cross gender fun?

[Ealli]

The way it is for my campaign is I'll let the players try cross-gender, but if it becomes a disruption it will be their character that must be retired.

Now for my story of fun.

Last year I ran a oneshot campaign on April 1. Since we all knew it wouldn't have any long lasting repercussions, I felt free to toss in all sorts of fun items that I have never used in a regular campaign, like a girdle of giant strength + masculinity/femininity and a Deck of Many Things.

Early in the adventure, the party found the belt and identified it as giant strength, one of the male fighter types put it on. "Good news/bad news. The good news is that it gives +6 strength, bad news is that it changes your gender." The player took it well. "Cool, I guess my character is now Aragorna" [from Aragorn].

A short while after the belt was found, the party of 8 came across one of the puzzles of the dungeon. The dungeon was a Jester's funhouse so naturally it had a room full of distorted mirrors that blocked the path onward. The players consisted of 2 females and 6 males, to get through the hall of mirrors, one of the female characters needed to look in a mirror and say they were still beautiful. I had expected one of the two female players to do this, but it ended up that Aragorna was the one to say it. The day was saved by the belt of masculinity/femininity.

Later in the funhouse, the party acquired a Deck of Many Things. Aragorna drew an alignment switching card and the party became worried. The next character drew 3 wishes. The party decided it would be wise to use one of the wishes to undo the alignment switch. The player of Aragorna had wandered out of the room but overheard this discussion and rushed back shouting "Whoa, whoa, whoa, I don't want to be a man. Let's not be hasty with the wishes." His quote is still famous in our group.

 

[LostSoul]

So you tell me, do guys find combat, (pretend combat anyway), amusing? I would hazard a guess that most do.

Yeah, pretend combat is fun. I replied to your earlier post because I wasn't sure if you meant that men (as a group) do real violence casually and for entertainment, or if you were just talking about the game.

 

[Negative Zero]

thanks for the encouragement Sialia and William, but the problem isn't really the other PCs. it's the players. although i do keep track of what's said IN-character. one of the PCs who was supposed to be my character's childhood best friend is in for quite a shock next time she tries to call on that friendship, or if she becomes privy to the journal details sent back to my bards parent organisation.

then again, part of the actuall inter-character stuff might come from the fact that my PC is somewhat of an outsider in the group. they're an ex military now turned merc unit, and my PC was sorta tacked on to them (with what is assumed to be an honourary title coz of her royal birth).

she normally takes the few in character derisive comments with the grace and poise befitting an elven princess. and i usually take the out of character stuff in the same vein coz i like to keep in character at the table.

my group is a great bunch of guys and girls for the most part. they're fun to hang out with as well as play with. but there's deffinitely more of an air of "hanging out" at the gaming table. plus i've found that finding a gaming group in nyc is a major chore! lol

~NegZ

 

[TroyXavier]

My favorite NPC is a human female rogue who had her tongue cut out. She was a blast trying to communicate with others. Course now she's scary with her mucho powerful sneak attack.

 

[Humanophile]

As a general rule, I'm against cross-gender gaming, for reasons somewhere between Billy's and -0's. As a rule of thumb, the average, random gamer is more likely to play a sex kitten or be quite lewd and inappropriate comments to the player of a female character (even if said player is female). And the problem here is, you can't always tell who's going to regress to junior high locker room antics and who won't. So if you join a group I'm DM'ing and ask me to take your word that you're a capable, responsible roleplayer, think again. No, I won't let you play Bubbles, even if your last group liked her.

If everyone in the group is mature enough and knows each other well enough (and is comfortable enough with each other), than go ahead. But established groups of friends have a lot more lattitude than groups that will accept the occasional new player or random pickup games at cons. And as a guideline, if most groups include either a player who can't handle it well, or else a player who wants to but does it wrong, it's best to say no as a default answer.

(That said, I've tried my hand at a couple of female characters, and I have a couple more kicking around in my head. It's not that it's not doable, it's just that it's expecting a lot for every gamer to be a mature, capable, reasonable gamer. Your average gamer isn't a good gamer, they're an average gamer.)

 

[Green Knight]

I clicked "No" but then I remembered that I HAVE played a female character. Once at a Con where we ended up with pregenerated characters. The DM just told us class and level, and with a choice between a 3rd level Fighter and a 2nd level Fighter I took the 3rd level one. The 3rd level Fighter turned out to be a female human named "Kim". Err...

I have had bad experiences with guys playing "total sluts" who attempt to trade sex for anyting they want

I've seen this happen, too. Knew a player a couple years back who played nothing but female characters and they were always sex-bombs, using sex to get stuff. For instance, this one time his character wanted a saddle, so she let a stable owner "get in the saddle", so to speak. She wanted a free horse, too, but after that first time the stable owner was tired and went to bed. LOL! (LOVED the way the DM handled that. Hehehe)

That ... was a pretty disconcerting part of the game, truth be told.

Anyway, I'd never play a female character by choice. I'd feel pretty uncomfortable doing so.

 

[Vaxalon]

I just wonder why those rules don't apply to the GM as well.

 

[ladyofdragons]

I am in no way against cross-gender gaming, though I rarely do it myself. As a woman, I've never had the problem of playing in a single-gender gaming group, and since the men in our group always play male characters, I play the female to round out the party. I think in 15+ years of D&D I have played exactly 2 male characters. One was really rather asexual, the other was a really stupid half ork named Krunk, who liked to pick flowers and make daisy chains and crush bad people. So really, I don't think I'm very good at gender-bending while roleplaying and I avoid it. As a DM, however, I play male NPCs all the time, but since I really don't need to get very deep into their motivations it's not an issue.

As for playing Women of Loose Morals, I've done that before, and it was a lot of fun. But nobody in our party would ever have thought of calling her a slut, she was simply a free spirit following the tenets of her god. Sluttyness requires the character to realize what she's doing is 'sinful' and go on doing it in spite of (or because of) that.

Really, I've only ever met one man who could play a female character and do it justice. He did a wonderful job playing a sex mage (I forget what the actual title is) from the netbook of carnal knowledge, and managed to do it lightly, humorously, and without making the women in the room cringe thinking "a woman would NEVER have done that".

One great twist on this is a campaign I played in where one of the characters had a curse placed on him, where every night he had a 1 in 6 chance of switching genders. Since this was new for him, being a woman, it required some tutelage and he wasn't expected to really be a believable woman, just to make a good hack at it. Was some good fun, since the person he had to ask for advice on how to be a good woman was the aforementioned free-spirited cleric.

In summation, I guess I'm trying to say that playing someone of the opposite gender (or perhaps the opposite sexual preference) well is a very difficult task, something I generally avoid, but it can be done and can add to a game, if all the players are mature enough to handle the subject.

 

[Shadoe's Lady]

I have a hard time thinking like a guy.
I've seen some guys play women fairly well, though.

 

[S'mon]

Re: Re: Re: Quite Right...

I've met Gygax. I found him to be an offensive little troll of a man not too far removed from the average 17-year-old. Maybe he was just having an off-night, but regaling convention goers with tales of hiring Hustler centerfolds to frolic nearly nude with his teenage son and the son's friends do not engender much in the way of respect from me.

Yeah, what kind of a living legend worth the name can't even get a Hustler centrefold to strip all the way?!