I liked the ones from the early 2000s, personally. They give you a good "feel" for the type of fantasy the game is, and there totally inclusive in terms of race/gender/etc. (Well, the covers are. Having never played, I can't speak for the actual content of the books.)

The "half naked female warrior" is a huge pet peeve of mine. As a woman with breasts, I would want them well covered by whatever armor I was wearing, thanks. Ditto my midriff and thighs - I like my vital organs and major veins well protected when I'm off killing monsters.

My boyfriend owns a comic book store. Seeing how much aversion v4.0 had hit (for other reasons), it's probably just a cheap scam to lure buyers who would otherwise stay happily with their v3 and 3.5. In fact, I see more people coming in looking for the used 3.5 books than ever before, now.

The V3 - 3.5 covers are my favorites; the V4 cover feels like it belongs on a dimestore novel.

Of course, not to detract from your outrage, but the fellow she's standing next to is about equally covered, even if not nearly as sexy.

Can someone explain how the female character on this cover is "highly" sexualized? It's not her pose, because to me she just looks like she's bracing herself for fighting something. I suppose it could be her outfit, but I don't really think that it is in this case; every other D&D character shows a lot of skin, female or otherwise, including the non-human character standing next to her.

The cover also shows the common gender dichotomy in fantasy games and lit that men fight with their bodies and women fight with their minds (magic). I've never played D&D, but in video game RPGs, women are usually programmed with stats that make them useless as physical fighters and necessitate that they use magic. So while woken and men both fight in these stories they often fight in gendered ways.

In my experience playing D&D, editions 3.5 and 4.0, the content is very gender-inclusive. Players choose their own gender, which has absolutely no bearing on their abilities, skills, or class (like the profession they choose.) Furthermore, many of the rulebooks are written with alternating male and female pronouns for the player/character rather than defaulting to "he." In my groups of friends, many people play cross-gender and sometimes trans-gender to add to the roll-playing and fun.

The book art and miniature figurines do tend to be hyper-sexualized, but this is definitely true for men as well, if not as egregiously as for women. It is a fantasy world--looking incredibly sexy (or grotesque, or intimidating, or whatever) is part of the deal.

Also, when thinking of the absence of women on the earlier edition covers, the game was played predominantly by men at that time. More women have started playing, but we are still far from an equal gender distribution of players.

Yeah, early D&D was kinda bad at things, as it were, not even getting into things like the Drow discussion. Another interesting story on the updating of 4e covers is the side-by-side of the Adventurer's Vault 2 cover: http://www.wizards.com/DnD/Article.aspx?x=dnd/4alum/2009august .

As to 4e, while I got a slight chuckle out of the 'Envoy' ref, I don't think it's particularly fair to compare 'pictures of sexy women in lingere for a game whose focus is resource management with no people' to 'a stylized female adventurer in a game where the point is people playing stylized adventurers'. It'd be nice if there were more armor on either of them, honestly, but I've played in games where people wanted the full realism, and games where people wanted the more fantasy or anime styled non-realistic character designs. (This doesn't erase the gendered component, of course. I'd be lying if I said I thought that they didn't think they should have some sort of attractive female character on the front of the book. I am glad that she's not in passive pose, however, on this or the other books she shows up on.)

That said, I think the better analysis than 'lol boobies' is that 3 and 3.5's books chose an cool basic motif: the idea of the tome of knowledge. It's a good motif, and it implies a certain amount of mystery and awe and study. But 4e's 'back to basics' concept meant focusing on the people involved, and the action shots (The back of the 4e book's tagline is 'The World Needs Heroes'), even though they use one which conforms to the standard fantasy female armor tropes, which is disappointing. Compare the 2nd PHB: http://www.amazon.com/Players-Handbook-Core-Rulebook-Bk-2/dp/0786950161/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1263144510&sr=8-3 (and look at the rest of the 4e books too, there are even female characters that aren't showing off much skin.) It's by and large a theme for the 4e books: people and action shots on the cover. It's also a little more visually accessible in my opinion, but there's a YMMV factor.

