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

Wik · Oct 31, 2015

Lanefan said:
OK. Now, what about: "one or more of these choices does not fit in with the game world as envisioned and-or designed"? Example: if in my world the Gnomish culture as designed (and clearly stated upfront) says only female Gnomes go adventuring and an adventuring male Gnome is likely to be scorned (or worse) if it ever encounters any other Gnomes, do I allow male Gnome PCs or just ban them? And if I do allow them, and the scorn comes, is it then a "don't say I didn't warn you" moment?

My opinion? It honestly depends. If you ask the player, and they say "I just wanna play a gnome!" yeah, should probably allow it, and maybe dial it back a bit (or some up with an exception; the world is full of exceptions). If they say "yeah, I like it, it sounds lie a challenge" then allow it and have fun.

I have this in my own game - certain priesthoods are "almost entirely" male or female. But if a player wanted to break that? I'd be more than willing to let them - and let the player decide whether it's going to be "a thing" or not.

At the start of my current campaign all PCs had to be a) Human and b) of the same ethnicity (Greek-equivalent). I did this intentionally, to set an early tone of what sort of culture the game would be set in and to drive home the fact they were starting in a place where non-Humans weren't always very welcome. What this meant was that if someone had their heart set on playing an Elf right from puck drop they were SOL; they'd have to wait a while. Is this wrong?

Whole other can of worms. And really, I don't see too much of a problem, if that's the game you wanna run. But IF you said "Well, no, you can't be female". Or "nope, you can't be gay" then yes, I'd say you were wrong.

TheCosmicKid · Oct 31, 2015

Hussar said:
Still think gender makes no difference?

That's not what I said. Even granting that everything you say is true, those are simply different "things" than the "things" I was talking about, and this only confirms what I said about the term "things" being uselessly vague.

Now, is what you say true? @GMforPowergamers has already touched on some of the more glaring oversights in your claims. And in general, what differences there are can clearly be attributed to sexist writing (especially so with 1960s-era Star Trek). That's gendering being imposed on the characters from outside; it's not what I'm asking about. I'm asking whether such people would actually, in real life (or given a perfect writer, if the idea of thinking about starship captains "in real life" is a problem), make different decisions in these crisis situations because of their gender.

Hussar said:
(other than some perhaps subtext with Seven of Nine)

This claim from fans has always really bugged me, because I read their relationship as very much surrogate mother-daughter. Xena and Gabrielle they are not. Now, the struggle between Janeway and the Borg Queen over Seven does have the overtones of a custody battle...

hawkeyefan · Oct 31, 2015

The Kirk/ Janeway comparison is interesting. Flip the genders of them and how we view them might change. Especially Kirk. His escapades are legendary, and he's viewed as an alpha male. Yet if Kirk was a woman, most would view such actions negatively (right or wrong).

Clearly, gender matters. Certainly in real life, and very often in fiction. Not always though.

Gaming is even one more step removed. Sure, the gender may matter quite a bit depending on the settings social trappings or depending on the character concept. But it doesn't have to.

I think that's the spirit of the message in the PHB...that your choices are yours to make. So the relevance of those choices are also up to you.

I couldn't possibly care less about my fighter's love life. Not one bit. Most players in my game would agree. Their sexuality and sexual identity do not matter in the game.

In another game at another table, that could be the entire thrust of a campaign. It's up to the players, and any decision is fine.

TheCosmicKid · Oct 31, 2015

Wik said:
Whole other can of worms. And really, I don't see too much of a problem, if that's the game you wanna run. But IF you said "Well, no, you can't be female". Or "nope, you can't be gay" then yes, I'd say you were wrong.

There's a huge difference between race/ethnicity and sex/orientation. The distribution of races and ethnicities varies from place to place so it's reasonable to say that certain people are rare or nonexistent in certain areas. But sex and orientation have the same distribution everywhere (assuming humanlike biology, of course -- with hard-SF aliens, anything goes).

billd91 · Oct 31, 2015

GMforPowergamers said:
yes... because again the character's were not the same... there was a marriage difference...

No, Hussar's definitely hitting an important issue. Five Star Fleet captains, 4 single men, 1 engaged woman (she wasn't married, she had a fiancé she stayed faithful to until she learned he had given her up for dead and married someone else - it nevertheless did serve to keep her chaste). Though it's a small sample, it's enough to provoke some thought (and this is with Star Trek, as forward thinking as it is on many topics).

TheCosmicKid · Oct 31, 2015

billd91 said:
No, Hussar's definitely hitting an important issue. Five Star Fleet captains, 4 single men, 1 engaged woman (she wasn't married, she had a fiancé she stayed faithful to until she learned he had given her up for dead and married someone else - it nevertheless did serve to keep her chaste). Though it's a small sample, it's enough to provoke some thought (and this is with Star Trek, as forward thinking as it is on many topics).

Janeway's long-distance relationship is itself a genderflip of a classic trope that goes all the way back to the freaking Odyssey, of the far-flung man who longs to return home to his wife. (Yes, in the Odyssey Odysseus was wildly unfaithful, but that's the Greeks for you; in more recent fiction the man doesn't.) So no, really not seeing the gender disparity there.

