NPC creation trends?

[ProfessorCirno]

Moral grey areas. The vast, vast, vast majority of NPCs - both on the side of the characters and against them - lie in grey areas rather then absurd black and white/good and evil. It makes for a much richer narrative and much better drama and experience, where choices are made based on the player and the character rather then stock cliches. Note that this isn't just for humanoids - in my current setting, dragons are most assuredly not color coded for alignment, and one of the major antagonistic movers and shakers are a family of gold dragons. Outsiders aren't good or evil either, but typically alien instead. Devils and angels don't differ on "goodness" but in how they view non-immortals; angels feel they should help non-immortals on their own, devils feel the non-immortals need to earn it (thus why devils make pacts), but neither one is unified in wanting to do good or evil. Perhaps ironically, events in the past caused the angels to withdraw - meaning devils now act for and with non-immortals more then the angels.

Is it any surprise I hate alignment?

It also has the added bonus of making actually evil characters seem truly disgusting. If every other orc is a monster, then the general "evilness" is meaningless. If most people in the world are just folks trying to get by, or are doing what they feel is best, or just don't put much thought into it, then having a sociopathic enemy makes them that much more horrifying.

 

[Cerebral Paladin]

I roughly agree with Wik's assessment as to why, although with I think different normative values. From my perspective, avoiding the stock characters of the helpless female character and the good scientist who is always male and so forth is a good thing. Many of my players have complained about seeing those patterns in other people's games, and I've found it annoying in games that I've played in. It's desirable to avoid the sexism inherent in many GMs' presentations of their worlds. But it's only half-way there: the real goal is to avoid simply reversing things into a new set of stereotypes. And that requires either being really careful and skilled at not falling into patterns, or using random mechanisms.

So as I see it, the hierarchy from worst to best practices is:
1. Consistent gender normativity in a game: all scientists and guards are male, all people in distress are female, etc.
2. Exceptional individuals exist, but otherwise gender normativity: some carefully detailed scientist or knight characters are female, but a random cop on the spur of the moment is always male. (This is what I think of as the Battlestar Galactica approach: sure, there are the named character female characters in nontraditional roles, but boy, the extras sure do seem to conform to traditional roles--so you get the female Starbuck leading a platoon of all male Marines.)
3. Reversed and idiosyncratic stereotyping--all the female scientists are good guys, the female knights are always good and competent, etc. In some ways, this is the pattern with the particularly high number of black lieutenants in police shows--it's the token minority in a position of authority.
4. Actually getting past the stereotyping in either direction, i.e. through random means.

All that said, I don't really know why in your case it shows up in scientist characters in particular.

 

[Firebeetle]

I noticed that I had a great propensity to make "crazy old coot" NPCs, which is pretty much what I am personally. To combat this, I made a list of impressions I can do (even if they are bad impressions) and made that into a table. As long as you avoid catchphrases and don't tell the players you're doing an impression, they work quite well. Most effective is if you ad an ironic element, which is funny for you at least.

This is my current table. You'd have to make your own of course.
roll d20
1. Johnny Carson "That's some weird, wild magic"
2. David Letterman
3. George Bush
4. Kermit the Frog
5. Elmo (yes, Elmo, great kid character esp. if you play him foulmouthed)
6. Emo Phillips
7. Steven Wright
8. Mick Jagger
9. Patrick Stewart
10. William Shatner
11. Mirina Sirtis (y'know, Counselor Troi "I feel something.")
12. David Caruso
13. Forrest Gump
14. Katherine Hepburn
15. Madonna
16. Miss Piggy
17. Mae West
18. Church Lady
19. Miley Cyrus
20. My wife

Not all NPCs, just the ones I like to "ham it up" with.

 

[Nifft]

7. Steven Wright

I had a warpony...

Cheers, -- N

 

[lamia]

Hmm..well, reflecting on my NPCs the main thing I noticed is that all of the main villains are female. There are some minor villains of the male variety, but the G in BBEG stands for girl every single time!

Maybe that is just my subconscious mind rebelling against the fact that in every campaign I've ever been a player in the reverse was true.

Another fun fact: I have way more gay men in my campaign then any game I've played in.

And there haven't been any barmaids, only barmen. They are typically scantily clad and flirtatious That was more on purpose, as over half of my players and myself are ladies.

I should probably seek a balance though. I honestly hadn't noticed the lack of male main villains!

 

[Wik]

I've thought about this a bit more, and you raise a good point on your XP post (thanks, by the way. ) Namely, why only do it with science-types? And to be honest, I'm not entirely sure.

It could be, simply, that you value science more than you might other roles. You think, in your hierarchy of values, that a scientist is more important than a merchant, a soldier, or a doctor. Because of this, you subconsciously ensure that your scientist heroes are all female, lest you come off as offensive. This might especially be the case if you have multiple female players.

Gender roles in entertainment is a huge topic, though. For example, in almost every commercial involving multiple genders, the female is placed in the dominant or lead role - probably because most consumers, even of male-oriented products, are female. This is why, for example, the ads for men's colognes feature beefcake dudes. Even when the woman is in the error, she inevitably comes out on top or as somehow wiser - due both to who the market is, and out of fear of offending.

There's this great example for Corona Beer. There are two commercials involving a guy and a girl on the beach. In the first one, a hot girl walks by, and the guy sort of watches. Without turning her head, the guy's girlfriend sprays him with a lime. Then we see the second commercial, where a hot guy walks by, and the woman watches. The guy shakes her beer out of spite... and without looking, the girl offers him that beer and grabs her own. The idea being, of course, that the girl is always in the right.

The strange thing is, this is how most of us think. I have a female friend who cheated on her boyfriend (long story, it's not entirely her fault, let's just leave it at that), and he forgave her. And nobody was too surprised by this. However, he has just cheated on her, and EVERYONE wants his blood. Never mind that it's a similar situation as hers; the standards have just flipped. This sort of gender divide in our thought processes is pretty complex.

Long story short - I wouldn't be too worried about the behaviour. It's just culture and society ingraining yourself onto you, and you'd be amazed at how much this sort of thing is going on in the world around us.

 

[ProfessorCirno]

One thing I've had people bring up that I do:

So, in my setting, the sort of "main area" the PCs are at is based not on the boring as hell semi-medieval Europe, but rather on the Venetian Republic. That means it's a center of trade and commerce and that there's a huge influx of other races.

...And other ethnicities.

My players have pointed out something I very purposefully set out to do - my games are not just White People Only (and I'm sorry, but dwarves and elves and orcs do not count as people of color unless you actively try to portray a culture with them that isn't "LIVES IN FORESTS LIKES TREES" or "LIVES UNDERGROUND MM BEER"). Both antagonistic and assistant NPCs come from a wide array of locales, be they elves or dwarves...or the darker skinned Maskians from the south, to give one example.

It's something irksome I've found in other games, and I don't just mean tabletop games - video games tend to be rather terrible at this too. Even in the major metropolitan towns, the only humans are the white ones.