EmJ made a good pickup on the male fighter-female caster thing being used here as well. It's definitely a cover which conforms to standard fantasy tropes.

-Mecha

Actually, you used the wrong pronoun. I'm a boy. :D

As far as fantasy art goes, that woman isn't *nearly* as sexualized as she could be. My initial response to that cover was "Oh, hey, they're including a female character on the cover, that's cool- and she's not even wearing anything too ridiculous!"

Perhaps my years as a gamer have lowered my standards for "ridiculous" in fantasy art. :) But to be fair, I would actually play a character that looked like that. I am glad to see women included on the cover, though, even if it's a bit cheesecakey. It's been a long road for women in the hobby.

This reminds me of the popular MMORPG "World of Warcraft." You can choose a male or female avatar, but often, the same piece of armor equipped to a female character is extremely revealing while the male's armor is a complete, normal, armor cover up.

There's a GREAT post about it here:

http://borderhouseblog.com/?p=541

I'm one of Caspian's roommates. Didn't know he sent this into your blog. It's cool it got published!

I know things like art style don't actually effect gameplay in any way, but it does change how people perceive the game. If I was new to DnD and saw the artwork on the cover/inside, I might make a more steriotypically gendered character. I would probably do this thinking that it's how I 'should' play the game, as all of the illustrations are demonstrating.

When I first saw the cover I wasn't offended by it, as I saw it as a very 'typical' game cover. It's sad that nowadays the typical game cover requires cleavage and midriffs.

For those of you who have the 4.0 players handbook at home, I have a fun game you can play. It's called 'count the midriffs.' Go through the numerous illustrations in the books and see how many characters have midriffs. Then, play that same game with the previous DnD player's handbook (3.5). You will notice less midriffs in the previous edition of DnD. It's funny how wizards decided that in the new edition nobody needs armor over their soft abdomens anymore. Maybe there's a new spell that protects you from getting stabbed there? I'm not sure.

I lean towards the commenters saying that this is a fairly mild example of a very common trend in the genre. Also, an interesting change is that whereas the 2nd edition players' handbook had this paragraph near the beginning:

"The Male pronoun (he, him, his) is used exclusively throughout the second edition of the AD&D game rules. We hope this won’t be construed by anyone to be an attempt to exclude females from the game or imply their exclusion. Centuries of use have neutered the male pronoun. In written material it is clear, concise, and familiar. Nothing else is."

the 3rd and (I assume but don't know) 4th were pretty free with the 'she's or at least 'they's.

Lets talk about the number of people of colour included in the interior illustration: I count 1 dark skinned halfling in the PHB & one dark skinned human in the DMG; of course, there are a fair number of dark skinned monsters...

This post on race and gender in D&D from a TSR illustrator seems relevant.

Mordicai's statement holds merit and is something i have long bemoaned (at least to myself) as very avid DnD player. While we're on the subject of the internal illustrations, though, let me just say that this cover art really isn't anything new. While the 3rd Edition covers seemed innocuous enough, many of the drawings and paintings within them were as servile to what's erroneously thought of as (male 18-35) "nerd culture" as this cover for the 4e player's handbook.

The plethora of art within the books has much more of an effect on the outlook of the players and is more telling about the art department's priorities, if you ask me. Wayne Reynolds, the illustrator of this cover, grew to the level of stardom required to be doing drawings for the covers of the key books during 3rd Edition's run and this is really nothing new for him. I love his drawings of monsters and battles but he has a tendency to do what his entire industry (and I'd hazard to guess his education as well) have encouraged him to do: sell his art with sex.

For examples of perhaps worse objectification in the 3rd edition of the game, observe:

http://www.wizards.com/dnd/images/oa_gallery/Bog_hag.jpg

http://www.wizards.com/dnd/images/dd_gallery/dd4/Sif_p188.jpg

http://www.wizards.com/dnd/images/MM35_gallery/MM35_PG198.jpg

Also, remember that even back in 1st edition, the famous and popular module "Vault of the Drow" opens with a description of the well-known old man wizard character Elminster getting ready to have a threesome with 2 Drow Priestesses (who were always little more than white-haired, ebon-skinned objects to drool over).

