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

[TheCosmicKid]

The Gaelic people employed female warriors during the early Roman occupation using guerrilla tactics. They proved no match for the Roman soldier.

Well, neither did the male Gauls.

But no female Miyamato Musashi, William Marshall, or crazy Viking berserker guy holding bridge against a hundred men until they speared him from the below the bridge after he drove them back alone.

Read Vinland Saga. One pregnant woman, two axes, no mercy.

 

[TheCosmicKid]

Yeah, archeology is full of guesswork. However, there's a fair bit of evidence that there have been female warriors in a whole lot of cultures over time, and the "no women in combat ever" thing is an anomaly, not the default.

I think that's an overstatement or possibly a misleading statement. If by combat you mean they fought back when they and their homes were attacked, yeah, that would have happened quite a lot, because history is horrible. But if by combat you mean they participated in battles away from home as "regular" warriors or soldiers -- well, it definitely happened, but I would not be using phrases like "a whole lot" or "common" about it.

 

[seebs]

I was including also things like, say, banditry, police forces, any role that was inherently combat-prone. (For instance, Ching Shih.)

 

[Hussar]

So, here's the thing: I don't think there's anyone in this thread who thinks there's anything intrinsically flat and passive about femaleness. But the argument being made by several people here, I think including Hussar, is that there is something in our society's view of femaleness that inclines writers to write female characters flat and passive and above all defined by the men around them - as lovers, as mothers, as prizes, as not-quite-full-persons. That, basically, when a whole bunch of (mainly men) who are being bad writers specifically about female characters tend to be bad in the same basic ways, there is something larger than just a particular lack of skill in one person. And that the solution has to be approached on a level bigger than calling one person after another a bad writer and moving on. Especially when the way the audience (male and female) tends to read characters shows similar patterns to the mistakes the writers are making.

That's my reading of Hussar's point, at least, so I thought I'd try clarifying and see if it helped.

This is a better way of saying what I was trying to say. Thanks for the leg up. The idea that you can interchange male and female characters doesn't IMO, bear up under scrutiny. Characters are written differently if they are male or female.

I think that's an overstatement or possibly a misleading statement. If by combat you mean they fought back when they and their homes were attacked, yeah, that would have happened quite a lot, because history is horrible. But if by combat you mean they participated in battles away from home as "regular" warriors or soldiers -- well, it definitely happened, but I would not be using phrases like "a whole lot" or "common" about it.

That's also problematic because what do you mean by "regular" warriors or soldiers? Not many societies pre-Middle Ages had anything remotely like standing armies (Romans and a few others notwithstanding). Most soldiers were not "career warriors", they were peasant levies. They went out, fought in whatever disagreement people were having, and then went home to their farms and regular jobs after that.

But, female irregulars do pop up here and there. Japan, pre-Edo, featured a number of women who received extensive weapon training. Even today, the naginata is seen as a woman's weapon. Defending the home while the men went away to do (typically) raiding or piracy was not uncommon. I imagine, although this is only a gut feeling, that Viking culture featured a lot of the same sort of thing. The men went off to raid and the women stayed home and defended the home. While certainly I could see raiders as being more experienced warriors, I imagine that women would still receive a considerable amount of weapons training, simply to keep their neighbours honest.

 

[Lanefan]

I'm actually surprised nobody's mentioned Xena yet, as a fine fictional example of how a female warrior/character can work in a game-like setting.

Lan-"or Callisto"-efan

 

[Bluenose]

Yeah, archeology is full of guesswork. However, there's a fair bit of evidence that there have been female warriors in a whole lot of cultures over time, and the "no women in combat ever" thing is an anomaly, not the default. Certainly, they've been common enough that it shouldn't be hard to write one.

You don't even have to go to archaeology. You can do perfectly well with fiction, mythology and history. Scathach, Britomart, the Order of the Hatchet, Norse shieldmaidens, Skythian female horse archers, DFuchess Gaita of LKombardy, Countess Petronilla of Leicester, Agnes Hotol, the Arab women practising their archery when their city was about to come under siege, the female knights both the Arabs and Byzantines attest among the Crusaders, Caterina Sforza leading a cavalry charge while six months pregnant, and others.

 

[Celtavian]

I was including also things like, say, banditry, police forces, any role that was inherently combat-prone. (For instance, Ching Shih.)

You're talking about women in leadership positions during war. That is a very different matter. There have been many female war leaders. Even females mostly employed male war leaders, meaning queens and pirate leaders knew that males made better warriors. The one area where men historically have glossed over women in war is in leadership positions. There were many matriarchal cultures where women

I'm seeking female warriors that could compete with males in the field. Very hard to find women who for example were distinguished in actual combat. I have searched extensively for an example. I have found none. I even searched Youtube for videos of women fighting men. I've found a few videos of women competitive fighters fighting some no name guy and winning on points. There is no example of an equivalently trained woman fighter beating an equivalently trained male. A strong woman can beat down a weak male. That doesn't do anything if you're writing a story about a female warrior that you want to be able to compete against trained men on the field of battle, possibly in one on one fights.

