D&D was for those nerdy kids who couldn't play sports or get girlfriends, or were for overweight ugly guys that would be forever virgins. This was the stereotype that I saw more often then the "boys only" or "Satanic game" stereotypes that were also present. It's also the stereotype I've personally seen the most of in any media that portrays D&D. So me being a girl who likes this game that was only meant for these undesirable boys made me somehow even worse of a human being and therefore worthy of being treated so poorly by my fellow female peers.
This aligns with my experience as one of the nerdy kids 99% of the high school didn't want to talk to. No D&D players in my high school were trying to keep girls out. We would have loved to have some females in our social circle - or heck any of the "cool kids." But the mere fact that we played D&D kept all of those girls out of it. They would not be caught dead playing D&D with us, because they would not have been caught dead with us. No one outside of the few of us nerds was beating our door down to get into our games... no one. Certainly not any young ladies.
And although I did not personally know any D&D-playing girls in my day, I have met women my age since, who had the same experience as RoughCoronet... if anything treated worse than the boys were treated, and given how we were treated... that is saying something.
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WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
Because of the above (a paraphrase from Orwell) I no longer post to the forums -- PM me if you need help or anything.
Thank you, I think the conversation is an interesting one as well, and the debate has been an interesting read. I also think when it comes to discussing being inclusive, looking at the outsider's perception on the hobby as well as the perception of those already within the group is important. I had considered in my younger years if I should drop the game to avoid the treatment I received. I didn't and I don't regret it, but I do wonder if others women who might have gone through a similar situation to me did turn there back on the hobby because of that, or even other men who didn't want to be lumped in with the stereotypes.
I think Wizards has done a fairly decent job in making the game appealing to all manner of people. It's not just for "the losers club" anymore, its for anyone who enjoys role-playing, telling great stories, being creative, and just having a good time playing a game with friends. It's not perfect, and it might never be. However, its much better then it once was at least in my opinion in regards to feeling like anyone can play this game. I want people to love D&D as much as I do, regardless of any type of identifier or their walk in life.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
"Meddle not in the affairs of dragons, for thou art crunchy and taste good with ketchup."
D&D was for those nerdy kids who couldn't play sports or get girlfriends, or were for overweight ugly guys that would be forever virgins. This was the stereotype that I saw more often then the "boys only" or "Satanic game" stereotypes that were also present. It's also the stereotype I've personally seen the most of in any media that portrays D&D.
That matches my experience too. The only gatekeeping I've ever seen in this game from the 80's onward has been by the media. Those barriers have come down relatively recently because some of those nerdy kids grew up and became successful media people in their own right: Vin Diesel, The Rock, Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, etc. Now all the cool kids want in on the fun too. Which is fine by me. But they also want us uncool kids out. That isn't going to happen.
'When the mob and the press and the whole world tell you to move, your job is to plant yourself like a tree beside the river of truth, and tell the whole world -- "No, YOU move.”'
I've seen a bit of gatekeeping as part of the larger "fake geek" gatekeeping. But not much, and mostly by people who it was really better to not be in a group with in the first place.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Find your own truth, choose your enemies carefully, and never deal with a dragon.
"Canon" is what's factual to D&D lore. "Cannon" is what you're going to be shot with if you keep getting the word wrong.
That matches my experience too. The only gatekeeping I've ever seen in this game from the 80's onward has been by the media. Those barriers have come down relatively recently because some of those nerdy kids grew up and became successful media people in their own right: Vin Diesel, The Rock, Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, etc. Now all the cool kids want in on the fun too. Which is fine by me. But they also want us uncool kids out. That isn't going to happen.
That's because it was never about D&D.
We weren't "uncool" because we played D&D. Quite the opposite: D&D was "uncool" because we played it. "The nerds think it's great, so can't be any good." Whatever hobby or recreational activity we had chosen would have been an "activity non grata," because we were the personae non gratae, and therefore, like reverse Midases, everything we touched turned to dross.
This is why I can only laugh at people who claim now, 40 years later, that we nerds who were the social lepers, were somehow "gatekeeping" D&D and preventing the other kids from playing it. Such an assertion is absurd on its face, and is a fiction that could only be maintained by someone who did not live through that period. The other kids didn't want to play D&D, because playing D&D was something the loser kids did, and that made it unacceptable.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
Because of the above (a paraphrase from Orwell) I no longer post to the forums -- PM me if you need help or anything.
