Woman who Play SW RPG Were are you

Ok I am a male GM and Player of SW. I run a mixed game with half Women and the other half Men we range from ages 25 to 38. Most of my Female players have never picked up a RPG book let alone played. The only reason my female friends play is because they love the movies and the Universe. I want to know are their experienced Female GM?s or Players out there? I would like to know what most of you think about this subject. I find women play well but they are so hard to find.

 

Having been a gamer in the SW universe for the last 11 (12?) years, I can honestly say that we women are a rare occurance. Most of my RPG's consist of myself as the only female.

While I agree that women make excellent gamers (if they have the imagination for it) but they rarely put the time into researching the world beyond what they hear. I know exactly one other female who games who will read through the books before she jumps into a new world.

While Star Wars is a popular gaming system, alot of people don't realize that you can't always do everything you want to in a gaming world. Alot of women I've gamed with lose interest after the first game because they -can't- make a Jedi Knight or a really powerful warrior. They don't understand, and don't care to take the time to understand, how the system works.

That's just my experiences though. Very rarely do women have the same dedication to a game that the men I've gamed with do.

 

I suggest you to take a look to The Slayer's Guide to Female Players. It's a D&D supplement but who cares?

 

Well, I've been a GM since '82, my players have changed over the course of time but they always were approximately 50/50 (male to female ratio I mean). I'm GMing WEG's SW RPG in my current group - we started the campaign about 6 years ago, paused for a while to play some other RPGs and returned to SW this year. I didn't notice a difference between male and female RPGing behavior so far - all the players who stayed in the group are imaginative, able to improvise and know how to stay in character.
Oh yes, nearly forgot, I'm female too.

 

U WANT FEMALES WELL HERE'S A DAMN GOOD JEDI FEMALE RIGHT HERE
name's Mariel Nabberrie nice 2 meet u

 

As a reliativly new gamer myself, I can honestly say the major reason most of the Ladies I know remain outside the gaming community is because of several reasons: 1) the normal (and totally false) sitgma that all gamers are lonely geeky guys who sit around and talk about all the technical aspects of the movies and such (this was actually my thoughts until I was asked to sit in on a game and decided then and there that I had to play.)
2) they have no contact with other gamers and are shy to post and ask to participate.

These are the reasons I have encountered. In our group we have 3 ladies now who are slowly learning the game, and getting better regularly.

 

My gaming group has a ratio of 3:2 girls to guys

 

I all my life I have only RPGd with one female. . .sad isn't it.

I think the problem is that in my island, the idea that RPGers are geeks is multiplyied AND also that most people have no idea what tha' heck an RPG is.

 

I must lead the most sheltered life of any gamer on this site. In my twelve years of gaming approximately 2 women have joined our group. One did so for just one session, to appease her boyfriend (who was a regular at the table). The other did so because the alternative was hanging out in the cold with a bunch of broke losers who stood around and smoked weed all day. She actually stuck around for a few sessions. Maybe it's a local stigma for women, but most in my neighborhood wouldn't play an RPG with someone elses brain. Kinda disturbing.

 

I always feel a need to chime in on this subjet. I'm sure a shrink would have something interesting to say about that.

Anyway, I'm a female gamer and GM. I?ve been gaming for perhaps four or five years now. I forget exactly when I started, but I was in college, and one of my friends (also a girl) kept talking about these Star Wars adventures she was having, and I was intrigued and asked if there was a chance I could join. So before I really understood what I was getting myself into, I was creating a character and starting to play. I enjoyed myself a lot, and I even started my own campaign. (Which fell apart really ugly-like after 8 months or so.) The original group was 4-5 men to us two women, but the group I ran was an even split, not including me.

Since then, I?ve played fantasy and super hero games as well, and there?s usually one or two more guys than girls. I run two online games, though, and they?re all women.

I don?t notice as much anymore the preponderance of men to women. More interesting to me is the fact that it?s really difficult to find the ?right? kind of gamers. I?m interesting in the ROLE-playing aspect of gaming. I don?t care as much about rules and stats and how many monsters I kill. I enjoy getting into character and interacting with others and doing things I can?t normally do. When someone asks me what ?level? my character is, they get blank stares, because I don?t really care. Not that I don?t enjoy getting more experienced and stronger characters, but that?s not why I play. I play for the characters and the story.

Here are two examples of the reason I think many women don?t game:

First, a guy invited me to join his D&D game, based on Tolkien?s world. I was interested to see how he would integrate the game with the stories I?d read, and I was excited about getting to know a new group of characters and creating a story together. More than anything else, really, I was suffering gaming withdrawal. (Which explains more than anything else why I stuck with it so long.)

I explained to the guy that I wanted to be like a Rider of Rohan, and all I got was a blank stare. Very disturbing. He apparently hadn?t even read the books for years and years. That should have clued me in. But instead, I happily created a character background.

Which he then changed. A lot. Instead of a fairly normal character who happens to be able to out-ride a Mongul, I ended up with a character who had been gang-raped and then born the child of the leader of the gang. All before we start gaming, mind you. Again, I see now that I should have backed out, but I thought it might be interesting to play and deal with these issues.

