Ok, a question:
Who out there has a group or has had a group that was mostly women?
Or one where a woman was the GM?
And what systems did you play?
I know there's me, (mostly women, many days all the players but me are women, and Satine GMs at the comic store about once or twice a week) and there's Dungeon Mistress. There's also some LARPers I know and I know the women on All Games Considered often GM...
And what we play is a matter of public record (for us: mostly old school mostly D&D, though Satine runs 4e. Dungeon Mistress played I think 2e.)
______
Also, to make up for the lack of content in this post, I've added a bunch of pictures to this post, including Mark Twain being serious about his game and Edward Gorey sitting next to a teddy bear...
77 comments:
Most of one group I play with is women. We play 4e, Labyrinth Lord, and Call of Cthulhu mostly.
The group I run stuff for was all women (except me) for about a year or so when it started. (There is now one frequent male player, and one infrequent one). The last group I ran stuff for before that was... 2/3rds female? I think?
Game: various iterations of GUMSHOE, mostly Trail of Cthulhu.
I have, at various points. Systems: D&D 3.5, Pathfinder, Mage: The Awakening, Vampire: The Masquerade.
My introduction to GURPS was with a female GM. Between her and her sister and a friend that group was mostly female.
I've been in a group with a female GM. Amber and Pendragon are the games I chiefly recall being run.
One group I play with is mostly women, generally only having one other guy in it besides myself.
What we play is generally dependent on who is running. Usually its me, so D&D, but there have been a lot of different games run by the women there too.
Occasionally they've been the majority; never the whole group and never had a female GM.
Played a Pathfinder campaign over the sumer of 2010. GM was female. And one of the regular players. Their husbands played. About half the characters were female.
When I started playing in 1979 we had two women (college-age) in the group. I was in Junior High. So, women playing RPGs never seemed at all unusual to me.
See also:
http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?626671-Who-Out-There-Runs-D-amp-D-With-Mostly-Women&p=15408873#post15408873
My current group is 50% women, not counting myself, who's the DM. It's the most even-gendered group I've ever played with. We play Type III D&D, although I'm thinking of switching to AD&D or even older, or Labyrinth Lord heavily modified with house rules.
I have never had more than one woman in any group in which I've participated. None of them were ever the GM. Every one was the girlfriend of one of the male players.
Follow-up: the group is me, three men, and three women.
Responses from G+:
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The rotating group I mainly play with trends heavily towards 3-4 women, 2-3 men (including me), taken over the course of the last seven years or so.
2:14 PM
"Who out there has a group or has had a group that was mostly women?"
I have. My old 4e group was composed of my wife and a few others that would pop in from time to time, the main men playing every game were myself, my partner +Jon Ellis and our friend +Brandon Blair . So we were slightly outnumbered, I suppose.
"Or one where a woman was the GM?"
Yes my wife DMs. She enjoys running Dark Sun and ran a 4e Dark Sun campaign back in AZ.
"And what systems did you play?"
4e and 3.5 DnD, mainly.
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2:16 PM
I had a gaming group in Cleveland, before I moved back to Florida, where I was the only white, straight male. As a kid and through college, my groups were about 30%-60% female.
2:16 PM
I've done more DMing than I've done actually playing. I've run games for all male groups, games for half-and-half groups, and even solo adventures for a female friend of mine that I once had.
Wish I could read the post on Blogspot, but I'm at work and it's blocked. /smirk/
2:19 PM
John Wick used to post on his blog about a nWoD Changling game he ran for an all women group. I haven't been to his blog in over a year (maybe 2?) so I don't know if he is still doing it or not. But he had detailed session reports along with the occasional personal observances about the differences w/ all female players.
2:22 PM
My Sunday afternoon group is 2 men, 5 women.
2:24 PM
have had about 50/50, have had women GMs, haven't played with a majority female group
2:32 PM (edited)
Back when I ran 4e, the group was mostly women. Occasionally all women except me. The core was a group of female friends with some boyfriend hangers-on. One of the ladies occasionally subbed with the 4e-based Gamma World.
More recently with S&W-WB, the balance is closer to even.
This entire crew falls within 24-28 age range now.
