DBWI: Pen & Paper roleplay was more associated with boys?

I've been watching Netflix's Montauk for the first time ever, and it gave me a what-if idea: For those that don't know, Montauk has as central characters a group of female friends that are trying to find their missing member, Winona. Since it's set in the 80's, and sells itself as an homage to the culture of the very same, the show of course introduces the group while they're playing a Pen & Paper campaign that one of them, Mary, has written. True to the attitudes of the time, or at least playing to the tropes, when Eleven, the strange boy they find while on their hunt, struggles to communicate something to them (he has a very limited vocabulary due to the conditions he was raised in), Dustanne tries to offer him an analogy from their lore book, to which Lucy objects "Boys don't play P&P, dummy."

While a few boys back then did play P&P and systems like it, the threat of being accused to be effeminate by classmates kept it very limited. How might roleplaying have evolved if the hobby was more gender-neutral, or even slanted towards boys? Wargames have been around for centuries, and were obviously dominated by boys, might a different form of P&P, perhaps focused much more specifically on combat, have grown out of these?
 
What kind of genre were you thinking for for “Boy’s P&P?”

I agree that boys play more war games, but even when men play war games for work the level of characterisation and social negotiation is even lower than the actual negotiation that military staff engage in!

I was thinking Noir or Western might work better for boy’s P&P.
 
What kind of genre were you thinking for for “Boy’s P&P?”

I agree that boys play more war games, but even when men play war games for work the level of characterisation and social negotiation is even lower than the actual negotiation that military staff engage in!

I was thinking Noir or Western might work better for boy’s P&P.

Westerns are possible, they're fairly popular in P&P, one of the earliest starter lore books was a western scenario which I think was inspired by Blazing Saddles, though again it may be focused less on planning and quick negotiation and more on combat.
 

Am I too young for this because I had to look this up on the Internet. I think you mean « 1980s » boys because I'm pretty most boys and girls of the 21st century would rather use electronic devices and digital applications than Stone Age pen and paper roleplay
 
I remember reading somewhere that one of the ideas that the creators had was a High Medieval setting, but thanks to Robert Plant of all people making comments about how song lyrics inspired by the Lord of the Rings tended cause a backlash warned them off. The first incarnation of P&P ended up with a mystery setting that was loosely based on Nancy Drew as a result. It was extremely popular with girls in the 1970s and 80s.
 
I remember reading somewhere that one of the ideas that the creators had was a High Medieval setting, but thanks to Robert Plant of all people making comments about how song lyrics inspired by the Lord of the Rings tended cause a backlash warned them off. The first incarnation of P&P ended up with a mystery setting that was loosely based on Nancy Drew as a result. It was extremely popular with girls in the 1970s and 80s.

Fantasy seems an unlikely choice. Fantasy books, even reading in general, seemed to have a tendancy to open children up to bullying, a niche genre would just have the game remain being socially repressed among boys without even having a large female gamership to support it anyway. Boys fantasised about fast cars, sexy women and fighting Nazis, there's not much room left for dragons or dungeons full of monsters and treasure.
 
Why not Swashbuckling/Pulp Fiction? The kind of things you saw in Dime Novels about the 30's and popularized in shows like Johnny Quest and the Indiana Jones franchise? There's plenty of room for puzzling and mystery in those, which could easily be put into a P&P module format.

However, I ultimately think the greater male shift towards wargaming and simulation-style games: based on politics and economic number-crunching alongside puzzle solving, was ultimately a posative thing. Virtually all studies show the "Edutainment" brand of board and early computer games: be they single player (Such as Banana Republic), head to head (like most war games), or co-operative "Players vs. Board" (Like Corperate Conquest) result in much higher academic skills for players and thus made gaming a more socially acceptable hobby. Hard for parents to protest their sons honing their higher math skills doing the logistics and budget calculations for a game of Imperialism.
 
I don’t think it is fair to lock boys into resource maximisation pathway play like the “German board game” hypothesis states. A number of simulation games were balanced to the point where multiple paths were equally valid, and the “flavour” and “colour” of different pathways allowed boys the possibility of expressing character, drama and interpersonal conflicts. Boys aren’t just calculators!

If you’ve seen boys playing “Sink the Bismarck,” you know that they ascribe character and personality in their play, each weapons system is treated as an emotional subject. All that is needed is an early enough “breakthrough” where instead of ascribing character and plot, that boys play with character and plot.

Maybe some kind of dating simulator reskinned as a historical military staff meeting. “SHAEF up or ship out!”? Does anyone know if a daring group tried a reskin for boys?
 
I dunno, the stereotypical image of a group of preteen girls going around a table and taking turns being fairy princesses doesn't sound like the sort of thing that would attract boys. Too much imagination for anyone except maybe artsy types. A game has to make money to succeed, after all.

Maybe if math was involved? Something where you'd have to solve a math problem to hurt bad guys? And science too. Make it so that the characters are mad scientists fighting monsters or something. I think that could work.
 
I don’t think it is fair to lock boys into resource maximisation pathway play like the “German board game” hypothesis states. A number of simulation games were balanced to the point where multiple paths were equally valid, and the “flavour” and “colour” of different pathways allowed boys the possibility of expressing character, drama and interpersonal conflicts. Boys aren’t just calculators!

If you’ve seen boys playing “Sink the Bismarck,” you know that they ascribe character and personality in their play, each weapons system is treated as an emotional subject. All that is needed is an early enough “breakthrough” where instead of ascribing character and plot, that boys play with character and plot.

Maybe some kind of dating simulator reskinned as a historical military staff meeting. “SHAEF up or ship out!”? Does anyone know if a daring group tried a reskin for boys?

I don't think that it's that there's only one objectively right answer, in the sense of one of those murder mystery books (indeed, that's a common complaint in early P&P modules and even so today; the hobby is a money sink because of minimum lorebook replay value) but rather that there's objectively good and bad consequences to your actions, win-loss states, and a way to measure your and others performance so one can get "better". Let's be honest, with such vague rules and being essentially a co-operative storytelling experience between girls who like each other you almost never hear of a group "losing" a game; character death or failure was so rare that for xdecades it was dubbed a "Total Friendship Killer" after the fact such issues were often blamed on personal animus rather than failure on the part of the players. I'm not even sure in alot of modules total failure is technically even possible anymore...

"Hate the game, not the player" is a common saying in the gaming community not attributable to P&P players. Kind of why they get a bad rap as fanciful, entitled whiners who can't get boyfriends.

As for your dating sim idea... that dosen't really work for a tabletop game without decent AI. The best I can come up with is a Diplomacy-esque system like that used in Cold War political grand strategy games, in which one has to chose the correct responses to randomized events and implement the right policies alongside giving out aid in different forms to align countries to your bloc. Maybe a model Cuban Missile Crisis module, or some other international conference/event would work?
 
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