Thought from Steve Townshend, Wizards of the Coast Writer

Through the RPG Chicago group I found out about a talk with Steve Townshend about writing for the industry.  He recently just finished working on books for D&D 4.0, which includes the Dungeon Master's Guide III, Monster Manual III, and the Demononicon.  All three of those books are slotted to go out in 2010.

After the initial talk I got a chance to talk to him one on one.  Since he's been playing since 1982 I ask if he's seen an evolution in female gamers.  I wish I had a tape recorder to put more quotes in, but instead I have notes, so I'm mostly paraphrasing what Steve said. 

He said that in the early 80s there were not a lot of female gamers at all, and this continued in the early 1990s too.  In college he tried to have at least one girl in his gaming groups, but he admits that each girl was the "token female" in the group.  In th late 90s is when he saw there was real growth of women players.  He credits the growth of board games as one part, where a game brings people together.  Another thing he credits is Vampire the Masquerade and White Wolf, with a system that had more emphasis with storytelling.   All of that lead to Steve noticing the abundance of girls when he went to GenCon '99. 

Helping some of that growth continue has been the Lord of the Rings movies, thinks Steve.  Girls being able to relate to the characters, or in some instances have huge crushes on elf boys, helped a lot.

He also says that women are the "best storytellers" and story-telling is what women want more of in their games.

His wife Liz was great to talk to as well, who got into games about 6 years ago.  She definitely agreed with me that it's nice not to be the only woman in a campaign over a couple of years.  Believe me, boys will be boys and girls will not get half of it sometimes.  

Steve was awesome to talk to, and he has a great blog out there but the url I got doesn't work... if you're out there, Steve, let me know what the link is!