males playing females and the other way around, opinions?

[Thornir Alekeg]

Males should only play male PCs, females play female PCs. If not, the slippery slope will lead to short people playing half-orcs, tall people playing dwarves and halflings, scrawny nerd geeks playing burly warriors, and atheists playing clerics.

We cannot allow that kind of behavior to mess up our fantasy role-playing games.

 

[jonesy]

Cool! I clearly need to learn Finnish

Ok.

Minä (me), sinä (you), hän (him/her), me (us), te (plural you), he (them).

Those are the normal written language ones. You can use them for people or animals. Though if you do use them for animals the wrong context can make you look a bit silly, especially with the plurals (but that's not really different from other languages).

Then there are these, mostly used in spoken language, which you can use for people, animals, or objects, entirely equally:

Tämä/tää (this), tuo/toi (that), se (it), nämä/nää (these), nuo/noi (those), ne (them).

So if there was a horse, a man, a woman, and a tree in front of you, and I said "kato tota" ("look at that", 'tota' deriving from 'tuo/toi'), you'd have absolutely no idea which one I was referring to. Well actually, if I said "kato tota" in any situation without actually pointing at something the same would apply. You can't use it properly without context. Which isn't to say that people don't.


Edit: oh, and just to make it clear, tämä/tää is a regional dialect difference, not a sexual one.

Also, since I apparently suck at parsing, if you refer to yourself/yourselves you have to use the written language one (or a regional version).

 

[Hussar]

Hang on a tick here.

People are dogpiling in here saying that if anyone has even the slightest problem with someone playing across gender, they must have huge problems with players playing anything that they aren't.

This completely ignores anyones possible experiences. Several posters have chimed in to say that they don't like gender bending characters simply because every time they've seen it done, it's been done very, very poorly - either creepy or incredibly immaturely.

Is this really hard to believe?

I mean, I loathe elves in D&D for EXACTLY the same reason. I'm so sick of players playing humans that see in the dark. Nothing about the character actually denotes the fact that he isn't human, lives for centuries, comes from a culture that predates human cultures by millenia (true in most D&D settings) or in the slightest way draws any attention to the fact that this character isn't human.

In the same way, I've seen more than my share of female characters that in no way actually played up the fact that they were female. To the point of other players being surprised on the rare occassion when it came up in play.

It's not that gender-bending character's are a bad thing. They're not. It's an interesting challenge. But, that's the point right there. It's a challenge. If the player can't be bothered bringing a major element of the character to the table, why bother in the first place?

Either do it right, put in a bit of effort, or forget about it. Doing a half-assed at best job just annoys the crap out of me as a DM.

So, snide shots about being uncomfortable with my own sexuality aside, it's got nothing to do with the player playing something different, and everything to do with the player putting something on a character sheet and then never, ever referencing it again.

 

[jonesy]

Also, since I apparently suck at parsing, if you refer to yourself/yourselves you have to use the written language one (or a regional version).

Unless you point at yourself and say "tämä tykkää jäätelöstä".

"This one likes ice cream."

 

[Bagpuss]

I mean, I loathe elves in D&D for EXACTLY the same reason. I'm so sick of players playing humans that see in the dark.

Right but do you ban people from playing Elves? Dwarves? etc?

People ban cross gender characters perhaps because they have seen it done badly in the past, but I've seen bad roleplaying of all sorts in the past, why single out cross gender characters for the ban?

 

[ExploderWizard]

The DM's response was, "What the hell do you want me to describe for you here? FINE - you moan, you groan, you ___!" That of course put an immediate end to such stupidity and we never really had much problem with that afterwards.

I find this to be offensive. Why is the DM describing the reactions of a PC to "stimuli" in the game world? Isn't that the player's job? Be as lewd as you like but please don't usurp player agency.

 

[Theo R Cwithin]

Either do it right, put in a bit of effort, or forget about it. Doing a half-assed at best job just annoys the crap out of me as a DM.

So, snide shots about being uncomfortable with my own sexuality aside, it's got nothing to do with the player playing something different, and everything to do with the player putting something on a character sheet and then never, ever referencing it again.

What is to you a "half-assed" rp job might be the best another player can do. It seems odd that a player would be barred from a PC concept just because of his inability to "correctly" roleplay something on the character sheet. The PC may well fully exist in the player's mind, whether or not he can successfully and overtly rp all the PC's characteristics.

Now, as many have said, when character selection (gender, race, status, alignment, or anything really) crosses lines that make people at the table uncomfortable in real life, well that surely needs to be stopped. (Yes, I've suffered through that. Ick.). And if a DM wants to restrict such selection in order to avoid those issues, that's totally cool; I understand that rationale.

But violating the DM's idea of good RP is not, imho, not a good reason to reject a character concept.

 

[Hussar]

Right but do you ban people from playing Elves? Dwarves? etc?

People ban cross gender characters perhaps because they have seen it done badly in the past, but I've seen bad roleplaying of all sorts in the past, why single out cross gender characters for the ban?

Well, to be fair, I did design one of my homebrews to remove elves entirely from the game for pretty much precisely this reason. I dressed it up in all sorts of in game reasoning, but, the primary reason was I just hated elves that much.

But violating the DM's idea of good RP is not, imho, not a good reason to reject a character concept.

How many chances do you give someone though? I'm not saying it has to be Shakespeare here, but, there should be at least enough of a personality in the character to delineate the character's gender, species and general culture.

Heck, I don't really care if it's done badly. I care that it's there AT ALL. There's a million ways to play a character, and probably most of them are not exactly going to win an Oscar. I'm groovy with that. All I want is the player to put in enough of an effort that no one at the table is ever surprised by basic facts about the character that should be pretty obvious from casual observation.

I really don't think that's too much to ask in a role playing game. If your character is physically strong, I expect that to affect your portrayal of the character, just as if the character is physically weak. If the character is female, there are a million and one ways to bring that to the table, some great, some, not so much.

I'm just asking for one.

 

[jonesy]

A lot of the comments in this thread are along the lines of "because I've experienced players doing a bad job of roleplaying a different gender I no longer accept it".

Sheesh. You get better at roleplaying by roleplaying. Roleplaying a different gender might come with a huge difficulty modifier, but it gets better once you get better.

If someone wants to try it, and then sucks at it, you don't then outright deny it.

 

[Abraxas]

A lot of the comments in this thread are along the lines of "because I've experienced players doing a bad job of roleplaying a different gender I no longer accept it".

Sheesh. You get better at roleplaying by roleplaying. Roleplaying a different gender might come with a huge difficulty modifier, but it gets better once you get better.

If someone wants to try it, and then sucks at it, you don't then outright deny it.

The objections to cross gender characters really aren't different from the the objections to banning any other type of character - but few people jump all over someone for banning dwarves, dragonborn, kender, evil characters, monks, etc, etc...not that you are jumping all over someone

As for not allowing it because of a prior event - how many times does a bad/creepy situation have to occur before it's just easier to not allow it? For some people once is enough.

The following is in response to various statements throughout the thread.

I would be, and am, more ticked that someone would assume I'm sexist or homophobic because I find it easier to not have to deal with it. I also find it just a little jarring to have to switch gears when remembering the guy across the table is running a female PC when running my NPCs. I am uncertain why that is harder to remember but I suspect it has to do with the minimal impact it has except when interacting with the NPCs - Unlike race or class which have mechanical aspects that affect the game pretty much continuously.

IME, I have yet to see a character concept that requires the character to be male or female. IMO, I honestly don't see how a player could need their charatcer to only be male or female that doesn't include elements that I don't care to have in a game I play for entertainment.

YMMV, probably does, and that's fine and dandy