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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Nisarg" data-source="post: 1673903" data-attributes="member: 19893">A BTW to some of my earlier posts. I had talked about this thread to my gaming group, which at this moment includes one female player.  We had just recently also played a session where that female player experienced some pretty extreme discrimination for being a woman (the ruler of this city-state refused to even acknowledge her prescense other than as "the woman" of the male party leader, and the rest of the party had the run of the palace and the city but she was limited to the women's part of the palace).So it became a good moment to bring up the issue and see what the group as a whole and this female player in particular felt about it.  She said that she enjoyed that session very much, she liked the challenge of it, and had no problem differentiating between what was happening IN GAME and what I and the other players are like out of game. She specifically wanted me to mention here that she, as a woman, had no problem with that scenario, given that it made sense in that culture for that character of hers to experience those problems. Now, the more I think about this the more I reach the conclusion that the problems some of the other female gamers on this thread have encountered may be a case where the sexism is spilling over onto the game GROUP itself. Its one thing to have an NPC "sexist noble" ignoring your female character, its quite another to have the DM ignore you as a player. If you're feeling marginalized, or useless, or incapable of getting anywhere, in the game, then the problem is not about the setting, its about the gaming group (and the DM in particular).  I think the difference between what some of the other female posters experienced and what my female player experienced was that I still gave her lots of things to do, and the sense that she was doing important things, and that once she learned the social rules of the city-state she was in, she could operate effectively in it (sometimes in ways or in places men couldn't get to).  In other words, she had relevance, and progress, and the whole experience led to a deepening of her character's personality and thus a deeper connection between her as a player with her character.  Those are the basic goals of an RPG, after all: To develop your character (and I'm talking personality, not just stats), and to have fun. So again, with the other women who are having problems with their gaming groups, I think the problem isn't some kind of inherent sexism or endemic social crisis, its your gaming groups. Nisarg</blockquote>

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