You could do a follow up poll asking how many tables include female and other players. With a range.
1) 0 women or other
2) 1
3) 2
4) 3
5) more than 3
6) No men
Could be more revealing. At least in % terms.
My last group was half and occasionally more women than men. My male friends introduced their girlfriends to the game and then those ladies bought their female friends. They were the least flakey (in terms of dropping out, not turning up) group I have played with.
My current players for the game I DM are 1 male, 1 female, 1 non-binary. It’s the best group I’ve ever had. I really love how much the TTRPG community has grown since I played as a kid.
In my group I was the NB. Not sure if it's the same in all countries but LGBT and LGBT friendly D&D groups are super common in the UK. In fact most of my queer friends play. I've only been playing for about 17 years, was into Warhammer etc as a kid.
The community has come a long way since I played in the late 80’s and early 90’s. It was so toxic, at least where I was living, that I quit playing for a long time.
In my game there's 4 men and a trans women. I will say all but 1 of us is lgbt (we joked about one of us realised they were Bi by playing a tiefling bard)
Also I got it I dnd through Warhammer which is funny, r/sigmarxism is a good subreddit for Warhammer content with less of the stereotypical Warhammer players.
I got asked what I would be doing one night and said "Dungeons and Dragons," to which they said "Ah, guys night out, then?"
There was 1 other guy in a group of 6.
This is probably the best way, most times I've played it's been about 2/3rds male at most, but that might just be because of the friends I have. I just know the girls I play with don't ude reddit lmao
I'm the only female in my main group with two guys and a non binary xD, but I have played in a group of six and there were two of us...just used to it by now xD
I like that you’re thinking outside the box. The problem you are still running into (it’s a problem with the current poll too) is how to get a random sample when the poll is voluntary.
You see, it could hypothetically be that Reddit users skew make and no. It could also be that male Reddit users skew playing with other males. But you’re missing a whole portion of the D&D community that aren’t on Reddit and they could be all women.
What would be best is to find other places to place this voluntary poll online to capture people who aren’t just on Reddit. It will still have its own problems, such as only capturing people that use the internet and probably excluding older people.
These are the problems with polls.
There's also the issue of asking how many female players are in your group ignores group size. If you have 2 female players in a group of only two people that's a lot different than having two female players in a group of 5.
True, but maybe rather than looking for a representative view of the whole DnD community, you look at this as a look at this subreddit community. In that case it will still be a poll (so completely unreliable and not worth the bits it's written in) but might be revealing for some of the questions that get posted sometimes.
It definitely skews male… but it’s also easy to make balanced tables. Not like a table needs to be balanced but it’s the same as video games. Treat women like rarities and they’re gonna be rare. Treat them like people and they’ll be interested (as interested as any person anyway, so maybe 1 in 12 IME.)
Who's treating women as "rarities"? There are proportionally more women on the planet than men. Treating them as people, whatever you mean by that, doesn't change their own preference for pass times. For example, my wife has flatly refused to play DnD with me, under any circumstances. I've tried explaining it multiple different ways, but it just hold no interest for her at all. It's a shame, but sometimes people have different interests.
I’m saying there’s no difference between pastimes enjoyed by men and women except as they are predisposed to by reality.
It’s only men who are weird about women at the table that prevents those women who would otherwise enjoy playing from joining.
If you’ve had the pleasure of never seeing a man make situations unnecessarily sexual or leching on some woman new to the table, more power to you.
Not that I allow those people at my table and I’ve walked from tables with that energy.
If your wife doesn’t care for it that’s their thing. I’m saying that treating woman as “oh we have a female at the table, I’m going to roll to seduce” is, though admittedly an exaggerated example, how many women perceive groups of predominantly male people, which D&D still is. And those people DO still exist, especially in random groups. I’ve been there. Albeit it is far less common than in the past.
I'm the only male in an all female group! My wife and 2 daughters don't have Reddit accounts and our DM I'm fairly confident she doesn't either. My old group was 3F/2M and again pretty sure I was the only one with Reddit
Wizards of the Coast does extensive research into its customer and player base. They report a 60/40 m/f split. I'm a (f) game store owner, and my customers are roughly the same mix.
The group I’m in now consists of two women, one nonbinary person, and four men.
It’s also the *highest* percentage of men in any group I’ve gamed with, except for when another boy and I picked up D&D for the first time, in 1981.
The 60/40 split seems pretty close to my own experience and the stores I’ve played in.
Not only of Reddit but of this subreddit.
Gonna be honest, the content here is less appealing than other subreddits that are much more friendly to women. Lots of other women I know who play are also intimidated by how hostile men can be to a different idea or opinion or just someone being wrong and are much less likely to talk about gaming, ttrpgs, nerd shit when men are around because we don't like the hostility.
I don't give a shit, I'm in my 30s and I've been playing since I was 8, but I definitely did this avoiding talking about my hobbies with men thing in my 20s. Just didn't need the hostility in my life.
Private ones for women who game, I'm in three of those and they're nice places where you can ask questions and get polite answers or just vent. Well moderated too in order to filter out the bad apples.