Even when I looked up European dueling with fencing weapons, there were no prominent female fencers that could best equivalently trained men. Fights between men and women for legal reasons often had the man standing in a pit with the woman armed with a stick whacking at him to give the woman a chance in the fight.

Males are often too physically dominant for a female to fight in one on one battle, especially so in the ancient world. The gun was a great equalizer in the modern world. Even with roids and weightlifting, female fighters still can't compete against male fighters at the same weight due to the physical dominance of men. It's really distressing when you are attempting to write a female warrior in a somewhat realistic manner. I'm starting to feel I need to toss realism out the window and just write her.

Instead of worrying about genetics, what female characters do people feel have been well done in fiction? That don't feel like flat or powerless characters. Some of the ones I've liked are Brienne of Tarth, Eowyn, some of the females in the Mazalan series which has many vicious, effective female warriors with well-developed personalities, Major Motoko (though she's a cyborg), Clare in Claymore, Sarah Conner in The Terminator series, Gina Carano in a few of her films, and obviously Rhonda Rousey has the mentality I'm looking for. She's a bulldog with strong skill. If she had a male body, she would be a top level fighter in the men's league. She owns her weight class against women. Never seen a more dominant fighter.

What are some other well depicted female warriors?

 

[Fragsie]

I can't help but point out that just because history doesn't seem to point out any 'equally trained women who won' doesn't mean that they didn't exist. You have to think about who wrote that history (in the west at least), in the more recent centuries it would likely have been academics or politicians. whom until the 20th century would have been male (or if female; they would likely have pretended to be male in order to have their work taken seriously), and before that it would have been the religious orders that recorded and copied histories, and I struggle to think of any institution in the west that (again; until the last 100 years or so) was any less sexist. It wouldn't surprise me at all if it turned out that a large number of female war heroes/combatants had been glossed over or outright ignored by the figurative history books.

A little research into theories behind the lack of female warriors in a lot of cultures seems to bring up a lot of parallels with marriage customs; cultures that developed marriage as a political tradition (i.e. that marry to unify houses or create political bonds) are more likely to keep the women at home rather than send them to war, this is very much the outcome of an unequal society where women are considered in some part to be property. First their parent's, then their husband's. Ancient cultures that had no such customs around marriage, tended to have more female warriors in their ranks.

 

[hawkeyefan]

The Maidens of the Spear from Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time come to mind. And Birgitte as well. Women generally have much more societal power in that world, so there are many examples, both those ones stand out for being warriors.

Joe Abercrombie has presented many compelling warrior women in his books...most notably Ferro Maljinn and Monza Murcatto.

The fact that these characters are female certainly matters to their stories, and I don't think that anyone would argue otherwise.

Games are different than fiction, though. Yes, a character's gender in a game can certainly matter. But Player Characters are a collection of mechanical statistics that determines how they function in a game. Given that the PHB specifically states that there is no mechanical difference between the genders, there is clearly some level of interchangeability that's hard to deny.

 

[Sunseeker]

So, here's the thing: I don't think there's anyone in this thread who thinks there's anything intrinsically flat and passive about femaleness. But the argument being made by several people here, I think including Hussar, is that there is something in our society's view of femaleness that inclines writers to write female characters flat and passive and above all defined by the men around them - as lovers, as mothers, as prizes, as not-quite-full-persons. That, basically, when a whole bunch of (mainly men) who are being bad writers specifically about female characters tend to be bad in the same basic ways, there is something larger than just a particular lack of skill in one person. And that the solution has to be approached on a level bigger than calling one person after another a bad writer and moving on. Especially when the way the audience (male and female) tends to read characters shows similar patterns to the mistakes the writers are making.

That's my reading of Hussar's point, at least, so I thought I'd try clarifying and see if it helped.

I want to make a note about writing: someone is going to be half-a-person. Might be a girl, might be a guy, might be a lot of people actually. Stories have limited room for full character development. Now, I totally agree if we're talking about the main characters, the people who should be full-characters. But typically secondary and tertiary characters are fairly two-dimensional or worse.

Now historically speaking most stories center around the adventures of men, so yes undoubtedly you're more likely to see flat female characters because they really aren't people, they're plot devices. Saving the princess from the evil dragon is really no different than retrieving the magic crystal. Because the story isn't about her, it's about Bob the Barbarian going on an epic adventure, potentially learning, loving, losing and doing something fantastic and heroic. Now if we were to replace Bob with Jane, and Jane ended up being a flat character, yes that's a problem.

This is why I said, going back about 30 pages to a discussion I think I even had with Hussar over playing a female character in a D&D game was:

It's important to consider the character as a person first and address their sexuality or gender identity second. Good writing does this. In fact, this is also a great approach to life: address people as people first and then move on to their more generic traits.