Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lady Chaomii" data-source="post: 5947580" data-attributes="member: 6691756">For those of you too vague to notice my name; I am a female gamer. And I will vouch for the truth in the fact that female gamers do have a tendency towards casual gaming (However, as always, this is not the rule and there are many MANY exceptions, myself being one of them). HOWEVER, if you want to make Roleplaying Games more female friendly, you should be looking at the setting, NOT the mechanics. I mean let's face facts here; roleplaying games are not casual games. Trying to fiddle with the mechanics of a roleplaying game to make it casual is like trying to optimize a main battle tank to make it fit into the back of a sports car.In our game, it is interesting because the roles of men and women in the setting have been reversed, given that it is meant to be a matriarchal society; essentially empowering women. (Note: If you use a matriarchal society in your own game it's important not to just take Medieval Europe and blast it with an epic level enlarged mass Rule63 spell. Do you really think that in a world dominated by women, men would be treated like house wives tasked with cleaning the house and looking after the children? Of course not. However this is a topic for another day.)Empowering women is an easy way to make a setting more female gamer friendly, but is in no way a necessity mind you depending on how true to life you and your players wish to make the setting. Perhaps there are woman exclusive mages' guilds or baring that, perhaps the archmage of the capital city is a woman.Doesn't mean you can't empower males too though, and you could even still have a bit of discrimination in the setting (But you must be very careful about this and make sure the players are ok with it), though said discrimination should be reserved for villains. One game I played an important antagonist was a woman hating misogynist, and our female fighter relished the opportunity to crush his head in with her greataxe. Even if you do use discrimination, be very clear in making your players understand that these are the views of the character and not you as a DM, and be subtle about it, rather than overt and offensive.Another big thing is to never ever EVER restrict a female gamer to a female character, EVER! Don't even bring it up. And this goes for male players too. In my own game that I DM there are 4 male players and all of them play female characters. If a player asks if they are allowed to play a character of the opposite sex, just laugh and say "Why wouldn't you be allowed to play a (fe)male character, that's just ridiculous," because that's exactly what it is.Last pointer of this directionless post is probably the most important of all. Never make assumptions and never make (overt) allowances for female gamers. The biggest challenge for female gamers is to not feel like the black sheep at the table, and making changes to the game just for them is the most counter productive thing you can do. But that doesn't conflict with everything being said in this thread. You -can- make changes to make a game female friendly, just don't make it painfully obvious that "You're doing this just because there are female gamers in our group". And in cases where it's inherently obvious, such as the implementation of a matriarchal society, just don't say it out loud.So to sum up this post; giving female PCs and NPCs the power they deserve is a very good way to making female players feel comfortable in the setting, males don't have to be subservient just because there are women with power, discrimination can also be used but tread carefully when doing so, women are allowed to play male characters and vica vera and finally; giving female gamers special treatment in order to make them not feel like the black sheep of the group is counter producive.</blockquote>

Verification