Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8031973" data-attributes="member: 27780">Polyhedron Issue 20: Sep/Oct 1984part 4/6Women in Role Playing: We had a fair few articles on the persistent sexism problems in gaming over the course of Dragon. It's not surprising they'd turn up in here as well, where the hardcore nature of the RPGA means the gender imbalance is even greater than the general population of roleplayers, and the focus on conventions means they're more likely to be exposed to situations where these kinds of conflicts happen. This is made worse by the fact that AD&D 1e has sexism baked into the system, with actual differences in max stats due to your character's sex, which means it will tend to attract people who want that kind of crunchy simulationist biological essentialist stuff in their gaming and drive people who'd rather not sweat the small stuff or actively want to feel empowered in their fantasy fun elsewhere. Roger Moore gives us a decidedly mixed message on this front. On the one hand he does want more women in gaming. On the other, he's still not only fully enforcing the AD&D rules in his own game, but has additional sexist house rules on top of that. Despite the efforts of his wife, who contributes some footnotes to the article, he's still got a long way to go with his own internalised attitudes and assumptions. So yeah, this shows that while the TSR of 1984 is trying to be progressive, they're still pretty parochial by modern standards, and even the products which are aimed at attracting women, like the new Dragonlance setting, will have their own problems as a result of that. Equality is a long difficult battle, and even if you manage to balance one axis, there's still racism, ablism, homophobia and all manner of other intersectional discrimination to tackle. This is one problem that can't be solved by a team of plucky heroes slaying an evil overlord and taking their stuff. Now that it's Over: Mary gave her perspective on Gen Con in the editorial, now it's Roger's turn to talk about the cool stuff that caught his eye. Having mentioned Dragonlance in passing last article, we see a little more about it, further reinforcing that it's definitely intended for a different market than Greyhawk, with it's deliberately mixed-sex development team, tie-in novels (which rapidly become the main focus and the RPG books the tie-ins) and emphasis on little setting details like mounts, songs, cooking recipes and the outfits the characters wear. There's plenty of cool stuff from other companies that caught his eye too, like Paranoia, Toon and Chill, as the hobby continues to diversify and create gams for smaller weirder niches. And although wargaming is definitely in decline at this point, there's still enough hardcore fans for some epic minis setpieces. They also debated the possibility of doing monster cards, but decided against it for logistic reasons. (something they'll change their mind on 6 years later when technology has improved and they have more artwork to recycle) It's another pretty interesting snapshot of what was going on that year.</blockquote>

Verification