Annoying Game Questions You Want Answered

TiaC · Post by **TiaC** » Thu May 14, 2015 6:40 am

Prak wrote:Is it just confirmation bias of my personal experience, or has anyone else noticed a weird tendency of women getting into gaming to mostly play rogues/thief types?

No, I find they hit the remarkably specific stereotype of Savage Race Paladin at some point while I gamed with them. Seriously, I think three of the last four women I played with played some sort of half-orc, hobgoblin, even a neanderthal paladin.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Thu May 14, 2015 6:47 am

I don't think there's anything weird about women mostly getting into gaming as some variant of Rogue or Warrior. After all, the game sells four broad archetypes and new players of all types are shunted towards those two rather than the Wizard or Cleric because the casters are considerably more complicated.

-Username17

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Thu May 14, 2015 7:19 am

I was thinking over the women I've introduced to D&D and came to-

Girlfriend 1: Rogue (she was a punk sort of chick with parent issues)
Hookup: Healing Theurge in Werewolf/Druid in D&D (because she's that nurturing sort of person. Pretty sure she was a nursing student)
Girlfriend 2: Rogue. Almost always. I think I gave her a pumpkin king for her first character because I happened to have one built. (She was a gothy wiccan>Satanism type. With parent issues)
Friend and most recent woman I've introduced to gaming: Stabby, steal-y, really excited about her MTP pyrokinesis powers later in the game rogue (because it's what she played in WoW).

Four is totally not a sample size, and the plural of anecdote isn't data, and all that, I was just curious.

DSMatticus · Post by **DSMatticus** » Thu May 14, 2015 7:27 am

Anecdotally, I've been in two campaigns with female first-timers. The first was a Tome spherelock with seduction + arctic. The second was a Pathfinder druid.

Koumei · Post by **Koumei** » Thu May 14, 2015 8:18 am

I've always gone caster. When my girlfriend was roped into a RIFTS (TM) game, she went Mega-Juicer (fighty type). Female friends have run the complete gamut.

RelentlessImp · Post by **RelentlessImp** » Thu May 14, 2015 8:58 am

A female friend of mine adores playing Rogue-types, but she's always been rather obsessed with being sneaky. Occasionally she'll combine that with a caster, but always goes for the sneaky sorts of casters - illusionists and enchanters and whatnot.

rasmuswagner · Post by **rasmuswagner** » Thu May 14, 2015 9:23 am

My wife plays healers, supporters and now caster beatsticks; she played one(1) martial character and quickly realized that having dick shit in your bag of tricks was boring as hell. She prefers spontaneous casters, because fuck spell prep.

EDIT: Our mutual girl friend plays archer rangers, no exception, regardless of system.

ishy · Post by **ishy** » Thu May 14, 2015 11:16 am

IIRC I've played with 6 female first-timers and only with 3 male first-timers so far, others already knew D&D.
Females: female gnome bard, female human bard, male human sorcerer, female gnome sorcerer, female gnome druid, (4e )female human paladin

Males: male human bard (wanted to play druid but told it was too complex), male air-goblin ranger, (4e) male dragonborn fighter.

Can't say I've noticed any trend in what classes male / females pick. Though individual people tend to have preferences.
And there do seem to be trends in what races females / males pick, though this might be due to confirmation bias and limited sample sizes (since I tend to play with the same groups).

tussock · Post by **tussock** » Thu May 14, 2015 12:43 pm

If you look at the art in 3e/PF, there's consistently Female Paladins, Druids, Thieves, and Sor/Wiz. I can't immediately recall a female Fighter in the art since 2nd edition, though I'm sure there's one somewhere in 3e, definitely the Psiwar.

The Pathfinder first 4 have a female Thief and Sorcerer, right on the cover. Next 4 have female Druid and Paladin. First-timers are going to go by the art, or a name they already liked from somewhere else. Takes time to have enough bad experiences to check the mechanics first, and even longer to read much of the fluff.

momothefiddler · Post by **momothefiddler** » Thu May 14, 2015 1:14 pm

When I play a non-rogue, both in ttrpgs and in crpgs, it's a conscious choice. Part of that, I'm sure, is that my first ttrpg character was a rogue, part of it's because I find it easier to identify with tricksy hobbitses than anything muscly and jock-ish, part of it's because (esp in crpgs) I find it weird to just... be okay with getting hit (unless I force myself not to, it doesn't matter how I start in Skyrim - I'm gonna end up killing people with sneak attack crits and never letting them hit me).