2:26 PM
Aside: I thought you were wandering off and couldn't allow your discussion to proceed without you +Levi Kornelsen, and yet here you are... :)
On point: I know women who have all or mostly all female groups, but it's usually majority male with one or two women when I've played over the years.
2:29 PM+1
We should correlate this data with ages...
2:31 PM (edited)
I have a few groups that are either mainly female players or have a female GM.
The games we've played with mainly female players were: Cthulhu (BRP/Trail), Apocalypse World, Vampire, Buffy, Changling, All Flesh Must Be Eaten, Prime Time Adventures, D&D 4E, Dread, and Mouse Guard. But predominantly Cthulhu.
The games we've had a female GM were: Cthulhu (BRP/Trail), Pathfinder, Dread, Burning Wheel, and Buffy.
The above doesn't count one shots which would add way too many games to both lists.
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2:33 PM (edited)
Back in late high school/early college it was pretty much 50/50, player-wise Mostly, it was guys GMing, though occasionally one of the female players would run. These were typically mini campiagns lasting 4-6 sessions. In my circles then, women tended to be more involved with facilitating White Wolf LARPs. I occasionally took part in these DON'TYOUDAREJUDGEME but it wasn't really my thing.
2:31 PMEdit
One shots do not count
best I could manage was 50/50, playing a Storyteller hack set in Middle-earth for 3 years.
2:40 PM (edited)
My home group is about half women, which is a 50 percent improvement on gender balance from before.
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More from asking this question on my G+ feed:
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My current group is all women, except for me. We play several games, depending on mood: ACKS, Unhallowed Metropolis, CoC, M&M(3rd), WFRP and a couple of other things. It depends on what people feel like.
My group before that only had 1 guy aside from me in it. We were playing Unhallowed Metropolis.
My group before that was about 50/50, but the players rotated a lot and there was a lot of trouble meeting.
Back when I was in college I was in several groups, but they seem to have tended towards 80/20 men/women.
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Years ago, I GMed a GURPS Supers game for a group that I think had more women playing than men.
And in my current gaming group, our default GM is a woman. We play indie and story games, including some homebrew stuff (currently Smallville). The longest-running game was sort of Call of Cthulhu mashed up with CyberPunk, using Over the Edge as a system.
Oh, and there was a League of Extraordinary Gentlemen 1930s game, using homebrew simplified Storyteller system, a few years back that had a women GMing and had more women than men playing. And the time I tried out Dogs in the Vineyard, our GM was a woman. (Those are three different women, the two GMs in the paragraph and the one in the previous.)
This would be, uh, almost all my groups ever. Even when I'm not DMing usually I'm in a group that's mostly women, or DMed by a woman.
So: 3e D&D, Arcana Evolved, d20 Modern, 4e D&D, GURPS, Traveller, LotFP:WFRP (that one was all chicks), Pathfinder, Feng Shui, Buffy.
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I play in an occasional 4e group which is 3-2 female-male on the player side. The DM is a guy. It's the DM's sister and wife (two separate people, I might add--sometimes the "Pennsyltucky" reputation precedes itself), my wife and I, and a mutual friend of ours.
I've had a female DM in some of the LFR games I played in Colorado Springs and when I used to LARP, there was a woman in charge of the Plot Committee towards the end of my time at Alliance.
I definitely saw a higher ratio of women running and playing LARPs than Game Store/Con D&D games.
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I've run World of Darkness for a group that eventually turned out half-and-half, and I'm gearing up to run some flavour of something D&D-ish (possibly Errant) for a group in which I'll be the only chap.
I GM online at Paizo a lot (4e, which is a bit perverse, but there you are). Home game varies but is about 50/50 male/female. I'm the only one of the women who GMs at the moment. We rotate depending on schedules.
My current play group is entirely female, except for me. So that's three females, one male. We are currently playing Shadow of Yesterday. In the past we've played Warhammer Fantasy 3rd Edition, Smallville, Dresden Files, Fiasco, A Taste for Murder, Burning Wheel, Rogue Trader, Whispering Vault... I think that gets it all.
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Aaron Gordon3:20 PM
These days my gaming group is 5 men, and 1 woman. I have, in the past been in a group that was 50/50, and briefly joined a group where there were 4 women and 2 men, but the group splintered thanks to incoherent scheduling issues.