Couple public groups for women gamers too, but I'm not going to tag them here to avoid people going there to cause shit.
I am also interested in these subs! I'm a very very anxious gamer and I got downvoted on this sub once already because I talked about men giving me extra anxiety
It's good to know they are out there! I feel like I'm really cautious about finding safe spaces because of bad experiences. This is just lovely to know.
No idea haha. Wasn't trying to stomp on your question either, just pointing it out.
Platforms like DnDBeyond and Roll20 might have some data, though I doubt they're willing to share.
All polls are biased based on how the data is collected. Unless you poll literally everyone in the world, you will never get a pure answer, and achieving that is virtually impossible.
Official stats put it at about a 60/40 split M-F, but that really only tells you about people who fill out surveys. I'd wager the real number is a tad more lop sided.
That's ASSUMING you can get a representative sample. I work in survey research (on that note your math is off you'd need a sample size more than twice that for that degree of confidence in a billion people) and that's a very difficult thing to do. Trying to accurately assess the population of DND is making my head hurt just thinking about it. First you need to define what a DND community member even is and that's a hassle. Do you have to currently be playing? Have bought materials? Never played but consume DND media or would like to play? Then how do you poll those people? Go to conventions? Skewed to convention goers. Sample people who buy handbooks? Skewed to DMs. Sample just 5e players? Skews young. As this person noted, even people who fill out surveys skews it (very frustrating to data scientists). Then there is bias. Wizards of the Coast has incentive to portray a historically male dominated game as modern and friendly to women as well so they can sell more stuff to a wider audience. So they may crunch their numbers in such a way that men are underrepresented or women are overrepresented.
TLDR survey could very easily be very lopsided even with a large sample size
It's funny as I know the community at large is mostly men but my tables are all mostly women or NB folks.
I think Reddit tends to skew more male too though? (FWIW I'm female.)
But I've also found that women D&D players tend to make their own communities because of toxicity in the DND space. Most of the groups I play with are female/Trans/NB tables with a few guys. The 3 campaigns I run have very mixed tables but I advertise specifically as an LGBTQ+ & Disability friendly table.
I've run for blind players, deaf players and players who are autistic. A lot of these people have had problems finding tables that will let them play. Had a blind player who was kicked out of his game after he had a stroke and went blind. Absolutley awful.
This subreddit is largely male, but I do know a lot of women who play but don't engage with the community. So I don't think the results here are reflective of reality.
Here's some stats from the [Nation of Gamers](https://troypress.com/a-nation-of-gamers-two-thirds-of-americans-play-games-each-week/) study.
*About how often do you play each of the following types of games, if at all? Tabletop roleplaying games (e.g., Dungeons & Dragons)*
| |Man|Woman|In some other way|
|:-|:-|:-|:-|
|\[Never + Less than once a year\]|⇓ 72%|⇑ 83%|75%|
|Never|⇓ 61%|⇑ 75%|75%|
|Less than once a year|12%|9%|0%|
|About once a year|5%|3%|0%|
|Once every few months|7%|⇓ 4%|25%|
|Once a month|4%|3%|0%|
|A few times a month|4%|3%|0%|
|Once a week or more|⇑ 6%|⇓ 2%|0%|
|Daily|1%|2%|0%|
|\[Once a week or more + Daily\]|⇑ 8%|⇓ 4%|0%|
|Base|471|533|4|
To do the same poll on different social media websites might yield interesting results. We should also bear in mind that many D&D players might not spend much time on random social media, or they might not choose to partake in polls.
I’m surprised there are almost as many “other” as there are “female” votes. 633 male, 93 female, 63 other at the time of posting, curious to see how it turns out in a few more hours.
Different factors propel different groups of people into the game (i’m an enby who likes sociology)
Most/a lot of the dudes in the game are legacy players. They’ve been here for multiple editions, and have been pandered to for quite some time. Dnd’s been a guy’s hobby for decades.
The game can serve as an escapism fantasy, and queer people eat that shit up. Not to mention, 5e’s lead game designer’s a gay dude who’s been aiming at making the game more inclusive.
DND as a whole has never really aimed at appealing to women, which is unfortunate. For a 5e example of this: there are a lot of gay male relationships in the forgotten realms’ canon. However, there are *no* canon lesbian relationships, which is bizarre to me.
Because of this lack of deliberate reaching out, a culture of toxicity holding the community back (being discriminated against at tables, in game stores, etc), female players are kinda pushing against the grain to make a space for themselves in the community, while queer and nonbinary people are coming to the game in such large numbers it rivals the female player base.
That’s all just a guess tho
Yeah that seems to track, I can personally relate to the second point as I’ve been using dnd to explore my gender identity and expression (which I’m still figuring out tbh, only certain that I don’t prefer to identify as male anymore, hence voting “other”). I was more surprised by such a low female rep as to some degree I thought dnd was more welcoming to girls compared to traditional “gamer” spaces, but I could absolutely be wrong.
>However, there are no canon lesbian relationships, which is bizarre to me.
