Why does every girl I have ever played dnd with always make a half elf ranger as her first character...

I recently joined my first Pathfinder group with an aasimar paladin. This is also the first game for the wife of another one of the players, she rolled a human witch. Our third girl is a bard.

Our bearded man's man is the one playing the druid.

Girl's first characters from my group:
Aasimar Sorcerer,
Aasimar Druid,
Dwarf Ranger (really a detective),
Human Cleric (really a doctor)

I'm from Rome. Maybe living in a big city makes you strive for nature? The girls were actually very different from each other; that surprise me the most.

I never said that only girls play half elf rangers; but that the girls I've known made half elf rangers as their first character. Their other characters were actually quite different, ranging from a lolsorandom gnome warrior to a wise child wizard to a cruel half orc warlady.

I have only anecdotal evidence to offer; i don't know scientific papers aggregator à la Pubmed regarding roleplaying games. My bad. If you have stronger evidence regarding statistical distribution of classes among genders I'd like to read it. I'm not sarcastic, I'm actually asking.

That could be it, but the girls that have played with me while I was being the DM have actually put a lot of effort in writing a background, drawing their characters, even writing poems in-game to their loved ones. One of them wrote even a song for their character. It was very bad tho.

Every role player sucks at it initially OP, just like every newbie sucks a little at everything they try at first.
You did too, remember?
We ALL did once upon a time.

Mine was
>wood elf fighter
>half-elf fighter
>human barbarian
>human barbarian
All of them female and named after women in TV shows (Mostly Buffy the Vampire Slayer)
It was probably because she hated casters and didn't like picking spells when she leveled.

>I'm from Rome.
Jelly as fuck. Is roleplaying a big thing in Italy though? Never expected it to really be such a big thing outside of the US, the UK and maybe France.

That's true. But they didn't actually suck, just one of them; I guess I was worse as a first timer. The point is that they all made the same character and I can't honestly figure why.

It's big enough, I think. I personally know many group of young players (20-25 years old) and judging by some italian sites pen and paper rpg are popular enough. There are even some interesting italian-made rpgs. Where are you from? Why the surprise?

I'd guess it's relatively big in the first world in general. There's always fan translations for those systems that don't get official ones, even.

Of the women I've gamed with, only one's first character was a half-elf ranger. Meanwhile, others' first characters included a boisterous dwarf paladin, a stereotypical halfling rogue, a matronly fighter, a sullen Dragonborn warlock, a playful wizard, a heroic archer, a Lady Gaga-inspired bard, and an attention whore cleric.

Not in the same game, of course.

My wife's first character was basically pic related.

I have it too user, and I don't really care.

People have their fetishes and the way they go around them.

Aslong as they can indulge in their shit, so can I.

Most people start with a favorite character in mind. Most, but not all, commercial fantasy books/movies move female characters to the back line/support roles because women in bloody hand to hand isn't something people think they can sell right now.

That means that most girls new to the hobby are going to want to play either an archery/scout ranger, a healer-type, or a DPR caster. Most groups already have sufficient healing and most RPG magic looks pretty daunting at first so "woodland animal friends and arrows" carries the day.

Once they get the hang of things, they'll move on. Protips: always ask new players what their favorite character is in the genre you're playing and offer them that first. Always have a beginner friendly melee, ranged, and support pregen ready to go immediately. 5e's Champion Fighter (1 sword and board, 1 arrow build,) Warlock, and Life Cleric will save you hours of character creation time.

That's a sensible answer and a good advice; I guess that the details come after the ranger choice as direct consequences. Thank you.

Why would you play Half Elves when they are such an underpowered class?

How fat is she?

>Have you have ever met this kind of feminine half elf ranger?

Nope. The female D&D players I know, whose first games I saw, made:

>elf paladin
>elf paladin
>human paladin
>half-elf sorcerer
>elf druid
>human assassin
>orc ranger

I've seen more guys make half-elf rangers, as they better fit the typical newcomer power fantasy of the dangerous, cloaked loner with a mysterious past and no home.