Levi Kornelsen3:20 PM
+Stuart Robertson - Yeh, was procrastinating. I hate scrubbing the bathroom.
Ian Burns3:24 PM
Yeah, most of my group of women, although they won't touch GMing with a ten foot pole.
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My last several groups were 50% female, and in most cases everyone took turns running something, so we had no shortage of female GMs.
I ran a 4e game with four gals and three guys for about a year and a half. My groups mostly seem to have at least two women. I haven't played with a female GM since college.
our White Wolf/World of Darkness game is more than half women. I'm running a game very shortly and have run them in the past.
I have been in a couple of Erin Palette's Skype games, most notably a really fantastic L5R one, which had one female play and two males. The ratio of those involved was therefore equal (two gals and two guys).
For much of my time in the hobby I have had a roughly equal number of female to male players. Some of gaming groups have had one or two more men and some have had one or two more women.
Just yesteday I run a game for 3 girls at a manga con. First time ever for they, since it was after an "introduction to rpg" panel we hosted. The system was improvised and ultra-light rules, and the setting was generic fantasy (they chose). pic.
I run a lot of intro games, and I have on average 50% women. Sometimes more women than men, and viceversa. I'm always the DM here, since these are first-time-ever games. I use mostly Mouse Guard as system, but also many others. In my experience women tend to come back more than men.
Also, my actual group are 2 girls and 1 guy. We play with "La Puerta de Ishtar", a spanish-language game (webpage here, but is in spanish, I'm the author). I'm the GM.
My girlfriend runs several LARPs as GM. Mostly medieval or vampire-themed. Usually more women than men in here.
Who out there has a group or has had a group that was mostly women?
Yes, mostly women. More then 60% of the groups.
Or one where a woman was the GM?
For Murderous Ghosts and Shock: Social Science Fiction
And what systems did you play?
Burning Wheel, D&D, GURPS, Shock: Social Science Fiction, Lacuna, Car Wars, Over the Edge, Paranoia, umm probably some others
My old group was about half women at one point, and two of the women ran games, though not for a very long time.
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In my old group, we had one woman who ran the Pendragon RPG and the Hero System. She was damned good at it.
Bennet Akkerman4:07 PM
In a past CoC-campaign, I started with 3 male and 3 female players and ended with 1 male and 3 female players.
Currently, I'm playing in a 3e dnd campaign with a total of 3 male players and 2 female players and a male GM.
I never ran a dnd or gamma world campaign with more than 1 female player. It's a shame one shots do not count, because I ran a lot of CoC one shots which consisted of mostly female players (record of 7 female players and 1 male player). Somehow, most women I know find Call of Cthulhu more interesting than DnD or GW.
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Matthew Goodman4:17 PM
My longest running group consists of two married couples and myself, so 2 women and 3 men. Mostly Cthulhu (we played all the way through Masks, and the Masks group included another male), with some Star Wars, Zeppelin Age, Trail, and now Savage World Space 1889. One of those women ran a 3.5 campaign for her (male) kids, her husband, and me with characters that started at 1st level and got up to 5th. Waaaaaay back in the early 80s my first D&D DM was female, and in addition to D&D (which was Arduin flavored) she ran Traveller and wanted to run Cthulhu, but couldn't get buy in, alas. That was probably a lot to ask from her audience of fellow 8th graders, alas.
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I started gaming with RIFTS and D&D 2e during the 90s: all guys
in the 2000s: post-High School group was Deadlands, D&D 2e, and White Wolf stuff, mostly guys 9/2 ratio usually
in the 2010s: post-college group started with ALL GIRLS, 3-4 females to my 1 male. We would occasionally cycle in the odd extra person, 50/50 split.
My current group is 9 players, 5 girls 4 guys, and me. The players are me (the game master), 3 guys (all PhD professors), three female spouses, and a lesbian couple. Ages range from early 40s to mid 20s.
I've noticed that the females have a higher tendency to play male characters, and are generally more bloodthirsty melee types than the guys.
We started with a female only player group using D&D 3.5, and transitioned the characters and game over to 4e. When we switched, we gained a BUNCH of new players, some who hadn't played since first edition D&D!
I rebooted the story, and everyone has been enjoying playing a loose version of 4e.
For a 4e D&D campaign, I can count the number of combat encounters we've had on one hand. My players are excellent lateral thinkers, and frequently sidestep violent encounters.