And here's an example of a much more interesting drawing of some kind of female spellcaster whose armor DOES look effective, also by Wayne Reynolds:

http://www.wizards.com/dnd/images/moi_gallery/91039.jpg

I don't see a change in the degree to which female characters are sexualised - I only see one female character portrayed.
I was also under the impression that the sexualised female fantasty character was far from new. For example, it was spoofed in Terry Pratchett's The Colour of Magic, first published 1986.

This article is really very poor work and based on thorough ignorance.
For a start the D&D/AD&D covers do not have an impeccable history of being gender neutral or gendered balanced: Please observe the female character on the right hand side of this cover http://paizo.com/image/product/catalog/TSR/TSR2011_500.jpeg from 1979.

The Dungeons and Dragons sets almost always include three rulebooks, supplemented by several others- A Dungeon Master's guide for those who wish to run the games, a Monster Manual detailing opponents and a players hand book. While the players handbooks are the bare minimum a player needs to buy, along with dice, to play, it is usually expected they will own a selection of the others. The article has made no effort to survey those covers, either in their current editions or in previous versions.

It is an enormous overstatement to accuse the current edition of taking the 'Evony' route. The female character is not posed to be submissive. She is not revealing anymore skin than her 'Dragonborn' counterpart and she is not posed, nor the cover composed, to emphasize her sexual features.

For those who wish to take a broader view of the current range I suggest a quick Amazon search, which will allow you to click from one title to another: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Players-Handbook-Dungeons-Dragons-Rulebook/dp/078695390X/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1263160104&sr=1-5

The depiction of women (and also race) in fantasy art, even in dungeons and dragons books is not wholly unproblematic from perspectives of equality, but the current and previous editions of the books have made a conscious efforts towards balance and diversity- in the face of pressure to do otherwise: http://montecook.livejournal.com/150303.html . This post shows remarkably poor insight and research, even for a blog post and risks hindering debate on what could be a very interesting topic.

As a female illustrator/game artist who does a lot of fantasy work, this is something I feel conflicted about daily. I tend to paint a lot of my female characters with body types similar to mine; thin, petite, white. It's something I struggle with in my own work. It's difficult to break out of that shell when it's your tendency and there is such a push in that direction from other illustrators, your art directors, the marketing team, etc... I work with a lot of young white geeky men and their ideas about sexuality tend to dominate. It's difficult to push anything like male nudity, a homosexual subtext, or older female body types (in non-evil characters!) because all of those things can make them uncomfortable.

Anyway, right now there are a lot more young female illustrators becoming interested in fantasy art (although most female illustrators still tend to gravitate more towards editorial work and children's book illustration) and hopefully things will begin to change in a few years. Hopefully soon we'll grow out of the era of Frank Frazetta and John Howe imitators.

just a bit of clarification from a dungeons and dragons nerd on the issue of the gender-image-dichotomy in this illustration: the armor clad figure is in fact a female dragonborn.

I never picked up 4th edition, even though I've been a D&D player for years, starting with 2nd edition AD&D in the early 90's when I was but wee. This was mainly BECAUSE of the cover that Wizards of the Coast decided upon for 4e... and the artwork contained therein. With 2nd ed, female characters were mostly highly sexualized (I recall 1 picture plate from the edition pictured in the main post, the last in the 80's series of 2nd ed covers shown, that had two women and a group of men standing over a dragon's corpse-- none of them were sexualized, and it's what made me want to play in the first place), and most of the women were pictured as magic-users. 3rd ed and 3.5 marked a change in the art-- it wasn't a perfect shift, but there were more non-sexualized female forms, and more sexualized male forms between the covers. There were still the hulking males playing to the male idea of what men should be, and there were still sexy women in next to nothing, but it struck me as a more balanced portrayal, giving everyone an image to aspire to, and some eye-candy to boot.