Lanefan · Oct 31, 2015

IlluminatedSeraph said:
1) Designing against the default social expectations of your own society is helpful. Probably the best and most useful bit of design I did in this vein was for a sci-fi game, where I started from Asian cultural tropes (especially Japanese, because I was familiar with them) and set up a matriarchal society with a slanted birth-rate (more women than men) that embraced bisexual polyfidelity as its its default family model - two to three women and a man as the default household, with one woman traditionally acting in the military sphere, a second as the primary parent and the third in politics/business. The man was very much seen as a valuable resource to be cossetted and kept from doing anything silly and reckless like joining the Star Navy or taking a stressful job - artistic careers and helping professions would be much more in line with his family's needs.

That sounds about exactly how Gnomes see their men or Dwarves see their women in my world. Gnomes will often do the polyamoury thing, but Dwarves generally won't.

2) Avoid universality. This is mainly a tip for helping to avoid alienating players, but it seems to help a lot in making setting design more lively and flexible, too. Avoiding statements like 'all dwarfs believe' or 'all elves have these expectations' can get you out of the trap where the carefully detailed culture you've built up for your game doesn't mesh at all with the expectations of your player(s). In those situations, being able to say "The gnomes of Region X are a rigid matriarchy with these certain practices, but the gnomes of the High Mountains have a very different view" can really open up options. Even better is if you can sit down with your player and do some cultural design work on the idea they have about gnomes/humans/elves/whatever, so that when their character runs into your carefully designed culture, they can respond the way many humans have in foreign countries all through history - with wide-eyed fascination that so many things can be different between people who are so superficially similar. And it really takes pressure off of you in terms of cramming an awkward character concept in - the players who love to be inspired by the setting can draw from your prebuilt cultures, and the ones with firmer ideas can be accommodated (within reason) without disarranging your work too much. So while I don't think that your "all players must be human and from this region" campaign is wrong, per se, I do think that you're asking for a great deal of buy-in from your players up front and I hope you talked about it with them before hand (and, if you didn't, that it managed to go well anyway).

The players knew what they were getting into; and the campaign's been going for 7.5 years now so I guess it's worked out OK.

So "wrong" is a strong word for any of what you're talking about, but "likely to cause you and/or your players problems" is definitely a phrase I might use.

Sometimes part of the intent might *be* to cause players some problems...to push the comfort zones a little and see where things go. An example of this is one campaign I was in in the '90's (which also lasted about 8 years) had a rule at the start that everyone's first character must be of the opposite gender to the player (we started with 3 men and 2 women as players). Only one player had any real problem with this, but he played a female as his first one anyway; and though I might not start a campaign this way myself (if for no other reason than it's already been done in our crew) I think it was a good experiment.

Lan-"I think my first three in that campaign were female; each with a lifespan of about a session and a half"-efan

Sunseeker · Oct 31, 2015

billd91 said:
No, Hussar's definitely hitting an important issue. Five Star Fleet captains, 4 single men, 1 engaged woman (she wasn't married, she had a fiancé she stayed faithful to until she learned he had given her up for dead and married someone else - it nevertheless did serve to keep her chaste). Though it's a small sample, it's enough to provoke some thought (and this is with Star Trek, as forward thinking as it is on many topics).

To be fair, Kirk was married, and it didn't work out in part because he liked to sleep around. Picard was a job-first kinda guy and never got married in part because he had a large family and didn't think it was necessary but had an occasional fling with Dr Crusher and an odd character here to there, Riker got most of the sex-tention. I'm assuming you're including Sisko here who was married but his wife was killed and never really had a relationship after that. I honestly don't recall Enterprise enough to remember Archer's martial status.

So I mean if we're saying "while they were captains" yeah, 4 single men, 1 engaged lady. But that's looking at a very very narrow view of their characters.

The real issue here isn't so much marital status or sexuality, it's one-dimensionality. Which is usually what makes for bad characters, bad games and bad stories all around.

IlluminatedSeraph · Oct 31, 2015

TheCosmicKid said:
Janeway's long-distance relationship is itself a genderflip of a classic trope that goes all the way back to the freaking Odyssey, of the far-flung man who longs to return home to his wife. (Yes, in the Odyssey Odysseus was wildly unfaithful, but that's the Greeks for you; in more recent fiction the man doesn't.) So no, really not seeing the gender disparity there.

I'm tempted to make a crack about the respective faithfulness of Penelope and Janeway's husband, but that's probably unkind. The fact that the one female captain just happens to embody a classic trope that keeps her chaste while the men get a diverse range of tropes that don't require them to is just a bit suspect, though, don't you think?

hawkeyefan · Oct 31, 2015

[MENTION=6803508]IlluminatedSeraph[/MENTION] If you are ignoring Sisko, maybe. Or would you classify him as a chaste widow?
[MENTION=93444]shidaku[/MENTION] I disagree about that last bit. One dimensional characters can be compelling or at the very least entertaining, especially in games. Years ago my brother played an idiot of a fighter named Babu the Bizarre. He made the character to play with my friends and I when he was home on break from school, and made him intentionally one dimensional because of that. All the character wanted to do was fight.

As annoying as it could be, there were lots of memorable encounters that happened because he refused to negotiate or debate. The group often found themselves in a lot of trouble because of him.

I know what you were saying, and I agree to a large extent...but man those games were fun. I think that we need to make a distinction in this discussion between real life, fiction, and games. Games are significantly different.

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

Wik

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