roleplaying across the gender line

[mythago]

I've defended my standpoint on these boards before and won. I've had a lot of practice and I've put more thought into this topic than anybody.

Your Jedi mind-tricks will not work on me, padawan.

But seriously, could you show a bit more of that thoughtfulness, and less trolling then, please? Because when you start shrieking about Barbie dolls and tree-hugging, you don't sound like a thoughful person who has considered the issue at length; you sound irrational at best and like a troll at worst.

Like this:

They're determined to make us run our games their way, aren't they Fus?

So are you not reading what I've posted at all, or are you dishonestly pretending you aren't? Just curious.

I've said repeatedly that I don't care how you run your D&D games. (It would be a boring world if we all had the same game, eh?) Run Gor, or a simulation of Bronze-age Sparta, or whatever floats your boat.

But at least have the guts to say yes, my game world is this way because I like it this way. Not, but history made me do it. Not, but if I don't men and women will turn into androgynous Kewpie dolls. Not, if the players run into more female NPCs the sky will fall.

Umm, how so?

Elves are no more real or historically accurate than benevolent matriarchies or priests of Vecna. So if the argument, as you made it, is that no such thing ever existed, your argument applies to more than just female heads of the Guild of Merchants.

So there's a wealth of research material for me on how one culture might react to the presence of another they consider unhuman - such as demihumans. J.R.R. Tolkien managed it.

Tsk, now you're sliding from "historical examples" to "fantasy literature." Plenty of fantasy writers have managed the task of portraying societies where females have a significant public presence, and even (gasp!) positions of power or influence.

History is rife with examples of societies where women were involved in rulership, business dealings, travelling, and so forth. If I can extrapolate from "treatment of other tribes" to "treatment of demihumans," how hard is it really to extrapolate in other areas?

He has stated, correctly, that females would be less dominant in a medieval society.

Then run a simulation of Pendragon, but don't play "cafeteria historian" and keep those elements of true history (women in the private sphere) as Accurate while jettisoning most of the others as Fantasy.

 

[Nifft]

In one game, I'm playing a "slutty" (not-too-picky) male Elven Cleric of Solonor. He sees it as his duty to improve the human stock. He hasn't been particularly successful, but I feel no great desire to roll-play the seduction -- I'm satisfied with a simple Diplomacy roll (hopefully in the hay).

-- Nifft

 

[Piratecat]

You know the real reason why gender modifiers were removed, right? They're simply not fun. Artificial constraints shouldn't hamper heroism, especially in a game about heroic fantasy.

I've defended my standpoint on these boards before and won.

You, my friend, have an extremely curious definition of the word "won"; thirty people telling you that you were wrong and you stubbornly sticking to your guns didn't make you necessarily correct! So bringing it up now as "proof" is somewhat disingenuous. No big deal. I will agree that you've put quite a bit of thought into the subject, and I don't want to head off on a tangent.

However, if a man comes to me with a female character concept, I'm more likely to suspect he's someone with whom I don't want to game.

I'm with you there, but on the opposite side of the spectrum. If I was going to join someone's campaign and found out that they disallow cross-gender characters, it's a good sign that I wouldn't want to game with them.

I've played or run about 340 convention modules over the last decade, all of which had pre-generated characters. I'd guess that roughly two out of every six PCs were female, and at a con you play what you're randomly given. Out of that sampling, I can count the number of people who played cross-gender PCs using offensive stereotypes on the fingers of one hand. It simply isn't an issue, and I see very little difference between a DM running cross-gender NPCs and a player running a cross-gender character.

 

[mythago]

By "won" I think he means "got the last word in."

 

[Piratecat]

By "won" I think he means "got the last word in."

Now, play fair.

This refers back to a painful, vitriolic thread several boards back. We all agreed that we would Never Speak Of This Again (tm), so I don't want to open old wounds.

 

[Thanee]

I think the problem lies simply within the fact, that the guys who are vehemently against cross-gender (male->female) roleplaying had some really bad experiences with it.

As you can hopefully see, there are a lot of people here, that do not share these bad experiences and therefore might get away from your rather narrow-minded (not to be taken as an insult) view eventually, which only focuses on your few experiences from the past!

Don't judge everyone by the few you know!

Bye
Thanee

 

[mythago]

I have had some really bad experiences with it, back in the even Older Days than Piratecat is talking about. (Whippersnappers. ) Nonetheless, things have gotten better, and I don't oppose cross-gender PCs.

I do oppose lame roleplaying and caricatures. The guy who plays a female PC as a chainmail-bikini-clad bimbo, the white player whose dark-skinned barbarian talks like Steppin Fetchit, the guy whose dwarven trader is a penny-pinching greedy miser named Abraham Cohenshammer--I don't know what their issues are and I don't really want to know, but I don't want to be fighting alongside them defending the Keep of the Sun, either.

