I've been seeing more women at conventions, but most seem more interested in cosplay than role-playing games.

>5)  The audience changed from 88% male to 50% male for 5e, but this was not a reduction in the number of males playing but instead a huge additional growth in the number of females playing along with a growth in the number of males playing. This  doubled the size of the audience, in addition to high school boys and now high school girls, which was a big growth accelerator.

I'm calling that a lie. I've picked up one woman player online.  When I go to hobby shops I see about 10% - 15% women, which includes staff.  When I go to conventions I see a lot of women present, cosplaying, drinks and spouses/girl friends, although one time a guy bought his decerped mother in a wheel chair to play.  At the tables, again maybe 15%.

I think Winninger is using some leftarded firms who lie about demographics or D&D Beyond with dudes who call themselves chicks and put on some nail polish.

Quote from: MerrillWeathermay on January 24, 2025, 09:01:49 AM

Quote from: RNGm on January 23, 2025, 06:25:43 PMI'm going to press x to doubt that half the 5e playerbase is female.   Has it increased over the past 20 years?  Absolutely, my guess is that it's possibly doubled!  From 10-15% to 20-30% at most and that upper limit includes people that transitioned during that period as well.

agreed: every convention I have been to, including Gamehole last October had a 5e WOTC D&D room

that room was entirely populated by guys (99%+), most of them younger, almost all of them extremely overweight and sickly. I hate to use the term neckbeard, but it was an ocean of neckbeard

the only women playing 5e are the ones grifting on YouTube and pretending to be gamers.

women do like to play Call of Cthulhu and some other RPGs

This is an actual sourced study on what women don't want to date hobby wise.

Most unattractive:
#1: Comic books
#3: Debating
#5: MTG

Those three have a lot in D&D, anyone here can't remember debating a modifier for an attack?  Women historically look at D&D as unnatractive.


https://datepsychology.com/the-most-and-least-attractive-male-hobbies/

Quote from: honeydipperdavid on January 24, 2025, 08:11:30 PMI think Winninger is using some leftarded firms who lie about demographics or D&D Beyond with dudes who call themselves chicks and put on some nail polish.

Yeah, it reminds me of the study the video game industry was using years ago to justify the switch to female protagonists in so many AAA console and PC games.   The study said almost half of video gamers were female but it turns out they counted people who casually played Candy Crush and similar mobile games in that poll.  While technically true, that's not particularly a strong crossover audience with console shooters and action games that they were changing as a result.  Again, I do agree that the percentage of female hardcore gamers has increased over the past 20 years but it's no where near half like they're pretending to justify the massive shift in target audience industry wide.

You guys realize they ask gender in every survey, and for your DnDBeyond account, right? I mean, you can critique their data all you want of course, but it's definitely superior data to your personal experience.  Their sales sure show they're doing something right.

Quote from: Mistwell on January 24, 2025, 09:57:42 PMYou guys realize they ask gender in every survey, and for your DnDBeyond account, right? I mean, you can critique their data all you want of course, but it's definitely superior data to your personal experience.  Their sales sure show they're doing something right.

That's a good point.   I honestly don't use dndbeyond much (tried a 5e campaign for about 8 months during lockdowns but that's it) but I didn't see any option for me to declare my gender on my profile.   Do you know where it's listed?  No sarcasm as I'm genuinely asking since I didn't see it but I'm definitely NOT an expert nor was my search particuarly exhaustive.   Given their politics, it seems like a dicey (pun intended) proposition for them unless they have all 47 in a pull down menu or let you just self declare whatever gibberish you want.

Quote from: Mistwell on January 24, 2025, 09:57:42 PMYou guys realize they ask gender in every survey,

"Gender"

Quote from: Mistwell on January 23, 2025, 02:48:43 PMThey discovered, accidentally, that by scaling down the number of products they published, the remaining books they did publish sold a lot more. In fact they were not losing in total sales by producing 3-4 books per year versus producing far more books per year. The prior TSR policy of selling 60 books per year was cannibalizing book sales from each other, and to some extent that had been still happening with 3e and even 4e. Even though they knew signs of this problem had been seen in 1998's surveys.

The fact a company's own products can be competing against each other shows just how much of a zero sum game this market actually is. And lots of designers seem to be in complete denial of this.

Quote from: Anon Adderlan on January 25, 2025, 12:03:04 AM

Quote from: Mistwell on January 23, 2025, 02:48:43 PMThey discovered, accidentally, that by scaling down the number of products they published, the remaining books they did publish sold a lot more. In fact they were not losing in total sales by producing 3-4 books per year versus producing far more books per year. The prior TSR policy of selling 60 books per year was cannibalizing book sales from each other, and to some extent that had been still happening with 3e and even 4e. Even though they knew signs of this problem had been seen in 1998's surveys.

