You asked~Female gamers

[LufiaLillystorm]

I have had a lot of people ask me, even in the short time I have been here, why I play and what turns girls off from playing more...well I have a few things to say to help

I know that this may not be the correct place to post this, but feel free to move it around hehe.

One thing is that a lot of the roleplaying is focused around violence. While I like to hack and slash as much as the next gamer I accually hate adventures that require it. I can't stand not being able to get out of things by a peacefull means, even if that peacefull means is saying, 'sure capture me and take me to your camp where you are going to kill me'. Because in between that time something may happen where I can get away...but so many times there are just no outs, every encounter is one that has a set motive, the bandits want your money, but if you give it to them they don't run happy to have an easy situation, no they are determined to kill you even though you just took down a hillgiant???? goodness no

Beyond that, why isn't it appealing? well something about sitting at a table full of boys is a bit....scary hehe I have been gaming for several years and even still, when I go to a new group and see the 5 guys sitting there looking at me like 'oh a girl' it makes things a bit awkward.

Then there is what to wear to a role play...but maybe that is a bit TOO into the mind of a girl <giggles>

Also, I have a lot of trouble with the books. You can tell they are geared toward male readers, just look at the art. But also, I don't understand things they say in those books. It doesn't have anythign to with being a girl but they are confusing, then they put everything everwhere, the 3e books were much better. Ack I never understood Proficiences...we wont go back to that <hides> it was scary.

Hmm that is all I can think of...hope it helps hehe

<hides back in teh DM section>

 

[Mistwell]

Start Rant.

I play in a game with 3 women and 4 men (and it was 3 and 3 for a long while). It's true, I think, that the female players enjoy the role playing, mystery, riddles, and traps portions more than the combat portions of the adventures.

However, more importantly, in the "olden days" when I used to play as a kid, there is no way 3 women would have been playing. The main difference is age. As the average age of gaming increases, I think the gender make-up of the game comes more in line with society. Maybe it starts with boyfriends inviting girlfriends into the game. Maybe it's just that men have more female friends as they get older. Whatever the cause, as our group has aged, more women joined.

I think there are three things we can do to encourage more women to play the game:

1) Make D&D 3e appeal to an older crowd. It's been said by many on these boards that 3e has more of the "feel" of the original D&D than the second edition. I don't know if that is true, but if it is, it's a good thing. The more the game appeals to the nostalgic side of adults for their teenage gaming, the more the adults will return to the game. And, as mentioned above, the more adults that play means the more women that play.

2) Make the game seem less "geeky" and more "pop culture". I was hoping the D&D movie would help with this aspect, but it didn't. However, Lord of the Rings is certainly helping, and if it wins some academy awards, that will help even more. It isn't an easy task to degeekify D&D, of course, but it can be done. The comic books field made significant gains in this respect over the last decade, and gamers should take note. The comic convention is now called the "pop art" convention. More "normal" female characters are portrayed (and fewer bikini-clad big-breasted superheros are around). If there are any famous people who read comics, a big deal is made out of it (Kevin Smith, for one, has helped). D&D should do the same thing. Make D&D a nostalgic look back to pop culture of the past, and a new form of storytelling "art" for the 21st century, which is played by "normal" or "interesting" people we already know and accept. It's a game shown being played in the movie ET, and it should be a game shown being played on "Friends" (or more likely "That 70's Show" or "Malcom in the Middle".)

3) Refocus the adventures away from combat and towards role playing, riddles, mystery, and traps. D&D is not a wargame. It can, and should, have some wargaming elements, but it shouldn't be the focus. If you want to play a wargame, play Chainmail. I know, and understand, the new focus on the "Dungeon", and that's okay. It doesn't mean the game should be all about combat, and min-maxing your characters. Some small (SMALL) steps have been taken towards this goal. A few short adventures in WOTC magazines have appealed to these elements, such as Gorgoland's Gauntlet and Challenge of the Champions (1-4) (and those authors should be promoted!) But it isn't the focus of published modules at all, and it should be. I know this is going to cause some whining from folk here, but suck it up. If you appeal to a wider audience, you bring more people into the game. If you bring more people into the game, WOTC makes a lot more money, and they can afford to do both combat-oriented stuff and non-combat stuff. Right now, the focus is on combat, and it isn't enough. D&D still doesn't appeal to a wider audience. In fact, sales are still lower than Magic: The Gathering (and many people perceive MTG as a dead game already). Yahtzee (andother Hasbro product) still sells 100 times as much as D&D. If D&D is percieved as just a wargame with some twists, it will never reach the cirtical mass of popularity it needs in order to break in to the mainstream of gaming.

D&D doesn't have to be doomed to an obscure, teenage, male-oriented wargame. We can do better. We can attract more adults, more women, and a wider audience. We can break into the mainstream of entertainment. Hard core gamers may claim this is a bad thing. Let them. Some hard core comic book readers are still reading their Archie comics as adults, and complain about this "Pop Art Crap" which has led to Trade Paper Backs and Graphic Novels on the shelves of every Barnes and Noble (and every other bookstore for that matter), and blockbuster movies, and best selling novels. It doesn't matter that they complain. Overall, it's good for the industry that we reach into the mainstream, and it ensures a wider range of products, some of which will appeal to those very same hard core male wargamers, and some of which will appeal to the rest of the world.

