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Knight
 
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Last Login: Monday, November 17, 2008 11:02 PM
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Ok well i freely admit i dont get all the numbers and statistics. But seeing as i like to stick my oar in...
My ideas as follows-
Women tend to care more about their costume (not more than men but more than caring about how big their sword is) You see more women with finished costumes or looking better turned out than blokes, partly i guess cos its easier to find costume for women and parlty cos women are more intuitive about costuming, clothes and such. So women will be most drawn to races or cultures which have an appealing or strong look to them from this aspect. For example Wemics are easily identifiable have a strong image and compliment womens features nicely from a purely aesthetic viewpoint.
Women like to have a fight but i think it may be quality, substance and style over quantity, we need more motivation than men. And women cant be arsed with all the faffing/testosterone which goes along with it. I wont fight much at LT cos its shit combat but i will fight at smaller events i play (if i can get an axe in sideways before its all dealt with) cos its heoric and has a point to it. I tend not to fight because i choose to wear authentic clothing for a woman of the time and its not really very good for fighting in. Cant be arsed to wear/make armour.
Women like to resolve arguments and win them  I think most women get alot of satisfaction out of being right and proving a point, so that lends itself naturally to politicing and solving mysteries or plot lines etc Not saying men dont but women definatley do.
Magic is good cos it often comes with the advantage of being a thinking thing and can be applied in practical or combative ways. With the bonus of putting you automatically into a group of people who do the same thing and therefore you instanly have other people to play and interact with. If you use it in combat you either dont have to or cant wear armour which is a pain in the butt most people would probably rather avoid for long periods of time.
Say i'm playing a computer game, i like to organise my inventory alot and i like to collect things and complete stuff, the same could be applied to lrp in that i like to organise my props and costume, i like to collect skills like magic spells or craft skills, i like to complete/resolve situations and plot threads etc.
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Knight
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Last Login: Saturday, November 29, 2008 12:36 AM
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I'm going to freely admit to not having a clue what women other than me want out of LARP - heck, often I'm not even sure what *I* want out of LARP.
My current observations on this are that I like interesting bits of setting to poke at and learn more about (either as plot-hounding or as FOIPing in the purest sense of the word), the opportunity to hit things with weapons without being worried that getting into a fight is going to result in my character instantly dying, and interesting people to interact with.
The incapacitated/debilitated and mortal wounds death system in Maelstrom does a lot to assuage my worries about instant death, coming as I do from a system that until recently had the possibility of random extra damage killing you outright.
(We have since replaced CUTT's old death system with one much closer to Maelstrom and EOS. It gets its first test at the end-of-year event this weekend. )
Also I have learned from Maelstrom that I like painting myself funny colours, which means playing a non-human character is great.
----
Having waffled about what it is I like, here are some stats for my local system (Cambridge University Treasure Trap) off the top of my head:
* Signups for last year's end-of-year event, which gets most or all of our regular members, were about 21 male, 14 female.
* Ref teams for next year and this year are 4 male, 1 female; in 2006/07 they were 2 male, 2 female.
* Of the mainly CUTT-player-based Maelstrom groups I can think of, we have Marshall Enterprises which is (I think) 5 male, 5 female, and the Spine of the World which is 6 male, 4 female. There are also two male and three female CUTT players I can think of in various other groups.
(I've probably missed out some people - any other CUTT members who can count better than I can, please correct me on these numbers.)
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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One of the things I think is very interesting is that everyone acknowledges that Maelstrom has an unusually high percentage of women and yet that is in stark contrast to all the evidence presented so far... People are repeatedly quoting figures for events and clubs that have male:female ratios which are similar or much more equal than Maelstrom.
I want to suggest an idea, that male:female ratios are actually normalising in LRP from the historical bias of something like 9:1 towards 1:1 and that Maelstrom is simply part of that trend. Some games are ahead of the curve, some behind maybe. Maelstrom appears to have a high proportion of female players because we mentally compare it with what we think is normal based on what we have experienced in the past.