For example-- http://www.wizards.com/dnd/images/ph35_gallery/PHB35_PG41_WEB.jpg. This image of Ember, the monk, was shown on page 41 of the 3.5 PHB. She isn't wearing much, and there is a slight emphasis on her breasts, but she is mostly muscle, standing in a fairly aggressive stance that doesn't scream sex but rather that she's just stopped short of attacking. Marked difference from the 4e cover, with the female character's hip thrown out, body arched, and torso displaced to show cleavage-- try to mimick it, and it's almost untenable to hold that pose the way it's drawn; the dragonborn male next to her is in a very natural stance on the other hand. Alhandra (http://www.wizards.com/dnd/images/ph35_gallery/tn_PHB35_PG43_WEB.jpg), who is pictured on page 43 of the 3.5 PHB, is not sexualized in the least, wearing full armor. Conversely, Hennet (http://www.wizards.com/books/images/hennet_300pix.jpg), a male sorceror from page 51, is highly sexualized I would argue, body arched somewhat in a display posture, wearing an outfit entirely composed of leather belts. Inside 4e, even the most clad female, http://img.skitch.com/20080715-g9w537upd4cps2e2jgjjn8rukq.jpg, (aside from the halfing female pictured in the "races" section, who is also the PoC pictured) possesses a highly sexualized face, with parted lips, heavy-lidded eyes, and a direct acknowledgement of the viewer.

Comparing these images gives you a better idea of the art contained in past editions, and what is emphasized in each character creation section. No, the 4e cover isn't terrible when compared to the artwork of Boris Vallejo, but then, if Boris Vallejo is setting the tone for all fantasy art, there isn't much out there that is more sexual short of hardcore porn (and I honestly don't have anything against porn). Compared to previous editions... well, WotC sexed it up A LOT.

Honestly, with the release of 4e a year and a half ago, I suddenly felt excluded. 3.5 took steps to be more equitable. 4e was a sudden shift in the target market for WotC, and I felt on the outside after being a loyal gamer for so long.

I can think of a few images of women in DnD where they got it right. Ember, the representative of the character class monk, while nearly naked, is upright, no-nonsense, and muscular in a almost believable way for a martial artist. The monk class never wears armor, and is the only class that is considered armed when they fight with their bare hands (and feet, elbows, head, etc.) The Paladin, whose name I do not recall, is wearing armor that covers her as much as a man would be, and is hardcore enough to sport brandings of her god's symbol as a sign of her devotion. Lidda the rogue is completely covered and is often portrayed in active poses, stealing and picking locks. Mialee the wizard is also scantily clad, but hardly sexualized, with alien features and a flat chest.

Ember: http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/cc/20000626e
Lidda: http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/cc/20000626c
Mialee: http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/cc/20000626b

And just for fun, I submit Devis the bard, a character who uses music, grace, good looks and illusion, who is easily the most sexily posed of the core npc characters from the phb 3ed.
Devis: http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/cc/20000626h

I was kind of shocked to realize that these images are almost ten years old. I don't play d&d anymore, having moved in the opposite direction of play style, and I've never tried 4th ed.

This is nowhere near Evony- she is reasonably clothed and her hand is shooting fire! Fire! That seems cool to me. If I was a young girl looking at this, I would think she was a cool character in the game, not some sexy eye candy. At least shes not being held hostage by a dragon!

Also, a little lampshading of the whole sexy fantasy lady thing by Rich Burlew's Order of the Stick:

http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0676.html

A lizardperson prostitute with breasts and hair.

Keep in mind that she's clearly a mage. They usually wear cloth armour, which is naturally less covering than plate. Sure, she could have been covered top to toe, but there aren't a huge number of configurations that would fit in with the world AND allow for a great range of movement.

I don't find D&D terribly sexist, honestly, except in the art (and not all of it, either). On the other hand, it's very blatantly racist. I was browsing through the monsters manual, looking for fun non-human species to play (yep, the "monsters" manual covers all species but human, sentient or not), and I was appalled to find that all ugly sentients are evil (and stupid, smelly, disgusting, comically ineffective...) - no exceptions. If you want to play, say, a gnoll, you'll have to be the one special unique snowflake who isn't evil, and possibly bathes

it is part of a set of books you should examine the other covers too
not just the PHB

I skimmed over the comments and didn't see anything mentioning this, so--

If you could see the contents of the manuals, you might have a somewhat different view of the trend with regard to visual portrayal of female characters within the D&D universe over time. The AD&D 2ed books had their share of somewhat-sexualized images amongst the pages (scantily clad wizard-women with their arms raised high for some ritual, etc). The woman displayed on the cover you've elected to display doesn't come close to that level of sensuality. If you're criticizing the portrayal on its own merits, alright, but the recent installments are in fact much more tasteful and gender-balanced in this regard than some of the older books whose covers are on display.

