Are female D&D players comfier around male D&D players these days?

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Silverlion said:
I very much doubt that any of those movies really hit on the attention span of young adult girls in the 90s when Vampire Chronicles, Vampire Diaries, and others.
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My sister, the one that got me to play DnD, had a Langella poster on her wall, they were selling them a kmart or whatever.
 
TristramEvans said:
I gamed with girls because I was friends with girls.
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My friends who were girls were not interested in games, they were interested in theater and movies (and later animal rights). They would take one quick sweep through my Fighting Fantasy tabletop system, Warhammer 40k manual, or Magic: The Gathering rulebook and politely pass.
 
For me as a teen, having four sisters (five, except one died), one thing exactly I didn't want was to spend more time around girls than I had to. It also was my gf a proto-goth deathrock girl who got me to play vampire in college.
 
TristramEvans said:
Yeah, I don't get that. The amount of girl gamers that I've slept with (that I wasn't already in a relationship with beforehand) is close to zero. I don't see any correlation between gaming with folks and romance.I gamed with girls because I was friends with girls.
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I think it's probably true, but only in the very generalist sense that a) a common hobby is a way to meet people and b) common interests can be something to hook a relationship on.

I've dated "gamer girls", true. But I've also dated "theatre girls" and "indie girls". A lot of it is just about social circles.
 
Shipyard Locked said:
My friends who were girls were not interested in games, they were interested in theater and movies (and later animal rights). They would take one quick sweep through my Fighting Fantasy tabletop system, Warhammer 40k manual, or Magic: The Gathering rulebook and politely pass.
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Pretty much. One weird irony is that one of my best female friends from childhood who never showed any interest in playing back then (I got her to reluctantly join one or maybe two WFRP games and that was it) is now an active 5E player and GM and is always trying to talk me into joining her games which I’m not really interested in, and if I ever do it will be purely out of friendship, an exact mirror of the dynamic from the 80s.
 
I think it's worthy to note that for most RPGers, their exposure and early experience to the game is probably Grade School or High School (10-18). That overlaps with the time that adolescents and teens can be extraordinarily cruel to each other, intentionally or not. This even extends into college a bit for many.

When RPG groups were Geek Clubs, they seemed pretty welcoming. As RPGs have gotten more mainstream and popular, they get closer to the standard "high school" experience, which can be pretty shitty.

Women are always going to have an extra bit of care/fear then men, sexual dimorphism is a thing. Are women in MORE danger from RPGers than any other group they can interact with? I kind of doubt it (if for no other reason, they can outrun all the fatbeards :devil: ).

An anecdotal story that can scar a person for life has a powerful impact on others. Used as data to construct a general narrative though, other than "this did happen" and "women get exposed to this more than men" however, is where you get into pretty sketchy territory.
 
Shipyard Locked said:
My friends who were girls were not interested in games, they were interested in theater and movies (and later animal rights). They would take one quick sweep through my Fighting Fantasy tabletop system, Warhammer 40k manual, or Magic: The Gathering rulebook and politely pass.
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Mine too. We could occasionally get my friends younger sister to play RPGs/wargames but that's it. The others would watch and hang out with us sometimes(rarely) but it just wasn't their thing.
 
Black Leaf said:
I think it's probably true, but only in the very generalist sense that a) a common hobby is a way to meet people and b) common interests can be something to hook a relationship on.

I've dated "gamer girls", true. But I've also dated "theatre girls" and "indie girls". A lot of it is just about social circles.
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By far, the one place (or places) I've hooked up with the most women (including my wife) has been wherever I work. I've never been the type to "kiss and tell", and once a woman you work with realizes you're the kind of guy who can keep his mouth shut, she's a lot more open to "fraternizing" with you.

Hey, a job should offer something besides paying the rent.
 
Gringnr said:
By far, the one place (or places) I've hooked up with the most women (including my wife) has been wherever I work. I've never been the type to "kiss and tell", and once a woman you work with realizes you're the kind of guy who can keep his mouth shut, she's a lot more open to "fraternizing" with you.

Hey, a job should offer something besides paying the rent.
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Guess my office was different. We had super-comfy office chairs and hot water taps for all the tea I could drink!
 
Gringnr said:
By far, the one place (or places) I've hooked up with the most women (including my wife) has been wherever I work. I've never been the type to "kiss and tell", and once a woman you work with realizes you're the kind of guy who can keep his mouth shut, she's a lot more open to "fraternizing" with you.

Hey, a job should offer something besides paying the rent.
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Oh God no. I mean right out of college I dated someone in the office and never did that again. There's a lot of fish in the sea. Plus if you move up to any level of authority it's just asking for trouble.
 
