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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="StalkingBlue" data-source="post: 1670086" data-attributes="member: 645">I'm one of S'mon's two players who are having problems with sexism in his game.  I've always worked in male-dominated fields in real life, and as it happens my leisure interests also largely involve activities in which I meet more men than women.  I'm at ease dealing with men in work and personal life, half of my close personal friends are men.  Generally speaking I'm pretty well able to conquer my place and hold it.  Unfortunately that isn't true in S'mon's game, at least to my perception.  After playing in his campaign for almost a year, I still feel invisible at his table a lot of the time - and it's getting worse, not better.  Ironically enough I also run my Midnight game for a subset of the same players.  I'm comfortable with the players at my own table, but feel more and more inhibited at S'mon's table as time passes.  S'mon's game is all about war and, as PCs grow, increasingly about power politics.  Unfortunately, as S'mon has said, in our campaign area there is a strong social bias against both women and spellcasters, in favour of male melee warriors with big weapons.  S'mon runs wonderful combat challenges that I love to play in.  (Those of you who have read some of my Midnight threads may know I run a pretty combat-heavy game myself.)  I'd like us to have much more impressive party tactics than we currently have, but even lacking that I enjoy our battles.  Combat tactics is the one area in S'mon's game where I can hold my own.  I fight an uphill battle every single time to be heard at the table, but I kinda manage.  Politics are another matter because of the palpable gender bias in the game.  I should probably switch to playing a male with a Big Sword, which I've done occasionally in other games and enjoyed it - but I don't want to be forced into it by the bias of the world.  OTOH I'm also getting tired of eternally struggling against that underlying bias with my current female PC - it feels almost like being enwrapped in a thick cottonwool cocoon.  The worst thing is that it feels to me as if the gender bias from the world echoes out into the gaming group.  The same guys who have no problem gathering what I say and accepting my authority in the game I run, will happily and consistently ignore me at S'mon's table.  I've fought hard and long to find a place in the game that I can enjoy (I love S'mon's combats, I love roleplaying with him in other games where I don't feel so inhibited), but I'm getting pretty frustrated and am close to giving up.  As S'mon has said, his homebrew world is many years old, and his current campaign had already been running for years (with changing players) at the time I joined.  Not sure how good the chances are of changing things at this stage, but from reading this thread I'm getting the impression that S'mon would like to find a solution that would remove the frustration for me and the other female player - so if any of you have suggestions to help with that, that would sure be great. Moving to another area that has less or no gender bias (if there are such areas in the game world) is not an option btw:  all the PCs, currently 15th level, have more or less valuable connections in the region, both the male melee PCs also already hold positions of power - one is a king, the other the commander of the local duchy's armies.</blockquote>

Verification