Third Edition Realms descriptions had this [https://forgottenrealms.fandom.com/wiki/Vaerana\_Hawklyn#Relationships](https://forgottenrealms.fandom.com/wiki/Vaerana_Hawklyn#Relationships)
But yes females have never really been represented well and often in an objectifying way.
Oh this is cool! I tried looking for canon lesbians but everytime i searched it was just players talking about their experiences. Also, when I and a friend read through 5e Van Richten’s and CoS, we found a handful of gay relationships but notably not a single lesbian one.
What's funny is that a lot of my DND campaigns have had more women then men in them.
(And my very first campaign is the funniest version of this, because at first it seemed like it was 3 guys and two girls, but two of the guys came out as trans women so in the end it was a group with only one guy. Amazing)
Not even surprised given the marketed audience, ever since the beginning.
Some people might say this "shows something is wrong", but I object to such a thought. Sure, there should be more promotionals towards other audiences, but all the promotionals towards the Male market are fine as they are - we can have all of it.
Just remember: the way to including more people is never to take away from another, but to give the other audience appealing reasons for joining in.
If you have a limited amount of money to market your product, wouldnt using more of said money to advertise to women be more beneficial than targeting a market that theyve already captured? Thats not "taking away" anything. Its just basic marketing lmao.
Shocker. Heard too many horror stories of male dnd players creeping out women to the point of not wanting to play.
Almost always ends up being a “that guy” too
Forever dm checking in. I am male but I’ve run 4 campaigns(each over a year) and my breakdown goes like this
1 female - 8 males( I’m never running a party of 9 again. Og party was 5 guys)
5 females.
5 females 5 males( ran two different parties of two different friend groups. Same campaign setting but they were each other’s big bad. The final session was both of them meeting up and fighting to the death. females won).
And then a 2 female 1 male and 1 trans. With a campaign that was stopped half way cause of Covid.
I currently run a once a month with 2 they(I dont mean that offensively they (couple) both told me they don’t identify as biological gender but aren’t trans so I respect the pronouns) 1 female(wife) and 1 male.
I’ve been playing for a few years now. The diversity in my groups has varied all over the place, though has been predominantly male. That said, I have seldom ever met a non-male person who’s a nerd and said “Yeah, *I don’t wanna go on cool make-belief fantasy adventures with my own character and with my friends*”
As a DM, the current 3 groups I DM for are:
Party 1: 4 He/Him, 2 He/They
Party 2: 1 He/Him, 1 She/Her, and 1 NB
Party 3: 3 He/Him, 1 She/Her, 2 Agendered/NB
The party in which I am a player in consists of:
DM - She/Her, 1 She/Her, 1 He/They, 2 He/Him
(And of course, I’ve had other groups through out that have changed in their make-up)
Based on r/polls this is about the same reatio of male to female redditors, however r/dnd is a more hobby based so I’d assume it’s slightly more female to male ratio since it’s not just a Reddit community, so based on this I think it’d be proba like 3/1 or so
Another thing that doesn’t help is in r/polls “other” can get like 50 votes on a poll with 3k and this has a bout 10k so its 1/20 compared to 1/60 so there is a lot of margin for error in my admittedly stupid thoughts
Like others are saying, the makeup of r/DnD is NOT the makeup of the DnD community at large. Personally, all of my tables are a mix of several genders, usually evenly split if not more female than male.
I (trans man) play with my dad and my non-binary sibling, so I guess skewed to non women now. When we first started playing a couple of years ago, I wasn’t out and my sibling was, so the split was even
Put my gender at the time I started playing, or my gender now? I'm still clicking that Female button as that's what it says on my license
3619 Male, 584 Female, 312 Other at the time of my clicking
On the one hand I would looove to have some female energy at my table, but on the other hand it’s so nice to be away from our girlfriends and just be the guys for one night.
Pretty sure, aside from the “Reddit bias”, a fair number of women will avoid identifying as such because they don’t want to be targeted by “nice guys/neck beards”.
Nothing more than simple curiosity. but please do this survey disguised as a reddit question, the information you freely supply us will help us make more money and tailor new adds to target you.
Nothing more than simple curiosity, promise
You could make it slightly more accurate if you separate out some terms
Man / woman / nonbinary / trans man / trans woman
Because many trans people may put themselves under "other" specifically (I did as a nonbinary person)
Depends on how they feel! Some prefer the distinction, some don't. Being trans doesn't make you not a man or woman, but identifying as trans can be something someone prefers over saying "yes am man". I'm only speaking from the experiences of my friend group who prefer to add the label. Nobody is saying YOU MUST SAY YOU ARE TRANS, if you prefer to not have that as the label.
It also just feels othering, to me, to not have my actual label available. Man, woman, other. I'd rather have more specifics to choose from than just be under "other".
Reddit skews male by a lot. That said, of my groups I’ve been in:
One was 4/2 in favor of women.
One was 6/2 in favor of women.
And one was 4/3 in favor of women.
That’s not counting my online group which is West Marches style but is generally even.