The big group just had its first anniversary recently.
My longest running D&D group was made out almost entirely of women (save only for myself).
We started playing Everquest RPG, but transitioned to Type IV once I had the ability to. It is still my favourite gaming group to date.
Also, half of the women playing played male characters, and I played a recurring female NPC that helped them along.
The composition of my old 3.x campaign was 50/50 for about a year (6 players.)
Most of my AD&D campaigns have had at least one woman player and on occasion, have started out with say, two women and one man, then the ratio would change as more players, mostly male, would join in.
My ex-wife gamed, my two oldest friends are married to each other and game, we knew other gaming couples, etc.
The group we've had since college is just about half women, with some fluctuations either way. We've played Palladium Fantasy, RIFTS, Type 3 D&D, MERP, Star Wars (West End and d20), Labyrinth Lord, Serenity and assorted homebrews.
My wife ran the Serenity campaign.
My current group is three guys and two women (and has been for a few years). One woman is a fairly new gamer who GMed us in her first campaign last year using Mutants & masterminds (and it was awesome). The other is a veteran gamer who has GMed a lot in the past, but favors Pathfinder/D&D 3.x (also awesome). We rotate GMs, so it goes around.
As a group, we've done WoD, GURPS, M&M, D&D 3.x, Over the Edge, and Fate. I am GMing Fate currently.
I have run games for women, in fact I often write con games especially for women. But when gaming at home, I just enjoy the chance to be away from the skirt swishers. The memsahib runs in occasionally with half time oranges or with an additional bottle of port.
I think one of the reasons our marriage has been such a success is that we get these little holidays away from each other.
You are the first person I have ever encountered who has expressed the desire to escape the company of women
*raises hand*
OWoD (naturlich), Cyberpunk 2020, Fading Suns
Only one ongoing game that ever reliably crossed the 50% line - a Buffy-ish homebrew game run 2000-2002 (with a 2007 revival) that was usually three-to-two. A bunch of one-offs with female majority though, over the years.
Oh, I did that. Entirely Savage Worlds, some of it a Zombie Run story and then Scairy Tales, which went over well.
I have played in quite a few woman GM'ed groups , mostly in first and second ed AD&D, Vampire (table top not LARP), Paranoia and Toon.
I have run quite a few all girl player groups , First Ed Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, Cyberpunk, Second Ed Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, basic set and blue book Dungeons and Dragons, Shadowrun, Champions , Call of Cthulhu, and quite a few wargames and I find they are remarkably similar to all male groups , with the exception that they generally seek out more information and backstory. I have also found that you need to throw in a lot more detail on food and drink to keep them happy . They love getting competitive with any "old boys" network of players.
Hi, who is the lady with the throne? :)
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Many of the groups I've played in have been fifty-fifty or thereabout--maybe one more player of one sex than the other or so. I have run one campaign that was mostly female players--iirc there were 4 female players and, depending on when during the campaign, either 1 or 2 male players, with me as the (male) GM. I've played in, I think, one long-term campaign with a female GM (D&D); the players were about 50-50. I've played in numerous con games and one shots with female GMs; some of those have also had mostly female players.
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My first group had 7 players of whom 5 were women. We played AD&D. A few players dropped in and out - all the replacements were women as well.
ran a mostly female group for four years, in our heyday up to 13 people.
Teenagers From Outer Space, Cyberpunk, Call of Cthulhu, FASA Trek.
Best crew I ever threw dice for. I miss 'em.
I have played with women in the past and my current group is 50% women (2 girls and 2 guys including me). I've never played with a female GM but my lover is one of my players and is really interested in GMing. I expect she will do so before long.
We play Swords & Wizardry.
I am a female GM. I almost exclusively run games - I rarely play. My group ranges from 20% to 50% female depending on which subset of my players are in a particular game.
The only place I've ever had a female GM for tabletop was at a con.
When I write LARPs I write 50% male and 50% female roles, and never have a problem filling either (though occasionally people want to be cross-cast, which is fine with me).
I rarely play in LARPs not written by a member of my group, and we all follow the same writing / casting principle.
The primary games I've run: D&D, Vampire, Shadowrun, Nobilis, 7th Sea, Ars Magica, homebrew tabletop, homebrew LARP.
