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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Bedrockgames" data-source="post: 8528757" data-attributes="member: 85555"><p>I think it was less of a straight trajectory up, as much as it was hills and valleys along the way. When D&D first came out, my understanding is it was pretty popular. By the time I was aware of the things, the very early 80s, it was culturally relevant enough that there was a TV show, and it appeared in movies like ET. Then by the time I got into it, it had become strictly a nerd thing (for the most part at least it seemed). But the 90s you had white wolf and you had a lot of things in the culture fusing to RPGs. At that time I saw a big surge in female gamers locally. I don't know what the trend was across the country or globe, especially since I live near Salem (which ties very closely to the white wolf fandom). It is possible we had more gamers in general around here for example. But during that time I had a lot of women in my groups, and knew of groups that included a lot of women. I knew female GMs as well. And I remember a lot of the content I was reading was designed or edited by women too (Obviously Margeret Weis of Dragonlance, but also people like Lisa Smedman, Cindi Rice, Andria Hayday and Teeuwynn Woodruff; plus writers for the various Ravenloft novels I was reading: Christie Golden, Elaine Bergstrom, P.N. Elrod, Carrie Bebris (who also edited for game lines), Laurell K Hamilton (many of these people also had things like non-RPG related vampire series that were popular at the time too). It may just have been what I was purchasing at the time, and not a trend, but I noticed less female writers with D&D stuff when WOTC first took it over (again I could simply have missed the names or not bought the books), but I definitely noticed fewer female players at that time (at least with D&D specifically). I do recall people like Jackie Cassada though working on Ravenloft during the 3E period. But in more recent years, it seems there has been more and more women coming into the hobby again. I bring all this up just to point out, it doesn't always go all straight up over time. And some periods were more varied than we might remember (it isn't like I have done a data crunch of this stuff, but I do remember the 90s being a much different time when it came to gaming culture than the 2000s---and I would say different in a better way than the 2000s personally). But I also mention it so we don't lose sight of the women who worked on a lot of the lines in the past.</p></blockquote><p></p>

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