This commercial was clearly done by people who had never played D&D. The table is clearly way to clear of books, paper, dice, pizza and mountain dew. If that doesn’t convince you, then based on the players behavior alone - they stay on-game - it’s fantasy.
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The Irony for me is, 25 years ago at the tender age of 8, I was introduced to D&D by two sisters who lived next door, the elder being the DM while her sister and myself played. Since then every group I have played with, either as a player or as DM has had at least one female player, and more often then not as many women as men if not more.
Heck my current group which I met with less than 12 hours ago consists of six members, myself as DM (I’m male) two men and three women, who are the backbone of the party. One of them recently even introduced her boyfriend to the group when another player left.
So yes, to me D&D has always had great gender diversity, but that’s not to say that there are not some problems. When my current group was founded just over a year ago at a big meet up with over 50 players trying to find DM’s/groups to play in I had several guys (mostly University students) who wanted specifically to join my group because there were more women who joined my group then there were men, but they were politely rebuffed, because to me you should play the game to play the game, not to try and find a date.
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Mirror Mirror
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This is more like most of my sessions, anyway. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0447166/
And no one considered that male players might want female characters, either? Huh.
I wonder if that is why they made the (fortunate, IMHO) decision to not have any stat differences between male and female characters.
My reply is completely irrelevant to your point, but frankly, the 2nd edition rules were so complicated and layered that with the right source books she could probably have made that happen legally. Actually, I know for a fact that she could, since the DM guide in AD&D had rules for custom class building, and the only penalty for totally overpowering a class (assuming the DM allowed it at all) was a much much slower XP progression.
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You can’t argue with the dice!
I played D&D a bit in HS and college (when I was back home on break).
Trigger warning, I guess.
I heard about, but did not witness, two players (they were all guys; I didn’t know any female players that I knew of) made it a habit of raping every female creature they killed. Post-mortem. The DM finally had enough of it, had them roll, and announced they failed their saving throws, their two current paramours had turned to stone, and their d**ks along with.
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The first rules that considered female characters in D&D appeared in Dragon Magazine, where they had a number of articles that set up gendered stat differences and even different character classes for female characters. There was a pretty negative reaction from readers, apparently. Which is probably why the beginning of the AD&D books promise that there’s no difference between male and female characters (unlike rules for, say, Chivalry and other RPGs), but then they stuck a strength cap for female characters in AD&D anyways. (Which wasn’t even offset by a CON bonus that the other games gave female characters.) I suspect many players just ignored that stat cap in AD&D, though.
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Long ago I read the AD&D player’s handbook far too many times (you had to, to even come close to keeping track of everything!) and I never even noticed that rule.
I will also note that in the group I played with in college was nearly all female (before that the groups were all male). I was DM (always was, no one else ever wanted to), and I can say that the women were a lot more creative at role playing and made more interesting and varied characters.
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Urgh. Classy guys, reinforcing all the negative stereotypes…
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Christ, what assholes!
I never understood that snigger-snigger-let’s-do-some-sexy-stuff. I’ve walked away from several gaming groups in the past because of the skeevy knight who wanted to know how many sexy women were around. Thankfully that was back in the dim, distant past!
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I noticed I tend to play lurking, misanthropic characters who are suspicious of everything. So I decided to shake things up a bit this time around by making my bard a charismatic, womanizing lesbian. Well … mostly lesbian. Turns out she’s not really that picky. It’s been very entertaining, but I probably get away with it because I’m actually female.
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Wait a moment… I thought the percentage of women majoring in computer science was much higher in the Age of Reagan than today.
OTOH, maybe the gaming end of the nerd community is different from the academic end.
I guess, as long as it’s not like that scene from Community, 'tis all good. 
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