Possibly just an issue of lag? Running games tends to be weighted towards people who have been in the hobby for a longer time, so you would expect it to change after player distribution changed.
What would be interesting would be to a long term study tracking people who have played RPGs during different parts of their lifetimes to see how many of them choose to step into the role of the GM/DM and find out their reasons why. If possible, I think it would be helpful to also include other types of table top RPGs in the study and compare the numbers. For instance, Vampire: The Masquerade seemed to have a significant female player base for a while.
That matches my experience too. The only gatekeeping I've ever seen in this game from the 80's onward has been by the media. Those barriers have come down relatively recently because some of those nerdy kids grew up and became successful media people in their own right: Vin Diesel, The Rock, Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, etc. Now all the cool kids want in on the fun too. Which is fine by me. But they also want us uncool kids out. That isn't going to happen.
That's because it was never about D&D.
We weren't "uncool" because we played D&D. Quite the opposite: D&D was "uncool" because we played it. "The nerds think it's great, so can't be any good." Whatever hobby or recreational activity we had chosen would have been an "activity non grata," because we were the personae non gratae, and therefore, like reverse Midases, everything we touched turned to dross.
This is why I can only laugh at people who claim now, 40 years later, that we nerds who were the social lepers, were somehow "gatekeeping" D&D and preventing the other kids from playing it. Such an assertion is absurd on its face, and is a fiction that could only be maintained by someone who did not live through that period. The other kids didn't want to play D&D, because playing D&D was something the loser kids did, and that made it unacceptable.
The truth is probably a combination of both "push" factors of some adolescent boys/men making gaming awkward/hostile and "pull" factors of many peers/parents telling girls and young women that table-top RPGs are too nerdy and therefore social Kryptonite. I game with a group of women and trans people regularly. One of the stories I've heard of high school D&D taking place in the early 2000s included a woman who stopped playing table-top RPGs for a long time b/c the group that introduced her to it were high school boys who played out a torture scene of a captured prisoner for over 40 real time minutes with the DM doing nothing to stop it.
I don't think we should ignore the possibility that men and women respond to media presentation about RPGs differently. I mention media because it's true that social expectations of inclusion are partially shaped by the media's depiction of anything that is introduced to individuals or groups that have not previously encountered the subject advertised. Does seeing almost all cisgender men being GMs on YouTube or in Livestreams inadvertently depress the growth of women as GMs? Is there any correlation between the vast majority of media about fictional characters living in fictional worlds depicting "Good" leaders as being consistently men for decades ("The West Wing," "The Lord of the Rings," "Captain Phillips") and "Bad" leaders as women during those same decades (mostly animated fairy tales with an "Evil Stepmother," "Evil Queen", etc.) impact the confidence of women in taking on what is effectively the leadership role in table top RPGs?
I also don't think we should leave out the fact that video is a very visual medium and that women who "perform" for that medium are held to higher standards of appearance than men usually are. (See the televised U.S. presidential debates for instance.) As such, this could also constitute a different popular threshold both for who is willing to put themselves before a camera as a GM as well as who becomes popular enough to get a lot of views, which itself feeds into more viewership down the road and may have an indirect effect on the number of women who see themselves taking up the mantle of GM.
The truth is probably a combination of both "push" factors of some adolescent boys/men making gaming awkward/hostile and "pull" factors of many peers/parents telling girls and young women that table-top RPGs are too nerdy and therefore social Kryptonite. I game with a group of women and trans people regularly. One of the stories I've heard of high school D&D taking place in the early 2000s included a woman who stopped playing table-top RPGs for a long time b/c the group that introduced her to it were high school boys who played out a torture scene of a captured prisoner for over 40 real time minutes with the DM doing nothing to stop it.