One thing - Here's a cover from the Basic Set, circa 1981. Notice the female character is actually very similar to the one portrayed in the latest version. Little armor, using magic instead of brawn, tossing a fireball along side a male warrior. So I don't think it really reflect any kind of change:

http://www.acaeum.com/ddindexes/setpages/setscans/basic8th.html

Dungeons & Dragons has never been anywhere as bad as other PRGs with the over the top nekkid women type covers, especially as they were in the ,80s where you had mech warrior type games with bikini clad women on thew front cover for no particular reason.

Macho Women with Guns was a RPG that went all the way with this ridiculousness to the point of making it absurd allowing you to play as "nuns" and "sexy librarians" fighting against male chauvinism in a post apocalyptic world.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macho_Women_with_Guns
http://www.amazon.com/Macho-Women-Guns-James-Desborough/dp/1904577334

note-this is not the best write up on the game or my thoughts on the topic as I am out the door to play a home brew zombie apocalypse role playing game tonight!

Give me a break. Look, just because you protofeminazis *want* everything in the world to be an intentional gender bias or slight in a blatant attempt to personally piss you off doesn't make it so.

On a positive note, in an inversion of the new Dungeons and Dragons's objectification of women, Paizo released an RPG called Pathfinder in which many of the iconic characters are well-covered and armored women.

Examples:
http://paizo.com/image/content/RiseOfTheRunelords/Pathfinder4_Cleric02.jpg
http://paizo.com/image/content/PathfinderChronicles/PZO9202-Iomedae.jpg
http://paizo.com/image/content/RiseOfTheRunelords/Pathfinder7_Paladin.jpg

Oh come on now, the Evony ads are /way/ worse than this! And while I do tend to get frustrated about girl characters in insufficient armor, she appears to be a magic-user of some sort, and casters are not supposed to have much in the way of armor. They are squishy.

It might be interesting to note that this is not the original cover art for the 4th edition players handbook, the original can be seen here

http://jhkimrpg.livejournal.com/67761.html

Well, at least this doesn't happen in real life. Oh, wait, it does, and it was already posted on this blog. Go Olympics. Go backlash against the breakdown of gender roles. Woo.

http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2008/08/15/the-sexualization-of-female-olympiads/

I think some of you are allowing your ignorance of the DnD mechanics to cloud your judgement. The pictured female character is NOT a "warrior" by any means. She is clearly a magic-user, and as such heavy armour would be useless at best, and a hindrance at worst. In addition, the male dragonborn character is exposing about as much skin overall as the female character. I don't think anything about the image itself could be considered particularly exploitative or sexist. In fact, the outfit the female character is wearing is fairly moderate compared to some of the clothing of choice for both male and female characters.

That said, the fact that a female is given a non-physical/magic heavy role is clearly a sexist cliche in gaming, and something I grow increasingly tired of.

Wow so many comments, I hope I am not repeating... well anyways if you open up the book there are many more half naked women inside. I havent seen the earliest ones but the late 80's and onward I remember being full off boobs - just not on the cover.

This post is pretty old but it popped up again in my gmail inbox recently, and rereading it made me realize something: Since encountering this discussion the first time around, it's made me more aware of these issues in how I play D&D. In an hour I'll be welcoming my D&D group into my house and sitting down to play my dark-skinned female multiclass bard-paladin elf, who is a devotee of Artemis and is on a holy mission to fight sexism. The DM is having a lot of fun working big issues into the plot line to challenge me and the other Good-aligned characters in our campaign. I'm actually so into this character that I'm designing my first ever home-brew prestige class for her!
So, thank you, people commenting on this post, for making me think about this stuff! :)

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