PCs dealing with sexuality

[ACreepierFolklaw]

recently i was talking to my gf about old game i DM'd which involved a (heterosexual) romance between a PC and an NPC.
To her, it was totally gay; she couldn't really seperate the DM from the NPC, to her it was all a bit weird, two hetero guys romancing each other as she saw it.

i think this perfectly explains the difficulty of exploring these real deep issues in a game...

 

[SnowleopardVK]

recently i was talking to my gf about old game i DM'd which involved a (heterosexual) romance between a PC and an NPC.
To her, it was totally gay; she couldn't really seperate the DM from the NPC, to her it was all a bit weird, two hetero guys romancing each other as she saw it.

i think this perfectly explains the difficulty of exploring these real deep issues in a game...

Ah true, I forget sometimes that people have inhibitions like that.

In my current group all the guys are straight and all the girls are not, so I don't think anyone would have that particular problem trying to romance a character of mine.

 

[Aeolius]

In my current group all the guys are straight and all the girls are not, so I don't think anyone would have that particular problem trying to romance a character of mine.

My current game is run in a chat-room. I often wonder if all of my players are in fact the same 54 year old man living in his mother's basement. Some people have trouble with "willing suspension of disbelief". I have trouble with "reality".

 

[SnowleopardVK]

My current game is run in a chat-room. I often wonder if all of my players are in fact the same 54 year old man living in his mother's basement. Some people have trouble with "willing suspension of disbelief". I have trouble with "reality".

Like... All of them secretly being the same 54 year old man on multiple accounts? Or do you mean all different 54 year old men, each masquerading as younger men and girls?

 

[Aeolius]

Like... All of them secretly being the same 54 year old man on multiple accounts? Or do you mean all different 54 year old men, each masquerading as younger men and girls?

The same man with multiple accounts. To me, that's creepier.

Though, to be fair, I masquerade as a 1,000 year old undead hag and have a great amount of fun doing so... so who am I to judge?

 

[Tequila Sunrise]

And of course sex scenes don't get played out at the table! Sheesh, that's not the only part of a relationship you know.

Just the best part.

Jokes aside, no, I've never rped a romance of any kind. I don't find them very interesting; although admittedly the gay issue adds another layer of potential interest.

In our Dark Sun game, I play a hulking half-dwarf gladiator. Recently one of the other players decided to draw all of our characters, and she came up with a rough sketch. Someone commented that my character's pose was somewhat flamboyant, and she replied "Yeah, I couldn't draw the gladiator not-gay." Oddly, or perhaps not, the artist is a lesbian.

So who knows? Maybe my character is gay, which would make my first rp romance gay!

 

[wingsandsword]

When I'm a GM, I normally never make an issue of it. I might use lovers/partners/spouses as a background/storytelling reference in passing. However, once I had a PC who insisted that his Elven Enchanter was not only heterosexual, but promiscuous and at least a little lecherous. Since he was wealthy and fairly high-level, there were running jokes about the trollops he often brought to his tower at the keep. . .and the party Cleric having to dispense Remove Disease and other treatment spells periodically. I used it for a plot hook when I had one of those harlots turn out to be a succubus that was trying to infiltrate their keep. That's the most that any orientation-based RP has gone in any campaign I've run.

Now, I've seen it played, but only as a joke. The worst case I can recall was a lesbian Kender sorcerer in a Planescape game, played by a heterosexual male. He often tried to slip in jokes about the orientation, of which maybe one or two over the course of the campaign were mildly funny (but definitely NOT to be repeated here), but typically fell very flat if not generally offensive. It only reenforced my desire to keep sexual orientation out of games, as a general rule.

Not sexual orientation, but in terms of gender identity I've seen that come up as well. A person I used to game with way-back-when (a decade or more ago) always either played characters of the opposite sex, or characters with various spells/powers that could let them shapeshift between genders (regardless of the system, they'd find a way, or find an excuse to not play). Of course, when she came out to us, it was a surprise to absolutely nobody. That person came out a few years after all that and now lives as a woman, and apparently was using gaming to sort through gender identity issues they didn't want to consciously admit to.

 

[haakon1]

It seems an interesting thing to want to explore at the table, but perhaps it needs a very select group. In the world I play in, homosexuality is just as acceptable as any other for the most part and nobody cares

In my Greyhawk campaign world (world because it's two campaigns in the same setting), homosexual NPC's certainly exist and are the PC's are occasionally aware of one (like through Detect Thoughts on an NPC), but they are not particularly open about it.

For example, the rulers of Hommlett, two former adventuring buddies who live in a tower together and rule together, are gay, in "original" Greyhawk per Gygax and in my campaign because I like that. I never realized it when I played that adventure, but in a question on ENWorld about gay characters, Gygax pointed to that and said it was "obvious" they were gay.

In my real life, growing up in a small town in the 1970s and 1980s, I didn't think much about the possibility that people were actually gay until I got to college and first met people who were open about it. Like in my hometown, the two old ladies who lived together and ran a farm where we used to buy eggs -- thought never crossed my mind, though it was obvious to my parents.

So I figure my campaign world is like that. Not something that has dread implications if revealed, but not something people are typically open about either. So a gay character might be open about having a roommate who is a close friend, but probably wouldn't refer to them as a significant other, at least not around people he didn't know.

Which fits well for the campaign I play in (but don't DM) too, where one of the players is (I suspect) in the closet with us -- he was in the military, so if he is gay, he's probably quite used to avoiding the topic. When my wife met him once, she was sure of her gaydar, whereas had only a vague idea that he never talked about women, in character or out.

 

[Thanlis]

I've played in games with PCs with conflicted sexuality. At least one of them, a male player was playing a male PC who had a covert crush on my male PC, and I'm a guy. No big deal. It's just another potential interesting roleplaying aspect.

 

[SnowleopardVK]

...So I figure my campaign world is like that. Not something that has dread implications if revealed, but not something people are typically open about either. So a gay character might be open about having a roommate who is a close friend, but probably wouldn't refer to them as a significant other, at least not around people he didn't know.

That seems to be pretty much how my current situation is going. The two party rogues, both women, are getting a bit close but closeness tends to get handwaved as a "she's my teammate/a fellow rogue" thing, or "she's saved my life more than once" (which both of us have done for the other).