I’ve never been in a regular group with non-white people.
It’s happened at conventions but RPGing in the UK has traditionally been pretty white and upper-middle-class; you need money for books, time to meet, space to meet, a decent facility with language, and at least back in the day a certain amount of social capital so that you didn’t have to care what normal people thought of you, each of which is somewhat correlated that way. It’s certainly changing now but there isn’t a lot of player churn among the groups I play with.
Even women have been fairly rare in the groups I’ve been in, usually zero or one, often the partner of one of the other players (though I’ve never met the “bored partner” stereotype, they’ve always been interested and involved in the games; and in one case the partner left the group and the woman stayed). I’ve never seen women being hit on or creeped on at the table, though I’m aware that I may simply not have noticed; as a group organiser I’ve always tried to ensure that people know they can talk to me if they’re not happy, but I’m sure that hasn’t always worked.
I’ve met one or two out gay gamers who mentioned it, but the subject has rarely come up; so there are probably plenty more I’ve met but didn’t know, even without any attempt to conceal it on their parts.
So most of my experience with diverse groups is in one-shots with pre-gens, that don’t cater for a lot of cultural input. That said, it’s always been positive: even in a one-shot, I’m trying to show off what I think is best about RPGs, and a big part of that is that players can come up with unexpected solutions to problems which the GM can then adjudicate.
I definitely haven’t noticed a male-female correlation with characterisation. Some women like to play the talky rather than the fighty type; others are happy to get up to their elbows in orc guts. Same with non-white players.
I haven’t a lot to say about ethnicity. I’ve had a black player, a Hispanic player, a South Asian player, and an East Asian player, but only one of each. I’ve encountered other East Asian players in campaigns I’ve played in or guest starred in; I think they’re fairly common in southern California.
I’ve had two gay male players that I know of; one lesbian player; one bisexual player; and one transgender player. That was in San Diego, where my players were pretty up front about such things, whether because most of them had been with me for years and years, or because our local culture tolerated such revelations. I may have had a second transgender player in Riverside, but neither they nor anyone else made it explicit.
One of my women players appeared in a guest role in my transgender player’s first campaign with me, and, learning that he was transgender, promptly asked if he would go out with her. That wasn’t cool!
I think that was the only time there was ever an issue about any player being in any of these categories. One of my two gay players was much admired, but I think that was mainly because he’s one of the two best roleplayers I’ve ever had in any campaign (his being a professional voice actor probably provides helpful skills; he once ran a convention workshop on improv acting exercises for roleplayers, which is a really great idea).
Finally, the other dimension of diversity I would mention is ideological, philosophical, and religious—and this has worked in an odd way for me. I’m aware that a lot of gamers come from a military background and tend to lean conservative. (I myself am not conservative, nor do I have any military background.) However, my circle in San Diego were predominantly progressive, and the core members almost exclusively so; the ideological spectrum ranged from a couple of moderate Republicans (who are now never-Trumpers or outright Democrats) to liberal to bitterly intolerant liberal. This meant that there was a sort of “diversity” here, in that my players were sitting down with me, and I’m a fairly hard core libertarian. The only one who’s close to me ideologically is C (perhaps not surprising, as she and I are married!).
In general, this doesn’t come up during games, though occasionally after-game conversations veer into ideology. But more importantly, I don’t use my game worlds as vehicles for preaching any particular ideology. My goal isn’t to run a utopia (a “good” world) or dystopia (an “evil” world—not merely a bad one in a neutral, factual way, but one where harmful things are actively imposed out of moral conviction), but often to run a heterotopia (a different and interesting world). My point of view does suggest questions to ask about a world, and tools to use in answering them. But the explicit beliefs of characters in a world may be quite different from my own; they have to make sense in their own terms, and not as mouthpieces for GM sermons.
There’s less of an incompatibility on religious matters; I think my players have largely tended to agnostic or atheistic. I have had the odd pagan, including one woman who became a practicing shaman; in one campaign I had a devout evangelical (my one East Asian player, by the way); and I’ve had some players who would consider themselves spiritual. Now I was introduced to gaming by people most of whom were seriously Christian in one denomination or another, but that was long in the past. And we secularists haven’t been inclined to argue with the pagans, or vice versa.
(I should note that one of C’s and my closer friends, the woman who officiated at our wedding, is an evangelical literalist. But she’s not a gamer.)