The fact a company's own products can be competing against each other shows just how much of a zero sum game this market actually is. And lots of designers seem to be in complete denial of this.

Not necessarily. It's possible to saturate a market. We saw it with X-Wing Miniatures. The game was very sucessful and very popular, so FFG started pumping out expansions. Eventually they covered all the major aspects of gameplay, and everyone had plenty of ships. They painted themselves into a corner, so to speak.

 

Quote from: Ratman_tf on January 24, 2025, 07:21:28 PMFunny how we're focusing on the number of women in the hobby part of the post.

Mainly because this assertion is clearly and demonstrably untrue.

Quote from: honeydipperdavid on January 24, 2025, 08:23:56 PMhttps://datepsychology.com/the-most-and-least-attractive-male-hobbies/

I had no idea the dating community gave so much thought to Archery and Blacksmithing. Is this survey from the middle ages?

Quote from: RNGm on January 24, 2025, 09:50:18 PMYeah, it reminds me of the study the video game industry was using years ago to justify the switch to female protagonists in so many AAA console and PC games.   The study said almost half of video gamers were female but it turns out they counted people who casually played Candy Crush and similar mobile games in that poll.  While technically true, that's not particularly a strong crossover audience with console shooters and action games that they were changing as a result.  Again, I do agree that the percentage of female hardcore gamers has increased over the past 20 years but it's no where near half like they're pretending to justify the massive shift in target audience industry wide.

To be fair though, if I'm going to have to be looking at someone's backside for hours, I'd rather it be a representation of an attractive woman's. Lara Croft is a thing for a reason.

The same logic held for oh so many third-party supplements during the d20 glut too; put a hot chick on your cover to grab eyeballs of the largely male demographic.

I'd honestly agrue that particular initiative wasn't some acknowledgement of increasing numbers of female players as that their primary demographic likes eye candy.

The woke, of course, insisted eventually that all the women be uglified and that's where you're really seeing the falloff. Turns out there pretty much ARE objective standards of female beauty (with cultural preferences within the range). Middle-aged, blue-haired landwhale with piercings, tats and a buzzcut is basically the antithesis of all those standards.

My bet would be that, like the candy crush example above, the demographic numbers were snagged from the WoD LARPing heyday and presented as if that was the norm. I also remember a lot of women attanding Origins in the 00's, but that was definitely during the LARP heyday (even D&D settings like Arcanis were hosting LARP events then).

I also think the prevalence of online gaming via Roll20 likely skews the demographic slightly more female, but only in the digital sphere, the number of women showing up at the FLGS venues for RPGs is about the same as always... there has been a notable uptick in women turning up for boardgame nights though.

Quote from: Chris24601 on January 25, 2025, 08:41:01 AMI also think the prevalence of online gaming via Roll20 likely skews the demographic slightly more female, but only in the digital sphere, the number of women showing up at the FLGS venues for RPGs is about the same as always... there has been a notable uptick in women turning up for boardgame nights though.

In private games or are you referring to streamed games that you watch?   I'd agree with the latter but the representation seems curated to me personally as they almost always magically hit the proscribed number of check boxes of every type for practically every campaign.  I've been mostly online RPGing since the pandemic started (with only a few months worth of exceptions in total including just this past weekend ironically) and I'd say that only about 1/4 to 1/5 of the online crowd (whether on discord, roll20, foundry, etc) I've met in dozens of games (unfortunately no successful long time campaigns though much to my dismay) is female.  It's not like the online sessions have been turning others away most of the time so this is just the natural proportion of people who expressed interest in the post advertising needing players (usually in a discord for a setting/system) and who showed up.  One single session out of dozens of different games (admittedly for about a half dozen systems though) had two women out of the five players... other than that it was typically just one or none.   I fully admit that maybe the types of games I'm interested in might influence that (typically rules light systems, sword and sorcery or cyberpunk settings) and women are flocking relatively speaking to more popular ones like heroic high fantasy (i.e. D&D) and slice of life games.

I'd say private virtual games skew more female too. I'd say the number of women in virtual campaigns is about twice what it is in live play.

Now, that generally means about a third of the group being women virtually vs. 15-20% face-to-face so it's not like it's a majority even there, but it's definitely more.

I'd guess something about the anonymity of voice-only and screen names makes it less potentially stigmatizing and, while I haven't gone out of my way to check, most of my online gaming is during weeknights and I wonder if the female population falls off for weekend games.

Also, the numbers are for 5E, and especially if they're getting them from D&D Beyond, they probably don't reflect a lot of the older player base and non-5E/Beyond users.

Now, the scale of D&D (especially if the claims about 5E sales are accurate) means that's probably just a rounding error, but it could also be that we have two parallel but largely non-overlapping hobby cultures here.