![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
women and role-playing games
Elsewhere, in a locked entry, a game designer asked what game designers ought to be doing to market role-playing games to women. (Women gamers are definitely a minority.) I wanted to record my (slightly-edited) reply to him. (If this post generates discussion, I'll probably point the original poster at it. This post is public.)
What got me into RPGs, in high school, was that it was a natural outgrowth of the books I was reading. SF&F nerd ostracized by the "cool" kids was the right basis, as it turned out. I, not the guys around me, was the instigator.
Once I got to college I found games to play in, all run by men, and I played rather than running for many years. (As a self-taught GM I was pretty terrible at it.) I was often the only woman in the group despite trying to draw female friends in. I didn't try to analyze it much then; I chalked it up to geek/non-geek rather than male/female. (I didn't know too many female geeks.) There wasn't much "R" in the RPGs I was playing at the time, by the way. More about that later.
More recently, I've seen the "associate" effect [that somebody else wrote about] dominate -- a woman who plays in the game because her husband does, etc. I don't think it's a new trend; I think it's just that I'm now in a position to run into it more. The most recent campaign I played in started with three women (among seven players): one was a not-very-interested wife of a gamer and both of them drifted away after one session; one was the wife of the GM and she was very interested but had a low threshold for rules-geeking; and I was the third. The two women who stuck around both engaged most with (1) storytelling and (2) interesting magic (not just direct-damage spells, though we used those too). I should note that I personally detest games like "Once Upon a Time", but I love the cooperative storytelling of a campaign with a plot and an arc through it. (What's the difference? Maybe the pace? Dunno.) I liked pure-hack-and-slash games when I was in college, but now they don't draw me. I want to craft a three-dimensional character who shares an interesting world with other non-cardboard characters.
To market to women like the two of us, then, emphasize the power of the system to tell interesting stories, to allow character development that isn't pure-optimization stat-wrangling, and throw in some interesting magic. Oh, and don't make the rules so complicated that they get in the way of the story; D&D 3.0/3.5 had its flaws but combat was smooth and spell effects were easy to calculate, and that's huge. I walked out of the only game of Traveller I ever played an hour into character creation because the whole thing was just too complicated. (Bookkeeping is fine -- RuneQuest! was one of my favorite RPGs, back in the day -- but it has to stay in the background.)
So that's one woman's view, for what that's worth.
What got me into RPGs, in high school, was that it was a natural outgrowth of the books I was reading. SF&F nerd ostracized by the "cool" kids was the right basis, as it turned out. I, not the guys around me, was the instigator.
Once I got to college I found games to play in, all run by men, and I played rather than running for many years. (As a self-taught GM I was pretty terrible at it.) I was often the only woman in the group despite trying to draw female friends in. I didn't try to analyze it much then; I chalked it up to geek/non-geek rather than male/female. (I didn't know too many female geeks.) There wasn't much "R" in the RPGs I was playing at the time, by the way. More about that later.
More recently, I've seen the "associate" effect [that somebody else wrote about] dominate -- a woman who plays in the game because her husband does, etc. I don't think it's a new trend; I think it's just that I'm now in a position to run into it more. The most recent campaign I played in started with three women (among seven players): one was a not-very-interested wife of a gamer and both of them drifted away after one session; one was the wife of the GM and she was very interested but had a low threshold for rules-geeking; and I was the third. The two women who stuck around both engaged most with (1) storytelling and (2) interesting magic (not just direct-damage spells, though we used those too). I should note that I personally detest games like "Once Upon a Time", but I love the cooperative storytelling of a campaign with a plot and an arc through it. (What's the difference? Maybe the pace? Dunno.) I liked pure-hack-and-slash games when I was in college, but now they don't draw me. I want to craft a three-dimensional character who shares an interesting world with other non-cardboard characters.
To market to women like the two of us, then, emphasize the power of the system to tell interesting stories, to allow character development that isn't pure-optimization stat-wrangling, and throw in some interesting magic. Oh, and don't make the rules so complicated that they get in the way of the story; D&D 3.0/3.5 had its flaws but combat was smooth and spell effects were easy to calculate, and that's huge. I walked out of the only game of Traveller I ever played an hour into character creation because the whole thing was just too complicated. (Bookkeeping is fine -- RuneQuest! was one of my favorite RPGs, back in the day -- but it has to stay in the background.)
So that's one woman's view, for what that's worth.
WhiteWolf Systems
Now, this has been a few years since I last ran a WW game. Also. WhiteWolf reworked some of the game systems a while back so my information may be out of date when compared to what you can find on the shelves of the local gaming shop.
One of the first differences between the D&D system and WW is the dice required. WW uses a D10 system, meaning all you need are 10 D10s to cover all roles. When compared to the multiple types of dice required by D&D, this simplifies the system. You always know you have selected the correct die in WW.
As for the rolls, typically they would be a stat plus a skill, rolled against a stated difficulty. Each die that was equal to or greater than the difficulty counted as a success. The more successes you achieved, the more spectacular the outcome.
Let me provide an example. You are walking down the street and you hear two people arguing in a language that is not your native tongue. You wish to determine what language it is, and if you can understand what they are saying to each other. As your storyteller, I would ask first for a Perception + Languages roll. Lets say that you're average human, so you have two dots in perception and you speak Spanish (1 dot in languages). You would roll 3 D10s. I set the difficulty at 6 (a standard difficulty rating). You roll a 3, 6, 8. You now know the two men are speaking Portuguese. Since it is a language that you don't know, trying to understand them will be a more difficult (most likely an 8) Intelligence + languages roll. You roll a 7, 5, 1. Since you rolled a 1, a critical failure, I would tell you something completely different than what they actually said.
Now that is a quick example, but you can see that the system is rather open to ST interpretation. There are very few tables that need to be referenced. I found that it allowed me to weave a more compelling and involved story through a modern time line since I wasn't always looking things up to determine a course of action.
One of the other things I enjoyed about the WW system was that all of the subsets could exist in the same game environment. You could have Mages, Changelings and Werewolves as players with Hunters and Vampires in opposition. This allowed for the creation of a vast and highly complex interactive environment for players to move through. It takes a strong storyteller to handle that scenario, but it is quite possible.
Now naturally, like all players want to do, I had players that tried to break my games through creative rule application. So there will always be rules lawyering, no matter what system you play in.
I hoped this has helped.
Re: WhiteWolf Systems