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KillerGM wrote:

Thanks for the suggestion! I've edited the posts accordingly.



While I'm usually not a fan of "quota" systems, I think it could be of some use here. It's not that I want everything to be distributed exactly down the middle along gender lines, but six times as many men as women is something that can leave, on a subconscious level, the impression of a significantly male-dominated world. And I think that detracts from the game.

I don't necessarily think that having more women involved would "fix" the problem - I think becoming aware of it is more important. I mean, I don't think the team consciously decided to have so many more male NPCs. I think it just happened because that's the tradition - "We need a ruler!" "Lord" (rather than Lady); "We need a sage!" "Old dude with a beard!"; "We need a merchant" "Big fat dude!"; "We need a thug!" "Big brawny dude!". There are specific instances where the gender caught me off-guard - one of the Deurgar theurges, and the gnoll demon scourge, for instance. I think that shows at least some thought to the gender of the NPCs.

I think, but am not sure, that if more women were involved with writing the adventures that they would subconsciously make more female characters. When I make my own adventures I sometimes make characters men by default because I don't want portray a female badly. I can play and imitate many different type of men but when it comes to women i become quite unsure and default to male for character (yes I know quite often women don't act much different than men and yes this a habit I am trying to break myself of). So what I am trying to say is that the high number of male characters may be do to men writing the adventures. If a few adventures were written by women then there may be more women npcs written into it. For the 4 4E adventures written so far they have each have had 2 authors and in each case the authors have been male. Making one author female may help make the number of npcs that are male and female be more even.

ToastedAmphibian wrote:

ToastedAmphibian disagrees as to the cause of the bolded part. ToastedAmphibian doesn't think you are affraid to portray women badly because you are male so much as because there is a larger amount of stigma associated with negative portrals of "minorites" than there is with negative portrayls of the "majority". In the particular case of women you also have the momentum of Chivalry(TM) and Gentlemanly Behavior(TM) added to the more contemparary press of Political Correctness(TM)

For instance, poor portrals of females or minorites in a body of art is likley to have a larger effect than poor portrals of males.

ToastedAmphibian imagines this is also a portion of the reason why the vast majority of nameless "Mooks to be Slain" (MtbS) are adult males as opposed to women or children.

This is basically exactly what I meant and yes it is because I am male and that I am trying to portray females. In western culture women are seen as a minority and as less empowered as men. I well tend to make characters that are much more closer to my demographic so as not to portray those that I don't understand badly. So I could say that I tend to not make female NPCs because I am a man and thus more comfortable with portraying men.

I am sure that there are quite a few men that are this way. It seems like all of the major authors for the books and adventurers seem to male so it would make sense that if they behave similar to me, either conscious of it or not, then it would make sense to why there is six times the amount of men NPCs than there is female NPCs. I would suggest having some women help write the books, either as a major or minor author, for it should help with the number of female NPCs through out the adventure.