I'm not personally interested in striving for some 1:1 parity, I think numerical equality is a deeply flawed concept, but I am interested in increasing the appeal of LRP to both men and women and that a different approach may be relevant in both cases.
One thing that interests me is that I think that mechanics have simplified over time. The Maelstrom rules system is complex in some ways but is largely free of the battleboarding complexity that was prevalent in clubs until recently. I wonder if women and men take a similar interest in games, but complex mathematical number crunching to achieve an additional +3 damage while backstabbing constructs with a short blade put off women more than they do men. I've no evidence for this other than the slowly increasing number of women in LRP apparently running in tandem with the evolution to simplify rules and combat systems. My anecdotal evidence is that women (on average) are less interested in "rules" than men and prefer to avoid the kind of min/maxing that blokes are more likely to engage in.
History is an important source for LRP. Along with other works of fiction.
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Heroic Knight
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Last Login: Friday, November 28, 2008 5:16 PM
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Another oar in from CUTT here...
I think the Khaniel gets kicked in by women post may be more useful than the tongue in cheek would imply. One huge trend in CUTT is that women appear noticably more active in pvp than men. I can think of more pvp deaths caused by female players than male, despite our playersbase having the opposite ratio (as mentioned by Bluebottle). Possibly this is too small a sample size, or possibly just a couple of players throwing out the numbers, but I am going to persist with my lame hypothesis a bit longer.
I'd suggest that pvp violence is rather different than pve in key ways. For one thing, when I go on a pve linear, my stats seem quite important for killing waves of monsters in straight-up combat (assisted by any hard skills I can muster). For pvp, what seems to matter is mental attitude and planning (assisted by any soft skills I can muster).
Further to this, three of the four most dangerous pvp players I know from CUTT are female. At least one of the women and the man played Assassins in Cambridge (I'm unsure about the other two, but have a feeling they also played), with a high degree of success. All four play Maelstrom and, to the best of my knowledge, the bloke is the only one whose stats would suggest he is a combat character.
Notably, the woman who played Assassins has mentioned that she doesn't give a damn about character skills and that they make very little difference to her ability to kill other players. Observation has borne this out.
If the statistics exist, do we know how many of the deaths at Maelstrom (very much a pvp system) are caused by male or female players? Probably not counting eidolons (except in the case of a tie).
PD Jean De Winter
Insurrection Abraham, Wayfarers Guild
RL Tim
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I do talk a good fight
Group: System Moderators
Last Login: Saturday, November 29, 2008 11:45 AM
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Rosie (6/16/2008)
women are more intuitive about costuming, clothes and such.
Hmm, I find that attitude more than a little sexist! The mores of contemporary Western society certainly permit women to "peacock" more than men do, but that's just due to Beau Brummell convincing Victorian gentlemen that a chap should wear a smart black suit at all times, and nothing else would do; some of us have been fighting that attitude for as long as we've been alive.
Back to the issue of 'Strom stats, my unscientific & possibly offensive guess is that Maelstrom has a higher proportion of women than most big LRP events because the women of Maelstrom can be divided broadly into 2 categories:
1) Yer original, old-school, keen female LRPers, who want much the same as LRPing men do -- that is, some of them love combat (& may have come from a background of and/or still play more of the traditional linear dungeon bash kind of game), some of them love intrigue, drama, social games, high characterisation, etc. (& may have come from a background of and/or still play more of the traditional freeform or freeform-derived game), & some of them like a mix of the two & just plain love LRP.