Last year the group I gamed with was always more women than men, spending most of the year being 2/3 women. We played Call of Cthulhu and Pathfinder.
The year before, the group I played with was a 50/50 split, though it spent a few months being 2/3 women. With that group, we played both D&D 3.5 and 4.
My current gaming group was usually split 50/50 depending on the day. There were several times though when we had only women players.
I was the GM though so there was always one guy.
We played a modern fantasy version of villains and vigilantes. The game is sort of taking a break for the summer.
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At one point I gamed with a rotating group of about 8 people, 3 of whom were girls. The girls almost always showed up while the attendance from the guys ranged anywhere from 2 to 5.
I occasionally play with a group now that's about 60% women.
In high school I didn't game with any girls at all.
For age comparisons I went to high school in the 90s and have never done any LARPing whatsoever.
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It's always nice to be special.
My friend Kath has DM'd GURPS Vikings and Cthulhu. But she usually plays.
The groups I DM for trend about 1/3 female. I play in a SAGA Star Wars game run by a female DM.
One of the groups I played with back in high school included me and five girls. Most of the groups I've played with for any length of time since then were usually a 50/50 split and I can remember only one group that was all male.
I'm not counting Google Plus games which seem to be dominated by men. I haven't played a G+ game with more than on woman in the group yet.
As for systems, we played mostly 2nd edition D&D. There was also a lot of Amber, Ars Magica, WoD (the first one, including all the subgames after vampire the masquerade like mage and fairie), Legend of the Five Rings, D6 Star Wars, Hero Fantasy, RIFTS, TMNT and Toon.
Jen was one of our best GMs and Cassandra was one of our worst (but not THE worst, she had her moments).
Played in an all-women-but-me 2e group for several years back in the late 90s. Have always had at least one, often several, female players in all of my other groups for the last 20+ years.
God that makes me feel old.
I am almost 43 now and have been playing RPGs, mostly D&D of one sort or another, since I was in 5th grade. When I was younger, pre-teen up through my college years, we rarely had more than one girl in the group at any given time/campaign.
Now that I am older almost all the people that I play with are women. I almost always GM, my wife and two daughters play, so that skews it a bit, but I also get more women coming to the game from outside my immediate family than men. My average D&D party probably has 3 guys playing (1 of whom is my son) and 1 DMing, and 6 women.
I have never LARPed, but I am in the SCA, and I did meet some of my gaming group there.
I've played in a game of Conspiracy X and also an extended Type IV campaign that were both run by a female GM.
Most groups I play with and have played with had around 40% women, some more. Games I GM are generally in my own homebrew system and I have had predominantly female players in some groups. Female GMs I have played under (is that the correct word for the spatial relation of GM and player?) have used anything from Call of Cthulhu to 7th Sea or Deadlands. Don't really see a pattern in it. Player is player in my eyes.
One of the two groups I'm currently playing with and GMing is about 70% girls (although, if I had to be realistic about our ages, they should qualify as women) and most of them have GMed.
Through the years we've been playing D&D type III, Stargate d20, Witchcraft, some WoD, Firefly, Supernatural, Superheroes Inc. (a spanish game), 7th Sea, and currently DC Adventures, Dresden Files, Dragon Age and Shadowrun.
I've played in several groups with one woman in the group, never more than one, and they weren't ever the DM. But gaming with one woman at the table hasn't been all that uncommon, and while they're usually attached to one of the players, that hasn't always been the case (80/20 maybe).
The current group is comprised of 4 males & 5 females when everyone shows up; me, the male DM, makes things exactly even.
We play "D&D [Version]" which is what Type Five aspires to be.
The Pathfinder group from a couple of years ago was 80% female.
I'm currently DMing a 4e DND game (my wife) and playing in a Deathwatch game (2 females) and a Shadowrun game (DM's wife).
Never had more females than males in a group, but always had females in every groups i ever made or joined.
Since people are bringing up The Distant Past: the high school group I was in had 1 or 2 girls out of eight or nine players. I had arrived in the group after Some Unspeakable Drama where at least one other girl left.
My last year of high school I ran a Vampire game for three girls. Stuck with the World of Darkness through college and wound up running a Wraith game for 8 players with about a 50 / 50 split. Terrible game system, but great group. The women had far and away the better / more original character concepts.
