You and Your Characters: Gender and Sexuality

[Garick83]

I tend to play male character as playing females tends to be awkward, especially with that one guy in the party that always flirts with the female characters....

 

[was]

I'm a guy and that's what I usually play.

 

[GhostShip Blue]

When gender is part of a solid idea for a character, I go where the idea indicates. But unless there's a reason to do otherwise, I tend to make my characters men. I a guy, unless there's an active reason to think about a character as NOT a guy, it's kind of the default. Besides, my roleplaying as a guy is more convincing.

 

[TBRMInsanity]

As a male I find it easier to understand the male mind (and the hetrosexual male mind). That being said, some of my best characters have been females.
I'm all about roleplaying over rollplaying and as such I want to choose a character that is easier for me to get into. This makes it immediately harder to play female characters unless the character concept jumped out at me from the start.

 

[Bagpuss]

I would have thought if you were about the "roleplaying" then you would pick a character further removed from yourself, for the challenge and experience. What sort of character you pick has no bearing on if you are roleplaying or rollplaying.

 

[TBRMInsanity]

Bagpuss,
Sometimes I do that, sometimes it is nice to play a character that is very different from myself and I can experience, to a small degree, what it would be like to be that sort of person. I guess I do have a comfort zone and I tend to stay in it quite a bit.
I would love to hear what a psychologist would say about that. Weather I use roleplaying as an outlet to resolve issues in my life, or if typecasting my characters means I'm comfortable with myself.
Things that make you go mmmmm.

 

[Sword of Spirit]

I'm male, and I generally play male. Strangely enough, this topic came up in context of one of our gamers playing his first female character, and another mentioning that I never play female characters. It was strange to hear that, because as someone who likes to DM, and that includes playing suplemental DM PCs to help small parties, I frequently play female chracters.I think there is something to length of the campaign and the degree of identification. If I'm going to be solely identifying with a character in an extended campaign, I think it would be difficult not to play a male, but if it's short term or I am role-playing more than one character, it's much easier.

 

[Cor Azer]

I'm male, and play whatever flits into my mind, even discounting when DMing. Pretty well represented on all gender and sexuality continuums.

 

[Systole]

Guy IRL. I go roughly 50/50 male/female with PCs, though. With that said, most of my characters are fairly asexual, because RP romance kind of creeps me out. (Exceptions: My WotW antipaladin actually really liked the medusa from the third book because she was 500 years old and he was a history buff, and it would have almost been stranger if they hadn't hooked up. And it seemed natural that my wasting-curse oracle would like his women ... erm ... 'firm and fruity' as Lord Flashheart would say. So when the party met a green hag who'd set up an alchemist's shop, he tapped that.)

 

[ExploderWizard]

I'm a male and play male characters most of the time. I don't have any problems playing female characters on occasion. Sometimes for campaign reasons its nice having a female PC in the group just to be able to go places that socially, a male character couldn't.