I don't think we should ignore the possibility that men and women respond to media presentation about RPGs differently. I mention media because it's true that social expectations of inclusion are partially shaped by the media's depiction of anything that is introduced to individuals or groups that have not previously encountered the subject advertised. Does seeing almost all cisgender men being GMs on YouTube or in Livestreams inadvertently depress the growth of women as GMs? Is there any correlation between the vast majority of media about fictional characters living in fictional worlds depicting "Good" leaders as being consistently men for decades ("The West Wing," "The Lord of the Rings," "Captain Phillips") and "Bad" leaders as women during those same decades (mostly animated fairy tales with an "Evil Stepmother," "Evil Queen", etc.) impact the confidence of women in taking on what is effectively the leadership role in table top RPGs?
I also don't think we should leave out the fact that video is a very visual medium and that women who "perform" for that medium are held to higher standards of appearance than men usually are. (See the televised U.S. presidential debates for instance.) As such, this could also constitute a different popular threshold both for who is willing to put themselves before a camera as a GM as well as who becomes popular enough to get a lot of views, which itself feeds into more viewership down the road and may have an indirect effect on the number of women who see themselves taking up the mantle of GM.
Yes!!!!!!!! This is totally relevant, thank you. And especially the second point, about media representation washing over into social confidence? Totally a real thing, thank you so much for sharing your take!
One of the stories I've heard of high school D&D taking place in the early 2000s
I'm gonna stop you right there.
I mean no offense, but one cannot compare something that happened in around 2002 to something that happened in 1982. It is just apples and oranges.
By the early 2000s, video gaming had become a big thing. Games like Baldur's Gate and Everquest, and Ultima Online had become moderately successful (not WOW-sized hits, but still successful). Gaming had 20-odd more years under its belt, and there were dozens of different RPGs out there. On top of that, the LOTR movies had come out and those were a huge smash hit, and made liking Fantasy and Frodo socially acceptable all of a sudden (or at least socially neutral), which it had never really been before that. Thus, although there was and remains a social stigma to playing RPGs, by 2000 it was an order of magnitude lower than it was in 1982, when 90%+ of the people you met had never heard of AD&D, or Lord of the Rings.
A simple example: In 10th grade English, we were required to pick something off the "acceptable literature" list to read. One of the things on the list was Lord of the Rings (how it made it onto that list, I will never know). Now keep in mind, we only had to technically pick ONE book and LOTR was a series, so it was 3x as much as any other book on the list (or most of them -- I think a couple of other series might have been on there). I had read LOTR in junior high but didn't want to read most of what else was on the list, so I asked if I could read that. (And I'll admit I figured I could write a book report on it without actually having to read it over again....)
The teacher asked if I had read it before, and I admitted I had (she would have known I must have, given my rep). She didn't want me to re-read something I had already read (fair enough) but in the process of saying no, she said, and I quote (because I will never forget it), "I realize that the Lord of the Rings is a cult thing, but...."
A cult. That's how she viewed people who liked Lord of the Rings, in 1986. I am sorry but you cannot compare that to 2003 or something, when LOTR has won a bevy of Oscars, and millions of people name it as their favorite movie. Liking fantasy is not consider being "in a cult" now. It was , however, back then.
So although I am sure that unpleasant things have happened to people who have tried to play D&D in the last 20 years, there is no comparison between today and what it was like back then. Unless you lived during that time period, you can't really know what it was like.
One of the stories I've heard of high school D&D taking place in the early 2000s
I'm gonna stop you right there.
I mean no offense, but one cannot compare something that happened in around 2002 to something that happened in 1982. It is just apples and oranges.
By the early 2000s, video gaming had become a big thing. Games like Baldur's Gate and Everquest, and Ultima Online had become moderately successful (not WOW-sized hits, but still successful). Gaming had 20-odd more years under its belt, and there were dozens of different RPGs out there. On top of that, the LOTR movies had come out and those were a huge smash hit, and made liking Fantasy and Frodo socially acceptable all of a sudden (or at least socially neutral), which it had never really been before that. Thus, although there was and remains a social stigma to playing RPGs, by 2000 it was an order of magnitude lower than it was in 1982, when 90%+ of the people you met had never heard of AD&D, or Lord of the Rings.
