Gender, Settings, Mechanics, and Everything Else

[Balsamic Dragon]

Its not looks, its voice for me more than anything. My players ham it up a bit, deepening or raising their voices to more closely fit their character's size and persona. But at the end of the day most males CAN'T sound like a female and most females CAN'T sound like a male. I can substitute appearance fairly easily, I'm having to imagine the fight or the town or w/e anyway, but when they talk in character I can't imagine their voices as anything different. If that some how makes me "bad at roleplay" as many of you have seemingly suggested I apologize, but I don't believe that I am.

It doesn't make you "bad" at roleplay, but it does make you inexperienced at certain kinds of roleplaying. As a GM, if I'm lacking in one area, I try to improve it. For example, if I were really bad at descriptions, I'd work on consciously adding more descriptions into my game. If I wasn't very good at incorporating three dimensions into my combat, I'd try to run some aerial encounters to get practice.

A player can speak in their normal tone of voice, they don't have to simulate pitch just like they don't have to dress up in costume. If you want to be a better roleplayer, practice using your imagination with all of your senses, not just with your eyes. With practice, you will improve, and so will your game

 

[TheYeti1775]

Simple answer:
If it works for your game and group, do it. Else don't.

The rest is all opinions.

Having said that here is my opinion.
If the setting doesn't already have it (i.e. 3E D&D), don't add it.
If the setting has it (i.e. 1E AD&D), and you like it than keep it, else discard it.

Someone mentioned Game of Thrones. That is a very heavily sexist based in a social sense. But as mentioned you can build a 'Strong Woman' such as Brienne.

Social stigma I will play with depending on the world and the situation.
In FR, if your in Waterdeep and a woman, sure your pretty equal. But you go up to Ten Towns, you run into the regular male and they treat you like 'just a woman'.

Now as far as Cross-Gender rp-ing. I don't have a personal affront against it. Though I have stopped it at a table I ran before. But that was because of one player's constant potrayal of constant slut on a different character.

Typically though I personally normally only play males, though I have from time to time played a female. Those are rare occassions though.

I can understand the voice immerssion as well to an extent.
I had posted once before about a guy bigger than me playing a Female Elf Barbarian and it honestly seemed wierd. He didn't play it wrong or anything, just struck me wierd. The guy read the post and asked why I said that and and I told him it was just a bit 'off' in my eyes. This was also when 3E was still fairly new to me, so the I still had a standard roles in classes & race in mind.

Nowadays it isn't gender differences that bother me at the table as much as age disparities in players (mental & physical).

 

[NewJeffCT]

In my experience, cross-gender play has almost always been a disaster. Like the cross-gender play portrayed in "The Gamers 2", only worse. Much, much worse. That said, I'm not seeing the same issues in my current campaign - it may well be a maturity issue.

I've been gaming since the late 70s, and that has been my experience with cross-gender play as well, up to & including when my old group was all in their 30s age-wise. (my current group is all in their 40s, except for 2 guys that are 50 and everybody is playing male PCs)

I'd be okay with it if it were done well & done maturely, but I've never actually seen it at the table. I personally think mature & well-done cross-gender role playing is a myth.

Back to the original topic - I would never tell somebody that their fighter or barbarian couldn't be as good as another fighter/barbarian because their sex was inherently weaker. (Similarly, on intelligence, wisdom, etc) I have no problem with cultural differences for gender roles, however, be it women are weak & subservient to men, or women are amazons and men are weak and second class.

I typically play that women adventurers are less common than male adventurers, but are not at all unheard of or unusual. (Unless it is a cultural thing...)

 

[S'mon]

Muahaha.. good point. The real world is already very pluriform, and that even within one country, let alone across the world... there is no 'one right way' to even BE a male or female, let alone 'one right way' to play one in a fictional world...

I just thought of one example - when my wife was courting me, she sent me a scanned picture - of her rock hammer. I guess if she was playing a Dwarf Delericho would be happy, but a human?

 

[S'mon]

I also think giving female humans lower Strength scores than male elves to be ... weird.

I normally make Elves human-sized, so male elf commoners have STR ca 9-10.

If you have 5' tall Elves with human-type physiology then yes, the common males should probably be slightly weaker than typical 5'4" human females, and the females will be like Kylie Minogue.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

I just thought of one example - when my wife was courting me, she sent me a scanned picture - of her rock hammer. I guess if she was playing a Dwarf Delericho would be happy, but a human?

Your wife is kinky.

Spelunker?





...wait, that didn't sound right.

 

[S'mon]

This makes it harder to immerse for some people when there's cross-gender characters.

I do understand that other players don't have this issue, but to brush off this reasoning seems unreasonable.

As a reason for banning cross-gender PCs it's certainly unreasonable IMO.

Maybe it's to do with me mostly DMing, but I can't understand why anyone would think it's ok for the male DM to play female PCs, but not for the male player to play a female PC.

Of course there are also the male DMs who won't play female NPCs...

 

[S'mon]

I'd be okay with it if it were done well & done maturely, but I've never actually seen it at the table. I personally think mature & well-done cross-gender role playing is a myth.

I might think that immature and badly-done cross-gender role-playing was a myth (in the UK that is; obviously Americans are crazy ) if I hadn't seen it once, 24 years ago. I was 14 years old, running a Star Wars d6 game, and that fellow 14 year old's* PC 'concept' lasted all of one school lunch time - about 30 minutes.

*Allen Shiels, that was not your finest hour. Or 30 minutes.

 

[S'mon]

Your wife is kinky.

Spelunker?

Undergraduate geologist. The way she tells it, the only female one at the University of Tennesee (which led to some interesting situations on field trips, eg if you wanted a warm shower there was typically just the one shared shower room...) . Her rock hammer days are far behind her now, sadly.

 

[Crazy Jerome]

As a completely subjective, anecdotal observation: In games I've run, there has been a distinct improvement in the quality of cross-gender play when there are players of both genders present. This was true comparing mixed groups to both all male and all female groups. (I'd like to be a fly on the wall some day to watch a female DM with an all female group. However, I think the all female group I had thought of me as separate as the DM. So still an interesting sample.)

OTOH, there has been a distinct improvement in the overall quality of the roleplay when there are players of both genders. So how much of the above is included in the general roleplay improvement, I can't say.