End Rant.

 

[LufiaLillystorm]

Great point

Great point Mistwell

I mentioned art before and I wanted to talk a bit more about it, because I was a bit vague.

Art work like on page 13 of the Players handbook shows the various women for the races. All of them are wearing very little, even the half-orc <does a bit of a shiver on that one>. It just seems like there is an over exageration that women are supposed to be this exotic thing during this setting :-/

I don't know lol maybe it is a mute point but it is how I feel

thankies hehe

 

[Oogar]

Interesting, LL, thank you for posting. Personally, I do not enjoy playing in a group without a woman. It may simply be a personal feeling, but an all male group often feels .... mentaly stale. I am male, I live in a male mind, and when there are several of us we think in a very "Male" way.

The woman in my Wednesday night group, R'yzel (character name, to protect her identity), has some qualities in common with your post. She does not know the rules, back to front. She is just as willing to comit violence upon her foes as the rest of my group, yet hates getting hit (Rather funny to me that she is playing the group fighter). She is the person who writes everything down, everything. If she did not write it down, I would be likely to say that it did not happen. She is honest, funny, and still has a tendency to play herself, rather then the role of a character. In the last 3 years she has become a "member" of the group.
I find that in different groups, the deciding factor of a womans enjoyment is as simple as that. When a woman stops being Joe's wife, Fred's girlfrind, or even "the girl, she is accepted more easily and has more fun.

The violence issue is really not much of an issue to me. I find that the fault for single option combats tend to lie with the DM or players that are unwilling to try other options. Some groups go a week or more with no combat what-so-ever. Most newcomers to a game will often, erroneously, judge all groups as being just the same as the first one that they encounter. *Shudder* I am very glad that some groups I have played with were not my first experience with gaming. Many woman don't like the combative style of the game. Many feel that they have something more "real" to do. But so do many men.

I agree that a feel of maturity will draw more players of both sexes to the game, and that the resulting influx of players might find something worthwhile on which to spend their time.

One last thing, I have encountered female players whom I did not enjoy playing with. Just because a player is female does not make her a good player. Yet a good female player is worth her weight in snackfood (Some might say gold, but snackfood is very important at my gaming table *chuckle*)

Edit: Typo and spacing (more typos I am sure. "Anyone who can only spell a word one way has got no imagination." - Quote anyone able to tell me if that was W.C. Fields?)

 

[JRRNeiklot]

Hmmm. Maybe it's the type of women I game with, but every woman I have ever gamed with has been WAY more blood-thirsty and hack-n-slash minded than the guys.

 

[RangerWickett]

I think Todd Lockwood, who did that picture, was just showing off physiques. He did draw most of the males topless too. Overall, 3e has done a good job of mixing even-handedness with cool-looking concepts of costumes, and since my girlfriend Jessica is an artist working for Natural 20 Press, I'm always trying to be careful when considering art for gaming products. In Wild Spellcraft, there were two male artists and then Jessie, and the only scantily-clad woman was drawn by her.

I do agree that teenage boys are much less likely to have women players, at least until about age 16. In middle school, it was just me and my guy buddies, but the first game I played with my girlfriend (age 16) consisted of me, my girlfriend, her sister, and one of her other female friends. Maybe I'm a bit abnormally lucky in that regard, but I think it's just that you need to reach a cusp of maturity.

Jessie does tend to play her own personality into her characters, and despite my best efforts, she doesn't want to munchkinize her PC so she'll be good for combat. She's a storyteller, as am I, but the rest of our group is mostly video-gamers, who enjoy 'winning' and looking good while doing it, so I mostly cater to them, and trust Jessie to grab onto the story hooks I leave.

Then again, in my current college group, we don't particularly make a big deal of sex differences (except for the one girl who didn't feel like describing her character, and said she was just a nebulous pair of breasts with a sword). And Jessie, in her group (she's at a different college), has six women and one guy.

What all does this mean? I dunno. I just suspect it's not as big a deal as you think. I find that if you have friends, your friends will play the game, as long as you don't make them uncomfortable in the game. Play the first few games really openly, giving them as little or as much guidance as they want, and they should come to like the game, even if they've never gamed before. Sex differences really don't matter, since any good DM caters to his or her group.

 

[barsoomcore]

Mistwell: While I agree with your basic notions on how to bring more women into gaming (I volunteer to head up the special Task Force For Slutty Goth Chicks), I don't think D&D is ever going to achieve anything like the mass popularity of comic books, M:TG or Yahtzee. It can't.

Make the game seem less "geeky" and more "pop culture".

The problem with D&D isn't that it seems geeky, it's that it is geeky. D&D requires a pretty serious intellectual investment just to be able to understand what's happening -- far more so than a comic book does. A comic book is accessible to anyone who can see -- but D&D requires a person willing to at least go to the effort to imagine a non-existent person and somehow translate their qualities into numbers. That sort of activity seems inherently geeky to me -- obsessive and meticulous and imaginative.

