A Seat at the Table: Women in TTRPGs at UK Games Expo

At UK Games Expo, I attended A Seat at the Table: Women in TTRPGs, a Women of TTRPGs seminar hosted by Lyssa of The Slovenly Trulls, with panellists Steph of Fistful of Crits, Michelle Kelly of EUphoria AP, Kayla Dice of Rat Wave Game House, and Danii Squishy, AP performer and model maker.

The title was A Seat at the Table, but the conversation quickly made clear that a seat is only the beginning.

A seat matters. Being in the room matters. Seeing people like you on panels, in credits, on streams, on books, behind GM screens, in design teams and on convention schedules matters. But what came through most strongly was that real inclusion is not simply about letting people in. It is about making sure they are heard, credited, paid, protected, supported, mentored, and invited back.

The panel moved between community, creativity, AI, gatekeeping, mentorship, imposter syndrome, and the realities of trying to make work in an industry that often runs as much on networks as it does on talent. It was warm, funny, blunt, and sometimes uncomfortable in exactly the way these conversations need to be.

Because if TTRPGs are imagination games, then we should probably be brave enough to imagine a better industry too.

Community is how people stop creating in the dark

One of the strongest ideas from the panel was that making RPGs can feel like creating in the dark.

That felt poignantly true to me. You can spend months writing, designing, drawing, editing, posting, printing, pitching, playtesting, and hoping that somewhere, eventually, the thing you made will reach someone. Unlike live performance, where feedback is immediate, TTRPG creation can feel strangely distant from its audience. You do not always get to see the table laugh at the joke you wrote. You do not always know when someone uses your safety tool, your class option, your adventure hook, or your weird little indie game to make a memorable night happen.

That is where community becomes more than a nice extra. It becomes infrastructure.

The panel spoke about how, from the outside, TTRPG spaces can seem unwelcoming to marginalised people. That does not always mean someone is standing at the door saying “you cannot come in.” Often it is quieter than that. It is looking at the industry and not seeing yourself reflected. It is assuming you are not experienced enough. It is thinking everyone else already knows the rules, the people, the language, the secret handshake.

Community is how people find out that they do belong. It is how someone realises they already have the skills to make something. It is how the person who has only ever played at home discovers indie games, actual play, publishing, zines, mentorship, conventions, open tables, streams, and the thousand tiny paths into the wider scene.

At one point, the discussion touched on the idea that a lot of us were weird, lonely kids. That felt like a very TTRPG thing to admit. Many of us found these games because we were already drawn to the strange edges of things. We liked monsters, maps, made-up languages, impossible worlds, character playlists, lore documents, dice rituals, and very serious arguments about whether a goblin would unionise.

The panel’s message was not that this weirdness needs to be polished away. Quite the opposite. It was that people need to know they are not weird for loving what they love. Or, perhaps more accurately, that they are weird, but so is everyone else here, and that is rather the point.

Put the ladder down

A recurring theme was generosity. Not vague generosity. Not “thoughts and support” generosity. Practical generosity.

If you know how to do something, share it. If you have a platform, lend some of it. If you have contacts, open the door. If you understand printing, layout, rates, contracts, pitching, crowdfunding, editing, streaming, convention applications, or how to send the email without immediately crawling under your desk, pass that knowledge on.

The phrase that stayed with me was simple: do not pull the ladder up behind you.

This matters because TTRPGs can look open from the outside while still being difficult to enter in practice. You can technically publish a game tomorrow. You can technically post your work online. You can technically apply for things. But knowing where to begin, who to speak to, what to charge, what red flags to look for, how to get printed, where to promote your work, or how to find collaborators is a different matter.

That is why mentorship and grassroots support matter so much. Steph spoke about her experiences and the value of supporting marginalised creators through mentorship, design, and printing. The wider point was that support should not just be motivational. Advice is useful, but help is different.

Part of lifting people up is seeing them as equals, not as grateful recipients of wisdom from on high. The best communities do not treat knowledge like treasure to be hoarded. They treat it like a shared resource.

