GnomeMaiden's page

We will most likely have pre-gen characters there for anyone who wants to just jump into a game and play, but we won't allow folks to create higher level PCs from scratch and just jump in and play.

Does "most likely" mean definitely? My husband and I signed up for a tier 7-11 adventure (I assume tiers means levels?) and haven't done any PFS adventures before. We will be able to play with premades? Or should we re-assign those slots to a lower level adventure and bring our 1st level characters?

I've DM'd for a lot of women, and played with another. I think the total is something like 10 or 12. Of them, only one played a druid (but she played druid over and over in every campaign). The most popular class by far is barbarian - three of the girls, all new to the game, picked it very enthusiastically. I think it is popular because it's a socially sanctioned way for a girl to show aggression and let off some steam. All three barbarians were female characters as well as players. Of the others, we had a bard, a ranger, a paladin, a fighter, a cleric, a rogue, and a ninja. Very melee-oriented, even the cleric (I provided a heal-bot DMPC so she could do something other than heal). The one man in the group (my husband) played the wizard.

Oh, and my first character was a female dwarf fighter with a charisma of 3, but I've played casters since then, when I've had the opportunity to play.

Also, let's look at those thirty years.

1970's - D&D evolves out of wargaming; Gygax and co have no clue whether it'll catch on or be popular. TSR starts publishing. A few geeks who wargamed get into it, tell some of their friends. The stereotypical D&D player is born. (This is when my parents started playing, including my mother. She was the only female gamer around, and she didn't play nearly as much as the guys.)

1980's - D&D becomes known in popular culture - but as a Satanic, suicide-inducing influence. Most people in the wider culture form a highly negative first impression of the game; the media latches onto the hype. TSR doesn't seem to know how to counteract this message.

1990's - D&D goes underground. Those who are really committed to the game keep playing, but relatively few others can be convinced to start, given the cultural taboo against it. TSR makes poor marketing decisions, goes bankrupt.

2000's - WotC buys D&D. It's been out of the public eye long enough that many people have forgotten its notoriety and there's a fresh generation of players available.

TSR wasn't exactly known for its marketing/advertising acumen. Most of those thirty years were pretty mismanaged in terms of D&D's relation to the world at large. I wouldn't be surprised if the "pretty dumb" mistakes really were made there. TSR's market research was basically nonexistent.

The fact that Hasbro/WotC have committed resources to D&D provides hope that there can be a "fresh slate" and it will now be possible to advertise to a wider audience, including women. WotC has been busy developing the new edition of the game and shoring up its current player base. I don't know if they're waiting for something in particular or just working on the research to start advertising to the popular market. I know that if I were in their shoes, I'd want to be extremely careful about the way I presented D&D to the wider market...I wouldn't want to inflame the old passions and doom the game for another generation. I'd want to come up with an innocuous way to advertise and present it that avoids the hysteria of the 80's. It was just this April that a "D&D for Dummies" came out - I think that's a great start. I really hope that if WotC and the other companies do manage this fresh start, that they are carefully and deliberately figuring out how to change all the negative stereotypes, including the whole "guy thing" unwashed geek image. I hope that they do the research necessary to figure out how to present the game to women.

I don't think that the game itself needs to change, for the simple fact that it can be played in *any* way a person wants. It can be heavy on the RP and personal development, or it can be a rules-lawyer gala...it's a flexible game, and enough variations are published by the third party companies that there will be incarnations that appeal greatly to women. But the advertising has never been there, and too much negative information has gone unchecked. I place much of the blame at TSR's mismanagement. It hasn't been 30 years of serious effort to improve the advertising and image, it's been more like 5 and just getting up to speed. If all goes well, now is a good time for things to start changing.

I must say, D&D has elements that appeal to both men and women. All you need is a flexible and attuned DM - because the game is incredibly flexible. When I started a campaign at my school, I instantly attracted 7 other women to play, and there were more that I had to turn away. D&D is a game of imagination, made social and given rules. That appeals to both genders, even if the content of their imaginations are often different. It's not even necessarily about the "hero" archetype - it's about an alter ego of any archetype, it's a vicarious experience of the setting and the character and the story.

And I agree that if women are interested enough, they will disregard the social stigma - or more likely, set up an environment that eliminates many of the elements of the stigma (ie, there will be good hygiene, "creeps" will not be allowed, etc.) But - and this is really the big point - very few women have the opportunity to get interested in the first place. D&D has been around for 30 years, yes, and its adherents have considered the question of appealing to women during that time, yes. But the general public has *no clue* about D&D. They may have heard of it on the news as some sort of satanic cult. Fewer still have heard of any other kind of PnP RPG. The social stigma is all that most people *ever* see of the game, and it's not unreasonable that women (and lots of men) don't bother pursuing something that looks icky, from all they've seen.

