Weird. My daughter is 10 and hasn’t shown an interest in princesses or My Little Pony in many years. She has, however, asked me several times about playing D&D. I’ve dug up my 1st edition books from the attic, and rolled up a character, but I really was never good at being a DM, and I always feel you need more than 1 player playing…
She did get into Pokemon (shows and games) in kindergarten, so that may be the reason for both not being into princesses anymore and the interest in D&D…
Heh. I doubt that I’ll have any problems with recruiting my nieces and nephews into playing D&D with me when they’re old enough–their parents are big boardgamers.
Jacobson says before we see the boys-plus-girls gaming sessions, the girls played a practice game of D&D without the boys before filming “so the boys didn’t have an unfair advantage.”
It makes sense to do a practice game before filming just so the first-time players get most of their newbie questions out of the way, but an unfair advantage in what? I haven’t watched yet, but I assume they were playing cooperatively.
For me games without female players seem to be the exception rather than the rule. Granted, this was in college where enough of the social awkwardness is gone.
Is the top photo’s background a dragon versus a horned Alfred Hitchcock?
Yeah, I don’t know what the heck that thing is supposed to be, but I’m pretty sure it’s not something you can roleplay in the Player’s Handbook. Catastrophic graphic-lede failure, call the photoshop ambulance…
Yeah, I think that practice game was more about avoiding the awkwardness of waiting for the DM to explain the game mechanics on camera for the big event. Worse, possibly making the boys annoyed at having to wait through all of the boring beginner stuff.
It’s great that the girls have apparently not been indoctrinated against roleplay by the old time social stigma that it’s for forever-virgin nerds and that cool kids should treat it like a sphere of annihilation. That said, pulling girls from households with gaming parents seems like a bit of a cheat. Where are the girls from households where the parents are strictly religious?
I’ll read/watch later, but this makes me really need to go find the adventure I made for my daughter several years ago. She enjoyed it, though I don’t think she remembers it really, and I bet we could go through the adventure again.
My group in middle school always included a few girls - the same girls who got us to read Lord Foul’s Bane in the first place. That was back when D&D came in a box, and wasn’t even advanced yet. They always fit in great, in fact that one creepy guy was the only problem.
My experience is that if you have a reasonably diverse group, it will attract other people who aren’t straight white males. My last group had two women, a mix of races, a disabled veteran and a transgender person in it.
My peer group had a great campaign running through most of late grade and high school. I know for a fact that girls can and will enjoy the game as much as boys do.
There were two girls in my peer group who wanted to play. One just sort of worked her way in, got accepted fairly easily, and we played. Great! The other one waited a few years, then asked for a private game with close friends. She enjoyed it immensely as well.
Of course those were 70’s and 80’s norms in play too. These days, I would think girls would have a much easier time overall. Plus, with all the online role play going on, playing mixed gender characters would be more easily accepted by everyone, further making room for girls in the scheme of things.
Of course, back in the day, exclusion of girls wasn’t because we weren’t willing to play with them. It’s because we were giant dorks girls wouldn’t give the time of day.
I had a friend who stopped into a game shop about 5 years ago, and several cheerleader-type girls came in, were all excited about some new module that came out, bantering about the game - obvious players. He was just gobsmacked. Where were these people when we played?
When I played in high school, it was just the guys. But I agree, once I hit college age, there were almost always girls in the groups. I wonder how much of it is girls/boys looking for any excuse to spend time together (most girls in the groups were somebody’s girlfriend, at least when they started playing), and how much of it is college “experimentation” phase of breaking out of previously-assigned roles.
Either way, I think that D&D is a fun game for creative kids of any sex. At 4 and 1, my nieces are still too young to start playing, but when they get older, I fully intend to give them the opportunity.
Every group I’ve ever played with included girls. Who knew we were so ahead of our time.
Unfortunately the one girl I played with was the hardest core min-maxer I have met and did everything she could to get an advantage.
What’s kind of funny is that the only time when I didn’t regularly game with women at the table was in college (since my gaming group was associated with the Sci-Fi/Fantasy club at college and that was a bit of a sausage fest). In high school about a third of the group was female, while the conventions were about a third or so female as well. My home group has less females (1 of five in the game I GM and 2 of six in the game I only play in), but that’s because there’s mainly single guys in the group (my mother is the constant female between both games, and a married couple brings in the other woman, our GM, in the one a only play). I think at the highest concentration my home game had a four in eight ratio, including me as the GM (three married couples and a female friend of one of the couples, with one of the couples being my then still married parents, and another being the couple I still game with every other week).
Have I been transported back to 1980? I’ve been playing since my dad taught me when I was 8. Although it is true that most of the boys in school wouldn’t let me play with them; until high school anyway.
I do kind of want to play with @nobodez’s mom, now.
The only group I’ve ever played with that wasn’t a mixed-gender group was our weekly Friday overnight session back in high school (in the early to mid 80’s.) That one wasn’t mixed due to the overnight part, of course, we also played when we could in school and those groups were always mixed. Our current group (GURPS, actually,) actually has the women outnumbering the men – 4 to 2.
Don’t know, Mister44 … maybe you were just unlucky or didn’t notice anyone who wanted to play?
I have started, a few months ago, to DM a group consisting of my 13 yo daughter, 2 other girls (13 and 14), and a boy of the same age. There are differences between how they play versus how i played D&D when I was 13.
They are constantly striving to avoid fighting, and solve problems strategically. They take seriously the moral implications of their actions, and it took awhile to get them used the role-playing aspect of their alignments. But once they understood the role-playing, they really got into it. Even to the extent that I often am not sure if they are showing real emotion or role-playing. Once a thief went behind the backs of the group( who are mostly lawful and/or good) to complete a mission assigned to her by a local thieves guild, to “recover” a gem from a local merchant . While successful, she wound up being spotted and pursued by the bodyguards of her target, and swept up the sleeping party into a running retreat from the village. They lost equipment, loot, a mule, and access to the village. Once they escaped, the thief broke down into tears during her apology to the party, and I intervened only to find out she was just acting.
They very quickly wanted to build a home, partly as a base of operations and place to store their loot, but also to be able to furnish it and design it. Once they start playing Designers & Drapes instead of Dungeons & Dragons, I usually leave them alone to their own devices and they continue with that aspect for hours (The lone boy playing his Nintendo DS or leaving at that point though, heh)
