D&D 5E 5e's new gender policy - is it attracting new players?

Isn't Jeremy Crawford gay? You'd think someone like that wouldn't create a game that excluded GLBT folks.

To answer the OP, are there GLBT NPCs in the products? Yes. If you want them that way, sure. It never says the sexuality of any of the NPCs. I'm guessing because sexual preferences or gender identity isn't something that's important to the game. Saying that it excludes GLBT because it doesn't explicitly call out GLBT NPCs is like saying the game excludes left handed people because no NPC is called out as being left handed.

I've been playing for over 30 years, and the PCs sexual preferences or gender identity has never been an issue. A player wants to play a GLBT PC? Sure, knock your socks off. Doesn't impact the game play at all. And I've had players do that, and do it tastefully all the way back to 1e. Sure, it was nice to have that paragraph in there if it makes people feel better, but I don't see the need to have quotas in a game for a subject that has no impact to the game itself. The most important thing about D&D, and is often repeated, is to make the game yours to fit your table and gaming group. So if you want every NPC to be GLBT, just do it.

Sacrosanct said:

The most important thing about D&D, and is often repeated, is to make the game yours to fit your table and gaming group. So if you want every NPC to be GLBT, just do it.

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That actually reminds me of a couple of NPC tables I created for biological gender, gender identity and sexuality. Having a table leads to some interesting and fun situations. I recall one time a PC ordered a drink at a bar, and, thanks to the table, the male bartender smiled at him and told him it was on the house. Another time, a PC thought a barmaid was interested in him when it turned out she was looking at the female PC sitting next to him.

I'm especially impressed with how the PHB paragraph on sex and gender matter-of-factly threw open the doors not just to characters from anywhere on the spectrum, but to entirely different cultural perspectives on the whole subject. It reminds us that dwarves and elves and fantasy humans may not have the same norms, standards, or even categories as we do in the real world. And when we think about how these cultures think about issues of gender and orientation on their own terms, we're giving gay and trans characters an organic place in the setting. I have a hard time seeing how someone could complain of "anachronism" when the character in question comes from, say, a land where same-sex romance is seen as a pursuit for the elderly once the fertile rush of youth has passed.

Mentions of gender identity have been in D&D from the first edition, why is everyone acting like this is a new thing?

ClockworkNinja said:

Mentions of gender identity have been in D&D from the first edition, why is everyone acting like this is a new thing?
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Were there no goddesses in 1E? There are always male gods, so having a page that shows one doesn't seem to mean much, nor the fact that it says "he" when talking about the god.

EDIT: I apologize, I was stupid to not have actually read all of the page. Skimmed it a bit and saw it was a god page, and made my post after that. Have now actually read it and saw the "male female both or neither" bit.

Sacrosanct said:

It never says the sexuality of any of the NPCs. I'm guessing because sexual preferences or gender identity isn't something that's important to the game.

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It's funny how it only doesn't matter when somebody suggests the possibility that maybe they shouldn't all be straight.
Incidentally, I have barely cracked my copy of The Rise of Tiamat, but was almost completely certain I could leaf through it and find a character whose sexuality was mentioned--I quickly found a woman explicitly stated to have a husband. It wasn't hard.

From The War of the Burning Sky, already mentioned for having an all-female love-triangle, I could easily mention several male NPCs explicitly interested in women or vice versa off the top of my head. The lesbian characters stand out as memorable because of how exceedingly rare they are.
Straight characters can just exist. It's only "mentioning sexuality" when they're not.

Sacrosanct said:

So if you want every NPC to be GLBT, just do it.

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Maybe all published NPCs should be gay. If you want straight characters, you can make them yourself.

According to gallup, 3.8% of people in the US identify as gay or lesbian.

That means, assuming you accept that figure for your frp world, one in roughly 26. And there could be incentive in a given frp world for gay and lesbians characters to not self identify (e.g. persecution from the majority, religious stigma, et al). That means, given the paucity of NPCs whose sexual preferences is identified at all, instances of identifiably gay or lesbian NPCs should come up rarely in a world that models the real world, but they should occasionally come up.

But really, the fact that an adventure says a male NPC is married to a female NPC could have nothing to do with whether one or both of them is gay. It happens all the time. So even those references do not exclude gay or lesbian NPCs.

I cannot specifically recall any homosexual characters in official D&D adventures. I do recall a gay pirate in the CRPG Temple of Elemental Evil. I also believe Baldur's Gate 2 had some homosexual romances and other such dalliances possible.

I do not recall any D&D novels having gay characters, but I haven't read all of them to be sure.

Wik said:

I DO think, however, that D&D as a brand has not said much on gender diversity/sexuality in gaming in the past. As in, there's precious few LGBTQ characters in official D&D products, or even much mention of it. Pathfinder is much better at this sort of thing, absolutely, but even they admit that they often don't do enough in regards to transgender characters (though this has been changing). But pathfinder is not D&D...

