Gender Issues

[Umbran]

And IRL the military lifestyle is proportionately more attractive to lesbians than to heterosexual women, because the military lifestyle involves a lot of masculine activity like fighting, and lesbian women are more likely to enjoy such typically male actvities.

If you feel a need to engage in stereotyping based on sexual preference, do it elsewhere. Doing so is not acceptable behavior on these boards.

If anyone has a problem with that, take it to e-mail with any of the moderators.

 

[Particle_Man]

Well I am going to try a bisexual in 7th Sea. He had romantic longings for a female character but now is fixating on a male character with Stunning Beauty (+4 dice to social) *and* Dangerous Beauty (+2 dice to seduction).

I mean, COME ON! That is like having a CHR 30 in D&D games where CHR = looks.

I've tried female characters before. One was a hulking half-orc fighter with int 4 and it took a while before people noticed her gender. The others tend to be clerics and mages, but I had a female dwarf fighter/paladin/monk that was fun. Currently I have a female human Crusader, and she is doing well. I don't know if I am borking the gender stuff or not, mind you.

In 4e, I am doing something new for me ... an OLD character!

 

[The Green Adam]

I just hate it when males play female characters and vice versa and I rarely use the term hate for anything in the creative hobbies. I've never seen it done well, though I've seen it done a great many times. Why discard the rare (amoung many groups as I understand it) opportunity to have true-to-life male-female interactions and reactions. It is sadly difficult in many gaming circles to have female players and then they play a guy while one of the males poorly portrays a woman. Bleh!

Unless you are exceptionally good at characterization or you're an improve actor by profession, your character is going to be some variant of you. They may be bolder, more cowardly, more romantic or dastardly but in the end they want what you want and think as you think (both the player and the PC are using the same brain after all).

Just be yourself.

Just for the record, my mainstay group for many years consisted of three female players and 3-4 male players with me (a male) as GM.

AD

 

[Kichwas]

I've played almost only female characters since 1985. I've gamed with people who play only their own sex, only the other, flip a coin, don't write anything down until expressly asked, make it up to suit the individual character, and so on.

Never had anyone express an issue over it other than the very first time I did it, where the DM of the day for an Arduin game first made me roll bust, hips, waist from a table in the Arduin Grimoire (with no matching columns for the male characters I might add) and then used the game session to have his male 'DM-PC' try to rape my character, and on facing resistance suddenly manifest a black vorpal blade with stars in it and cut my character in two with a single slash that went from crotch up...

(So if anyone ever wonders why I have an irrational bias against Arduin, DM-PCs, and Elric... there's your answer).

In online games I play female toons as well, and the only problem I ever get is people constantly asking 'if the player behind the toon is a girl or not?'
- When they find out, they then insist on referring to my character by references to me rather than her... and have to get beat over the head (not literally, but figuratively) to be reminded to stay In-character... or at least refer to the characters in the game by their names and with the pronouns that fit them rather than the players...
- I get that last problem at the table top a lot too...
I usually combat it by never using a player's name or gender pronoun once the session begins, but only character name and character gender pronoun.

On the online front, for over a year now I've been the owner of a Horde-side adult age guild in World of Warcraft. For the first 4 months there were only 2 or 3 real life males in the entire guild. Toons were of all horde races and sexes, but nobody ever bothered anyone over their 'real life' sex other than the female toons...

 

[Lord Xtheth]

It depends on the feel of the character. I chose name and gender usually last, unless I have a spacific play style in mind before hand.
Depending on how my characters turn out is what gender they become.
I have yet to make a character in 4th (being the resident DM of choise) However in other games it usually turns out well.

My latest female character is a M&M super-ninja who's moves are taken straight out of any high fantacy japanese movies/anime you can ever immagine (not porn/hentai however). She is an ultra-conservitive mastermind when it comes to tactics. Her hero identity is her real identity, her "Secret identity" is who she pretends to be when not fighting crimes.

Don't get me wrong. I've played my fair share of "men-playing-women" characters... but mostly for comedy value. (Hooray BoEF)

I've also seen people do REAL bad jobs at playing females.

 

[Lord Mhoram]

I do a fairly even split. I play about 45% Males, 45% Femals 10% other (Generless Robots or Warforged, I have a man sized Amoeba from the Andromeda Galaxy who reproduces through mitosis in a Supers game I play).

I've had female players tell me I play decent female characters, a fact which I will owe to my wife, whom I asked advice on such things years ago.

Some character just feel female or male when I am mentally putting the character together. Some I chose it specifically for story reason ( A female Cleric/Paladin of a female god for instance).

Our group tends to not worry about such things, with every player having played a character of a different gender.

My wife can be a fairly strident person. If someone was doing something really obnoxious she'd come down on them. Never has happened. We also have a PG/PG13 group, so sexuality, while addressed is almost never the focus of play. If anything is roleplayed, the curtain drops after a single kiss. That helps keeps some of the more severe problems of playing cross gender in check.

 

[Kichwas]

If you feel a need to engage in stereotyping based on sexual preference, do it elsewhere. Doing so is not acceptable behavior on these boards.

Stereotypes aside, of all recognized minority groups in Police departments, Lesbians are the most professionally successful, and Gays are the most unsuccessful. Reasons for this are open to speculation, that is just the statistic based on career success in terms of hiring, retention, and upward mobility within the ranks.

Statistics are bias neutral, and any number of reasons could explain the above facts. But facts they are. The info comes from a number of books I read while obtaining a degree in political science and criminal justice. You can look it up yourself by researching minority success in police and criminal justice related careers.

 

[Snoweel]

Stereotypes aside, of all recognized minority groups in Police departments, Lesbians are the most professionally successful, and Gays are the most unsuccessful. Reasons for this are open to speculation, that is just the statistic based on career success in terms of hiring, retention, and upward mobility within the ranks.

The best female soldiers in the Australian army are in almost every case lesbians. They're certainly the least likely to expect special treatment, or complain about foul language, etc.

Most of the straight chicks just seem to be there to find a husband (or a fat lawsuit payout).

Of course, as in the rest of life (and RPGs), there are always exceptions.

 

[Ziana]

It does seem like an inordinate amount of males who play female characters decide somewhere along the line that their female characters are lesbians. Whether this is poor roleplaying or issues with their sexuality or whatever, I can't really say.

As these are fantasy games, I think our characters are often extensions of ourselves and express either what we would like to be in some way, or an ideal person we'd like to know, either as a friend or mate.

Men can RP women tastefully or horribly, and vice versa. When it comes to sexuality however, I think many heterosexual men are uncomfortable picturing themselves as being the recipients or objects of male sexuality. If they need to bring sexuality into the picture at all, they'd prefer it be with another woman, a situation that doesn't carry a sense of personal violation with it. Maybe that's poor RP, but I'm not sure a person should feel obligated to express a gender-preference in their character that makes them personally uncomfortable, for the sake of realism. It also doesn't necessarily indicate any sort of homophobia; it can simply mean they don't find the idea of sex with men appealing, and don't want to explore that in their game-playing.

 

[ProfessorCirno]

Wow, this thread is turning ugly fast. Better get my say in before it goes to crap completely.

One of the more awesome characters I've seen was played by a female player, who decided to re-create Julie d'Aubigny. Good lord, it was glorious. Her other characters included a female dwarf who constantly insulted the magic users in the group for being pansies and lamented the lack of real men, and a raging/brutal barbarian with a loving family back home that he constantly sent money back to.

As for playing different gendered characters, I've got no problem with it in theory, so long as the male playing the female character doesn't walk around in a bikini, trying to sleep with everything.