Which isn't to say I've never played anything else - my current FNV playthrough is all about the punchin' and I'm currently building a War Cleric for a PbP - but rogue is by far the most natural niche for me.

Zaranthan · Post by **Zaranthan** » Fri May 15, 2015 4:59 pm

The ladies I've gamed with have played fighters, paladins, rogues, clerics, druids, wizards, and sorcerors. They have played humans, elves, halflings, dwarves, and one thri-kreen. Can't say that I've noticed any pattern.

Eikre · Post by **Eikre** » Fri May 15, 2015 7:02 pm

Rogues are the most everyman class, in my opinion. Probably anyone here can get up, right now, put on a leather jacket, and achieve some mild success ambushing people with a kitchen knife; the same cannot be said for busting out Lichtenauer on anyone's ass, and particularly not for actual sorcery.

It says something that there's a whole game and subsequent genre of gygaxian dungeon crawlers called Rogue(likes).

Smeelbo · Post by **Smeelbo** » Fri May 15, 2015 9:32 pm

In the KingMaker campaign I am running, the group calls itself "Lady Fish," and consists of a Barbarian, Duelist, Druid, Sorcerer, and Inquisitor, and the player we lost had a Rogue. Everyone is very experienced with RPGs generally, and PathFinder in specific.

It's not an easy group to balance encounters against, as their power levels vary a lot at 8th.

Smeelbo

Count Arioch the 28th · Fri May 15, 2015 11:03 pm

The serious gamer chick in my previous group played warrior types. Barbarian, then later Aegis/alchemist. The other two women in my group didn't matter because they didn't know what they were doing, and would refuse to take any advice other than from the worst optimizer in the group (he was their gay best friend, you see). I couldn't tell you what they played because nothing they did was effective. I was asked to not use my psionic dominate ability because it made her enchanter look small in the pants (I don't know how that worked other than her being immensely incompetent)

TheFlatline · Post by **TheFlatline** » Fri May 15, 2015 11:27 pm

Last pathfinder game I was in there was a woman there who took the Level 0 Shagging the DM feat and rolled a rogue. I'm sorry, a rogue was rolled for her.

I rarely bitch about ineptitude, but holy fuck this woman was either completely disconnected from the game or one of the slowest people I've ever met, or a combination of them both.

Six months of playing weekly games and by the time the group fell apart she *still* couldn't figure out how to make an attack roll. We'd highlight it on her character sheet and she never figured it out. We'd have to do 100% of the math for her. She'd just roll the die and blurt a number out. Occasionally this number was whatever she rolled. God help her with the flanking and sneak attack rules. We weren't even 3rd level when the DM just gave her a cloak of improved invisibility so she wouldn't get fucking confused at the sneak attack rules. It didn't help much. Ungh...

Anyway, she was pretty unusual. I've gamed with many women and usually they run the gambit of classes. Though for first timers we'd gravitate towards Vampire because it was easier to get the basics of and because vampires.

erik · Post by **erik** » Sat May 16, 2015 12:15 am

We've been breaking in a male first-timer for the last 6 or so months and he still has trouble with attack rolls among everything else. Granted one of our campaigns is Earthdawn and that's. Hell, I fucked up remembering what step/dice my Spellcasting was at last session.

Our the other campaign is LotFP and there's like only two rolls 90% of the time, a d20 or a d6, and newish guy still has trouble with that.

Chamomile · Post by **Chamomile** » Sat May 16, 2015 1:19 am

I would expect the female preference for apparently domestic but secretly sneaky badass characters (presuming it exists at all, which seems reasonable but is unproven) is probably in the realm of 10-15% at most, so it wouldn't come up in casual observation unless you've played with dozens of women. Considering most groups have one woman, tops, that's really damn hard.

