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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Elder-Basilisk" data-source="post: 1671807" data-attributes="member: 3146">Hmmm. Well, it appears the game is very true to its Sword and Sorcery source material then. I would suggest that you consider the genre of the games and its conventions in your conversations with S'mon on the issue. I'd suggest acknowledging that those descriptions really DO summarize the way women are often portrayed in sword and sorcery fiction and that any campaign that eliminates that will be less recognizable as sword and sorcery (and that, to the degree players enjoy playing in a Conan or Fritz Lieber novel, that will make the game less fun). Then, I think the thing to bring up would be that slavishly following the conventions of the genre is no more necessary in a game than in a novel. Reportedly, Robert Howard wrote some strong female characters into his Conan novels and there are supposedly a few instances of such buried in the Ffard and the Gray Mouser stories (I don't remember them but apparently some others do). So there is room for his game to deviate from those expectations to some degree, to twist the stereotypes and reimagine the conventions of the genre in some instances and still be recognizably a part of it. From the sounds of things, he has the skill to do that but has chosen to keep his world fairly strictly within the sexual conventions of the genre.There is, of course, a risk to twisting genre conventions. If you do it too much, the story ceases to be recognizable as the genre (for instance, IMO Marion Zimmer Bradley's _Mists of Avalon_ is recognizable as a pseudo-pagan feminist tract not as an Arthurian story--her changes went too far).Playing with the genre is probably a good option for you as well. I would imagine that it's a lot harder to try to make someone who is essentially a character from another genre fit within the sword and sorcery conventions than it is to take a character from within those conventions and give her a few twists that make her a strong, successful, and convincing character who still fits into the world. Taking a character who appears to fit one of the assigned roles and then fleshing her out into three dimensions would probably be easier than trying to create a new role entirely (though, as I said before, I think the "honorary man" angle has a lot of merit).</blockquote>

Verification