Silverlion said:
Uhm. While yes there are a lot of vampire movies, and books, vampires proliferated extensively after Anne Rice's Interview with a Vampire, particularly in literature (and even more specifically in the YA field) The fact is compared to a smattering of movies and more books the genre exploded post-Anne Rice (1976 IwaV) by orders of magnitude. Because it was what one might call a 'blockbuster' book.


It's not like there haven't always been Vampire stories to draw from I'm talking about a matter of scale.

I very much doubt that any of those movies really hit on the attention span of young adult girls in the 90s when Vampire Chronicles, Vampire Diaries, and others. (The era when vampires existed--as it came out in 91) and yes they fed pretty directly into the Vampire Larps locally. (All of this pre-dates Twilight and other ahem 'recent' explosions like YA Post-Apocalypse series.)
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Not dismissing Anne Rice, as she clearly has influenced the vampire genre, particularly in the area of moving the sexual element of vampires from suggested to putting it right out there. I had one girlfriend who liked Interview, but found her short stories far to kinky for her taste. My wife on the other hand has enjoyed all of her writing the kinkiness being a positive. Neither read her books as a teen.

Interview came out in 1976 but it wasn't an immediate hit, more of a cult following that grew to mainstream, kind of like LotRs. It took 9 years for a sequel, and 18 years for the film. Generally book to film adaptions seem to occur within 5 years of a books publication, 18 years is a long time for a hot book.
She seems to have been riding the wave of 80s vampire popularity as much as influencing it.

An important figure but the claims she "saved" the vampire genre are blown way out of proportion (you didn't say this but it is common to see this claim made). Unlike Westerns which did have a fall of and revival in the 80s and 90s, vampires have remained a popular subject. There were others writing romantic vampire fiction before and along side Anne Rice, and some even had more initial success, but have fallen to the side as the the Anne Rice books found its audience.

I do think you vastly underestimate the impact of late night monster movies on the vampire phenomenon. If you read period reviews women have always found vampires sexy. Many talk about Gary Oldman's very stylish and sexy portrayal of Dracula in 1992s Bram Stoker's Dracula, but there was a very similar reaction to Frank Langela's Dracula in 1979. Both the 1979 and 1992 Dracula's were a romance as much as a horror film. Christopher Lee's Dracula (1958) was also noted for the fact that his female victims seemed to enjoy the experience of being bitten by him.


Ravenswing said:
And I'd like to say that was an anachronism of the bad old days, except that the most recent such conversation was as late as 2004. My wife wasn't allowed to play a fighter in her D&D groups in the mid-1990s, and didn't get to do so until she took up combat LARPing (where we met) and no one could veto her picking up an axe. Gaming forums agonized over the issue throughout the 1990s and 2000s, and I've the saved posts to prove it.
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I am so happy that this part of gaming is strictly hearsay for me. I believe it happened just glad I never encountered it in the first person. Some people are just turds.

TristramEvans said:
Yeah, I don't get that. The amount of girl gamers that I've slept with (that I wasn't already in a relationship with beforehand) is close to zero. I don't see any correlation between gaming with folks and romance.I gamed with girls because I was friends with girls.
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I'm attracted to gamer / nerd girls, but those that I have dated (married one) were interested in gaming before me but were only able to actually participate in gaming after meeting me, for various reasons. Ex-girlfriend had dated a gamer before but he wouldn't let her play with his group.

My wife grew up in a family that discouraged "D&D" but didn't outright ban it (very conservative religious). She also lacked the opportunities to get into any gaming groups, being in a rural area and anti-social. She read a lot of D&D fiction, and in fact that was one of the things that caught my eye (well and being adorable in a Wednesday Addams kind of way).

dragoner said:
My sister, the one that got me to play DnD, had a Langella poster on her wall, they were selling them a kmart or whatever.
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I think a lot of people overlook the impact of the 1979 Dracula. It was every bit the cultural phenomenon that the 1992 Dracula was, but even though this site skews grey, most of us are still too young to really grasp that. I wouldn't be surprised if that costume got a bit of action after hours in the local pick up bars. :wink:

Shipyard Locked said:
My friends who were girls were not interested in games, they were interested in theater and movies (and later animal rights). They would take one quick sweep through my Fighting Fantasy tabletop system, Warhammer 40k manual, or Magic: The Gathering rulebook and politely pass.
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I think this is a huge part of it. The games a lot of guys are into don't resonate with women. My wife and older son both game, but there is a very narrow overlap among us in our preferences.

Gringnr said:
By far, the one place (or places) I've hooked up with the most women (including my wife) has been wherever I work. I've never been the type to "kiss and tell", and once a woman you work with realizes you're the kind of guy who can keep his mouth shut, she's a lot more open to "fraternizing" with you.

Hey, a job should offer something besides paying the rent.
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Work has been good to me as well. However since that is where I met my longest relationship before being married (5-ish years) and my wife (23 years), the number of relationships I've had with people from work is small. School beats work for numbers, but work wins for duration.
 
