Girl Gamers, Girl Game Masters

[havocthecat]

So, for the roleplayers out there, I have a question: How often do you find women and girls running their own games? I've been gaming for 23 years now, and had more gamemasters than I can think about, but only a few women.

Mostly, I want to talk about women as gamemasters, and how your experience has been either with running a game, or with a woman running a game you're playing in. Why are there less women than men who are out there running games? Especially when there are plenty of women with experience at gaming.

Comments

[wabbitseason]

I've only gamed for a couple of periods. Oddly I've had at least two female GMs, one for a lengthy Star Trek campaign, one for a superhero game. I'm actually trying to remember if any of the other women in our groups tried their hand at GMing. I even tried it for a short stint on a Timelords RPG, a time travel game where you're playing yourselves. I had an easier time coming with ideas for the campaign rather than the mechanics unfortunately. I didn't realize any of that was unusual, but then the college gaming group came from the local SCA shire/barony. They loved switching off on games, so they didn't get into a rut. The superhero game was more recent experience and that was an all-girl gamer campaign -- GM, players, characters. I wish that had lasted longer.

[copracat]

I used to game at university (decades ago) but stopped when I dumped that bunch of people due to their the patronising sexism.

I tried again when I moved towns, but while the new bunch had a few women, they were still dominated by sexist guys and worse, the GM was extremely by the book so it was boring, too.

Edit: by which I mean to say: I have never had a female GM.

[havocthecat]

I've had some really great women GMs. Actually, I've generally had a better experience with the women GMs than the men, especially when LARPing. (This doesn't hold true 100% of the time, of course, with all women GMs being great, and all men GMs being horrible.)

I remember showing up to the uni gaming group once or twice. (Twice, actually. Two different places and groups.) I remember walking out from each group and swearing I was never, ever going to deal with them again. Actually, I had that experience with a fair number of misogynist gaming groups.

My friend Liz and I stunned our respective significant others into silence when we started bonding about how we would keep our gaming cred under wraps, because of the misogyny. It felt very vindicating not to be the only one who heard, "Oh my God, our characters are the same alignment. They should date!"

[animeshon]

I have to admit I've never had a female GM, but the boys I game with are pretty good when they're away from certain other elements. When I first started playing with them they were a bunch of misogynistic tools, but then I started playing with them away from one of the other players and they've been great.

I'm trying to get in being a GM myself, but its been really hard getting the guys to organise their characters so no luck so far. I know for myself I haven't really gotten into running the game myself because I enjoy playing it too much, and also an element of hesitation. I'm always loath to start something new in case I'm terrible at it. But I gave it a short running an Exalted premade adventure and had a ball so now I'm more open to trying on my own

[meaghan_bullock]

Well, I'm a woman who runs her own games quite a bit. Also, usually half the GMs of our LARP (it's a team of five to six) are women. This is mostly because we've got most of the boys acceptably trained to not be sexist jerks; it helps when your players are not constantly staring at your bosom or assuming that you exist to please them.