That means collaboration over gatekeeping. Credit over clout. The best idea wins, not the loudest person in the room.

The AI discussion was really a discussion about trust

The sharpest part of the panel was the discussion around generative AI.

This was not a polite, balanced, “on the one hand, on the other hand” sort of conversation. The feeling in the room was clear: for many creators, especially small creators and marginalised creators, generative AI is not just another tool. It is a threat to labour, attribution, representation, and trust.

One of the most useful points raised was that AI does not only cause direct harm through what it produces. It also changes the atmosphere around creative work. It can create suspicion. It can make communities look inward. It can make people feel they have to prove that their work is really theirs. Kayla described this as a kind of poisoned well, and that phrase stuck with me.

That is a less obvious consequence of generative AI, but it may be one of the most corrosive. Creative communities rely on trust. We need to believe that when someone shares art, writing, design, a scenario, a performance, or a game, there is a person behind it making choices, taking risks, and bringing their lived experience to the work. Once that trust is damaged, everyone suffers, but the burden does not fall equally. The people already most likely to be questioned, dismissed, or underpaid are often the ones asked to prove themselves first.

The panel also connected AI to existing problems in fantasy and TTRPG history: sexism, ableism, racist tropes, harmful depictions, lazy shorthand, and the long shadow of D&D’s old assumptions. If a model is trained on the existing internet and the existing culture, then it does not arrive as a neutral intelligence from the clouds. It inherits the mess. Worse, it can reproduce that mess at scale while sanding off the context that would allow a human creator to challenge it.

Michelle described generative AI in especially blunt terms, speaking about plagiarism, poisoned information sources, and the harm done to people from smaller communities whose work and culture can be scraped, flattened, and regurgitated without credit. The point was not simply that AI produces mush and non-creative seeming ideas. It was that it can sever creativity from accountability.

There was also a strong labour argument. Kayla described AI as a tool for lowering wages, which gets to the heart of why so many artists, writers, editors, and designers are wary of corporate enthusiasm around it. In a healthier creative economy, new tools might be judged by whether they help people make better, stranger, more personal work. In the economy we actually have, tools are often judged by whether they let someone produce faster, pay less, and call the result innovation.

That is a very different proposition.

Human creativity is messy, divergent, and wonderfully inefficient

One point from the panel that I loved was the contrast between AI as convergent and human creativity as divergent. That feels especially important in TTRPGs.

So much of what makes tabletop roleplaying special comes from the ridiculous, accidental, emotionally specific things that would never emerge from an optimised content pipeline. The throwaway NPC who becomes the emotional centre of a campaign. The joke that becomes lore. The villain the party adopts. The character playlist that somehow explains more than the backstory document. The strange little mechanic that only works because it was built for one very specific feeling.

TTRPGs are not at their best when they are efficient. They are at their best when they are alive.

That does not mean every creative process has to be romanticised as pure suffering. The panel did touch on the idea that creativity can be difficult, and that difficulty matters. I think there is something useful in that, as long as we do not turn burnout into a badge of honour. The point is not that art must hurt to be valid. The point is that making something yourself means engaging with uncertainty. It means making choices. It means failing in ways that teach you. It means wrestling with the thing until it becomes yours.

If you skip all of that, what are you actually bringing to the table?

This is also where attribution matters. Human creativity is full of influence. We remix. We respond. We pay homage. We argue with what came before. We make things because of the books, films, games, art, music, communities, and people that shaped us. But healthy creative culture depends on those lines of influence being visible. We credit people. We point back. We acknowledge the conversation we are part of.

Generative AI blurs those lines. It turns influence into extraction and then asks us not to look too closely at the machinery. For a hobby built around imagination, authorship, and shared storytelling, that should bother us.

A welcoming industry cannot run on good vibes alone

One of the most practical parts of the panel was the discussion about how to actually lift women and marginalised creators in the industry.

The answer was not “be nice,” although that is a fine place to start if you are currently committed to being weird in someone’s replies.

The answer was action.