Shipyard Locked said:
My friends who were girls were not interested in games, they were interested in theater and movies (and later animal rights).
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My friends, men and women alike, were generally not interested in games (outside of the occasional boardgame with cocktails). Luckily I only ever needed a handful of folks who were.
 
TristramEvans said:
Yeah, I don't get that. The amount of girl gamers that I've slept with (that I wasn't already in a relationship with beforehand) is close to zero. I don't see any correlation between gaming with folks and romance.I gamed with girls because I was friends with girls.
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Well, me too, but my number is far different from yours: except for my very first girlfriend in 1978, every woman with whom I've ever been involved, from the briefest of flings to my wives, have been gamers. Each and every one. (The total is ... quite a bit higher than zero. Quite a bit.) As Black Leaf said, social circles.

Toadmaster said:
I would be in prison if I started dating my wife when I was in high school.
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Hah. I'd had have to have been Marty McFly. My wife was born when I was a freshman in college.
 
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TristramEvans said:
lol, well, I'm not sure anyone's come up with a solution for extricating assholes from any community, or society, but it is one of the reasons I exclusively game with friends and vet players beforehand
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I've vetted players (and they've been friends too) and still had them fall off the deep end :sad:
 
I take an approach of vetting the entire club I join these days. And indeed I've found the best clubs have quite robust vetting processes themselves. And often the best clubs can be quite picky.

One of the best rpg clubs I was a member of had one of the founders as what was literally described as a "consitutional monarch" alongside a pretty open voting structure. He wasn't allowed to suggest any rules changes or vote on them except he was allowed to veto any rules or ban any member. That made it very easy to weed out members who were arseholes but skirting the line. And indeed we rarely had any issues.

or alternatively I just handpick the group myself.
 
My wife, who was a RPer befoe meeting me, agrees with TristramEvans TristramEvans - if girls didn't want to play with you, it was probably because either a) the hobby was seen as uncool or b) the "you" part:shade:.
Also, the product themselves were probably irrelevant, unlike the reputation of the hobby.
In fact, sanitizing them would have repulsed a good many female players. Red Sonja was and is a popular archetype for female PCs played by female players. Except sometimes the art wouldn't show enough skin for their tastes...:tongue:

Also, female players definitely make more of an effort to vet the group/time/location for safety, and having at least one other woman in the group helps a lot. If the GM is a girl, the process would often go easily and quickly.

Also, I've slept with women I've met via gaming, and don't see a reason why you wouldn't...people who hang together and find each other attractive might well get to this point. See also: Ravenswing Ravenswing (who also has theadvantage of being good at cooking, IIRC:grin:).

Now I just need more info on that CYOA from the 30ies:shock:!
 
AsenRG said:
Also, female players definitely make more of an effort to vet the group/time/location for safety, and having at least one other woman in the group helps a lot. If the GM is a girl, the process would often go easily and quickly.
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I definitely get this. I got into the habit of vetting groups for jerks. I’ve had so many unpleasant experiences with asshole gamers. As a social outcast, it surprised me how many fellow geeks were bitter and mean-spirited instead of compassionate.
 
I think representation of women in D&D, and the more welcoming attitude of later editions has drastically improved since the 80s. Tunnels & Trolls specifically calls out AD&D for being sexist back in the early 80s, as female characters had lower stats, for no reason outside of basic misogyny. After the OG Basic of BECMI, there wasn't a female character on a corebook cover until D&D 4th edition. I don't know if it has anything to do with male players, but D&D as a game does a much better job being welcoming to all genders, and it has payed dividends with how many non-male players I see in game stores these days.
 
Ehh, I think that's a correlation without causation assertion. RPGs became socially acceptable, online scripted game videos rose to unprecedented popularity, references to D&D permeate pop culture media, board games rose to new heights of popularity in direct opposition to online socializing, and the pandemic stuck people indoors desperate for one on one interaction for over a year...

But we're expected to believe Wizards throwing a picture of a girl on the cover of D&D is responsible for an influx of women into the hobby?
 
TristramEvans said:
Ehh, I think that's a correlation without causation assertion. RPGs became socially acceptable, online scripted game videos rose to unprecedented popularity, references to D&D permeate pop culture media, board games rose to new heights of popularity in direct opposition to online socializing, and the pandemic stuck people indoors desperate for one on one interaction for over a year...

But we're expected to believe Wizards throwing a picture of a girl on the cover of D&D is responsible for an influx of women into the hobby?
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They started making a more concerted effort to show women since 3.x as I recall. It just wasn't the extreme it is now. Back then it was a fully clothed female thief covered in belt buckles because he everyone is apparently alongside 3rd party covers of gals in g-strings because sex still sold.
 
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