This is just another way to out yourself, gamer.

Had me until your last sentence.

It’s always going to be mixed, to some degree. The challenge is making it work anyway.

Yes, and Noon to 3:00 PM can blow a hole in your free time in a way that something running 7:00-10:00 PM doesn’t.

I put about 6-10 hours a week into RPG’s (DM’ing/playing/prepping) but would never want to play every Saturday afternoon. That would totally crimp my other interests.

Just want to point out Gygax had 2 sons, who are quite different people. I believe you are referring to Ernie Gygax.

Luke Gygax, by all accounts I’ve heard, is a great fellow.

Gygax also elevated Jean Wells in the company before the subsequent management basically made her a secretary. Wells had a decent working relationship with Gygax, which you can see if you read in Dragon magazine “Sage Advice” column from the mid 80’s. Gygax should have listened to Wells more often than he did, but he did try to empower her to make the game more friendly to women.

Still, his legacy towards women in gaming is mixed at best. In the 80’s, TSR games which Gygax was less involved in tended to do better with women, notably Star Frontiers, but also “Basic D&D” which did not include rules making it disadvantageous to play a female character, unlike Gygax’s Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, which capped female strength below male strength for each race. And I think telling a new D&D player their character would be a lousy fighter is pretty rough.

Yes, there was a pattern in Gygax’s creations of evil female power that went beyond the dragon example. Most notably drow were the only evil elves, and the only matriarchal (he would have said “female dominated”) ones. This pattern wasn’t his invention — it’s as old as Snow White, Cinderella, and the rest — but even in his own time, others (for example, Tom Moldvay) created more inclusive games.

It’s even better when the DM for you!

This can happen with new players who are native English speakers too, as D&D has a fair deal of vocabulary not everyone knows. Words like charisma and melee really got popularized by D&D.

Deep cut here: When I was a kid (ages past) and first heard friends talk about D&D, I thought there was a lens to keep you on the border. And without it, you might go straight Into The Unknown.

A group of my players brought this up. I let them know that was fine, but the monsters would be able to return the favor.

We decided “the weave” determines the angle of squares (no diagonals).

Goth girls are drow.