GVD, I think your error is simply in overestimating D&D's popular exposure. It's more popular now than ever, but that's not saying much when you look at the broader population. I just think that that fundamental premise is flawed. Women haven't actually seen the game.

The advertising on the actual products isn't bad. I don't want to see the PHB get a Vogue cover. But there's a general lack of positive advertising for the game; it's all word-of-mouth and very few of those mouths are female. There's plenty of negative advertising in the stereotypes. The majority of game stores make themselves male domains, like sports bars. There's women in both places, but only the brave few who happen to like male-dominated atmospheres.

It's an advertising problem and a communication problem. Luckily, I think it's also a self-correcting one, though it will take a long time via that route. It's just a matter of more of the word-of-mouth being spread by females or female-friendly people/institutions. Meanwhile, Wizards and Paizo ought to do the research to figure out how to advertise to a female audience. Once women feel welcomed and there's more information available than the stigma - those who are interested will come. You just have to give enough correct information for the interest to develop and catch hold. Truly, that has not happened, even in the 30 years.

I've been thinking hard lately about getting a subscription to either Dungeon or Dragon (both is out of the questions, money-wise). I was glad to see these messageboards, so I thought I'd add my questions. I apologize if this is a common question.

Here's my situation:

I'm a DM in the process of building my homebrew world and cosmology; I just started in January so a lot of things are wide open. I have been looking for any world-building information I can find and adapting all sorts of material. I'm looking to make this place very customized. It's a large world so I have room for all sorts of different cultures and I want to eventually delineate groups of prestige classes, feats, optional rules, etc based on region so that I can play different types of campaigns (ie, one area is all-core, one uses certain Unearthed Arcana rules, one uses Frostburn...). What I'm saying is, I'm open to ideas from anywhere. I never use pre-made adventures or settings, although I often take ideas from them.

Would Dungeon or Dragon be more useful to me in world-building? Which is more enjoyable to read? Is there a significant amount of non-adventure material in Dungeon (I lean toward Dragon for the greater variety of content)? I have been looking through Paizo's message boards and they've made me quite excited about getting a subscription. Seeing the editors post so helpfully is tremendously encouraging.

I've also read some bad reviews at Amazon and been somewhat deterred. I hope those reviews were based just on difficulties with the changeover from 2e to 3e. Do you see the quality as improving or declining? How much is directly useful to your campaigns (or would be useful to me, as I've described my needs)? I really like articles about D&D and gaming; general advice and interest is good information for me. My roommate has some older issues of Dragon (from 3e, not 2e or earlier, but also not 3.5), and they're intriguing, but a lot of the information in them I have from rulebooks published later. I don't really have access to a proper game store, and I don't know where to pick up paper copies to look through.

I like to research things pretty thoroughly before buying (limited funds), so any opinions or info would be very helpful. I can only get one or the other on my budget.

I'm curious to know how much effort has been made to attract female gamers. For Dragon magazine and WOTC, how much of their market research do they devote to female gamers and potential gamers?

I'm a woman DM. In my regular campaign I have 5 women and one man (my fiance). This is because I go to a women's college :). My parents introduced me to D&D when I was in elementary school and very soon thereafter I began DMing for my younger siblings (we lived in a tiny, heavily religious community in Alaska and my parents didn't want us getting ostracized, so we only played in the family).

My experiences have been heavily personalized and separate from the gaming world as a whole, until now when I've started visiting messageboards. Except for my fiance, I don't actually know that many guy gamers. Until this year, when I started DMing 3.5 after a long hiatus from the hobby, I hadn't even realized that 2e had more than just the core books for it. I think that this is a good thing, because if I'd come into the hobby from the other direction...well, I probably wouldn't have.

Since being out of Alaska, I've encountered hobby shops and the (all male) gamers in them. I've bought tons of rulebooks and looked at Dragon magazine, as well as many, many websites. I'm interested in the content, but I have to say that the presentation took some getting used to. If I had never played before, I would not really feel welcome. It just doesn't seem like the publishers - or retailers - are interested in a female audience. I'm a very feminine girl; I know some girls prefer "guy stuff" for its own sake, but I wasn't introduced to D&D as a "guy thing," and if I had been I might never have given it a second look.

That "guy thing" introduction is all that's available to most girls. It's not one big thing, it's a multitude of little things. It's hard to pin down, but there is the sexualized art, the crudity at an all-male table, the lack of other women gamers...a general atmosphere more than anything else, and I think it has everything to do with marketing.