>half elf
People who play as half anything should be shot.
Actually, scratch that, people who include even the possibility of "half-X" faggotry in the game, should be shot.
God damn zoophile degenerates.

I have never once come across this.

I've seen dudes who tried to pull this off, but couldn't keep it up and ended up being just as goofy as the rest of us.

Ain't ever played no games with no chicks.

Helping three girls make their first characters:

>"And you can be all sorts of fantasy races. You can be a gnome, or a dwarf, or an elf..."
>"Elf? Fuck those guys!"
>"Yeah, they think they're so much better than everyone. I'd rather be an orc."
>"Can I be an old lady dwarf who doesn't trust elves?"

Apparently they'd all read The Hobbit and LotR when they were kids, and all independently concluded that elves are wankers. I love these broads.

They sound like lesbian cunts.

I agree but that is not nearly as strangely specific as op. Big cloaks obviously fit a mysterious loner character so that's not much of a coincidence. Also roleplay is a form of escapism. People play characters that represent what they wish they could be. Sexy and badass adventurers with awesome powers. With so many chicks with rape back stories does that mean most girls secretly want to be raped?

Hm, first girl in groups character was a "not" slutty elf warlock who barely wore anything and was pretty close to CE, but it was largely forgiven due to her being hot.

Second built something equiv to a druid, also an elf, but not a red haired ranger.

Neither char came from a rape background afaik.

You sound lonely.

>"Elf? Fuck those guys!"
>"Yeah, they think they're so much better than everyone. I'd rather be an orc."

A girl after my own heart, 10/10 hope you put a ring on it user.

She's right under 300. I like them big so that doesn't bother me. I do sometimes find it hard not to think about her ex, who was black.

I'd rather not get into this, but it's an extremely common fantasy.

No, that'd be the elves.

You're a bitter virgin huh? I'm sorry girls are so mean to you.

OP here; after playing a half elf none of them ever played one again, except one that liked the idea of a half-halfling/half-elf sorceress. I guess that playing a half elf in our group is like a phase? What's strange is that every single one of my girl players was an avid reader, with very different tastes, yet every single one of them played a half elf ranger. I assumed it was more common that apparently is. I'm genuinely surprised.

Why do you not want to discuss it? I knew it was apretty common fantasy but didn't think it was that common. I'm not saying it means these girls should get raped anything obviously, that's why roleplay exists. My exes and my current partner have dabbled in the area. My exes were female and my current partner is a Chinese trap.

My wife's first character was a Human Cleric.
First girl and second girl I played with were an Elf Fighter and Tiefling Sorcerer.
The girl in my FLGS group is a Dwarf Fighter...

The only Half-Elf I've ever seen was a grimderp Bard who wouldn't shut up about naming his bow.

It is a sign, OP. Someday, you will meet a woman like this recurring half-elf. You will fall in love, but it will not last. Your heart will be broken, and grown anew.

When I first played when my dad was teaching me as a kid I went through a phase where I always picked a drow thief. Fortunately I was never edgy though. I've always liked thieves and I like drow because of how their skin colour looks with white hair. Just seems cool. I love white hair and exotic skin colours.

Now that you mention it: the first girl that played this half elf ranger stereotype wrote that the huge scar was made by a group of orc that tried to rape her but that she slain; I assumed that it was some kind of power fantasy, but more for the "rapist get killed by naive girl" vibe, not the "attempted rape" one. Knowing the player this is actually unnerving.

People can just get kinda weird in discussions like that.

You are welcome.

My first girlfriend was a not really beautiful readhead that hated her parents. I was 15, we never had sex and it lasted less than two months and my heart was broken but that made me grew. She also had a pet parrot.
But I started to play rpg about five years later.

That's funny. Do you have any more magic insight about my life, diviner-user?

My experience with girls i've played D&D 5e with/run for:
High Elf Assassin Rogue
Half Elf Eldritch Knight
Wood Elf Monk
Wood Elf Thief
Wood Elf Ranger
... Human Necromancer

The girl that played Necromancer was a tank aswell, 10/10 have played with in multiple games.