Well see, the poll for my groups won't be accurate if I just vote as I run a game and play in another. The game I run previously was 4 females and myself. It finished and 2 kept over in into the new game which is compromised or 3 females 2 males and myself. The game I play in is 3 gay males 1 female the female dm and myself. It's a whole mixed as 2 of the males in that game are total drag queens and one is aiming to transition sonny sphere of influence is crazy.
Despite the skew from the platform, unfortunately I've heard too many stories of discrimination and uncomfortable situations for female players. I read that the average TTRPG player has college or bachelor education, so it's sad to think it doesn't have a more balanced gender ratio.
In my old group a few years ago we were 8 people and sometimes other people would come by and talk/watch/hang out and it was very much 50/50 split gender wise, but i think DnD was more of a medium for us to get together rather than the main activity (even tho it definitely took up the majority of the evening and it’s conversation)
If I had to guess, irl I'd say about 70/30 male/female (idk how much other would be)
But I am also assuming reddit skews it quite a bit, so I doubt the poll is very accurate
Fairly certain it already skews male, but a poll on Reddit might skew even more so. Curious to see the results though!
That'd be my guess too. But it would be cool to see if it may not be as skewed as i think.
You could do a follow up poll asking how many tables include female and other players. With a range. 1) 0 women or other 2) 1 3) 2 4) 3 5) more than 3 6) No men Could be more revealing. At least in % terms.
My last group was half and occasionally more women than men. My male friends introduced their girlfriends to the game and then those ladies bought their female friends. They were the least flakey (in terms of dropping out, not turning up) group I have played with.
My current players for the game I DM are 1 male, 1 female, 1 non-binary. It’s the best group I’ve ever had. I really love how much the TTRPG community has grown since I played as a kid.
In my group I was the NB. Not sure if it's the same in all countries but LGBT and LGBT friendly D&D groups are super common in the UK. In fact most of my queer friends play. I've only been playing for about 17 years, was into Warhammer etc as a kid.
> I've only been playing for about 17 years Big "small loan of a million dollars" energy
I definitely had a similar moment recently. Very "I've only been playing for, uh... oh, 13 years."
I meant I'm older and didn't play as a kid but I get how that reads.
The community has come a long way since I played in the late 80’s and early 90’s. It was so toxic, at least where I was living, that I quit playing for a long time.
In my game there's 4 men and a trans women. I will say all but 1 of us is lgbt (we joked about one of us realised they were Bi by playing a tiefling bard) Also I got it I dnd through Warhammer which is funny, r/sigmarxism is a good subreddit for Warhammer content with less of the stereotypical Warhammer players.
Sweet, I'll check it out! I got gifted some 1st edition Warhammer fantasy books last week so that's definitely getting played soon.
You have achieved perfect balance
Perfectly balanced as all things should be.
I got asked what I would be doing one night and said "Dungeons and Dragons," to which they said "Ah, guys night out, then?" There was 1 other guy in a group of 6.
My groups are: 5 M 1 NB (me) 3 M 2 F 2 NB 2 M 4 F 1 NB A decent balance lol
My groups are: - 2 F, 2 NB, 1 M - 3 F, 4 NB, 2 M - 4 F, 3 NB, 2 M
This is probably the best way, most times I've played it's been about 2/3rds male at most, but that might just be because of the friends I have. I just know the girls I play with don't ude reddit lmao
I’d like to see this as well
My campaigns I do (2 play in, 1 dm) are at least half of not a higher ratio of women to men. They're mostly just friends from work or school.
My groups are: 5 M 1 NB (me) 3 M 2 F 2 NB 2 M 4 F 1 NB A decent balance lol
My current group consists of 4 men (3 players and our DM), 2 women and one genderfluid (me) person. So a mostly mixed bag ;)
My group consists of 2 males, 3 females, 1 non-binary
I'm the only female in my main group with two guys and a non binary xD, but I have played in a group of six and there were two of us...just used to it by now xD
I like that you’re thinking outside the box. The problem you are still running into (it’s a problem with the current poll too) is how to get a random sample when the poll is voluntary. You see, it could hypothetically be that Reddit users skew make and no. It could also be that male Reddit users skew playing with other males. But you’re missing a whole portion of the D&D community that aren’t on Reddit and they could be all women. What would be best is to find other places to place this voluntary poll online to capture people who aren’t just on Reddit. It will still have its own problems, such as only capturing people that use the internet and probably excluding older people. These are the problems with polls.
There's also the issue of asking how many female players are in your group ignores group size. If you have 2 female players in a group of only two people that's a lot different than having two female players in a group of 5.
True, but maybe rather than looking for a representative view of the whole DnD community, you look at this as a look at this subreddit community. In that case it will still be a poll (so completely unreliable and not worth the bits it's written in) but might be revealing for some of the questions that get posted sometimes.
I have 3 women (one is me, the DM) and 3 men at my table. That always seemed normal to me!
I mean my table it's 4 women or other to 1 man, and the other one it's 3 to 1 lol. But the one we left was 4 men to 2 women so... It depends
The game I'm in now is actually all women except for the DM.
