What We Lose When We Eliminate Controversial Content

[Maxperson]

Let me ask you a question that I believe the answer might explain part of the difference in what we have seen.
When you say "the hobby" what do you mean? Are you speaking of the whole of TTRPGs in general or are you speaking of specifically D&D?

Also, if you want some hard numbers Google the 1999 market research data done by Wizards of the Coast.
As much as I am sure it would likely run biased towards D&D players it returned a 19% female player base for TTRPGS in general, in 1999.

Yeah. I didn't see that, but I found it hard to believe that D&D could have gone from 0%(virtually no women) to 40% in the span of 5 years.

 

[AnotherGuy]

D&D does: 12+.

Which means it's not even PG-13.

How many PG-rated shows and movies show the horrors of slavery? Probably not that many.

Eclipse Phase has far worse and it's 12+

 

[AnotherGuy]

If the CR system is so weak that having monsters fire arrows from a distance means a combat isn't balanced, then the CR system is broken.

Maybe you're not playing the NPCs cleverly enough?

 

[Bagpuss]

This isn't about people who can or cannot tell the difference between fiction and reality, nor is it about people deciding how they're going to play a particular setting.

It's about a company choosing to not produce material that supports something they (and the people who make up most of their customer base) find unacceptable.

I'm not sure you can say most of the customer base does find it unacceptable (to feature in an RPG) if you look at the results of the Dark Sun problematic content poll, they seem to show the exact opposite.

There is a big difference between a TV show/movie and a game. This choice is being made by a company, or a select few companies, not by the entire entertainment industry. It's ridiculous to assume that the entire entertainment industry is going to think the exact same thing about everything, or that everything in the entire entertainment industry is geared to the exact same crowd.

Then why do you want everything in the entire RPG industry geared to the same crowd that doesn't want to deal with difficult issues in an RPG, when clearly their is a significant proportion of the crowd that is fine with dealing with it?

 

[Bagpuss]

It is concern about the fact that for much of the history of the hobby, people who don’t conform to a very narrow interpretation of history have been made to feel unwelcome in the hobby as evidenced by the fact that up until about five years or so ago, there were virtually no women in the hobby as well as very nearly no inclusion of anything that wasn’t 100% geared for white males.

Playing for 35 plus years and this has not been my experience. The evidence doesn't support it being unwelcoming either.

RPGs came from wargames surveys back in the 70's showed wargames had as little as 0.5% female gamers at that time. In '79 it was estimated somewhere between 5% and 10% of D&D players were female, while admitted still heavily male dominated, considering where it was coming from if it was unwelcoming you wouldn't have expected a 10 to 20 fold increase.

The first dedicated RPG publication (June 75) was Alarums and Excursions and was published by a woman, Lee Gold.

Flying Buffalo published the major supplement authored entirely by a woman in '78 a Tunnels and Trolls solo adventure by Lillian "Lee" Russell, the editor of their magazine was also a woman Liz Danforth, but prior to that women had co-authored a number of RPG titles.

TSR did seem to have an issue with women admittedly, Jean Wells reportedly having a rough time working there, and it's design staff were almost entirely male.

In the 80's you have R Talsorian Games, founded by Mike Pondsmith coming out with Cyberpunk, ICE had Heike Kubash as a founding member, and had several female authors of supplements. There were a number of other RPG companies with female founding members.

Lisa Stevens and Nicole Lindroos were founding members of White Wolf in the 90s and I think most people see V:tM and the LARP The Masquerade being responsible for bringing a much more diverse group of people into the hobby, that was 30 years ago not five. By 2000 11 of its 28 designers were women. Lisa Stevens went on to be the first full-time employee at WotC (1991), and in 2002 launched Paizo Publishing as it's CEO, Paizo has certainly been well ahead of WotC for inclusivity again still 20 years ago not five.

Admittedly in 1999 WotC survey had women accounting for 19% of players still a two to four fold increase, in about 20 years. However other surveys outside D&D at that time had representation as high as 34%.

I mean there is no doubt that it has been a white male dominated hobby (more so in D&D than the hobby as a whole), but I don't think as a hobby it has been unwelcoming (individuals have certainly been), my experience at University in the 90's rough 33% of the RPG games club was female if not more. At conventions I've been going to since the 90's I met a much more a diverse group of people from different races, sexualities, and gender identities, etc. than I come cross in my everyday life, and online through the hobby this is even more evident.