Okay, but do diverse groups of players have advantages like those claimed for diverse management teams and diverse engineering design teams?
Are diverse groups more fun?
Do character-players find themselves more effectual when they possess a marked difference of gender, generation, culture, class, field of training and experience etc. from the rest of the group? Or less?
Do character-players find themselves more effectual when they possess a marked difference of gender, generation, culture, class, field of training and experience etc. from the GM? Or less?
What do the GMs who make their games more amenable to players who have different ideas and approaches from theirs do to accomplish that?
And if you don’t know, but dare to speculate, what seems plausible and worth investigating. Would experiments be ethical?
Likewise. I’m reading about British India at present, preparing for a campaign, and the common game narrative of “A small group of people arrive in a strange land, deal with the problems afflicting it and expect rich rewards” is kind of colonialist, really.
I’ve played in groups that had more, but that is exceptional. I specifically like having women players, because male players tend to behave in a more civilised manner when there are women in the group. Quite often, they’ll also spot aspects of the situation that men miss, which makes the party more effective and the game more interesting.
This is not the case in the UK. There are some with military backgrounds, but they’re rare.
Well, the US has about twice as many active military personnel per capita as the UK, so even if terms of service are identical that would suggest ex-military people would be rather more common in the population. (And I think it’s quite usual in the US to do a single term and then get out, whereas most (former) military people I’ve known in the UK made a decade or two’s career out of it, meaning the US probably has more people per capita who’ve been in even than that ratio would indicate.)
Whether US military people are also more inclined to RPGs than British would be another matter.
I know that, largely as a result of my nearly 40 years of RPGing, I’ve learned quite a bit about some quite obscure things. But if my character doesn’t know them, I try not to use them in play. (I have been known to say “can (character X with the relevant skills) have an Idea roll to see if they think of this thing that (player of X) doesn’t know but I do”.)
I once asked the owner of the old Cambridge games shop why he stocked lots of Palladium books, never having met anyone who’d played it. He said they sold well to people from the USAF based in East Anglia, of whom there were a lot in the late 1980s.
I suspect that there may be more to it than diverse groups containing a greater knowledge of obscure details, though I suppose they do. People of different genders, cultures, generations, religions, professions, and so on may see into each other’s blind spots, span a more complete understanding of the big picture, perform different analyses of the fundamental situation or problem, and think outside each other’s squares.
Hmmm. Thinking about this, on one hand, I find it perplexing, and I might even say alien, to think of player characters as being “effectual.” I mean, for example, when I ran a one-shot game of Hellcats and Hockeysticks, an RPG set at an analog of St Trinians, it wasn’t really clear that the players were trying to accomplish anything. But they seemed to be having fun! And the flavor wasn’t all that different from campaigns with a mission statement; perhaps a bit more wild and crazy . . .
On the other hand, it seems to me sometimes that having a life history of dialogue with people who don’t share my worldview or my ethical outlook has been a valuable education for me. It may even have made me a better GM. But I don’t know how much benefit my players are getting from their adherence to things that I find weird and alien.
I suppose that it varies. But for myself, I find that if nothing I do can have any effect on the course of the game, or that no effort of mine can produce any effect that I want, I get frustrated and bored and do not enjoy the game.
Back in 1982 I played in a scratch AD&D game in which the DM handed out pre-generated characters of about 10th level and tried to run us through what I later came to know of as the Expedition to the Barrier Peaks. One of my characters was an 11th-level cleric, which list of prepared spells included by Wall of Flames and Insect Plague. part-way into the adventure I announced that I was going to use the Wall of Flames to create a protective ring of fire around the party (as the spell description said was possible) and then cast Insect Plague to produce a swarm of insects outside the wall of flames, to last 11 turns doing 10 hp/turn to everything in the volume of effect. The DM told me that if I did that the insects would all be killed crossing the wall of flame from me to the point of effect. I said “Okay, I’ll cast Insect Plague first and then Wall of Flame”. The DM said that in that case there would be insects inside the ring of fire that would do 110 hp each to every member of the party. So I said “The spell description for Insect Plague says that it can be used in conjunction with Wall of Flames to protect a party in the midst of the volume of effect in this way. My character doubtless knows how to do it, and whatever the correct method is I will do that.” So the party all took a rest for 11 turns while everything within 110" but outside out ring of fire took 110 hit points. And immediately the ring of flames went down we were swarmed by 4-hit-dice monsters. I felt that nothing I could do was going to have any effect, so I handed my characters over to @AndrewK and went off to get some work done in the terminal lab.