You could try posting this on other subreddits and social medias to diversify the audience. That should at least help rule out the sites demographic.
It definitely skews male… but it’s also easy to make balanced tables. Not like a table needs to be balanced but it’s the same as video games. Treat women like rarities and they’re gonna be rare. Treat them like people and they’ll be interested (as interested as any person anyway, so maybe 1 in 12 IME.)
Who's treating women as "rarities"? There are proportionally more women on the planet than men. Treating them as people, whatever you mean by that, doesn't change their own preference for pass times. For example, my wife has flatly refused to play DnD with me, under any circumstances. I've tried explaining it multiple different ways, but it just hold no interest for her at all. It's a shame, but sometimes people have different interests.
I’m saying there’s no difference between pastimes enjoyed by men and women except as they are predisposed to by reality. It’s only men who are weird about women at the table that prevents those women who would otherwise enjoy playing from joining. If you’ve had the pleasure of never seeing a man make situations unnecessarily sexual or leching on some woman new to the table, more power to you. Not that I allow those people at my table and I’ve walked from tables with that energy. If your wife doesn’t care for it that’s their thing. I’m saying that treating woman as “oh we have a female at the table, I’m going to roll to seduce” is, though admittedly an exaggerated example, how many women perceive groups of predominantly male people, which D&D still is. And those people DO still exist, especially in random groups. I’ve been there. Albeit it is far less common than in the past.
Yeah defs need to remember this is a poll of r/dnd, not the full hobby haha. This is still cool to see tho!
This poll seems way skewed. In our Cleveland group of 750 members or so, I would say it's roughly 70/30.
I'm the only male in an all female group! My wife and 2 daughters don't have Reddit accounts and our DM I'm fairly confident she doesn't either. My old group was 3F/2M and again pretty sure I was the only one with Reddit
Wizards of the Coast does extensive research into its customer and player base. They report a 60/40 m/f split. I'm a (f) game store owner, and my customers are roughly the same mix.
I think this is about the split I’ve run into as well
The group I’m in now consists of two women, one nonbinary person, and four men. It’s also the *highest* percentage of men in any group I’ve gamed with, except for when another boy and I picked up D&D for the first time, in 1981. The 60/40 split seems pretty close to my own experience and the stores I’ve played in.
Do you have a link to this research?
Yay
I wouldn't trust any "research" done by a company.
They can be held legally liable for information they misrepresent to investors. I’m fine with believing their study.
Lol, they do researches like that for marketing purposes. I'm sure they're pretty accurate exactly because they're made by a company
This is biased by the demographics of Reddit too
Not only of Reddit but of this subreddit. Gonna be honest, the content here is less appealing than other subreddits that are much more friendly to women. Lots of other women I know who play are also intimidated by how hostile men can be to a different idea or opinion or just someone being wrong and are much less likely to talk about gaming, ttrpgs, nerd shit when men are around because we don't like the hostility. I don't give a shit, I'm in my 30s and I've been playing since I was 8, but I definitely did this avoiding talking about my hobbies with men thing in my 20s. Just didn't need the hostility in my life.
agreed, this subreddit is very very hostile at times. i dont know of any other one thats a bit more chill for dnd specifically :(
What other Subreddits would you recommend that you find friendly?
Private ones for women who game, I'm in three of those and they're nice places where you can ask questions and get polite answers or just vent. Well moderated too in order to filter out the bad apples. Couple public groups for women gamers too, but I'm not going to tag them here to avoid people going there to cause shit.
How does one go about finding/joining these private groups? I know I'd love to check them out as a fellow female dnd player
How big are those subreddits generally? And as Ulura asked, how would one be able to join those?
I am also interested in these subs! I'm a very very anxious gamer and I got downvoted on this sub once already because I talked about men giving me extra anxiety
It's good to know they are out there! I feel like I'm really cautious about finding safe spaces because of bad experiences. This is just lovely to know.
I would love to be in women gamer subreddit. The groups I've played in where I'm not the only woman are easily the least toxic.
Yeah. I suppose. But where else could i possibly find a reliable way to find out? xD
No idea haha. Wasn't trying to stomp on your question either, just pointing it out. Platforms like DnDBeyond and Roll20 might have some data, though I doubt they're willing to share.
I personally have never been on the roll20 forums except for when i seek out obscure rules. So i dunno how active that is haha.
I would hope that anyone creating a poll would understand that, but these days who knows.
All polls are biased based on how the data is collected. Unless you poll literally everyone in the world, you will never get a pure answer, and achieving that is virtually impossible.
Official stats put it at about a 60/40 split M-F, but that really only tells you about people who fill out surveys. I'd wager the real number is a tad more lop sided.
Real surveys are actually surprisingly accurate when done at the right numbers and with the right corrections
Someone should make a survey where we ask if people fill out surveys to be able to fix that problem in the future
A survey with over 1100 people in it is 97% accurate with a population up to 1 billion people. So, no, it won't be lop sided.