Finished a Diaspora campaign that was 3 women and 1 man playing, plus me (male GM). That's probably the highest percentage; it was almost an all-women group until a player's husband joined.
I've almost always been the GM in my groups, so not very many female GMs happening in those games. I played with a group once in the 90s whose regular GM was a woman, but they played hardcore Rifts and were not so good with new players so it was brief.
In the game I GM there are three regular players, who are all female, and three casual "join every few sessions" players; couple of girls and a guy. We've been playing modified 4e for a year now. They asked me to teach them D&D. I hadn't played RPGs for years and jumped at the opportunity.
I've never had a female GM and before this I had only played with girls at one-off occasions, though I mostly played within a fairly closed friend group.
My regular pool of players consists of about 75% girls. Most of the time at least 2 out of 4, sometimes 3 out of 4 active players are female. We mostly play Vampire: The Requiem and various incarnations of FATE.
Once, I GM'ed an all-girl Vampire: The Masquerade group.
I'm fascinated to see how many LARPers are responding with female players. It has me wondering if the artifice of costuming is one way to tear down the barriers to entry into gaming. I know my experience with LARPing in the late 90s was more "playing dressup" and less "RP gaming".
I've never done SCA, but I have played Amtgard and I noticed the female player base there was much higher than the local pen&paper averages as well.
I ran a long-running campaign at my college. Average, we has 4-5 women and 1-2 guys. I run a pretty straightforward 3.5 campaign with my own gods and interpretation of races. My current group is 2 girls 1 guy. I guess I just have more ladyfriends.
Favorably impressed! I used to think I was one of the few who had the pleasure of mastering for an almost all female group (two decades ago) for several years.
I also mastered for a group consisting only of extremely intelligent (gifted) women (except me) more recently, but that held up only for two sessions. Was fun though.
Currently gaming with a group in which all 7 players are women.
It was a group *mostly* composed of women, but the 2 male players recently left, one to university, the other to live with his fiancé out east.
To supplement the group's numbers, we have 3 newer female gamers:
L, whom I work with; J, who I've gamed with before; and A, J's teenage daughter.
When the group was mostly women, we played in the Weird Adventures setting using the Spirit of the Century (FATE 3e) rules.
Now, the group is going to be playing Deadlands: Reloaded.
I think that I've only had one regular group in my whole life that was male-majority, though a fair percentage of most of my groups, myself included, are trans women, so it's an unusual situation to begin with.
I'm also the most consistent GM I know.
GURPS, Zenobia, Exalted, FATE, Atomic Highway, StarORE are the systems that have powered my campaigns with the female players outnumbering the men. Never had such a group for a D&D game.
Sorry I'm late to the party, but if you still want to know:
My group is usually mostly women. On the days it is not, it is split 50/50.
The games are: FASERIP, Vampire: VtM, D&D(Edition doesn't matter version), Serenity RPG, Buffy RPG and Shadowrun 4E.
2 men have GM'd. 2 women have GM'd.
You didn't ask but our age demographics are:
2 female teenagers
1 male 20's
2 female 20's
1 male 30's
1 female 50's
1 male 60's
My main group is 2 women, 2 men, with me (male) or my girlfriend (one of the aforementioned) DMing.
Gotta say, I haven't done a sit-down RPG in about a decade at this point. I can say my longest-lived and best RPG experience was in an all-female group. Female, in the sense of 'assigned female at birth, no Y chromosomes'; we didn't allow transwomen; in fact we excluded women who slept with men. Yes, lesbian separatist gamers. (Apparently our boundless and depthless hate and wrongness left us some time for rolling dice? It's puzzling, sometimes.) There were five/six in the core group, with various dropins over the nearly five happy ridiculous years it lasted.
Oh, and what did we play? Tekumel.
(Mostly. A fair amount of Traveller too.)
I can't explain this. It's tempting to throw out some references to how our cocks were obviously bigger than those of breeder gamers, or something, but it would be too transparent a distraction from the fact there doesn't seem to be much rational justification or explanation for this.
-Kim
Well you were a funny person, weren't you?
On the other hand, I can see the appeal of limiting activity partners to _only_ people you potentially wanted to sleep with.
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