I imagine that some players might have a similar experience when the things that they try don’t work because of a lack of shared understanding with the GM about what sorts of things happen.
Because I am not male, I have no idea how all-male gaming groups might differ from the gaming groups I am part of.
I accidentally ended up running a campaign for an all-female group once. (That is the participant gender mix was accidental because GMs pitched games and players selected what they wanted, not that the campaign was accidental). It didn’t play out any differently than games of mixed genders.
The only thing I can think of is that I have never encountered an adult female player whose default character type was murder-hobo. But I know several men who rarely play anything else. And a bunch of children (both boys and girls) who just want to kill people and take their stuff.
My friend is a teacher who runs her school’s RPG club. She says there is a distinct age difference in play style - the younger kids are all murder-hobos. The 17 year olds are more nuanced and want to talk to NPCs and solve mysteries, not just kill everyone they meet.
It’s usually only at conventions that I play with players from a BAME background. Back when I worked at the university and went to their Gamesoc we had one British Indian player and I played in a campaign with him. I didn’t notice any cultural perspective from him that made the game play differently, but it was a weird fantasy about pirates based on an anime, so would I have noticed?
Playing with gay or lesbian players I learned (a) not to assume their PC’s sexuality always reflected the player’s sexuality and (b) to be an ally when some dick is spouting off about “you can’t be a lesbian in D&D because it was banned in the real-world Medieval Period”.
I’ve run and played in campaigns with a trans friend before they were out. They said it was such a relief to them that I didn’t bat an eyelid when they wanted to play a woman and do all sorts of girly-girl things in character. (I still recall the shopping expedition for dresses, make-up… and a Barbie pink Uzi).
Some groups seem to have a strong tradition of not doing cross-gender play (I’d say “not allowing” but it’s not that formal) (I should probably also say “cross-apparent-gender” because a non-out transwoman is not likely to feel the same way about playing a female character that a man is). Some are fine with it. Some male players definitely shouldn’t play women because they fall inevitably into offensive stereotype; probably there are women who would do the same with male characters but I haven’t met them.
Way back in the twentieth century, in one of the first campaigns I ran after circulating a prospectus, one of the five players in my RuneQuest II campaign asked me, “You allow people to play the other sex?” I looked at him a little blankly and said, “Allow?” It had never occurred to me to prevent it. But he seems to have decided it was okay, as his own later campaigns had cross-gender play. In fact there was the one complex case where C and I were in his Caribbean pirates campaign, and she was playing the ship’s surgeon, who was a woman disguised as a man . . .
It’s amusing to me that, despite being a very diverse group regarding gender, the campaign I’m currently running has ended up with 5 male characters and 1 female (and one player has recently rejoined the group and is now playing a non-binary fairy, but was previously a male lizardfolk).
Hmmm. I think I would have to say that my approach is not “I’m running D&D” but “I’m running a campaign set in the historical Middle Ages with magic.” Or whatever other historical era it is; I’ve run campaigns set in Gaul in the Roman Empire (mid-third century), the Near East during the First Crusade, England under Edward I, France under the Regency, Alta California in the 1810s, London in 1905, San Francisco in the 1920s, New Orleans in the 1930s, and Hong Kong in the 1990s. And my approach is largely to follow the laws, customs, and cultures of the era, so far as I know or can find out about them, partly because I enjoy cognitive estrangement and seek to offer it to my players (and at least in San Diego, a fair number of them chose it when they had other options). That’s not to say I would say “You can’t play X” (unless it were, say, an aboriginal Australian in Norway in 900 AD or something); but I would ask, “How does your character deal with the cultural assumptions of the era about the option you’ve chosen?”
One of my current San Diego players (the lesbian, as it happens) has told me more than once about a campaign she was in where another player insisted on playing an out gay man in a medieval setting. (The other player is a woman, by the way, and presumably straight or bi, as she’s in a long-term relationship with a man.) It seemed incongruous to both of us: not that the character was gay but that he wasn’t keeping it secret in an era when, as I understand the history, sodomy carried the death penalty.
This is not to say that your taste in entertainment is “wrong.” But it’s not at the center of gravity of what I enjoy. And seemingly my circle of players in San Diego included people who enjoyed imagining themselves living in other cultures with different customs.