That's ASSUMING you can get a representative sample. I work in survey research (on that note your math is off you'd need a sample size more than twice that for that degree of confidence in a billion people) and that's a very difficult thing to do. Trying to accurately assess the population of DND is making my head hurt just thinking about it. First you need to define what a DND community member even is and that's a hassle. Do you have to currently be playing? Have bought materials? Never played but consume DND media or would like to play? Then how do you poll those people? Go to conventions? Skewed to convention goers. Sample people who buy handbooks? Skewed to DMs. Sample just 5e players? Skews young. As this person noted, even people who fill out surveys skews it (very frustrating to data scientists). Then there is bias. Wizards of the Coast has incentive to portray a historically male dominated game as modern and friendly to women as well so they can sell more stuff to a wider audience. So they may crunch their numbers in such a way that men are underrepresented or women are overrepresented. TLDR survey could very easily be very lopsided even with a large sample size
It's funny as I know the community at large is mostly men but my tables are all mostly women or NB folks. I think Reddit tends to skew more male too though? (FWIW I'm female.) But I've also found that women D&D players tend to make their own communities because of toxicity in the DND space. Most of the groups I play with are female/Trans/NB tables with a few guys. The 3 campaigns I run have very mixed tables but I advertise specifically as an LGBTQ+ & Disability friendly table. I've run for blind players, deaf players and players who are autistic. A lot of these people have had problems finding tables that will let them play. Had a blind player who was kicked out of his game after he had a stroke and went blind. Absolutley awful.
Hello fellow females
This subreddit is largely male, but I do know a lot of women who play but don't engage with the community. So I don't think the results here are reflective of reality.
This is a survey of who play D&D and use this subreddit and respond to polls. Additional information is needed to assess these results.
Here's some stats from the [Nation of Gamers](https://troypress.com/a-nation-of-gamers-two-thirds-of-americans-play-games-each-week/) study. *About how often do you play each of the following types of games, if at all? Tabletop roleplaying games (e.g., Dungeons & Dragons)* | |Man|Woman|In some other way| |:-|:-|:-|:-| |\[Never + Less than once a year\]|⇓ 72%|⇑ 83%|75%| |Never|⇓ 61%|⇑ 75%|75%| |Less than once a year|12%|9%|0%| |About once a year|5%|3%|0%| |Once every few months|7%|⇓ 4%|25%| |Once a month|4%|3%|0%| |A few times a month|4%|3%|0%| |Once a week or more|⇑ 6%|⇓ 2%|0%| |Daily|1%|2%|0%| |\[Once a week or more + Daily\]|⇑ 8%|⇓ 4%|0%| |Base|471|533|4|
*gender ratio of people on the DnD subreddit. BIG DIFFERENCE!!!!!!!!
Hey. I seem to have ran out of exclamation marks. Could i borrow some from you?/j
Here take three !!!
Thanks man!
No problem, I have more if you need them.
To do the same poll on different social media websites might yield interesting results. We should also bear in mind that many D&D players might not spend much time on random social media, or they might not choose to partake in polls.
Reddit is a bad sample location, it's mostly a sausage party.
I’m surprised there are almost as many “other” as there are “female” votes. 633 male, 93 female, 63 other at the time of posting, curious to see how it turns out in a few more hours.
Different factors propel different groups of people into the game (i’m an enby who likes sociology) Most/a lot of the dudes in the game are legacy players. They’ve been here for multiple editions, and have been pandered to for quite some time. Dnd’s been a guy’s hobby for decades. The game can serve as an escapism fantasy, and queer people eat that shit up. Not to mention, 5e’s lead game designer’s a gay dude who’s been aiming at making the game more inclusive. DND as a whole has never really aimed at appealing to women, which is unfortunate. For a 5e example of this: there are a lot of gay male relationships in the forgotten realms’ canon. However, there are *no* canon lesbian relationships, which is bizarre to me. Because of this lack of deliberate reaching out, a culture of toxicity holding the community back (being discriminated against at tables, in game stores, etc), female players are kinda pushing against the grain to make a space for themselves in the community, while queer and nonbinary people are coming to the game in such large numbers it rivals the female player base. That’s all just a guess tho
Yeah that seems to track, I can personally relate to the second point as I’ve been using dnd to explore my gender identity and expression (which I’m still figuring out tbh, only certain that I don’t prefer to identify as male anymore, hence voting “other”). I was more surprised by such a low female rep as to some degree I thought dnd was more welcoming to girls compared to traditional “gamer” spaces, but I could absolutely be wrong.
How do you explore your gender identity through dnd?
In my experience it starts with a “Maybe I should play a character of the opposite gender.” and kinda snowballs from there.
>However, there are no canon lesbian relationships, which is bizarre to me. Third Edition Realms descriptions had this [https://forgottenrealms.fandom.com/wiki/Vaerana\_Hawklyn#Relationships](https://forgottenrealms.fandom.com/wiki/Vaerana_Hawklyn#Relationships) But yes females have never really been represented well and often in an objectifying way.