A simple example: In 10th grade English, we were required to pick something off the "acceptable literature" list to read. One of the things on the list was Lord of the Rings (how it made it onto that list, I will never know). Now keep in mind, we only had to technically pick ONE book and LOTR was a series, so it was 3x as much as any other book on the list (or most of them -- I think a couple of other series might have been on there). I had read LOTR in junior high but didn't want to read most of what else was on the list, so I asked if I could read that. (And I'll admit I figured I could write a book report on it without actually having to read it over again....)
The teacher asked if I had read it before, and I admitted I had (she would have known I must have, given my rep). She didn't want me to re-read something I had already read (fair enough) but in the process of saying no, she said, and I quote (because I will never forget it), "I realize that the Lord of the Rings is a cult thing, but...."
A cult. That's how she viewed people who liked Lord of the Rings, in 1986. I am sorry but you cannot compare that to 2003 or something, when LOTR has won a bevy of Oscars, and millions of people name it as their favorite movie. Liking fantasy is not consider being "in a cult" now. It was , however, back then.
So although I am sure that unpleasant things have happened to people who have tried to play D&D in the last 20 years, there is no comparison between today and what it was like back then. Unless you lived during that time period, you can't really know what it was like.
That's double irony given how unsubtle Lord of the Rings was with its Christian allegories.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Find your own truth, choose your enemies carefully, and never deal with a dragon.
"Canon" is what's factual to D&D lore. "Cannon" is what you're going to be shot with if you keep getting the word wrong.
One of the stories I've heard of high school D&D taking place in the early 2000s
So although I am sure that unpleasant things have happened to people who have tried to play D&D in the last 20 years, there is no comparison between today and what it was like back then. Unless you lived during that time period, you can't really know what it was like.
Sounds like an American thing. Growing up in the UK there wasn't a social stigma, at least not in my schools.
I'm not sure what this "gate keeping" thing is people talk about. Is that just for high schoolers or you talking about D&D conventions or something? Hard to understand who is keeping which gate closed when D&D is primarily just something you play with friends.
At the very least, anyone and everyone is welcome at my D&D table so long as they can behave in a civil manner.
If by a civil manner you mean being chill and not disrespecting other players, I totally agree. As long as you like gaming and I have fun playing with you, gender isn’t important to me. That’s literally what equality means.
Possibly just an issue of lag? Running games tends to be weighted towards people who have been in the hobby for a longer time, so you would expect it to change after player distribution changed.
What would be interesting would be to a long term study tracking people who have played RPGs during different parts of their lifetimes to see how many of them choose to step into the role of the GM/DM and find out their reasons why. If possible, I think it would be helpful to also include other types of table top RPGs in the study and compare the numbers. For instance, Vampire: The Masquerade seemed to have a significant female player base for a while.
I know several girls (including me) who play Vampire and other World of Darkness games. Also Trinity Continuum by the same company, but that’s less popular and more of a sci-fI/superhero thing.
I know several girls (including me) who play Vampire and other World of Darkness games. Also Trinity Continuum by the same company, but that’s less popular and more of a sci-fI/superhero thing.
Vampire was the first RPG to develop a significant female player base. Likely in part because of the literary genre it pulled from (biggest influence was probably Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles, readership for which skewed heavily female; D&D mostly has its roots in sword and sorcery pulp, which always had a rather male readership).
I know several girls (including me) who play Vampire and other World of Darkness games. Also Trinity Continuum by the same company, but that’s less popular and more of a sci-fI/superhero thing.
Vampire was the first RPG to develop a significant female player base. Likely in part because of the literary genre it pulled from (biggest influence was probably Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles, readership for which skewed heavily female; D&D mostly has its roots in sword and sorcery pulp, which always had a rather male readership).
I totally agree. I love Anne Rice (and writers like her) and I love the Vampire RPG (and most of the other World of Darkness games).
One of the stories I've heard of high school D&D taking place in the early 2000s
I'm gonna stop you right there.
I mean no offense, but one cannot compare something that happened in around 2002 to something that happened in 1982. It is just apples and oranges.
<SNIPPED for brevity.>
So although I am sure that unpleasant things have happened to people who have tried to play D&D in the last 20 years, there is no comparison between today and what it was like back then. Unless you lived during that time period, you can't really know what it was like.
