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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7180585" data-attributes="member: 4937">Yes.  Because, regardless, a game were some players couldn't contribute isn't much fun.  Fundamentally, most RPGs - and D&D especially - have a certain 'spirit of Conan' assumption to their game, owing to their origins in wargaming and pulp fantasy.   And that spirit can be summed up by the line from the movie, "What is best in life... to crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and hear the lamentations of their women."   Most RPGs are built with the assumption that the measure of a person is their ability to kick butt and impose their wills on others.   But what we see from life, if we are honest, is (I hope) that that's not what life is really about.  Most of us don't go around finding violence at every corner, and if we do, we are probably bringing it with us.   So if we have a game that is more life-like, their might be some value in physical strength and martial prowess, but even a warrior will find most of his life isn't about that and most of his struggles aren't intimate violent combat - or if it is, he'll probably die young.  As you put it, most of time in life we don't solve problems by hitting things with a sword until they are dead.  And that's been true even in historical periods where violence was more common.  And, a person that solves their problems that way is objectively a horrible person.  Sometimes I wonder about D&D PCs and how they are usually played...<img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" />Of course not.  I think that the general idea that your character should fit the game and the setting is universally applicable.  Indeed, it's applicable to D&D in that you as a player are implicitly expected to play a character that is willing to take risks, and is capable of defending themselves and contributing to group of violent mercenaries engaged in violent struggle.   What you want to explore in a character in D&D at least, is secondary to fulfilling a role on a team.  Playing Elizabeth Bennett as a realistic character in D&D is not advisable.   Playing Elizabeth Bennett as she appears in Pride & Prejudice & Zombies on the other hand is perfectly valid.I think some posters are stuck on the idea that some hypothetical sexist wants women to only play 'weak' characters and have the rules enforce that, and that men are to play the 'strong' important characters that can do the important things like kick butt and impose their will on others.  And sure, that hypothetical sexist is out there somewhere.  But implicit in their assumption and the assumption of that sexist are several notions, one of which is that we are fundamentally only interested in playing idealized fantasy versions of ourselves.  That is to say, we only identify with a protagonist if the protagonist looks like we do.  And granted, there is nothing wrong with that, and the majority of players I've met mainly do play idealized or extreme or fantasy versions of themselves.   But I'm mainly a DM, and I have a very writerly/literary bent, so I play 'everyone else' in my normal game, and even on the rare cases where I'm allowed to be a player, I'm not interested in playing myself but in some sort of writerly/literary character.   Most of my characters start from philosophical musings about the setting and how it 'works'.  And while bending gender expectations is a very interesting thing to explore in a setting, doing so with 'kick butt action girl' is frankly one of the least imaginative and mature ways of doing that.Again, my 7th graders kick butt action girl with her in your face attitude wasn't motivated by a disrespect for women (or 'girls', I was a seventh grader), but it wasn't really motivated by healthy respect for them either.  It was just as much wish fulfillment for me the seventh grader as would be for a woman wanting to feel empowered.  But I have a bit of skepticism about the pervasive presentation of 'empowered women' as kick butt action girl, because that is actually a very comfortable (and comforting) archetype that fundamentally comes down to "girls are just like boys, right?"  Well, yes, and no.   And as someone that has seen been married 20+ years, and has two daughters, and has had many female colleagues, and who already explored kick but action girl in my mental space as a 7th grader, and who has ran lots of female NPCs since, if I ever did feel the need explore gender constructs and so forth, it sure as heck wouldn't be endless clones of Tank Girl, Laura Croft, Buffy Mara Jade, reboot Starbuck, Vin the Mistborn, Angua von Uberwald, etc. etc. etc.   And hey, do you notice that most of these are created by men?  Makes me wonder just how much beyond my 7th grade self's motives all these supposedly empowered women really are.   Don't even research the origins of Wonder Woman.  It ruins the character, and the further she gets from her origins the better AFAIC.</blockquote>

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