2) What might, in other large LRP games, have been the "healer girlfriend" -- the woman persuaded to show up once a year for the August Bank Holiday, & shoved into the "healer" role because the boyfriend/husband doesn't want to loan her a sword / she doesn't want to get crushed or trampled in that mad rugby-like mess that is her only experience of "LRP combat" / she's not that enthusiastic anyway. At Maelstrom, though, she's come along to one event & realised that there are other enjoyable roles; that it's not all about big rucks and boys' toys; that there is Jane Austen LRP too (or savage cat-woman LRP, or Arabic bird-person jewellery-maker storyteller LRP, or whatever), and that the risk of being sacrificed to WASPOR! is slight enough to just add a bit of a thrill to the whole thing. Rather than just doing one event a year, on sufferance, she's realised that this LRP stuff is actually pretty good fun; and she's evolved into something of a new breed of LRPer in the process. She's not a worse LRPer, or a worse role-player, than "Type 1". Sometimes she's persuaded female friends to come along too, so that some Type 2s aren't "evolved healer girlfriends" but "evolved healer girlfriends' mates". Some of them later end up trying other types of LRP game, too, or more likely, die/retire & start to play other character types -- perhaps more combative, perhaps more angsty & "serious roleplayery", perhaps a bit of both, perhaps something entirely new.
In conclusion, what Maelstrom has done (among many other things) is to provide not just a more female-friendly LRP environment than most LRP games (big or small), but also a more newbie female-friendly LRP environment -- one that gets people enthusiastic to come back for more, & more engaged with the game world.
Does that skew the stats? Maybe -- I'd love to have a different stats breakdown that would also broadly divvy up the existing culture/race/skills stats so we could find out how what the breakdown of female Wemics vs female Humans (etc.) is when you look at newbie LRPers, middlingly experienced LRPers, old hands, etc.
Oh -- another possible stat-skew -- some of the high proportion of males playing Mokoshes is almost certainly because their cultures tend to get some snacky-looking melee combat skills. If we accept the premise that men like combat skills & like combat, then picking a Merisusi axemokosh, Kamakuran swordsmokosh, or Gnoll justaboutanyweaponyoulikemokosh, is a very good choice.
http://www.hyboriantales.com
PD: Ghostdance ("The most irritating curse I've ever encountered" -- NPC played by H.)
Riftworld: Rossar Kuug ("Clearly mad, because he thinks he's a Com-Trow Skirmisher" - Aela)
Hyborian Tales: Crew, cook, dogsbody, general labourer, toilet cleaner ("Dangerously overoptimistic ref" -- Tom Nowell)
Otherwise usually crew ("Quite spry & fit, & willing to wear a big costume & run around a lot" -- various event organisers)
"My other oversized foam weapon is THE LORD" -- Questionable Content
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Squire
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Last Login: Thursday, November 20, 2008 8:44 AM
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| I can only speak from my current experience which is restricted to Maelstrom where I run a pretty large group, I believe that it numbers around 60 at the moment, of whom a sizable minority are women. Thinking about the 'Ranking Postions' women occupy a number of positions in proportion to their numbers in the group, something that has occurred purely organically, and these include the head of Military and head of close infantry. I can't say that I have noticed any difference at all in what either sex wants to get out of the game. I don't know if this is because we have a very strong group concept with a clearly defined 'win condition' or for some other reason. When cross training people there seems to be a similar demand for combat skills between the sexes and I am unaware of any OC issues with guys being unwilling to take orders from women either. Similarly when it comes to the social side of things, the guys seem just as keen to peacock up in their best Dress Uniforms as the girls. Maybe it comes down to a strong group identity?
The New World's most eligible bachelor.......
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Heroic Knight
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Last Login: Thursday, November 27, 2008 9:36 PM
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| It occured to me earlier, around about the same time as a conversation with some of the kids about why Health and Social Care isn't a subject for girls and why (for some obviously incomprehensible reason) I'm capable of teaching lessons about babies, health care and other such exclusivly female subject matter, that maybe I mis-interpreted my ESM data. Given the consensus male:female ratio is about 3:1, ESM does not represent a system with a large appeal to female larpers, but rather a system with a lesser appeal to male larpers. I'm currently around 40 blokes down on my expected attendance, this is not good.
__________________________
"Plan B is we swear fealty to the Dark Lord."
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Squire
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What do women want from LRP? Well, I can't answer for all women, but I can answer for myself. So here is my two penneth:
First and foremost, I'd like to point out that i'm a rugby girl | | | |