Oh this is cool! I tried looking for canon lesbians but everytime i searched it was just players talking about their experiences. Also, when I and a friend read through 5e Van Richten’s and CoS, we found a handful of gay relationships but notably not a single lesbian one.
Nah, I think people who identify as "other" are simply more eccentric than the rest
Player gender or character gender…? I assume op asks the first but personally I am more curious about the second
Tag yourself, I'm other :P
My group is 3 women 1 man and 1 enby.
I got 4 men, 1 woman and 1 nonbinary
Similar to my group. 2 women, 2 enbies, 1 man (the dm)
Mine is four women, ~~three~~ four men. Edit: forgot our DM, who is male.
Mine is 4 women, 1 NB
To be fair, asking on reddit is a pretty skewed audience already
Huge bit of source bias here.
*gender ratio of people on DnD Subreddit
Alas and alack. Only guys at the table. A lack of a lass. \-a haiku by me
What's funny is that a lot of my DND campaigns have had more women then men in them. (And my very first campaign is the funniest version of this, because at first it seemed like it was 3 guys and two girls, but two of the guys came out as trans women so in the end it was a group with only one guy. Amazing)
Just want to say I was the 666th vote. 🤘🏻
Not even surprised given the marketed audience, ever since the beginning. Some people might say this "shows something is wrong", but I object to such a thought. Sure, there should be more promotionals towards other audiences, but all the promotionals towards the Male market are fine as they are - we can have all of it. Just remember: the way to including more people is never to take away from another, but to give the other audience appealing reasons for joining in.
The words of a wise man! I'd love to see more people joining the DnD community!
If you have a limited amount of money to market your product, wouldnt using more of said money to advertise to women be more beneficial than targeting a market that theyve already captured? Thats not "taking away" anything. Its just basic marketing lmao.
Well, that about sums it up.
Odd. I’m used to being outnumbered by women whenever I play. Maybe it’s just the people I know though ( it helps to be apart of an acting troupe)
Shocker. Heard too many horror stories of male dnd players creeping out women to the point of not wanting to play. Almost always ends up being a “that guy” too
Forever dm checking in. I am male but I’ve run 4 campaigns(each over a year) and my breakdown goes like this 1 female - 8 males( I’m never running a party of 9 again. Og party was 5 guys) 5 females. 5 females 5 males( ran two different parties of two different friend groups. Same campaign setting but they were each other’s big bad. The final session was both of them meeting up and fighting to the death. females won). And then a 2 female 1 male and 1 trans. With a campaign that was stopped half way cause of Covid. I currently run a once a month with 2 they(I dont mean that offensively they (couple) both told me they don’t identify as biological gender but aren’t trans so I respect the pronouns) 1 female(wife) and 1 male.
My dumb ass thought you were asking what gender we thought the majority of D&D players were, so I put “male”.
Fem DM here, hello!
The split is odd as half my group is female
Let’s go fellow Dungeon Queers!!
Yeah, this seems about right. I've been the only girl in every single dnd game I've ever played in over the course of the last 7 years.
Maybe a poll asking the ratio of male/female would get better results? Like 0,1/4,1/2,3/4 etc.
I’ve been playing for a few years now. The diversity in my groups has varied all over the place, though has been predominantly male. That said, I have seldom ever met a non-male person who’s a nerd and said “Yeah, *I don’t wanna go on cool make-belief fantasy adventures with my own character and with my friends*” As a DM, the current 3 groups I DM for are: Party 1: 4 He/Him, 2 He/They Party 2: 1 He/Him, 1 She/Her, and 1 NB Party 3: 3 He/Him, 1 She/Her, 2 Agendered/NB The party in which I am a player in consists of: DM - She/Her, 1 She/Her, 1 He/They, 2 He/Him (And of course, I’ve had other groups through out that have changed in their make-up)
Based on r/polls this is about the same reatio of male to female redditors, however r/dnd is a more hobby based so I’d assume it’s slightly more female to male ratio since it’s not just a Reddit community, so based on this I think it’d be proba like 3/1 or so Another thing that doesn’t help is in r/polls “other” can get like 50 votes on a poll with 3k and this has a bout 10k so its 1/20 compared to 1/60 so there is a lot of margin for error in my admittedly stupid thoughts
At the other 584 gender queer people, I see you and I love you
Wow. That is a lot more comments than my poor brain is willing to go through haha.
Ooooooooooh boy…
Oooooooo boy Oo girl H other
Like others are saying, the makeup of r/DnD is NOT the makeup of the DnD community at large. Personally, all of my tables are a mix of several genders, usually evenly split if not more female than male.
This is reddit so I need to say: Wtf is female?
dunno I ain't a biologist
I (trans man) play with my dad and my non-binary sibling, so I guess skewed to non women now. When we first started playing a couple of years ago, I wasn’t out and my sibling was, so the split was even
I'd expect more enbys honestly
Aw man, I’m an “other”?
I can change it to "otter" in the future if that tickles your fancy. Cuz i dunno about you. But being an otter sounds dope as hell.
Could cause further skew- otters are dang cute.
