Buttercup said:
Is that how it looks to you? Interesting.
Remember that "all women are crazy except me" thread in
the other place; that's what I was thinking of.
Or maybe it's just that the people I started playing with were all adult professional types who were used to interacting in mixed groups without making a big deal of it.
I think this has a lot to do with it. But I have also played in my share of games that, although populated by adult professionals, were intensely masculine spaces. The social dynamic I'm thinking of is a men's weekly poker night or superbowl party. One of TB's campaigns, for instance, often ended with the GM and a bunch of the players heading over to a local strip bar for Amateur Night.
One of the games I'm in right now, actually, is a good example of a game with an awkward gender dynamic. Our DM's wife, who is used to playing in his games and has been doing so for more than a decade, genuinely feels a little uncomfortable and excluded by the really strongly guy-space vibe the group took on over its first eighteen months before we switched GMs and added her as a player. We almost never ask her opinion about anything because the way our group debates things is by people interrupting eachother, making sarcastic remarks, etc. We feel bad about the fact that she's not a great interruptor and so, occasionally someone will remember to ask her opinion and the table will go very quiet while we all feel kind of embarassed. We're also often self-censoring the sexist jokes and innuendo that became part of our group's shared culture over its first 18 months. This sometimes results in people making the joke to their immediate neighbours at the gaming table rather than to the whole group, because we don't want our newest player to be uncomfortable. This, then, results in the GM's wife feeling a little excluded because she can observe people at the table trying to suppress laughs they don't think would be appropriate for general consumption. And yet all of the people in the game were professional men in the 30s when we joined the game.
I had a similar experience in a campaign that was based around a hard-drinking straight male dynamic. Our DM ran nothing but completely one-dimensional NPCs. It was a hack 'n slash adventure so that didn't end up mattering too much. But when a gay friend of mine joined the group, he began to feel kind of uncomfortable about how the lone gay NPC was being run. I made a remark to the DM about easing back on the gay joke stuff and the whole game dynamic went into a tailspin from there. Again, a group of professional guys who knew a whole lot about which fork to use and how to carry on polite, sophisticated social interaction.
So, while I take your point, I do think that sometimes all-male groups can fall into behaviours that end up grating on a female addition to the group because D&D has become their caveman social space. In such a space, men aren't behaving any more socially authentically or honestly; they're just putting on a different act for a different audience.
The men of EN World have been, with one or two notable exceptions, perfectly pleasant and willing to include any woman who shows up with warmth and openness. GenCon is really a safe and low stress environment if you hang with this crowd.
Agreed. It seems that female-friendly space is something more easily found than created at Gen Con.
