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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Oni" data-source="post: 748625" data-attributes="member: 380">Surffice it to say I disagree with you.  I certainly do not advocate disallowing cross-gender roleplaying at the gaming table.  I do not recall from your previous post if you disallow all cross-gender roleplaying or only prevent male players from playing female characters, but I believe there are problems inherent to both approaches.  In the case of the former, if you are running any kind of reasonably realistic world there are going to be inequalities between the genders, socially speaking, in most cases.  By barring your players from playing cross-gender you handicap one gender or the other socially, and it is not fair to force the player to have to deal with these issues if they do not wish to.  If you are running the typical patriarchal psuedo-medieval world then this policy will regularly discriminate against female players, and in a hobby where woman are already fairly rare this is all the more tragic.  If the latter is the case and you disallow cross-gender roleplaying for males only then I think that you become responsible for increasing the social striation between the genders.  I don't deny that fact that there are difference between the genders both physiologically and socially, but I believe it is a poor choice to reinforce these at the gaming table.  Not only that but the extent to which the mental facilities of the genders might differ is arguable, and I do not believe that they are so great that they cannot be overcome with a small amount of thought and care.  I think you overly emphasize the differences between the sexes (on a mental level).  People come in a wonderous variety of personalities, and while gender is a part of this equation there are so many other factors that shape people that we can understand in each other.  It has been my personal experience that just about any personality type you can imagine occurs in both genders to varying degrees, and if you can understand a perosonality type within your own gender the leap to cross-gender does not seem so great.  I am curious, why do you believe you have been able to play female NPC's with some success, but have been unable to duplicate this with a PC?  I understand that there is a difference between the two, and I can imagine a few reasons myself, but I am curious as to your own thoughts on the matter.  The funny thing is I've actually heard this in regards to elvish characters on a couple of occasions, actually I think this comes from the fact that we have fairly strong archetypes for these characters, though it does strike me as being a bit silly in that they don't exist.  The thing is this, even though we do have women to look at as a model for roleplaying female characters, it still tends to devolve into some more stereotypical mode, and we forgot that they are individuals that can greatly depart from how we might see women in general.  So to hold up some example and say women don't act like that seems odd to me.  Sure some women may not act like that, or even most women, but the fact remains people are individuals and it is not unrealistic for a stereotype/archetype to be broken.  I don't really think this is a necessity, just about any personality type can go with just about any class.  Not only that I think some of the attraction of playing a cross-gender character is to try to look at things a bit from the other side of the fence, and what you suggest here somewhat defeats that purpose.  I'm not fond of the way that you've stated yourself here, it really does feel like your saying that by addressing such things you automatically have issues, and you seem to indicate a certain perverseness simply in considering such things.  Personally I think there are a couple of factors that come into play in regards to this specific topic.  First is the maturity level of the game you happen to be involved with, some people don't wish to address such things, and that is perfectly understandable.  On the other hand if the game is of a more mature nature then I believe these things are important.  Sex and romance are powerful forces in the motivation of people and if you want to consider your character thoroughly as a fully developed personality then this something that is going to be a significant factor in that.  I think the advice is sound on a certain level depending on the comfort level of your game, but I disagree with the reasoning behind it.  For the most part I agree with this.  I personally I don't caution so heavily against playing a female character in the the absense of female players, but on the other hand it never hurts to have inspiration or insight.  Though I have encountered women who call out a character and say a woman would never act like that, only to see them turn around and do the exact same thing themselves a shortwhile later.  So as in all things it pays to wary of the quality of the people you associate with.   I find this bit of advice very odd, as it becomes very difficult to play a convincing character of anysort when you just rely on the numbers on your character sheet.  I would think that you'd have a far better chance of portraying a convincing female character by at least trying as opposed to not doing anything at all.  Truly I'd rather see someone at least try and fail than not to bother at all.  You didn't say what I thought you were going to say when I read the heading to this section.  My thoughts are an older player would probably hand female characters better based on life experience, and that is what I thought you were going to address.  However I find myself faced with a point I kind of disagree with.  I don't see anything wrong with people playing older characters, but honestly I would think that playing a character significantly older to yourself would be just as foreign, or at least nearly so, as playing cross-gender.  Fair enough, we're all entitled to our own opinions, and obviously whomever you play with at the very least do not disagree so strongly that it would cause them to step away from your table.  I thank you for your post as it gave me something to frame my own thoughts around.  Anyway I don't expect you to up and change you mind, but I hope that you can see where I'm coming from here.  Happy Gaming!</blockquote>

Verification