benlehman

... has always done fine, IMO, in depicting a pretty broad range of gamers, typical and otherwise.

Let's also keep in mind that KoDT is first and foremost meant to be a HUMOR strip, and thus is going to trade in certain easily-accessible gamer tropes and archetypes, though I'd stop short of calling them outright stereotypes.

Remember that while the Knights are the main characters, there are at least 3 groups of gamers that regularly show up... one of them is all guys, another has 3 women, one of them the DM... Sarah, while pretty smart and mostly level-headed, certainly gets flustered occasionally, and is hardly infallible.

The bottom line: Next GenCon, take a walk around, say, the big Living Forgotten Realms hall, and take a head count, I suspect you'll see plenty of 'one girl' tables, a few with 2 or 3, and a comparable number of female DMs. It's still largely a male-dominated hobby, more so outside of the relatively comfy confines of story game-land. The comics do a pretty decent job of reflecting the reality of the hobby in what's probably the significant majority of 'trad' game-group situations. I think assigning 'agency' is welding on an intent where none likely exists, looking for malice where simple oversight is the likelier explanation.

-Jim C.