Sound smade-up.

>those aggressive responses
Yup, made-up.

Of course it was.

It's kind of annoying that someone would make up something so inane too.

In my group there is a girl who plays with a male character, she likes to play warriors and for her "it makes more sense if its a man".

Every woman I have DMed for picked an elf or half-elf for her first character, but none have been rangers.

All have been mysterious and quiet characters with personal trauma in their backgrounds. The only one who wasn't some other player's girlfriend IRL ended up doing the most awkward in-game marriage proposal you could possible imagine in the last session of that campaign.

>the most awkward in-game marriage proposal you could possible imagine in the last session of that campaign.
details?

I am one of the only dudes at my table who doesn't play batman. Three of our five characters are stealthy stabby chaotic good ranger/thieves who work outside of the law. The other guy is a heavy martial. The same heavy martial. Every time. I'm usually the only one ranged, tanking or healing, because in a party of five we have four melee damage dealers. I get that we all want to play the badass but we've been playing for four years can you please change it up a little.

>hambeast female half-elf monk/warlock
>ended up in a bad deal with her patron
>female changeling rogue (played by normal looking guy) finds a way to save her from the situation
>monk annoys the shit out of me to give her a chance to buy a ring in-game, doesn't care if it's magical
>confused, let her buy a nice ring
>end of last session
>she gets out of her seat
>gets down on one knee in front of rogue player
>presents cheap-ass plastic ring in a box
>guy gets deer in the headlights look
>other players look away and/or gets up from the table immediately
>everyone else in card shop stops what they're doing and stares
>I get up and tell them they can work out the ending for themselves
>both players left looking ashamed in a compromising position

Clearly I am not a very good diviner, if I thought the game preceded the girl when the real preceded the game.

Of course, it could be a sign that you will meet again. Either this same girl, or another like her, Just like many girls play the same woman in game, so too shall you meet a red bird-girl again.

What in the last two posts sounds "smade up?" The guy made rude assumptions about random women based on nothing so we assumed he was a lonely virgin because that would explain his irrational woman hatred. You're a special kind of stupid huh?

My first was a human Paladin

That's terrifying. We had one of those awkward moments when one of the half elf feminine ranger enacted the love poem she wrote on an actual real life parchment while we were playing in a pub. That was our first campaign, and that was terrible. I should still have it somewhere in my room.

It completely ruined the end of the campaign.

The guy she did the proposal to spoke in her defense to get her into the next one. She's playing a male fighter this time.

Nigga, you gay.

Here it is. It's written in archaic italian. After all those years I still don't know if it's cool that a player took time to buy some parchment and write a poem or if she was just trying too hard. I don't know.

Incidentally, for a very different reason, she involuntarily tried to destroy our campaign too. The campaign was saved, but our friendship was not.

ur a faggot lmao (laugh my ass off)

I'm italian too, and I've ALWAYS had gurls playing druids with bird pets.
Good thing nobody took the time to explain multiclassing to them I guess.

I'd say it's not big enough, we have a decent player pool but it's sometimes difficult to find a group if you don't have old friends around.
Also, lots and lots of casuals and 3.X-only-fags, but it's common everywhere I guess.

There's a pretty big PbP community though, I never did bother counting but probably a few thousands. Mostly edgelords and trolls, but still thousands.

Huh.

Yes, too many 3.x players; but also the "hardcore" players tend to play games which I don't like much, like Sine Requie, which is really popular, at least here in Rome.

OP describes strange and incredibly abarrant behaviour, especially about rape madness and "staying pure" romance.

Either shit that never happened OR all of OP's gal pals are insufferable Soap Opera finatics.

The chick in our game only makes catgirls.

The other chick makes normal shit that sounds cool.

The third, being a lawyer, tends to gravitate towards "explosions."

Then again we don't really ever play D&D so I guess that doesn't count.

