mhacdebhandia
Explorer
I'm male, and I've played female characters.
It seems, however, that I've coincidentally played mostly male characters in long-running games, because (apart from one-shots) I happen to have chosen to play female characters in games that just never lasted very long.
Many of the people I play with regularly have played cross-gender characters. Some of the people in my university gaming group could be pigeonholed as the stereotypical "social reject playing hot chicks to get off" if you were as uncharitably inclined as I am; others tend to play female characters often for some less-obvious psychological reason; others do it simply for the different experience.
For example, one of my close friends and regular gaming buddies played a female samurai in a Legend of the Five Rings freeform last year because the character he wanted to play was a particular kind of Japanese fantasy archetype which cried out in his mind for being female - he played the devoted bodyguard of an Imperial Magistrate with the requisite tragic romantic interest in her master.
The same player subsequently chose to play a female character in another freeform (this time, a Fading Suns one-shot) because he wanted to experiment with roleplaying a love story from a woman's perspective. Taken with the last paragraph, that sounds odd, but in the Legend of the Five Rings game it was much more of a "motivation", especially after her master disappeared, while in the Fading Suns game her romantic interest in another PC was much more of an active goal.
In the long-running Third Edition Planescape game I played in, a male player had a female PC - the only one to cross that gender line out of eight players, two of whom were women. This same player now runs a d20 Wheel of Time campaign in which the male DM of the Planescape game plays a female PC, natch.
Generally speaking, romance is not a big part of our games (though I'm aware that the first player I mentioned above tends to privately add in a great many themes in his own headspace to enhance the experience for himself, and I would not be surprised if romance was among them). Characters' gender doesn't usually matter, which I suspect reflects both the straightforward tone of quite a few games I've played and the egalitarian assumptions of D&D - if the rules reflected some kind of real difference between the sexes (which I think would be stupid, but go with me here), then people might choose to play cross-gender for mechanical reasons, in the same way that they choose to play nonhuman races for mechanical reasons.
Yet another friend of mine played a female PC in one of the most straightforward adventure-oriented D&D campaigns I've ever been part of, and the character's gender didn't come up at all.
On another related subject, the only time I've ever played a queer character was not because I had a yearning to try it out, but just as a not-so-subtle way of telling another player that I wasn't going to pay any attention to her incessant yammering about how pretty her character was, and how she was so good-looking male characters pretty much had to do what she told them to do, et cetera.
Admittedly, she had some basis for the latter claim, since this was Spycraft and being a knockout can be mechanically reflected in that system, but I had no patience for it.
It seems, however, that I've coincidentally played mostly male characters in long-running games, because (apart from one-shots) I happen to have chosen to play female characters in games that just never lasted very long.
Many of the people I play with regularly have played cross-gender characters. Some of the people in my university gaming group could be pigeonholed as the stereotypical "social reject playing hot chicks to get off" if you were as uncharitably inclined as I am; others tend to play female characters often for some less-obvious psychological reason; others do it simply for the different experience.
For example, one of my close friends and regular gaming buddies played a female samurai in a Legend of the Five Rings freeform last year because the character he wanted to play was a particular kind of Japanese fantasy archetype which cried out in his mind for being female - he played the devoted bodyguard of an Imperial Magistrate with the requisite tragic romantic interest in her master.
The same player subsequently chose to play a female character in another freeform (this time, a Fading Suns one-shot) because he wanted to experiment with roleplaying a love story from a woman's perspective. Taken with the last paragraph, that sounds odd, but in the Legend of the Five Rings game it was much more of a "motivation", especially after her master disappeared, while in the Fading Suns game her romantic interest in another PC was much more of an active goal.
In the long-running Third Edition Planescape game I played in, a male player had a female PC - the only one to cross that gender line out of eight players, two of whom were women. This same player now runs a d20 Wheel of Time campaign in which the male DM of the Planescape game plays a female PC, natch.
Generally speaking, romance is not a big part of our games (though I'm aware that the first player I mentioned above tends to privately add in a great many themes in his own headspace to enhance the experience for himself, and I would not be surprised if romance was among them). Characters' gender doesn't usually matter, which I suspect reflects both the straightforward tone of quite a few games I've played and the egalitarian assumptions of D&D - if the rules reflected some kind of real difference between the sexes (which I think would be stupid, but go with me here), then people might choose to play cross-gender for mechanical reasons, in the same way that they choose to play nonhuman races for mechanical reasons.
Yet another friend of mine played a female PC in one of the most straightforward adventure-oriented D&D campaigns I've ever been part of, and the character's gender didn't come up at all.
On another related subject, the only time I've ever played a queer character was not because I had a yearning to try it out, but just as a not-so-subtle way of telling another player that I wasn't going to pay any attention to her incessant yammering about how pretty her character was, and how she was so good-looking male characters pretty much had to do what she told them to do, et cetera.
Admittedly, she had some basis for the latter claim, since this was Spycraft and being a knockout can be mechanically reflected in that system, but I had no patience for it.
...i use the term lightly...as we seem to manage to play the characters personality fairly well ![:]](http://www.enworld.org/forum/images/smilies/devious.png "Devious :]")
(it could just be the way i'm playing her 
).
