And I'm principally ranting because at Origins I play with a younger daughter and as such I tend to be picky about the GMs and games I sign up with because well, both her age and her gender sometimes make her the target of casual dismissal or condescending attitudes despite the fact that she's been playing since she could read and do basic math in systems from WEG D6, to D&D, to Blades in the Dark, to Ten Candles both at my table and at the tables of peer GMs.
I'm sorry your daughter has had that experience. More than twenty years ago, I was a frequent participant in a gaming club here in town and we ran events that attracted a lot of new people. I remember a father showed up to one of our events with his daughter in tow, she was in her mid-teens, maybe 16 or 17, and they wanted to jump in. The dad had playted some AD&D back in the day and thought it'd be fun for them to check out this new fangled 3.0.
It's been so long I can't even remember if I was a player or the DM, but what I do remember is one of the other players, I even remember his name, was macking on this poor girl right in front of her father. This is what you might have called a "teachable moment," because what I should have done was shut that behavior down immediately, but at the time I really didn't know how to handle the situation. I made the classic mistake of just ignoring the behavior in the hopes Mr. Romance would eventually get her hints and just stop the bad behavior. That just doesn't work.
This must have been around 2001 or 2002. Fast forward to 2022, the old club is defunct, and I'm back to running games for strangers at the game store. There are more women participating at these events than there were back then and I haven't observed the same kind of bad behavior I did way back then. As a whole, I have found the general behavior of gamers, including their hygiene, has proved over the last 30 years.
FYI: I don't say this to discount the experiences you and your daughter have had. But sometimes I like to add a little ray of hope. I think things have improved and they'll continue to improve. I think younger gamers are more aware of some issues than we were at their age.
Directorial stance. The GM creates all the PCs as pregenerated characters with their own expected emotions and motivations and primarily expects the players to play out her vision of the character. The characters are usually fine as literary devices and believable characters but they aren't given opportunity to actually do anything.
This is kind of how
Alien from Free League Games works if you're playing a cinematic scenario. The player is given specific goals their character is suppoised to accomplish in the 1st, 2nd, and third act of the scenario. I don't necessary take this as a negative because it does give me a chance to roleplay a character I might not normally roleplay.
Board the Choo Choo Train. These are the most linear adventures with the hardest use of stage management and the least actual player agency I have ever seen in 40 years of gaming.
Anytime I run a scenario for a bunch of strangers I say something like the following: This is an extremely simple adventure. I don't even use the full rules as I prefer to keep things simple. I view these events as an opportunity to maybe play a game you've never played before, get familiar with the rules, and have a little fun.
Let's face it, I'm designing a scenario for up to 5 people who I don't know, may not know one another, and may have very little familiarity with rules. The scenario is going to be simple. We have four hours to complete this, and even my relatively simple scenarios will eat up most of those four hours.
Complete lack of self-awareness by the GM. The GM prides themselves on their lethality announcing for example that of 64 participants they had killed 45 and driven 10 permanently insane with only 9 survivors.
"I don't go out of my way to kill PCs, but I have to admit I love it when it happens. So if you see me cackle with delight, please don't take it personally."
I've certainly had my share of convention games that have gone poorly. Pre-COVID I participated in a GURPS fantasy scenario as a player at the FLGS game day and I had just a dickens of a time. It was a miserable experience that kept me away from such events for a few years.
In recognition of bad GMs everywhere, I also tell the players at my table at these events the following: "I'm not a jerk GM, even if I enjoy seeing your characters die in horrible ways. I'm going to assume a certain level of competence. You don't have to tell me you reload after a fight because I'm going to assume your character does that. If you're sneaking, I'm not going to pull a 'got'cha' because you didn't tell me you turned off your flashlight. In short, I'm not out to 'get you.' I just want us all to have fun. And to see your characters horrible maimed and killed."
So let's make this clear, while I would have given this a 4/10 experience simply because the oral storytelling was interesting in a "you are attending a lecture" sort of way, for my daughter this was less enjoyable than being condescendingly talked down to by a sexist GM the whole session on account of her age and gender, because at least that aside she was allowed to actually play an RPG.
Damn, that's pretty harsh. I'm not saying it isn't deserved, but if a player told me they'd rather spend 4 hours with a boorish, misogynist than play another game I ran I'd probably reassess my life choices.
