There's some truth to that, men are different when women are around even when the women aren't trying to change things.

Personally, I think the more common issue is when rules are written and/or changed in order to accommodate people that aren't really interested to begin with.

Defining rules as bad because a subset of people that weren't particularly interested in the first place is something that does a great deal of harm to a hobby or area of interest. Any woman that was scared away due to the characters having a slight reflection of reality was probably not worth playing with in the first place.
They're probably the most obvious people to want that, but I'm sure there's plenty of other people that like playing as a different gender. It's not really that much different from wanting to play as a different race or species all together. And that's independent of games where you spend half the game looking at your own ass.

Personally, I'd say that rules that require players to stick with their own kind are rather stupid. What happens when everybody in the group is men or perhaps the same race? And under that scenario, you'd technically all be required to be some form of human.

Personally, I'm not the biggest role player, but if I'm going to play a role, I'd rather it have as little to do with my real life as possible.

I know Eschalon isn't a tabletop game, but you can see it on the sleeves and wrists where it got it's influences from. It also moves about as swiftly as a grand D&D campaign, which is a slight problem, considering you are limited to a single PC. Being as such, the game is supposed to encourage specialization; with one small problem.

There is a boatload of specialty skills to choose from and you need a boatload of them to even survive.

The absurd thing is that many skills stop giving benefits after say, 16 levels, whereas others decide to keep going even after sinking 70 skill points into them and either way, there's no logical cap. What's better is that rather than having weapons as an innate benefit tied to your current stats, Eschalon has you spend those precious skill points to improve them.

Like I said. One of my best characters ever was a female barbarian with a penchant for using throwing axes and a two handed broadsword. Brutal.

And for the second part, while many see this as "no excuse" the times were different. I was younger, and our group less progressive.

Ahhh... the days of playing the original Wasteland on an Apple ][c, beating on the Scorpitron for hours with a canteen or a pineapple just to increase Brawling skill...

I didn't take it this way ;-)
I guess it's just that - bad luck. Either the female players just weren't very good or your male players were of the "Gentlemen's club" kind - not being able to include a woman in the play very well. From my experience all-male groups tend to play more violent and raunchy which might turn off female players. Although the raunchiest party I ever DM'd actually had two women (and 2-3 guys)...

I've seen good examples of male players playing female characters, although it's really rare. For good role-playing in this case it's necessary that the player has a very clear image of his character. Playing your own sex/gender you can have your character grow to you more... subconsciously. You play and add details along the way from your guts. Playing "cross" means you have to more actively think about detailing the person you're playing.

As DM I of course do gender crossing all the time, because I play all the NPCs. Some of them are really fleshed out and are recurring (sometimes over real years of playing...), some of them join the party for a quest (like they're my PC for a few evenings). I know that I do put a lot more effort into female characters beforehand and while playing to make them believable and "alive" - and according to my players I'm doing a pretty good job there. They still talk about some of my "creations" after years, like they had met them in the flesh.

On the other hand female players playing male characters are mostly really good... I don't know why that is - maybe we men really are more simple ;-)

What baffles me is that I have never ever met a female DM...

I know that some DMs do not "allow" gender-crossing - probably from bad experience - I don't know. In my case I really don't put limits on the players. I want good role-playing from my players and a badly played female character is not worse than a badly played elf (see "human with pointy ears"). If the character does not work I'll have a word with the player, and if nothing else helps the character will die in a graceful, heroic way and a new one is created.

That said, I've never actually had a transgender player. I've had gay, lesbian and bi-sexual though ;-)

I didn't meet any female role players (other than at Gen Con) until Uni. When I was playing there was a huge bias toward male players. But that was back in the 80/90's. Still a lot of gender based assumptions back then.

I think our 30+ Nottingham LARP Vampire game had about 10 female players. LARPing tended to have a higher male/female ratio.

I 'm sure some of the ladies had GM'ed a few games, but none I've played.

Regarding Drinking and roleplaying. I remember one time some friends got drunk and wanted to play bloodbowl. They proceeded to play it like Subbuteo with his pristine painted figures.