I don't see why the point you make is somehow contradicted by the point I made. D&D and RPGs have always been a "nerd" hobby and the numbers of women involved as hobbyists has generally been disproportionately small for most games. I understand that you're saying that the social pressures of being a nerd were much more severe when you grew up than during the early 2000s, but that does not erase the fact there that some gaming tables were made uncomfortable for women players back in the 80s just as they are now. (Probably worse in the 80s actually.) The pain of social ostracism cuts many ways and hurts a lot of different people. That does not mean that the socially ostracized do not sometimes also ostracize other people in turn even if they do so unintentionally.
I mentioned LOTR in my earlier post not because liking LOTR was "so cool" in preceding decades, but to give an example of popular media's representation of male leadership that many people who play D&D would be familiar with. I'm sure there were far more sexist media representations than Peter Jackson's LOTR movie series. Honestly, I'm not all that familiar with T.V. back in the 70s and 80s, but I do know that the idea of a female starship captain was a very controversial idea back then and that having a woman (Carol Burnett) as the central figure and director of a sketch variety show on T.V. was "ground-breaking." I cannot point to any direct scientific correlation between the dearth of women as DMs today and the availability of female leadership role models in earlier decades, but I think it would be naive to say the least to pretend that one has no impact on the other.
One of the stories I've heard of high school D&D taking place in the early 2000s
I'm gonna stop you right there.
I mean no offense, but one cannot compare something that happened in around 2002 to something that happened in 1982. It is just apples and oranges.
<SNIPPED for brevity.>
So although I am sure that unpleasant things have happened to people who have tried to play D&D in the last 20 years, there is no comparison between today and what it was like back then. Unless you lived during that time period, you can't really know what it was like.
I don't see why the point you make is somehow contradicted by the point I made. D&D and RPGs have always been a "nerd" hobby and the numbers of women involved as hobbyists has generally been disproportionately small for most games. I understand that you're saying that the social pressures of being a nerd were much more severe when you grew up than during the early 2000s, but that does not erase the fact there that some gaming tables were made uncomfortable for women players back in the 80s just as they are now. (Probably worse in the 80s actually.) The pain of social ostracism cuts many ways and hurts a lot of different people. That does not mean that the socially ostracized do not sometimes also ostracize other people in turn even if they do so unintentionally.
I mentioned LOTR in my earlier post not because liking LOTR was "so cool" in preceding decades, but to give an example of popular media's representation of male leadership that many people who play D&D would be familiar with. I'm sure there were far more sexist media representations than Peter Jackson's LOTR movie series. Honestly, I'm not all that familiar with T.V. back in the 70s and 80s, but I do know that the idea of a female starship captain was a very controversial idea back then and that having a woman (Carol Burnett) as the central figure and director of a sketch variety show on T.V. was "ground-breaking." I cannot point to any direct scientific correlation between the dearth of women as DMs today and the availability of female leadership role models in earlier decades, but I think it would be naive to say the least to pretend that one has no impact on the other.
I’ve been playing RPGs since I was 12 and among my friend group, the majority of DMs have always been male. If you’re talking specifically about D&D (as opposed to other tabletop RPGs), only me and one other female friend have ever run our own games.
(Actually, my friend I talked about in the very first post on this thread DM’d her own game in college back in the early Nineties. But she’s an online friend and older than the rest of my IP friend group, and even if you count her the majority of DMs I’ve known or played with have still been guys.)
It’s sort of like how in the big law firms, the number of female associates is equal or even higher in some firms to the number of males, but the partners (the people who actually own and run the firms) are still overwhelmingly male.
Still, the statistic somebody cited above that 39 percent of current D&D players identify as female is amazingly encouraging.
At the very least, anyone and everyone is welcome at my D&D table so long as they can behave in a civil manner.
In my current gaming group, females outnumber the only male (me) four to one. Even before the pandemic hit, my school group (which I dm for) was two-thirds female and comprised of myself, four females, and one other guy. Once the pandemic hit, I chose two of the females (their names are Susie and Macy, changed for privacy) to play with me over zoom during lockdown, joined by my little sister, and Susie's as well. Needless to say, my group won't gatekeep for anything.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
May all of your spells roll the best things for the situation on the wild magic table and all your checks to seduce dragons roll nat 20's
At the very least, anyone and everyone is welcome at my D&D table so long as they can behave in a civil manner.