 

[barsoomcore]

I'm not interested in debating the designers' intent. This isn't like a constitutional argument in which we ask "what did the framers intend?"

You're quite a master at transforming your own arguments when they get destroyed, aren't you? For clarity, what you said when you brought up the whole issue of the D&D "default" world was:

One need only look at the (snip) to see that D&D rules make certain assumptions about the world

Or:

the fantasy genre as understood by the framers of D&D

Note the similar vocabulary used: "framers", indeed. So I guess you DID ask "what did the framers intend?" until it became clear that what the framers intended was in direct opposition to your point.

Rather, the question that I have asked and answered for my campaign is, "What house rule will make this game more enjoyable and easy to run?"

And if giving women Charisma bonuses makes your game more enjoyable and easy to run, then great. Fine. I do not care what house rules you apply to your game.

I don't even care why you do it. Nor do I care what your opinion is on the "mainstream" fantasy world. Have whatever you want.

My only issue was ever with the notion that a given house rule provided much of a justification for another. You're not "forced" by the one to apply the other.

Does the intent of the politically-correct game designers nullify all of the clearly observable truths about the D&D world?

Let's observe clearly that you are distinguishing between "clearly observable truths" and "intent of politically-correct game designers" strictly on the basis of which one you happen to agree with?

I say that the fact that men and women have equal attributes in every way is another "clearly observable truth" about the D&D world. You don't, and that's okay. This is not something we need to agree on.

But why is it so hard for you to admit that the reason you run in a world where women fill smaller roles and have better Charisma bonuses (which seems weird to me, but never mind) is that you LIKE to? I like to run my game in a world where women warriors kick massive butt, dinosaurs chase caravans about, and there's as much swinging on ropes as I can reasonably manage. Because I LIKE to.

I'm not trying to tell you what sort of game you should run, Snoweel's hysteria to the contrary. I'm not saying (and have never said) that you should allow men to play women or not give women Charisma bonuses. I'm just saying that if you feel the need to justify your barring of men from cross-gender play, you ought to come up with more logical reasons.

I think you should, anyway. If you're happy with illogical reasoning, then fine.

Observing that a woman with a Charisma of 14 is more persuasive on balance than a man with a Charisma of 14 is not a house rule. It is simply an observed fact. This is a de facto enhancement bonus.

Actually, what it sounds like is that a woman with a Charisma of 14 has a higher Charisma than a man with a Charisma of 14. So perhaps the two people you're talking about don't in fact have equal Charisma. By all logic, equal Charisma ought to result in equal effects.

No. I said that this was one of five common motives I attribute to men wanting to play women in my experience. I then said that I found these five motive sufficiently common that I had done away with men playing women in my campaign. So, no, I don't claim to "know" the mind of any potential player.

Please, inform me of how you attribute motives to people without claiming to know their minds. I'm all agog to know.

 

[Bagpuss]

Fusangite, I'm just curious if you give male characters a bonus to anything involving spatial awareness as its been shown that region of the brain devoted it spatial awareness is usually more developed in men.

 

[fusangite]

Barsoomcore, you attempt to say that your statement about what the designers of the game intended is the same type of statement as my statement that the D&D rules describe a certain kind of world.

These are not in fact the same class of statement. Let me give you an example of these two different types of statements when applied to the Star Wars movies.

Your statement is equivalent to: "George Lucas did not intend for the Phantom Menace to be a sexist movie; therefore it cannot be a sexist movie."

My statement is equivalent to: "The Jedis depicted in the movie are almost all men; Jedis' roles tend to involve combat and the exercise of political influence; therefore, in the Star Wars universe, when interacting with Jedis, one tends to interact mostly with men."

Both statements draw inferences from information we have about the movies but they are a different class of statement. Mine is based solely on the actual thing we're talking about whereas you are interested in the intentions behind the process which created it. My contention is that intent is irrelevant.

Secondly, Barsoomcore and the rest of you, if I meant "acutal enhancement bonus" I would have said "actual enhancement bonus"; what I am instead saying is "DE FACTO ENHANCEMENT BONUS."

But why is it so hard for you to admit that the reason you run in a world where women fill smaller roles and have better Charisma bonuses (which seems weird to me, but never mind) is that you LIKE to? I like to run my game in a world where women warriors kick massive butt, dinosaurs chase caravans about, and there's as much swinging on ropes as I can reasonably manage. Because I LIKE to.

I admit it. I like to run games in which there are societies which make sense. I like to run games in which D&D humans are somewhat similar to real humans so that ideas about motivation, character, personality, etc can be drawn from history and literature. If I wanted a game centred on utterly otherworldly creatures who simply have similar bodies to humans and did not share the motivations, social organization or reproductive processes, I'd probably call them something else.