Sure a lot of the TSR stuff was geared towards white males, but you get a lot more diverse content from 3rd Edition onwards when WotC took control, that was twenty years ago, not five.

 

[Bagpuss]

Evidence? Every poll, every Dragon Magazine reader poll, every picture of Gen Con or any other gaming convention, every shred of evidence that isn’t just somieone’s personal anecdote tells me that you are wrong.

Not sure convention pictures are particularly representative. Also Dragon Magazine generally only means D&D players, which is only part of the hobby, the part of the hobby that hasn't had as diverse an appeal as say Star Trek/Star Wars/White Wolf's stuff.

It really does depend on who you ask and how for survey data. For example WotC put their female player base at 40%, but the latest demographics from Enworld.org put female visitors at just 17%. If you did a survey on TikTok of RPG players, I'm sure you would get a much younger demographic result than if you did the same poll here.

Conventions are one of those spaces where men feel safer to attend, especially large ones like GenCon. Also lots of people have been attending for decades, and so the demographic at a convention take longer to change than in the reality of home games. So a picture of a convention crowd doesn't represent the hobby as a whole. There a loads of groups that don't engage in the hobby outside their own small circle so getting exact number is near impossible, which is why you have results going from 19% to 34% depending on where, and who you ask.

Also I take issue with your use of the word "unwelcoming" there is a difference between being unappealing and unwelcoming, and I think the hobby or more particular D&D, has been unappealing to certain demographics, and more appealing to some over the years. But that is different from being actively unwelcoming.

 

[AnotherGuy]

When I went to Varsity some years shy of 30 years ago, I remember there were women within the roleplaying game society club room. They were all goths as RPGs had not as yet hit MSM (at least so it seemed to me from my anecdotal data set). I'd imagine most of your female RPGers would bleed out of the goth community. One niche community feeding another niche community.
I recall one of the older female students travelled around campus with her snow-white pet mouse which lay hidden within the folds of her clothing and on her body. Animalism

 

[Bedrockgames]

Really? Every piece of evidence we have, literally every single one, says that the hobby was about 90% male and overwhelmingly white. Ten years ago, there hade been zero growth in the hobby for about a decade. So, no, I don’t think that’s a bold statement at all.

Heck just Google image search gen con crowds from, say, 2001-2010 and tell me how wrong I am. Pre-2000 isn’t any better.

Just my own experience, but I saw a very big drop in female players after the transition to WOTC 3E (I also feel like I started seeing a lot fewer women's names as designers, editors and writers on the books). Speaking strictly about D&D though, I do think things were different outside of D&D itself (but D&D does shape a lot of the hobby). The 90s I saw a lot of female players, had a lot of books (especially stuff like Ravenloft) with women writers, designers, etc: Andria Heyday, Lisa Smedman, Teeunwynn Woodruff, Anne Brown, for the novels Christie Golden, Elaine Bergstrom, Laurell K Hamilton, etc. I am not saying it was the same as the past five years but definitely can echo some of the sentiments around games like Vampire having large numbers of women fans in the circles I was in (but we also had 2-3 women in some of our D&D groups). And I do feel like there was a very big difference on the credits pages of the books just before 2000. Not sure how much of my table experience was just where I grew up and where I gamed.

 

[cranberry]

There seems to be a prominent opinion that women were actively unwelcome in the hobby. I'm sure that's true, however, I think there is another factor that no one has considered.

Basic social acceptance and gender "norms".. for example, It took a while for society to accept women wearing pants as the norm. (On TV, women weren't shown wearing pants on a regular basis until the 70's)

Along those same lines, what society considered "acceptable" actives/interest for women changed over time as well.

At least in the early days, I think that may have played a big role in keeping women away from the hobby (in large numbers).

 

[MGibster]

This isn't about people who can or cannot tell the difference between fiction and reality, nor is it about people deciding how they're going to play a particular setting.

That's not true, at least for the second part, because people in this very thread have argued one of the reasons against the inclusion of slavery is that some players might have their characters become slavers.