In my current gaming group, females outnumber the only male (me) four to one. Even before the pandemic hit, my school group (which I dm for) was two-thirds female and comprised of myself, four females, and one other guy. Once the pandemic hit, I chose two of the females (their names are Susie and Macy, changed for privacy) to play with me over zoom during lockdown, joined by my little sister, and Susie's as well. Needless to say, my group won't gatekeep for anything.
That’s awesome!!! Though I do notice you’re still the DM. One of the first groups I ever DMed for started out as a male DM and five female players.
Just out of curiosity, do you go to a college like Sarah Lawrence or Vassar? I did, and I was wondering if that might help explain the high percentage of female players in your friend group.
This aligns with my experience as one of the nerdy kids 99% of the high school didn't want to talk to. No D&D players in my high school were trying to keep girls out. We would have loved to have some females in our social circle - or heck any of the "cool kids." But the mere fact that we played D&D kept all of those girls out of it. They would not be caught dead playing D&D with us, because they would not have been caught dead with us. No one outside of the few of us nerds was beating our door down to get into our games... no one. Certainly not any young ladies.
And although I did not personally know any D&D-playing girls in my day, I have met women my age since, who had the same experience as RoughCoronet... if anything treated worse than the boys were treated, and given how we were treated... that is saying something.
WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
Because of the above (a paraphrase from Orwell) I no longer post to the forums -- PM me if you need help or anything.
Thank you, I think the conversation is an interesting one as well, and the debate has been an interesting read. I also think when it comes to discussing being inclusive, looking at the outsider's perception on the hobby as well as the perception of those already within the group is important. I had considered in my younger years if I should drop the game to avoid the treatment I received. I didn't and I don't regret it, but I do wonder if others women who might have gone through a similar situation to me did turn there back on the hobby because of that, or even other men who didn't want to be lumped in with the stereotypes.
I think Wizards has done a fairly decent job in making the game appealing to all manner of people. It's not just for "the losers club" anymore, its for anyone who enjoys role-playing, telling great stories, being creative, and just having a good time playing a game with friends. It's not perfect, and it might never be. However, its much better then it once was at least in my opinion in regards to feeling like anyone can play this game. I want people to love D&D as much as I do, regardless of any type of identifier or their walk in life.
"Meddle not in the affairs of dragons, for thou art crunchy and taste good with ketchup."
Characters for Tenebris Sine Fine
RoughCoronet's Greater Wills
That matches my experience too. The only gatekeeping I've ever seen in this game from the 80's onward has been by the media. Those barriers have come down relatively recently because some of those nerdy kids grew up and became successful media people in their own right: Vin Diesel, The Rock, Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, etc. Now all the cool kids want in on the fun too. Which is fine by me. But they also want us uncool kids out. That isn't going to happen.
I've seen a bit of gatekeeping as part of the larger "fake geek" gatekeeping. But not much, and mostly by people who it was really better to not be in a group with in the first place.
Find your own truth, choose your enemies carefully, and never deal with a dragon.
"Canon" is what's factual to D&D lore. "Cannon" is what you're going to be shot with if you keep getting the word wrong.
At the very least, anyone and everyone is welcome at my D&D table so long as they can behave in a civil manner.
That's because it was never about D&D.
We weren't "uncool" because we played D&D. Quite the opposite: D&D was "uncool" because we played it. "The nerds think it's great, so can't be any good." Whatever hobby or recreational activity we had chosen would have been an "activity non grata," because we were the personae non gratae, and therefore, like reverse Midases, everything we touched turned to dross.
This is why I can only laugh at people who claim now, 40 years later, that we nerds who were the social lepers, were somehow "gatekeeping" D&D and preventing the other kids from playing it. Such an assertion is absurd on its face, and is a fiction that could only be maintained by someone who did not live through that period. The other kids didn't want to play D&D, because playing D&D was something the loser kids did, and that made it unacceptable.
WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
Because of the above (a paraphrase from Orwell) I no longer post to the forums -- PM me if you need help or anything.
