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Message: <blockquote data-quote="RHGreen" data-source="post: 5738582">I think the solution may be more simple than you imagine. D&D's strength, I believe, has been its very open design. It's like the Android OS equivalent of RPGs - you can run anything you want on it. The older D&Ds were nieve (not an insult) fresh things that were very open on the basis that they had chunks of needed rules that didn't exist. This meant that it developed a natural and organic attitude to house rules and mechanics understanding in a reactive need to adjudicate actions not written in the rule books. It was a pain and the quality of the results were haphazard, but what it did mean is you could literally do anything any player thought of. I know later editions allow you to do anything you want but their nature is not condusive to that behaviour. The later the editions get the more they push and funnel into tactical combat while pushing and swashing everything else to the side. Now this isn't a criticism of any particular edition. Old editions are fun haphazard imagination fests on one hand and glitchy botch jobs on the other. 3E has a lot of options and detail on one hand and is a accountants sluggish nightmare on the other. 4E is a relatively simple clean system with fantastic tactical combat on one hand and a hollow combat pigeon holed chess game on the other. What would be good for female gamers is exactly the same thing that would be good for every single one of us. Treat D&D like an open operating system. Make it so that we can do anything we want on it. Give us all the tools we need to do those things without having to make mechanics up ourselves. Make those tools in such a way that they do not cramp us and funnel us into one single style of play. If female gamers are given the tools and are allowed to do the things they want to do, they will play it. As to how they come to play D&D in the first place, well that problem isn't gender biased. It doesn't matter what it is -everyone is introduced to something. The only time that isn't true is when we invent it ourselves. (Why do you think marketing is such a well paid business when all they are really doing is shouting "LOOK AT MY SAUSAGE.")</blockquote>

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