Did I get to? NO! All we did was ride around and try to kill things and usually barely survive to drag ourselves back to town (which we had to do in order to actually GET our experience), at which point I would go up at least one level, sometimes two, and then we?d go out and do it all again. It became all I could do to keep my character alive. I started maxing all the fighting stats I could, throwing role-playing to the wind. (I thought it would have been cool for her to become a priestess of the diety that saved her, but I wanted her to survive, so I ended up scrapping that idea.) Everyone else in the group was doing similar things. It basically became us vs. the DM, including not only maxing stats, but rules arguments and even some people rerolling when they didn?t like the roll and the DM wasn?t looking. It was ugly. I finally gave up and quit the group.

The second experience was not as bad as it could have been, because the first prepared me for it. Another guy invited me to show up for a gaming session. I had left accepting the invitation to the last minute, and figured I?d get a ?No, sorry, but how about we create a character for the next session?? Instead, it was ?Sure! No problem! Come on in!? Now, the way I and my favorite GMs run things, it generally takes some good planning to add another character to a group. So I figured it was just going to be a hack-and-slash adventure.

 

I love having female gamers in my groups because as guys we do tend to be a bit more hack n slash and the females in the group help add another dimension to the game. Now having said that, I have played with female hack n slashers as well and they are were worse than us guys alot of the time.

 

I've played SWRPG for about the last 8-9 years I believe, whenever the first D6 system came out. I've actually found a lot of women willing to play. Other officers or Staff NCOs mostly.

 

Ok, it's official. Women Gamers, NYC NEEDS YOU!

 

I'm a girl, I love SW RPG, but I can't find anyone to play it with me
I love D&D, and have a group that plays frequently, but they aren't into SW

 

We have a group of 6 people and there is only one male *fg*

but our 8-year old rpg group don't stop by SW... Hellboy, MERP, BESM, Toons, Shadowrun and so on and so on...

at many points in our rpg history we had more males but the last two didn't play excessivly (sp?) enough (we play each saturday 3pm-11pm/12pm) and they wanted to sleep or drink or stuff...

so now we are only 6 weird peolpe, but we really don't have problems with female players

 

That's kinda strange, I would think women would prefer SW over D&D. That's just tragic that someone would actually take D&D over StarWars. Don't get me wrong, I've been playing D&D3e on and off since it came out (waiting to see what 3.5e is going to look like), but if someone asks between the two, no contest. Rather play, GM or watch StarWars over D&D. Especially GM.

 

Hey even if a girl joined a game that would probably balance the game out. It would add a fresh new female prespective to a normally male dominated game. I myself love girls!



YEAH BABY!!!

 

I really, really wish I had a group for SWRPG...

 

Yeah, you're right... to have both.. male and female... in a group boost up the perspective a lot...

take our SW Dark Jedi campaign... we have there 5 players: 4 are female and 1 is male...
we have 3 female characters and two male characters... it's really interesting which course of action we take depending on our sexual mix *g*we are a little bunch of seductrive witches and the male characters stand and watch us women manipulate our surrounding

in our rebell group it's the same mix again... 4 female players, 1 male - 3 female characters, 2 male (my girlfriend plays men veeeery often *fg*)... the males in the spec force strike team are the squad leader and the field medic...

hm... I really don't know how it is to play in a single sex group: for one I'm a girl myself and so it's quite scifi for me to play in a "only males" rpg group *fg*... but since we started our little weekly rpg-adventures 8 years back there was a balance... hm... maybe it's easier in Germany to make that real... maybe we just were lucky

in your place I would just show some women you know that RPG isn't the nerd producing hack and slay poodoo many think it is...

I wish you every luck; it wouldn't be fun for ME to play without guys... so I can imagine how it is to play without us...

keep looking and hoping, chums

EDIT: some posts earlier I said we had 6 people (me in) and now I'm saying we are 5... that 'cause the girlfriend of my brother don't get the feeling of SW and for now don't want to play this system :/

and for the original question: 8 years is a lot of time to produce great GMs... we are all very good (I think) and try to perfectionate our skills as story-tellers every adventure... I think there's no difference between male and female GMs if they have the talent to tell stories and the guts to control a bunch of weirdos through the action

 

I don't know any girls who like RPG. A mater of fact the girls I know look at me as a geek (I am ) and stay away from me. The only ways I get girls into my RPGs is to introduce them as NPCs. Nothing like the real thing though . Female RPGers, San Diego needs you!

 

I play RPG for 8 years now, I've met my wife there.
RPG is a very important part of my life.
We are lookes upon as geeks, nerds, maniacs and worse, but that's only from folks who don't have a clue what a RPG might be. So I don't smurfing care.

I am female but that doesn't really help balancing the group I think, because I almost always play male characters, because I somehow cannot personate female characters, they just don't come out right... I really don't know why...

 

this is my wife i talked about

 

Kyp, if you're in NYC I've got a group that can always use another. Generally well behaved, and sometimes actually intelligent!

 

sadly, Tremaniac, I'm a west coaster... and not even a californian, at that

 

I have to say that my new game has 60% women and 40% men go figure!!!!