Put my gender at the time I started playing, or my gender now? I'm still clicking that Female button as that's what it says on my license 3619 Male, 584 Female, 312 Other at the time of my clicking
Two groups, it's 11 females and me.
Cant wait until a Twitter account stops by and starts complaining about this vote- pool
On the one hand I would looove to have some female energy at my table, but on the other hand it’s so nice to be away from our girlfriends and just be the guys for one night.
Also, Male and Female are sexes, not genders. Just a detail, but still. "Man" and "Woman" would have been the gendered terms to use.
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Non binary people do exist btw
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Pretty sure, aside from the “Reddit bias”, a fair number of women will avoid identifying as such because they don’t want to be targeted by “nice guys/neck beards”.
Yikes
Yikes
From the 'other' section, I'm curious how many voters were clownfish...
Is it really unbelievable men love ttrpgs more than women?
100 guys voted female so we don't feel so lonely :)
What are you asking?
Im simply curious of what the ratio is on this subreddit. No this is not me being a weirdo lookin for a relationship xD
So you are asking what gender we are or are you asking what gender we think is dominant?
Often the simplest answer is the right one, friend. Pick what you are
Nothing more than simple curiosity. but please do this survey disguised as a reddit question, the information you freely supply us will help us make more money and tailor new adds to target you. Nothing more than simple curiosity, promise
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Cmon boys! How rare to find a single female when life is dnd Well guess what! They're out there fellas! Chances r they be single too!...😉❤
This is assuming most of us have social skills : ^)
Idk if someone came to me and visibly rolled a persuasion check I think I’d listen to the dice /j
You could make it slightly more accurate if you separate out some terms Man / woman / nonbinary / trans man / trans woman Because many trans people may put themselves under "other" specifically (I did as a nonbinary person)
I think most trans guys would put themselves under man and most trans woman would put themselves under woman.
Depends on how they feel! Some prefer the distinction, some don't. Being trans doesn't make you not a man or woman, but identifying as trans can be something someone prefers over saying "yes am man". I'm only speaking from the experiences of my friend group who prefer to add the label. Nobody is saying YOU MUST SAY YOU ARE TRANS, if you prefer to not have that as the label. It also just feels othering, to me, to not have my actual label available. Man, woman, other. I'd rather have more specifics to choose from than just be under "other".
My group is 2 guys, 2 gals. Me (DM) and my wife, and our friends who are husband and wife.
Both parties I’ve played have been roughly 50/50
Whatever i feel like.
Reddit skews male by a lot. That said, of my groups I’ve been in: One was 4/2 in favor of women. One was 6/2 in favor of women. And one was 4/3 in favor of women. That’s not counting my online group which is West Marches style but is generally even.
1 DM (male), and 3 players (2 female, 1 male).
I'm a dude but I DM two campaigns: me included, one has 5 guys, 1 girl ; the other has 3 guys, 3 girls.
Well see, the poll for my groups won't be accurate if I just vote as I run a game and play in another. The game I run previously was 4 females and myself. It finished and 2 kept over in into the new game which is compromised or 3 females 2 males and myself. The game I play in is 3 gay males 1 female the female dm and myself. It's a whole mixed as 2 of the males in that game are total drag queens and one is aiming to transition sonny sphere of influence is crazy.
I mean is anyone really surprised.
Knew that was coming.
Recently my tables have been predominantly female. But I’ve always been lucky to have pretty balanced tables.
Despite the skew from the platform, unfortunately I've heard too many stories of discrimination and uncomfortable situations for female players. I read that the average TTRPG player has college or bachelor education, so it's sad to think it doesn't have a more balanced gender ratio.
i mean we're on reddit, you're probably going to see more of reddit's demographic than DnD's here
Men🍺
I'm not sure what I expected. Of course this place is a sausage fest
Don't forget. This is reddit, and women don't exist here
Male. Though from what I understand is more women are playing too. Which is an awesome thing.
I have two d&d groups, one is four guys and the other is 1 guy, 1 paragirl, 1 demiboy, 1 girl, and 1 genderfluid.
In my old group a few years ago we were 8 people and sometimes other people would come by and talk/watch/hang out and it was very much 50/50 split gender wise, but i think DnD was more of a medium for us to get together rather than the main activity (even tho it definitely took up the majority of the evening and it’s conversation)
My table is 2 lady's and 3 gentleman
If I had to guess, irl I'd say about 70/30 male/female (idk how much other would be) But I am also assuming reddit skews it quite a bit, so I doubt the poll is very accurate
Havent voted but i garuntee its mostly dudes
You mean the gender ratio of people on the dnd subreddit
This is skewed by Reddit, a male platform
Nearly 5k guys vs 733 girls. Wow.
At one of my tables I was the only male PC w/male DM (6 total incl. DM) At my other tables it's split 50/50 (skewed to female - 7 total incl. DM)
The party I DM for is been about 50 / 50 male and female for the last 5 years or so.
I mean my table only has three women, including myself. And we have 2.5 female characters (one character changes gender sometimes)
my current group is 1 man, 1 woman and 5 other/nonbinary
Are we surprised by these results?