Support artists. Credit creators. Buy indie games. Hire women. Recommend people outside your usual circles. Share opportunities. Bring people into projects. Stop relying only on open calls and expecting marginalised creators to happen across them at the right time, with the right confidence, with the right network, while also doing all the invisible work of surviving in a difficult industry.

That point about open calls was important. Open calls can be useful, but they are not a substitute for being part of the community. If you only open a door and wait, the same people with the same confidence, availability, knowledge, and access are often the ones most likely to walk through it. If you want a broader range of people involved, you need to do the work of finding them, knowing them, inviting them, and making the opportunity genuinely accessible.

Inclusion is not a vibe. It is a practice.

It is workers’ rights. It is fair pay. It is credit. It is mentorship. It is making room on panels. It is giving people their first chance and their second chance. It is letting people make mistakes and grow. It is being graceful with each other without ignoring harm. It is understanding that cancellation, consequences, and public scrutiny do not land equally on everyone. As the panel noted, emerging and marginalised people can be pushed out far more easily than rich, powerful men.

That means community has to be careful as well as courageous. It has to make space, but it also has to protect the people inside it.

Ten seconds of courage

The final stretch of the panel turned towards advice for creators, and it was some of the most useful advice because it was so unglamorous.

• Have ten seconds of courage.

• Reach out and say, “Hey, I made this thing.”

• Put your work out there.

• Build a network.

• Do your admin.

• Reply to emails.

• Do not tie your self-worth to your creations.

• Just finish.

That last one is painfully simple and offensively correct. Just finish. Not because the finished thing will be perfect. It will not be. Not because finishing removes the fear. It does not. But because you learn so much from getting to the end of something. A finished small thing teaches you more than an imaginary masterpiece. A sent email does more than a perfect draft in your notes app. A released game can find people. A hidden one cannot.

The panel also challenged the idea that success has to be measured by capitalist yardsticks. Success does not have to mean becoming huge, famous, profitable, endlessly productive, or algorithmically unavoidable. Success can be finding a welcoming space. It can be making the thing you needed to make. It can be meeting collaborators. It can be helping someone else start. It can be making one table feel seen.

That feels like the right lesson for TTRPGs. After all, this is a hobby and an industry built around shared imagination. The best work does not come from closing ranks. It comes from making space. It comes from strange ideas, generous communities, brave beginners, experienced people who share what they know, and creators who are willing to be human in public.

A seat at the table matters.

But a seat is only the beginning. What matters is what we do once we're there: who we support, who we listen to, whose work we champion, and whether we leave the door open for the people coming after us.

Links and ways to support the panel

The panel was hosted by Lyssa of The Slovenly Trulls, in association with Women of TTRPGs.

Host

Lyssa
Host, The Slovenly Trulls
The Slovenly Trulls is a monthly podcast looking at D&D history and lore through an intersectional feminist lens.
Website: slovenlytrulls.com
Instagram: @slovenlytrulls
Threads: @slovenlytrulls

Panellists

Steph, Fistful of Crits
Fistful of Crits is a UK-based TTRPG design, apparel, product, homebrew, print, and publishing project run by Steph and Logan.
Website: fistfulofcrits.co.uk
Itch: fistful-of-crits.itch.io
Instagram: @fistfulofcrits
Threads: @fistfulofcrits

Michelle Kelly
Actor, voice actor, writer, actual play performer, GM, and game designer.
Portfolio: michellekellyperformance.carrd.co
Itch: michellicopter.itch.io
Instagram: @michellicopter

Kayla Dice, Rat Wave Game House
Writer-designer of TTRPGs exploring themes of alienation and connection, including work released through Rat Wave Game House.
Website: ratwavegh.wordpress.com
Instagram: @ratwavekayla
Tumblr: @ratwavekayla

Danii Squishy
Actual Play Performer, modeller and prosthetics artist.
Instagram: @danii__squishy

Community

Women of TTRPGs
A community platform uplifting women and marginalised voices in the tabletop roleplaying space.
Website: womenofttrpg.com
Instagram: @womenofttrpg
Threads: @womenofttrpg

Event

A Seat at the Table: Women in TTRPGs, UK Games Expo
Event listing: UK Games Expo event page