Your StoriesThis is a place for you to tell us about your experiences playing D&D, both positive and negative.*
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Your StoriesThis is a place for you to tell us about your experiences playing D&D, both positive and negative.*
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If you’re a woman reading this who has never played Dungeons and Dragons, or any other roleplaying games, or any sort of game at all--I want to invite you to play. I hope this entire website serves as an invitation. This invitation is both very real and an idea that you can take for yourself.
For the real part join our facebook group and we can connect you with some other ladies that want to play online. (I for one would be down for some one-shots on roll20.)
As for the idea of an invitation, many of you are interested but no one has gone so far as to invite you. I know this because whenever I gush about my own group to other women, I’m often met with so much interest, so many who want to play but don’t see the D&D community as a place where they could belong.
That’s because for so long the invitation wasn’t extended to us. We're here to change that.
D&D has long been a boys club, passed down to younger brothers and sons. Here’s a couple of examples from one of my favorite online D&D resources--Matt Colville. (If you haven’t seen his youtube videos, just throw on one of his playlists and listen as background noise even. I could listen to that man talk about MLB and be entertained.)
In this video Matt is making a character using the original edition rules. “I started playing in the 80s and yeah even though we were playing Advanced Dungeons and Dragons we had learned how to play from older brothers who had played this edition.”
“None of [my friends] started by reading the books and figuring it out on their own. All of them, including me started because people they know, often their older brothers or people in the grade ahead of them, ran D&D for them and they watched that guy running the game and thought I could do that."
And here’s the thing. I don’t believe many of those older brothers meant to exclude their little sisters. It just wasn’t a thing girls were supposed to be into. And many kids, many adults even, don’t put much thought into why we think certain things. Why was this for boys and not for girls?
Guess what. Women like to play games. Guess what. Women like to roleplay and interact with others. Guess what. Women enjoy exploring and fighting and using their imagination and reading books. Guess what. Women can like anything men can like and men can like anything women can like. Because... you know--people are complex.
What I’m saying is, the more women we have playing and DMing, the more women get invited to play. So. We’d like to be your older sister. And we’d like for you to be someone else’s older sister. Invite your little sister to a game. Even if neither of you have played but are both interested. We’re here for you! Invite her and invite yourself!
When Rachel first approached me about being in an all lady campaign I immediately loved the idea. Just talking about it already felt so special and exciting. She invited a couple of friends, I invited a couple of friends and today we have a group I wouldn’t change for the world.
Gaming groups (like many groups) tend to to move along to other games together. My mixed gender Pathfinder group also played Gamma World and Edge of the Empire together. All of the same people. It’s not intentionally exclusive, but we invite those we have relationships with or who have experience. And that’s one of the ways communities tend to stay homogenized. That’s not going to change. Even in our all lady group it happened. One of the players is in another D&D campaign with Rachel and another player is a friend I played Pathfinder with. It makes sense, these women were tried and true fans of RPGs. Why wouldn’t we invite them?
But we also invited other women who had never played a pen and paper RPG before and guess what--they loved it.
Our all women group isn’t meant as an indictment of men. But in order to subvert the paradigm sometimes you need to take it to the next step. When businesses say they’re trying to hire as many women as possible, they still oftentimes end up with the same skewed male-female ratio. Because once again, women may not have access to as much experience or existing relationships. But how the hell do you get that ball rolling?
You start all women D&D groups. You invite yourself to the party. And you invite others.
Written by Mell Rhodes. She knows you will accept this crazy invitation and be the most loved lady at the table--the one who brings the booze or snacks. Find her on Twitter @mellrhodes where she's forever fancasting Young Justice.
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August 2017
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