Anyways. I think the PHB was a step in the right direction, though I don't think much more has been done about it since. Are there any LGBTQ characters in the adventures?

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I'm not aware of any. But then, most of the NPCs are lacking in any detail that isn't directly relevant to the adventure. I mean, in OotA, I'd expect at least one NPC to fondly mention the sweetheart he has back home... so we know he isn't going to make it.

And I think that's relevant - Pathfinder's paths have a much larger page count, and one of the advantages of that is that NPCs tend to be presented in a bit more detail, which allows them more leeway. When OotA has to detail eight important NPCs in a two-page spread, they're necessarily more constrained.

Still, they have been getting more detailed with each path thus far, and so...

None spring to mind, which makes me think the PHB was just giving lip service.

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I hope not. If we're really lucky, the SCAG might render this conversation somewhat moot in a few weeks, by including one or more LBGT characters. A setting book should have a bit more freedom in that regard than in a book covering 15 levels of adventure in 250 pages.

And hopefully we'll see more representation in the storylines next year (and beyond).

But, of course, "wait and see" doesn't mean people should be content to wait forever.

Is that enough?

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I don't think so, but I do think it's a process: eighteen months ago we didn't even have the statement in the PHB/Basic. Now we do, but LBGT representation in the storylines is lacking. Hopefully, next year that representation will be better. And, the year after that, things will hopefully have improved again.

At least, that's what I'd hope. In the meantime, though, I appreciate that progress remains painfully slow.

And this curiousity has got me wondering - is the game's official stance on LGBTQ issues going to help attract new players in those (and other) communities? Does more need to be done, or is the current pace the correct one?

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I'm not sure it's necessarily helping attract new players in any significant numbers, but it does at least mean there's a "Welcome!" sign out, which is a good thing.

I apologise if this post comes off as lecturing, gender and sexuality are my main focus as a historian so I would just like to correct some misunderstandings in the thread regarding their place in history.

The idea that including LGBT characters in a medieval fantasy setting would be anachronistic is wrong, I am afraid. Unlike today, in the ancient and medieval worlds it was trans and gender-nonconforming individuals who were more visible and respected than gay people. Someone mentioned the hijra of India, other examples include eunuchs in many Mediterranean, Near Eastern and Asian civilisations, sworn virgins in the Balkans, the Vestal Virgins of Rome, and many more. These always existed in a specific religious or political context, such as the eunuch servants of the Byzantine court who were favoured because their inability to create families of their own meant they were seen as wholly loyal to their employers. I'm not trying to say that a trans peasant would have been accepted, but there were specific roles in many cultures which required or were reserved for people outside of the traditional gender binary, even in the most hyper-masculine societies.

Indeed, if you think that including a trans character in a medieval European-based fantasy setting is an anachronism, then presumably you would have to ban female characters from being anything besides wives, mothers, prostitutes and maybe priestesses, because women in history who stepped outside of these specific roles were viewed as violating the boundaries of their gender, unless it was in one of the aforementioned sanctioned roles. Historical conceptions of gender were extremely inflexible for both men and women, look no further than the reaction to Joan of Arc for an example of how a woman who involved herself in war would be viewed and treated, even without taking part in actual combat. And since no one has argued for such restrictions on female characters, I can't see how allowing trans characters would be any more anachronistic.

Non-heterosexual people similarly existed throughout history, and not just in Ancient Greece. For specific European examples, there are many kings who had male "favourites", some of whom came to bad ends but by no means all, as well as overtly romantic letters exchanged between monks. Evidence for female same-sex relationships is rather harder to come by due to the bias of having overwhelmingly male sources. Again, your average peasant probably would not have been able to express their sexuality freely, but for the upper ranks of society, specifically male members things were different. Often, as a long as a man did his duty by marrying and siring children, he could get away with taking lovers of either sex.

First post, hopefully I have made sense.

discosoc said:

I feel like transgender identity is a modern thing, and not really a good fit for the kind of fantasy games that people tend to associate with D&D. It's not incompatible or anything, just not really something that should be focused on any more than a characters sexuality in general.

That said, WotC has done a pretty good job of using a writing style that's not male-oriented since they took over the brand. Go read the 3e books and you'll see a very healthy (probably half) number of chapters written using female pronouns, so it's obvious they were trying to broaden the audience even going back that far.

Beyond that, I just don't see the point in trying to force every real-world current event issue into an RPG game like D&D.

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I agree that personal politics shouldn't be brought to the table, its D&D not the debate club. And hitting on people should be in character should be kept to NPCs, or with OOC agreements.

BtW men's rights aren't crap, there are millions of men in the world who are suffering and deserve compassion. That being said there is a time and place for activism, and this is not it.