D&D 4E Women in 4E

[Wormwood]

The. End.

 

[Kurotowa]

To be fair, that was the point - that painting matches the description of the ceremonial armour Alias was dressed in when she was due to be sacrificed with a knife to the heart, and mention was made in the text of the deliberate gap in the armour.

I've always wondered about the cause and effect there. Was the sacrificial armor written in as a justification for the art, or was the art created to match the sacrificial armor in the story?

 

[HP Dreadnought]

The reduced resolution can be tricky, but keep in mind that the armor is tying up her breasts, not supporting them like a bra. It's working more like a corset.

And before anyone cries "impractical", I remind you that the picture is called "Druid Amazon". So she has access to barkskin, which can make her bare flesh stronger than leather armor (at least).

See? Rules working in our favor!

. . . and of course. . . because of those rules which we all know and love and take for granted. . . it defies the laws of physics for her to benefit from having a hard skin AND wearing lether armor!! As soon as she puts on leather armor, her skin becomes soft again (if the leather is better) otherwise. . she puts on leather armor and its has absolutely no effect on her level of protection because her skin happens to be harder!

Grrr. . .

Anyway. . . back to the scantily clad chicks!

 

[Lonely Tylenol]

So can we have incubi like this in the Monster Manual? Or would it lead to a lot of whining from fanboys unable to handle the sight of men that women actually find attractive and whose sexiness is emphasised? Not just gross half-naked Schwarzeneggers or men who happen to be showing some skin, but men who are meant to be good-looking.

My wife says she doesn't find that attractive. She does, however, find it funny, and also wonders why they pasted Kurt Cobain's face on that dude.

An unfortunate number of male posters on fantasy boards do seem to be prudes. They'll defend the bikini babe but freak out over pictures of attractive men.

Well, it might help if you posted one.

They're effeminate, they're pathetic, they're not heroic enough, and so on. The amount of hate that, for example, Vaan from Final Fantasy XII gets!

A much better example. Of course, we can't have art like that in D&D. It's too anime!

Should I start posting pictures of men who have a lot of female fans in order to balance the Lux porn talk?

Sure. I wager that pictures of men that women like are a lot more like Vaan than like the gay porn you posted up there. Of course, if they want to get more gay men into gaming...

edit: the stuff you posted after the post I quoted is much better.

 

[Lonely Tylenol]

I for one am comfortable enough with my heterosexuality to say "Yes". If we are actually having a dialog, the contributions need to be two-way. The problem is, most male D&D players I know would be freaked out by pictures of men that women would find attractive.

I don't think this is true. I think they are freaked out by pictures of men that they find attractive.

Also, I don't think that anyone would get too bent out of shape by pictures of Johnny Depp, who polls well among every single female I've ever met.

 

[Lonely Tylenol]

Uh... what Wormwood said.


It's really tiresome to be called puritanical over and over in these discussions. Is it really that hard to understand that a person can like sexy art but still think that chainmail bikinis look stupid?

Find me a chainmail bikini in a WotC book, and then you've got a point.

 

[Klaus]

. . . and of course. . . because of those rules which we all know and love and take for granted. . . it defies the laws of physics for her to benefit from having a hard skin AND wearing lether armor!! As soon as she puts on leather armor, her skin becomes soft again (if the leather is better) otherwise. . she puts on leather armor and its has absolutely no effect on her level of protection because her skin happens to be harder!

Grrr. . .

Anyway. . . back to the scantily clad chicks!

Dude...

... natural armor. She can wear her +2 ironwood breastplate and benefit from barkskin all day long!

 

[AllisterH]

re: Beefcake for guys
Er, I hate to bring up anime but there _IS_ a reason why the manga/anime market in America is easily 50% female and a lot of it is due to the art.

Heavily muscled guys are a rarity in anime but this picture was one of the hottest posters at the AnimeCon when CLAMP showed up a few years ago. You should've seen the lineups to get this picture signed.

re: Female Barbarians
My point was, if Conan is the *classic* look of the barbarian and he pretty much is defined as wearing a loincloth, a female barbarian shouldn't be wearing that much.

 

[Cadfan]

Really? That's interesting. Care to say why, exactly? Have you ever read one of them? I have (again, this was as a quid pro quo for introducing an old girlfriend to gaming) and there is a lot of similarity.

Let me ask this: do you actually have any background and experience for selling or marketing any products towards women at all? If so, please share your insight...if not, why not leave things to the folks at WotC who spend a lot of money researching these things?

I'll say this again...women!=prudes, any more than men are. Let's not market to them as if they are, because, it just makes gamers look like we know even less about women than we do.

--Steve

For crying out loud.

I don't know why this is so tough.

Sex mags, soft-core erotica romance novels, and beauty magazines are things which women generally enjoy alone, or with other women, or at most with a significant other.

RPGs are generally enjoyed in groups, typically coed groups, if not majority male groups.

Things which are appropriate for the first context are not necessarily appropriate to thse second.

Lets think this through. Hmm, what's something marketed to males. Penthouse! Now, we could decide that because Penthouse is marketed to males, and D&D is marketed in part to males, Penthouse Letters should be our model for how to design, market, and advertise D&D. Except that would be stupid. The context in which males enjoy Penthouse Letters is different from the context in which they enjoy D&D. Things which would be perfectly appropriate in Penthouse Letters are not necessarily appropriate in D&D. This should be obvious.

Analogously, things marketed to women do not automatically provide a model for how D&D should market itself to women. If they are categorically different types of entertainment, then they provide little help.

A better guide might be to look at (non-erotica) fantasy novels marketed to women. I suspect you'll find things a lot different from romance novels and cosmo covers. Go to your local library and look at anything by Mercedes Lackey, for a start. You'll notice that skin is rarely shown, the female characters tend to be strong ones, and where skin IS showing, its contextually appropriate. Women in evening gowns might show some cleavage, but the warrior women don't have peek-a-boob holes in their armor.

This has nothing to do with calling women prudes. It has to do with pointing out the silliness of a one dimensional, contextually blind understanding of sexuality in entertainment.

 

[Cadfan]

For the record, the contrast between the posts saying "WOTC doesn't do silly sexually exploitive art, I don't know why're you're complaining?" and the posts saying "Boobies! I love 'em! Give me more boobies!" is just excellent.

WOTC honestly isn't that bad, overall. They still do a fair amount of silly stuff, but its better than the old days. In the old days, women's role in fantasy art was slavegirl. If they were lucky they could cling to the leg of a male, if they were unlucky they were chained to a wall. They uniformly wore strips of cloth. Then women became actual PCs. When this happened, their strips of cloth upgraded to strips of chain mail. They were exactly as immodest, but now it was chain mail! That's... empowering? Or something? And nowaydays, the chainmail bikini has been relegated to the scrap heap by most mainstream publishers. But women character's clothing is still usually impractical. Holes tend to be cut in armor to make sure cleavage is visible, and women all too often have gowns cut up to the belt line, or armored shinpads but no pants.

Still, I concede that things have come a long way. It would just be nice if they could come that last little step. The chainmail bikini is dead, the boob holes in armor need to die as well.