Women in Gaming

The post yesterday about my niece's all-girl gaming group created a minor nerdstorm, resulting in ~800 page loads in the last 24 hours (a lot for my blog) and a 30+ post thread on the Dragonsfoot forum. While the responses to my post and the Dragonsfoot thread were all completely positive, there were a number of minor comments presenting stereotypes about women in gaming. Mostly along the lines of: why are there so few/none, why do they tend to play elves with cat familiars, and why don't they like killing orcs as much as male players...?

These comments prompt me here to briefly present my own experiences with women in gaming. Basically: The only gender difference I have seen playing RPGs in Southern California is that there are slightly more men than women in the hobby. This includes cons and my local scene in Orange County. This does NOT include game shops or RPGA, which I have little experience with. Pretty much every session I play in - either my own D&D games, Strategicon events, Meetup events, or game parties - includes one or more women. I have seen absolutely no trend in women tending to play different types of characters or in different styles. Interestingly, in both my whitebox and Labyrinth Lord games women play front line brawlers, although we also have clerics and magic users represented. I know several women GMs in Orange County, and at one game party I hosted we had an all-female session of the card-driven Dragonstorm RPG rolling on for many hours. In the last few years I can only recall DMing one game (of Swords & Wizardry) that was all-male. Even back in the early 80s, when I was in junior high, I remember DMing Palace of the Silver Princess and having a girl playing a dwarf with a big axe.

I mean, c'mon dudes, if you want to develop stereotypes, shows like Dungeon Majesty and I Hit It With My Axe would have you believe that ALL D&D players in SoCal are women!

So if this is my experience, why are folks in other areas seeing something different? I don't really know... Maybe it's an urban vs. rural thing, a regional culture thing, or a statistical sampling effect in low-population areas. Or maybe it's just my cyclopeatronic cologne distorting the sex ratios around me...?

 * Dungeon Majesty *

FRANK FRAZETTA (1928-2010)

Word has just come that Frank Frazetta, one of the greatest and most visionary illustrators of all-time, has died of a stroke. This is very sad news, especially given the recent turmoil in the Frazetta clan. There will never be another like Frazetta.

 

UPDATE: NY Times just posted their official obituary.

My 16 Year Old Niece is a DM!

UPDATE (5/18): My niece set up her own blog called Dungeon Mistress to talk about her D&D campaign. Take a look!

I went to visit my mama yesterday and she passed along these clandestine photos of my 16 year old niece DMing an ALL-FEMALE D&D CAMPAIGN! This is a serious weekly campaign my niece is running, not a singleton pick-up game. My niece created the entire setting they are playing in - a world shattered by an epic historical struggle between factions of wizard-dragons. The players are trying to relearn the forgotten dragon magic to fight a horrifying zombie plague advancing from the northern tundra.

Uncle Cyclopeatron is so proud!

One of the girls in the game is working on a short video documentary about the campaign that will include the players providing in-character interviews. I'm very excited to see how this turns out - hopefully there will be some footage I can post here.

Behold these strange and rare images of high school girls in 2010 playing D&D (posted with permission of my niece):

Travel Through a Human Door

Our last D&D whitebox session took place on a lovely Sunday morning at a friend's house on Mt. Washington. From the hillside we had a great view of the Los Angeles basin while sitting at the playing table. Coffee and mimosas circulated for the ~4 hour session. In the old ramshackle house next door was an acid damaged squatter who was playing weird and quiet improvisations on his Casio keyboard all day. It was actually kind of a nice atmospheric backdrop for the game. After D&D some of us went on a walk through the hills, grilled up dinner, and played some Dominion.

About halfway through the D&D game the party found themselves in a wooden room. They broke through a wall and found the room was surrounded by a large dark space in every direction. The only feature they could detect in the darkness was a pillar a stone's throw away with a 7' tall, thin, and mustachioed man sitting on a chair. The man said his name was "I Am The Door".

It turns out that he was a rare and ancient Human Door. The characters learned that they could merge into the man's torso and be transported through space to different locations. They also learned that, upon invitation, I Am The Door could merge into himself to travel along with the party. Sadly he had been little used for so long - centuries in fact - that he could only remember two locations: (1) a  wizard's chamber isolated deep inside the planet and (2) the way to a place called Wiggin's Drop City. I Am The Door said he could easily learn new locations when provided with appropriate Door Scrolls containing coordinates, however no one in the group had ever seen such a scroll.

And so, after traversing a rope to the pillar in the darkness, the party merged with I Am The Door...

J. ERIC HOLMES (1930-2010)

J. ERIC HOLMES (1930-2010)

The April issue of Gridley Wave announced that J. Eric Holmes, the author of the the first D&D "blue box" basic set, has passed away at the age of 80. I subsequently found that the Leber Funeral Home, Union City, NJ. reported Holmes' date of death as March 20, 2010.

Holmes was born February 16, 1930. I was always fascinated by the thought of him being perhaps one of the oldest living dungeon masters. Related to this, in his 1981 book "Fantasy Role Playing Games" he made some very touching statements about how he always liked to have kids playing in his games. Holmes was a neurology professor at USC in his late 40s  when he started DMing in the early days of D&D. He was probably one of the oldest guys at the time to take up this new and strange hobby. Holmes has always been interesting to me because he was a research level biology professor, like myself, yet he made time for RPGs and fantastic fiction in his life. I also appreciate how Holmes came to gaming from the fiction side of the hobby rather than the wargaming side, again, like myself. I believe he saw the potential from RPGs to be an exciting and respectable extension of imaginative literature.

I have tried on several occasions to find Holmes' contact information, meeting only with failure. I was just telling my wife last week how much I would like to track him down for an interview or even to coax him into a game. I know in the last 10 years of his life Holmes was mostly active in Edgar Rice Burroughs fandom, and that he had a stroke in 2004 that limited his activities. I am very sorry I will never be able to speak with or meet the man. Again, the gaming community loses one of its most important elder trailblazers.

Jarrah's Cubic Dungeon

Awesome Alert!

Check out this brilliant cubic dungeon from Jarrah's great blog Rocket-Propelled Game:

 

There's one secret room with the way out!

Given the complexity of each geomorph tile I think my players might get grumpy if I sprung this on them, but maybe something a little simpler and less tortuous could be a lot of fun.

[Note: Norman at Troll and Flame subsequently described a similar project.]

Digest Format Mania!

A trend among old school do-it-yourself RPG fans has been producing publications using the digest format of the original whitebox D&D books. I love gaming books this size - they fit great behind the DM screen and they are easy to conceal from onlookers and snoops! The new Brave Halfling edition of Swords and Wizardry: Whitebox in particular is brilliant because you can order (or print out) extra player copies of any of the booklets. Carcosa and James Raggi's various creations, among others, are also notable recent digest format pubs...

30+ years ago there was a very high level of enthusiasm for digest-sized gaming material, from rulebooks to supplements to zines. Look at these recent collectors' posts to a thread on The Acaeum. The incredible diversity of amazing looking zines and DIY rule supplements is especially striking. Before blogs and internet forums these zines were the primary mode of communication. I'd love to browse through some of these super rare and obscure old publications. "Monsters! Monsters! Monsters! Galore!" looks like a good one, but it's currently going for $395 at Noble Knight, so I probably won't be flipping through that one any time soon.