>Sine Requie
I just googled it, it looks like Call of Cthulhu mixed with Italian exploitation B movies.

I've seen what he's talking about before. If you haven't good for you then.

I posted a proof of a tiny bit of the story a few posts above. I don't have much; I could search my notes for at least 2 character sheets of the players I mastered, but even so I don't know if I could find them.

I don't find the rape bit that aberrant tho. I believe that being a product of rape is a quite common background story for a half-whatever. Boring and clichéd, maybe, but not aberrant.

>being a product of rape
Don't know why people find that so fascinating. You're you, not your rape dad.

Sine Requie has some good mechanics (using tarots instead of dice is very immersive) but it's very repetitive and the setting could sound interesting but it's quite stupid and stereotyped.
Here is very popular. With a good master is really fun for a one-shot or two; after that the weaknesses of the game start to be evident.

Like someone said above, it's to give your character an easy "mysterious and painful" past.

>the setting could sound interesting but it's quite stupid and stereotyped.
Yeah, just like the B movies your country is infamous for. I do like trying out games that use stuff other than dice, though.

Italian B Movies often were really good movies; Lucio Fulci and Mario Bava are two famous directors from that period. B Movies were goofy and derivative; Sine Requie is plain stupid. Paladins with chainsaws in a dystopian church state and russian cyborgs with '50s tech is worse than most B movies.

Holy shit, OP, the girl in my group did LITERALLY everything you said, word for word.
What the fuck

I don't like SR much either, the mechanics are fairly enjoyable but the handbooks are just meh, not to mention badly, badly written. I mean, it's ok to use suspension points once in a while, but they sure don't add spookiness to the mixture - not since the 80s at least.

Never understood what the excitement for SR is all about, probably just the "replace dices with cards" thing.

I'm going to play a small campaign in a short while though, my friends voted it over GURPS 5 to 2. For some reason I wasn't surprised.

I concur. The writing is terrible; it seems to be written by a sixteen years old fan of Dylan Dog, trying to emulate its style without actually being a good writer. In the core manual alone there are at least three uses of "Nothing personal, Boy/Kid/whatever". It feels quite amateurish until you find out that the two creators of the game are in their 40s and have been writing it since the nineties.

Despite that, I have some friends with good taste that say that a SR campaign has been the best rpg experience of their lives. A good master and good players could make the difference; but as I can see from your post youplay with at least six players that you do not really think are good at RPG, so I understand how you feel about this. Good luck.

>With so many chicks with rape back stories does that mean most girls secretly want to be raped?

Have you never read romance books written for women? There's some variance, but even the "soft" ones have aspects of non-consensual sex. Women LOVE to fantasize about rape. You may find this shocking if you take their outward messaging about "empowerment" and "independence" seriously.

Just read smut written for females sometime. The ones that are male x male are especially funny. All rape, all the time.

My first character was an Orc Warrior

I should add, obviously these are fantasies. No one wants to actually be raped, in the same sense that most men don't want to ACTUALLY be in a war zone butchering thousands of people and getting PTSD.

But as a fantasy, rape and non-consent and other fantasies of control and loss of control are like the #1 go-to in smut.

(Men like them, too, of course.)

I think you missed the "expploitation" part of the post.

>my friends voted it over GURPS 5 to 2.
Been there. I love GURPS, but I've only played it a dozen times.

Yes, I did. Yes, you are right. Yes, Sine Requie feels like that, but worse.

Or they just played Skyrim.

Same.
>Mfw it was with a group of normies after I introduced them to 5e and one wanted to try DMing
>Mfw in the first combat a nat 1 on our Warlock's EB had the DM rule the stray shot hit my character's belt and drop her pants

The only girl I game with is my sister. Her first character was "Siberian Tiger" an ex-soviet super soldier turned super hero.

Her first fantasy character was an elf ranger though.

From what I understand the fantasy is common but not in the way we think of rape, as it's not rape per se. I think it springs more from something like a rapture fantasy, but with the guy being perfectly how they want them to be. More like romeo and juliet.

