what I'm collecting, but that's as far as it goes.

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