Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Kemrain" data-source="post: 918181" data-attributes="member: 12153">I've been involved in Gender Studies for a few years now, and I'm rather hyperconscious of gender rolls, both in and out of gaming.  The responses I've read here really do run the course, showcasing most of the stereotypes.  It’s interesting to see other people’s reactions to it, and I’m very pleased to discover how mature most people are.  Great show, folks.I always enjoy it when a player in my group crosses the line and plays a female character.  We’re a rather top-heavy group, being 5 guys, but nearly all of us have played female characters at one point or another.  Hell, in the campaign we’re playing in now, for a few months I was the only male in the party.  We’re as mature as a group of 20 year olds can be expected to be, but no one is given a hard time about the gender of their character.I don’t see the character’s gender being as major an influence on their personality as most people.  Your personality is not decided by your body, merely influenced by.  Upbringing and outlook are much bigger factors than it seems they are given credit for.  The people who don’t play characters of the other sex because they don’t think they can pull it off believably need only to be more observant of others behavior to realize the differences are much smaller than you’d think.Though my current character is male, I have a backup character that transcends gender completely.  As a native shapeshifter, with no true form of its own, the character is as androgynous as they come.  However, ‘she’ spends most of 'her' time in a feminine form, because most people seem to react more favorably towards a woman than a man, finding them less threatening and such.  It is interesting to play such an alien mindset, and it helps to better understand human behavior, being able to so easily step back and observe it with the objectivity of a third party.  When we play female characters, most of us do use a softer voice.  However, I feel that this is less because ‘that’s how girls talk’ and more to distinguish between different characters.  (The GM especially.)  We get into our rolls enough that our PC’s don’t speak with our regular voices, and whether they are male or female doesn’t matter much.Now, what I find really interesting, is the fact that, not only in this D&D game, but in our last Star Wars game, everyone played human characters.  We haven’t had a single elf, dwarf… My shifter is a little odd, but ‘she’ looks human most of the time, and we had a cyborg in the SW game, but it was human.  My group freely crosses the Gender Line, but we have yet to build up the courage to step over the Species Line.Go Figure. - Kemrain the Androgynous</blockquote>

Verification