I don't think it has to do with the backstories though, it's just a way to make the characters more interesting, just like no one wants to have their hometown burned down or some other cliche tragic backstory.

The only girl I played with was a half-elf redhead, but she was a pyromaniac bard.

>a dozen times

They're not that bad actually, we always had a lot of fun playing D&D and such, but the majority of them is reluctant to try something a little less tamarro over-the-top. They're probably just lazy, not much of an issue considering good RP partially makes up for bad mechanics.

I am from and live in Brazil. Role-playing here is a well known hobby and a lot of people partake in it.
I have been with the same group for 7 years and we recently added 2 more. We play on saturdays every 2 weeks.

I don't know. At its best SR is a good atmospheric horror, with good character building and sincerely spooky moments; at its worst it's literally Don Matteo con gli Zombi Call of Duty: Nazi Zombies. On my experiences I can say that it is a game best played with a small group; too many players could change the focus from dystopian horror to bad exploitation b-movie.

If they are good at being silent at the table and wait for their turn to suffer, you're good and I envy you.

Huh. Maybe I should believe more of other people's stories, if something that actually happened to me sounds made-up. I mean, I did edit for brevity; character creation got derailed for like 20 minutes as they all talked about how much they hated the elves in LotR. And another digression about orcish hair colors; I ruled that pink wasn't a natural hair color for orcs, but that proficiency with an herbalism kit would allow her to make hair dye from underdark mushrooms.

I don't know OP but let's brrak it down to see if we can't figure it out. Disclaimer: this is all conjecture< I could well be talking out my ass

>half-elf
I think this comes down to everyone having the same very basic understanding of what makes a good and interesting character early and I'm gonna come back to that a bit but basically half-elves are new player bait. They're different and uncommon but still largely familiar, they come with built in drama in the backstory but not so much as to be full on edgetarded. They're an acceptable level of snowflake built into a core race and that's the long and short of it.

>ranger
They're like rogues but less prone to the extremes of the scale which ranges from "atomic edge" to "lolsorandumb", also nature stuff allows backstory lonlieness which gells with half-elf. Really Rangers occupy a very specific space in DnD style fantasy in that they absolutely fit in the genre but they don't appear common enough to be obvious. They also have an excellent pedigree. Case in point Aragorn and Legolas are both rangers.

>the next 3
Again, it's basically an acceptable level of snowflake. The only one that merits any further thought is the Raven pet and that basically boils down to being the most resereved choice available

>the scar
Obviously badass and been through some shit but still beautiful, the appeal is obvious there

>the rape thing
That is weirdly specific and I'm kinda stumped but I'd guess that it has something to do with some sort of weird tragic romance crap that I don't really get.

>Romance
Similar to the above but with the added bonus that everybody loves a good love story so that's probably what they were going for. Also if you are from Rome then that might play into the wholeremaining pure thing, what with them being good catholic girls and all.

again though, I'm probably full of shit

Finnfag reporting in.
A pretty diverse roleplaying culture here, too.

Girl in our campaign is playing for her first time. Picked a tiefling, which is kinda out there, but she plays it well. Basically doesn't trust people because of racial prejudice, and is a charlatan trying to subtley fuck other people over. Is also a big time drunk and trollop.

I think you are on point on almost everything except the catholicism; all of the girls are atheist or very loosely catholic. I concede that the whole purity concept is a lot stronger here in Rome from a cultural point of view, so the appeal may still be there. (It may sound strange, but roman boys and girls are not exactly the most religious in the world; we are still a big city after all, with all the secularization that it implies).

The strange thing in the whole rape part is not the rape itself (which I believe is common enough as a tragic background) but the fact that is always a noble man. Why there should be many noble hero that in a moment of weakness abuse a beautiful and chaste elven woman? This is some kind of Arthurian-like situation that I would think as exceptional, not as the norm. Maybe there is some popular story or song that I don't know that feature this kind of situation.

Nah, you're not.