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Sat May 16, 2015 3:21 am

I'm thinking it may have more to do with personality types than gender/sex, since there were somewhat similar personalities in play here.

tussock · Post by **tussock** » Sat May 16, 2015 3:58 am

Six months of playing weekly games and by the time the group fell apart she *still* couldn't figure out how to make an attack roll. We'd highlight it on her character sheet and she never figured it out. We'd have to do 100% of the math for her.

She's probably got dyscalculia. The thing where she would sometimes call out the number on the die, and also not get how flanking is caused by being on opposite sides of a monster, is a couple classic symptoms.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyscalculia

Thought to be something about their brains not handling the concept of ordinals, everything interpreted as a group and never as an ordered list, so you can't really teach them math at all, and they struggle with time and measurement and stuff anything else we commonly mark with ordinals. Learn tiny bits and pieces of it all by rote.

RelentlessImp · Post by **RelentlessImp** » Wed May 20, 2015 10:31 am

What is the proper way to use the Tome of Fiends Conduit of the Lower Planes? Do you grab a bunch of Spheres with Basic access and let Enhanced Sphere Access give you enough uses while stacking the Sphere granted abilities? Do you grab a couple with Advanced Access? Or do you snag one with Expert and a couple utilities with Basic?

OgreBattle · Post by **OgreBattle** » Wed May 20, 2015 11:16 am

RelentlessImp wrote:What is the proper way to use the Tome of Fiends Conduit of the Lower Planes? Do you grab a bunch of Spheres with Basic access and let Enhanced Sphere Access give you enough uses while stacking the Sphere granted abilities? Do you grab a couple with Advanced Access? Or do you snag one with Expert and a couple utilities with Basic?

You max out the sphere that gives you Shadow Conjuration and then pick whatever else.

Kaelik · Post by **Kaelik** » Wed May 20, 2015 11:38 am

OgreBattle wrote:
RelentlessImp wrote:What is the proper way to use the Tome of Fiends Conduit of the Lower Planes? Do you grab a bunch of Spheres with Basic access and let Enhanced Sphere Access give you enough uses while stacking the Sphere granted abilities? Do you grab a couple with Advanced Access? Or do you snag one with Expert and a couple utilities with Basic?
You max out the sphere that gives you Shadow Conjuration and then pick whatever else.

Which is difficult, since that sphere doesn't exist.

To answer the original question, you can do a lot of things, but I'm a firm believer in at least one expert sphere which gives you level appropriate "attack" spells at every level you will be playing the game at. Something like Dominion, or Vile are my preferred ones, but depending on what level you expect the game to play at you can get by with a lot of others.

RelentlessImp · Post by **RelentlessImp** » Wed May 20, 2015 11:43 am

I'm dealing with someone who loves the Tome PDF and it does have a Shadow Sphere that gives you shadow evo, shadow conj, and the greater versions. Trying to convince them to use the "Errata" thread you started, Kaelik, to make Conduit more enjoyable at low levels since we're starting at 3.

Kaelik · Post by **Kaelik** » Wed May 20, 2015 10:57 pm

RelentlessImp wrote:I'm dealing with someone who loves the Tome PDF and it does have a Shadow Sphere that gives you shadow evo, shadow conj, and the greater versions. Trying to convince them to use the "Errata" thread you started, Kaelik, to make Conduit more enjoyable at low levels since we're starting at 3.

This is why the PDF makes me laugh my fucking ass off. Like, they completely fuck over the entire concept of spheres immediately, demonstrating that they have no idea what the design goals of spheres are, then they don't even clarify that it is added shit.

I explicitly spell out (Carthazes and my) design criteria: Level one having a single once per day spell like ability is fucking shit, and past level 5 you should have a goddam expert sphere access whether you want one or not, to be really real actual fucking Conduit. But because I didn't code mine in Lau it is "not official" even though it is equally as official as the actual fucking pdf bullshit that is terrible.

PS, don't use the metamagic rules in my errata with SLAs, it doesn't really work.

angelfromanotherpin · Post by **angelfromanotherpin** » Tue Jun 02, 2015 1:57 pm

Does anyone have an intact .pdf of the 3.0 DMG? All the ones I can find are copies of a version which is missing pages.