Not baffling to me- I've met few enough female players (really, there is still not nearly as many women who are into the "nerdy stuff" as men, and even among those most I've met are not really into RPGs), and there's always less people who want to play then those who want to DM. Some just don't like it, some don't have the time to prepare all the stuff. That's pretty much how I first became the DM - no one else wanted the job. Fortunately I discovered I like it, and I'm pretty good at it (at least I hope so, but I guess if I sucked the players wouldn't return for another campaign). So with a small base of female players, and the generall unwillingness to DM, it's no surprise to not meet a female DM.

IIRC Kult 2nd Edition, removed random damage from all weapons.

Its health system was x minor wounds equals a serious wound, and n serious wounds equals a fatal wound.
And fatal was fatal.

In first Edition each weapon had a chart, roll a d20 to see which number and type of wounds would be inflicted.

To be be honest once everything was set up, this roll wasn't a major headache. But they removed it for 2nd Ed in favour of set damage. Except they rounded down. A sniper rifle which was fatal on 8 or more was knocked down to Serious wounds.

I still find it baffling... I've met quite a few players over the years, including quite a number of women (although it seems 90% male territory, sadly). Most of the experienced male players have at least tried DMing at some point, I think about 8 out of 10. Maybe 3 out of 10 are DM on regular basis (most player groups I have met play different campaign in parallel with different DMs so the DMs have a chance to play some too). With women it's really 0 out of 10 who have at least tried it. I'm sure there are some female DMs out there, but I have yet to meet one.

Which is kind of sad, because I guess it could be a very interesting experience to have a female story teller - I find ie. female fantasy authors often refreshing to read. The style and "focus" is often very different to male authors. Also, looking at the female players I played with - the creativity is there, some of their characters had really rich and meaningful backstories (which for me is always nice, because I can incorporate things from there into my campaign).
I would understand it if they were all like my wife, who just isn't very interested in the rules and doesn't have the patience to dig into the "paperwork". But some of the women I met (and played with) were a lot more "stats and tables" than I am. One of them I would even consider "power player" (although she really did good role playing too), always trying to "abuse" the system to get maximum effect, be it combat rolls or level-ups.

Out of the 20 Role players in the Northampton RPG Club, I can remember only 2 others that where regular GM's. In the 3 years of playing with them I think there may have been about 6 games where one of the others picked up the GM mantle.

Nottingham, many more players but still it was still the same 5 GMs that ran most games.

If only 1 in 10 players are female and 1 in 10 GM, it's a 100 to 1 odds of catching a female GM.

That said. In roleplaying 1/100 is far more likely than 1/20, specially if you've annoyed the GM.

Damn, this thread really makes me want to play, and it's been almost a year since I've been able to put a group together. I have all those ideas for campaigns and one-off adventures, and nothing to do with them. People just seem to never have the time these days, and really usually it seems like they don't have much of an imperative to play either.

I've not roleplayed since leaving Nottingham. 12 years ago.

Really miss it, but as our lives are; getting the 3-4 hours a week to run a proper session was impossible.

I did buy copies of Fantasy Grounds to do an internet session with a friend, but that didn't work that well.

Still got all my books in the attic

I haven't played for over a year now, since my best friend died... But we have a date with the rest of the players end of the month where we will try to at least bring the campaign to a graceful end... One big session (the kids go to my parents) and a lot of fast-forward...



As I said, most of the players I know at least tried to DM at least once... but none of the women.

I've recently bought Wrath of Ashardalon, one of aseries of D&D board games, and I find it to be a decent substitute. I mean sure, it's not nearly what a proper RPG session should be, greatly simplified and reduced to pure dungeon crawling, but it's still fun and gets some of the spirit, and it's much easier to get people to play a board game for 90 minutes every now and again than to hold weekly, or even monthly regular 4+ hour RPG sessions. If I still won't be able to put a group together then I'll probably buy another one of those board games, Castle Ravenloft looks fun.

Me and the wife played WoW as a kind of RPG fix. While it lacked the openness of a real PnP RPG it was fun finding creative way to win or to use the system against itself. Pretty much why we stopped playing after Cataclysm. It had been dumbed down and simplified to much all creative playing was removed.