Yahtzee will always sell 100 times as much as D&D, for a very good reason -- it's 10 times more entertaining for 10 times more people.

I understand the motivation for your plea for less combat-oriented adventures, but the reality is that the market will determine which way the game goes. If "Hackem Dungeon" outsells "Roleplay Garden", than that is the way to expand the game's audience.

My prediction: D&D (RPGs in general) will always be less popular than board games, video games, comic books and virtually every other form of entertainment other than cat-baiting (nail a cat to a post and beat it to death with your head. Now that I think about it, it would probably be more popular than D&D). And I'm perfectly okay with that. I have enough people to play with.

D&D doesn't have to be doomed to an obscure, teenage, male-oriented wargame.

True enough. It can be doomed to an obscure, adult, female-oriented relationship game.

We can break into the mainstream of entertainment.

Here's where we disagree. But perhaps it depends on how you define "mainstream". Will D&D ever be more popular than video games? Never. Passive entertainment (TV or movies)? Never. Yahtzee? Never.

It's just too hard. The vast majority of people in this world don't want to work that hard for their entertainment. They won't. The comparision to comic books is largely irrelevant, because a comic book is every bit as accessible as a novel or a movie. All that had to happen was a few people to create comic books that weren't artistic non-entities. It required no investment on the part of the reader. But D&D does.

That it will become more popular than it is now I have no doubt. If that's what you mean by "mainstream" then I agree.

Hard core gamers may claim this is a bad thing. Let them.

It's possible you're talking about me. I don't say that popular D&D is a bad thing, though. I just don't think it'll happen and can't imagine how my gaming would improve thereby.

All I can say is that if you don't like combat-oriented games, there's no reason to play them. The game grows out of your imagination, so play whatever kind of game you want. I don't how anything that happens in the industry can possibly influence that.

 

[Nikchick]

Hmmm. Maybe it's the type of women I game with, but every woman I have ever gamed with has been WAY more blood-thirsty and hack-n-slash minded than the guys.

I know *I* certainly am, especially these days. }

What I wouldn't give to be an ass kicking commie dwarf, smashign the state with my big hammer right now.

Instead, it's off to the GAMA Trade Show for me.

At least the liquor flows freely there.

Nicole

 

[Wolfspider]

D&D requires a pretty serious intellectual investment just to be able to understand what's happening -- far more so than a comic book does.

I don't know about that. I've played with some pretty unimaginative and un-intellectual people before, and they got along fine. I don't think there's anything inherent in the D&D RPG (or any RPG really) that demands a certain level of intelligence. Didn't the WotC study that they did of gamers find that they're rather average in intelligence and education? If not, then my own experience bears this out. I myself have only an average IQ.

I know it's tempting to want to think that the people involved in a hobby you love are something special, but I'm afraid that this probably isn't the case.

Gamers are human after all.

 

[BMF]

One thing is that a lot of the roleplaying is focused around violence. While I like to hack and slash as much as the next gamer I accually hate adventures that require it. I can't stand not being able to get out of things by a peacefull means, even if that peacefull means is saying, 'sure capture me and take me to your camp where you are going to kill me'.

Vindication!!

I've been saying for years that the focus on violence is one of the major reasons girls don't game. Of course, every time I say that, some GRRL gamer attacks me with, "We are just as violent as men!! Wanna fight about it!!??"

The fact is, women watch Lifetime more than TnT. That doesn't mean women are not violent, but it does mean they are less prone to violence than men are. Of course, there are always exceptions to the rule. But if we want to discuss why women as a group don't game, we have to discuss women in broad, general terms. And, generally speaking, most women are not into senseless violence. They are more interested in social relationships than men are.

Often, when confronted with a problem, women will look for a solution that minimizes conflict, even if it means they have to compromise.

When men are confronted with a problem, they tend to look for solutions that are direct and forceful. They are much less interested in compromise. Men are far more prideful than women, which makes it hard for them to compromise.

These are innate traits that are caused by our gender. Men are inclinded to be dominating, forceful and heroic. Women are inclined to be pragmatic, understanding and prosocial.

Again, these are tendencies, not absolutes.

There is also psychological research showing that girls are more prone to "storytelling" than men are. Women are more likely to talk and share stories and ideas for the simple sake of enhancing a relationship, while men usually only talk when they want to say something that has an effect on other people. Again, men are more interested in dominating and influencing others, while women are more interested in maintaining positive social relationships.

I think that if d20 had a bigger focus on role-playing, more girls would play. The ratio of girls who play other role-playing games is typically higher than for DnD, and I think that is because other role-playing games, like Vampire, focus more on story-telling and role-playing than combat.

As for the scantly clad women in gaming, I can understand why many women wouldn't like that. And certainly, it isn't as gratuitous now as it was in 2e. But really, LL, how do you think all us guys feel about the naked man on page 7 of the PHB????