Dragons Are Fine, But Female Gamers? Come On!

As a teenager, I am an avid fantasy reader. My brother and I are both into tabletop roleplay, as well, and we both have separate groups of friends we play with regularly. Also, I wish it didn’t matter, but as this story will unfortunately show that it very much does, I’m a girl.

Me: “Hey, do you think I could join your group for the next campaign? My group is having a bit of downtime due to life and other responsibilities at the moment.”

Brother: “I don’t know if we’re gonna do another one just now. I’m kind of worn out as GM. I just wanna play for a bit, but none of the others are interested in the position.”

Me: “Oh, I could do that. I don’t mind at all!”

Brother: “Oh, cool! That’d be great! We can do a test run in two weeks and see how everyone thinks it works!”

I am thrilled and immediately set to work preparing. Since I am ahead in my school studies and on top of all my homework, I decide to use our free study period for prep work.

Some guys from another class happen to be seated next to me, and of course, they spot my pile of rule books and papers.

Student #1: “Wait, what are you doing with those?”

Student #2: *Snickering* “Yeah, girls can’t roleplay!”

Since I am busy, unwilling to bother class, and also uninterested in debating with morons, I just raise an eyebrow, look over at them, and go:

Me: “Okay?”

When they didn’t manage to come up with any intelligible answers to that after a few seconds, I returned to my books and ignored them for the rest of the class. If anything, their comments spurred me to prepare even better to make sure of an epic test run for the people that I thought knew better.

I turned out I was wrong; when my brother had let the group know a — gasp! — female was going to be the GM, they all decided it would probably be so bad it wasn’t even worth showing up. 

Joke’s on them, though; my brother joined my group, instead, and we had lots of fun for several campaigns to come. His old group ended up disbanding since no one would step up as GM for them.