What would be interesting would be to a long term study tracking people who have played RPGs during different parts of their lifetimes to see how many of them choose to step into the role of the GM/DM and find out their reasons why. If possible, I think it would be helpful to also include other types of table top RPGs in the study and compare the numbers. For instance, Vampire: The Masquerade seemed to have a significant female player base for a while.
The truth is probably a combination of both "push" factors of some adolescent boys/men making gaming awkward/hostile and "pull" factors of many peers/parents telling girls and young women that table-top RPGs are too nerdy and therefore social Kryptonite. I game with a group of women and trans people regularly. One of the stories I've heard of high school D&D taking place in the early 2000s included a woman who stopped playing table-top RPGs for a long time b/c the group that introduced her to it were high school boys who played out a torture scene of a captured prisoner for over 40 real time minutes with the DM doing nothing to stop it.
I don't think we should ignore the possibility that men and women respond to media presentation about RPGs differently. I mention media because it's true that social expectations of inclusion are partially shaped by the media's depiction of anything that is introduced to individuals or groups that have not previously encountered the subject advertised. Does seeing almost all cisgender men being GMs on YouTube or in Livestreams inadvertently depress the growth of women as GMs? Is there any correlation between the vast majority of media about fictional characters living in fictional worlds depicting "Good" leaders as being consistently men for decades ("The West Wing," "The Lord of the Rings," "Captain Phillips") and "Bad" leaders as women during those same decades (mostly animated fairy tales with an "Evil Stepmother," "Evil Queen", etc.) impact the confidence of women in taking on what is effectively the leadership role in table top RPGs?
I also don't think we should leave out the fact that video is a very visual medium and that women who "perform" for that medium are held to higher standards of appearance than men usually are. (See the televised U.S. presidential debates for instance.) As such, this could also constitute a different popular threshold both for who is willing to put themselves before a camera as a GM as well as who becomes popular enough to get a lot of views, which itself feeds into more viewership down the road and may have an indirect effect on the number of women who see themselves taking up the mantle of GM.
Yes!!!!!!!! This is totally relevant, thank you. And especially the second point, about media representation washing over into social confidence? Totally a real thing, thank you so much for sharing your take!
💙🤍~*Ravenclaw*~ 🔮
I'm gonna stop you right there.
I mean no offense, but one cannot compare something that happened in around 2002 to something that happened in 1982. It is just apples and oranges.
By the early 2000s, video gaming had become a big thing. Games like Baldur's Gate and Everquest, and Ultima Online had become moderately successful (not WOW-sized hits, but still successful). Gaming had 20-odd more years under its belt, and there were dozens of different RPGs out there. On top of that, the LOTR movies had come out and those were a huge smash hit, and made liking Fantasy and Frodo socially acceptable all of a sudden (or at least socially neutral), which it had never really been before that. Thus, although there was and remains a social stigma to playing RPGs, by 2000 it was an order of magnitude lower than it was in 1982, when 90%+ of the people you met had never heard of AD&D, or Lord of the Rings.
A simple example: In 10th grade English, we were required to pick something off the "acceptable literature" list to read. One of the things on the list was Lord of the Rings (how it made it onto that list, I will never know). Now keep in mind, we only had to technically pick ONE book and LOTR was a series, so it was 3x as much as any other book on the list (or most of them -- I think a couple of other series might have been on there). I had read LOTR in junior high but didn't want to read most of what else was on the list, so I asked if I could read that. (And I'll admit I figured I could write a book report on it without actually having to read it over again....)
The teacher asked if I had read it before, and I admitted I had (she would have known I must have, given my rep). She didn't want me to re-read something I had already read (fair enough) but in the process of saying no, she said, and I quote (because I will never forget it), "I realize that the Lord of the Rings is a cult thing, but...."
A cult. That's how she viewed people who liked Lord of the Rings, in 1986. I am sorry but you cannot compare that to 2003 or something, when LOTR has won a bevy of Oscars, and millions of people name it as their favorite movie. Liking fantasy is not consider being "in a cult" now. It was , however, back then.
So although I am sure that unpleasant things have happened to people who have tried to play D&D in the last 20 years, there is no comparison between today and what it was like back then. Unless you lived during that time period, you can't really know what it was like.
WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
Because of the above (a paraphrase from Orwell) I no longer post to the forums -- PM me if you need help or anything.
That's double irony given how unsubtle Lord of the Rings was with its Christian allegories.
Find your own truth, choose your enemies carefully, and never deal with a dragon.
"Canon" is what's factual to D&D lore. "Cannon" is what you're going to be shot with if you keep getting the word wrong.
Sounds like an American thing. Growing up in the UK there wasn't a social stigma, at least not in my schools.
I'm not sure what this "gate keeping" thing is people talk about. Is that just for high schoolers or you talking about D&D conventions or something? Hard to understand who is keeping which gate closed when D&D is primarily just something you play with friends.
If by a civil manner you mean being chill and not disrespecting other players, I totally agree. As long as you like gaming and I have fun playing with you, gender isn’t important to me. That’s literally what equality means.
I know several girls (including me) who play Vampire and other World of Darkness games. Also Trinity Continuum by the same company, but that’s less popular and more of a sci-fI/superhero thing.
Vampire was the first RPG to develop a significant female player base. Likely in part because of the literary genre it pulled from (biggest influence was probably Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles, readership for which skewed heavily female; D&D mostly has its roots in sword and sorcery pulp, which always had a rather male readership).
I totally agree. I love Anne Rice (and writers like her) and I love the Vampire RPG (and most of the other World of Darkness games).
I don't see why the point you make is somehow contradicted by the point I made. D&D and RPGs have always been a "nerd" hobby and the numbers of women involved as hobbyists has generally been disproportionately small for most games. I understand that you're saying that the social pressures of being a nerd were much more severe when you grew up than during the early 2000s, but that does not erase the fact there that some gaming tables were made uncomfortable for women players back in the 80s just as they are now. (Probably worse in the 80s actually.) The pain of social ostracism cuts many ways and hurts a lot of different people. That does not mean that the socially ostracized do not sometimes also ostracize other people in turn even if they do so unintentionally.
I mentioned LOTR in my earlier post not because liking LOTR was "so cool" in preceding decades, but to give an example of popular media's representation of male leadership that many people who play D&D would be familiar with. I'm sure there were far more sexist media representations than Peter Jackson's LOTR movie series. Honestly, I'm not all that familiar with T.V. back in the 70s and 80s, but I do know that the idea of a female starship captain was a very controversial idea back then and that having a woman (Carol Burnett) as the central figure and director of a sketch variety show on T.V. was "ground-breaking." I cannot point to any direct scientific correlation between the dearth of women as DMs today and the availability of female leadership role models in earlier decades, but I think it would be naive to say the least to pretend that one has no impact on the other.
I’ve been playing RPGs since I was 12 and among my friend group, the majority of DMs have always been male. If you’re talking specifically about D&D (as opposed to other tabletop RPGs), only me and one other female friend have ever run our own games.
(Actually, my friend I talked about in the very first post on this thread DM’d her own game in college back in the early Nineties. But she’s an online friend and older than the rest of my IP friend group, and even if you count her the majority of DMs I’ve known or played with have still been guys.)
It’s sort of like how in the big law firms, the number of female associates is equal or even higher in some firms to the number of males, but the partners (the people who actually own and run the firms) are still overwhelmingly male.
Still, the statistic somebody cited above that 39 percent of current D&D players identify as female is amazingly encouraging.
In my current gaming group, females outnumber the only male (me) four to one. Even before the pandemic hit, my school group (which I dm for) was two-thirds female and comprised of myself, four females, and one other guy. Once the pandemic hit, I chose two of the females (their names are Susie and Macy, changed for privacy) to play with me over zoom during lockdown, joined by my little sister, and Susie's as well. Needless to say, my group won't gatekeep for anything.
May all of your spells roll the best things for the situation on the wild magic table and all your checks to seduce dragons roll nat 20's
My first char (and namesake) Lili Scheppen!
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That’s awesome!!! Though I do notice you’re still the DM. One of the first groups I ever DMed for started out as a male DM and five female players.
Just out of curiosity, do you go to a college like Sarah Lawrence or Vassar? I did, and I was wondering if that might help explain the high percentage of female players in your friend group.