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Champion
 
Group: System Moderators
Last Login: Wednesday, September 03, 2008 10:18 PM
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I'd love to see some data from systems where in order to do any damage with a sword at all, you have to purchase sword skills. This is because my personal belief is that when it comes to LRP, women like me want it all. I personally don't just want to play warriors, or healers, or mages or crafters, I want to play warriorhealercraftermages, which is why if I were to start a new Maelstrom character, I would only buy combat skills once I'd got all the other stuff I wanted, since I could manage single anyway, and get any snackyness I needed from talismen 
If I were starting a new CP character however, I'd buy the combat skills first, because while healing and magic can be upgraded with Vet picks, you have to start with endurance if you want any at all, and you can't even do single unless you've bought the sword skill. So to avoid being a weak womanly stereotype at CP you actually have to buy combat skills, whereas at Maelstrom no-one is going to be completely helpless in a fight, even if they never buy sword double.
Internet Redcap: Don't make me put the hat on
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Wag
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Doctor (6/14/2008)
Whilst interesting, I think you may be coming at the numbers from the wrong angle. Taking theurgic spellcasting as an example, men have twice as many skills in that area than the women do.Don't forget that there are 2.28 times as many men as women at the game so we expect men to have 2.28 times as many theurgic skills all other things being equal.
[quote[That could be two men and one woman with the same quantity of skills each, or 400 men and 200 women likewise, or forty men with theurgic lore and one woman with twenty skills, so it doesn't really tell us if women are actually interested in it on average.[/quote]
That's possible but it's predicated on the idea that women have some extraordinarily skewed purchasing habits compared to men. It may be that women like to have a bit of everything while men prefer to specialise, but I can't believe it's as extreme as you suggest. Without any data to support it, the *simplest* assumption is that male and female buying patterns are broadly similar with bias on chosen areas rather than buying style. In practice there are major problems with this data set of which the one you have identified is just one.
If you had the same list of skill areas with "%age of men with some skill in this area" and "%age of women with ... ", then it would be somewhat clearer which aspects appeal to men and which aspects appeal to women, If we're still discussing the data set in a few days I'll run up some more figures. I can do the historical analysis that Marios asked for, racial bias by gender and the % of gender with a skill from this area fairly easily but they'll likely take 10 minutes each.
Actually trying to lay the data out in a legible form in the bloody post is the hardest part... 
Perhaps a list covering the above skill areas with percentages for men and women who have skills which aren't available at start up in those areas. That would give an indication of which skill sets men and women are interested in without having the results skewed by spare-point-spending or dabbling. It would be fairly easy to remove any skill you could acquire at start up, I think.
Or, you know, Matt could have a life.
History is an important source for LRP. Along with other works of fiction.
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Wag
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SevenSecrets (6/14/2008)
So I may have skewed your numbers slightly by taken skills for less-than-straightforward reasons. 
I would imagine all our players take their skills for less-than-straightforward reasons. There are >1000 characters in that data set, so no individual can skew the data except in some of the really low appeal skill areas. In practice I think any attempt to "explain" outliers is a fast route to conclusion insanity. ANY data set can prove ANY conclusion if you remove enough outliers.
History is an important source for LRP. Along with other works of fiction.
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Wag
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bunni (6/14/2008)
The fact Millen isn't more popular I largely blame on the fact that it isn't really mentioned as a viable culture in the character creation rules, you really have to play the game already to know about them.
How does this make more men pick it than women?
Finally,I notice the native and awakenedcultures aren't even on the list. And this makes me sad. The data set is too small to be meaningful I'm afraid.
History is an important source for LRP. Along with other works of fiction.
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Prodigal
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Matt - what do you intend to do with all this statistical analysis?
_____________________________________________________It is not a competition. It is a web forum.
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Heroic Knight
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Matt Pennington (6/14/2008)
Doctor (6/14/2008)
Whilst interesting, I think you may be coming at the numbers from the wrong angle. Taking theurgic spellcasting as an example, men have twice as many skills in that area than the women do.Don't forget that there are 2.28 times as many men as women at the game so we expect men to have 2.28 times as many theurgic skills all other things being equal.
Yes, but even comparing those numbers with an expectation of 2.28 just means we know whether the actual skill purchases are skewed towards men or women in comparison to an expected ratio; i.e. we would know that the male:female purchase ratio for skill group "x" is higher / lower than expected, but not how popular the skill group is by itself for either gender.
Matt Pennington (6/14/2008)
Doctor (6/14/2008)
That could be two men and one woman with the same quantity of skills each, or 400 men and 200 women likewise, or forty men with theurgic lore and one woman with twenty skills, so it doesn't really tell us if women are actually interested in it on average.
That's possible but it's predicated on the idea that women have some extraordinarily skewed purchasing habits compared to men. It may be that women like to have a bit of everything while men prefer to specialise, but I can't believe it's as extreme as you suggest.
Except I'm not making that suggestion, and I didn't mention anything about whether men or women (or neither, or both) specialise or generalise. In fact whether men or women (or neither, or both) have tendencies to specialise is irrelevant. The point is that the ratios listed only indicate that "men have bought twice as many theurgic skills as women", for example. That doesn't indicate the popularity of theurgic skills amongst women, though. The ratio is lower than we expect (2 as opposed to 2.28, assuming no bias in skill-purchasing tendencies) but is that because more women have bought skills in that area, or fewer men have, or are theurgic skills (un)popular with both genders and the ratio just happens to come out at 2?
I pointed out the extremes (twice as many men as women with an equal quantity of skills individually, and lots more men than women but with fewer individual skills), but anything between those extremes could produce the same ratio. I don't think those ratios actually tell us anything significant even if they are compared to the male:female player ratio of 2.28,
Being able to say "90% of women have bought at least one skill in the necromancy area, and 40% of women have taken their interest past starting skills" is a better answer to the question of what women want, than "women have twice as many skills in the talismancy area than men do" because that "twice" ratio could be two skills:one skill or 300 skills:150 skills or anywhere in-between so that "twice" by itself doesn't tell us if talismancy is popular with women or not.
Remember, you can't spell "analytical" without "anal".
(I've now rewritten this several times and I'm still not happy about where each bit of the explanation and analysis are situated. I can't seem to get it all to flow smoothly, so I give up.  )
PD: Dr. Jon Flynn
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Squire
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I have a few questions about the data:
1. Where are the player genders taken from? I can't remember mentioning my gender when I signed up for Maelstrom as a player (though I may well have done; it's been a while). If instead you're using character gender and assuming that's the same, what about people playing characters for which the only option is "Not Applicable"?
2. Following on from the last part of 1, you've just got the Known World cultures listed in the male:female ratios. Is there anything interesting in the native/awakened sections (that's not too FOIP, at least)?
Maelstrom: Potch, sun facet.
CUTT: Ref 2008/09 (formerly a half-demon, a soldier and an elf).
EOS: Lady Jessamine Olivia Arundel, Sorasian Nation (formerly Choke the Venin, made a tasty snack).
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Wag
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Sarah (6/14/2008)
Matt - what do you intend to do with all this statistical analysis?
Er nothing? I was motivated by Bacon's post refuting the idea that women in LRP choose talking over fighting to go and have a look at our data to see if I could find anything interesting there. Having looked I thought it was worth posting the data up here, so that others could look at it.
History is an important source for LRP. Along with other works of fiction.
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