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Message: <blockquote data-quote="fusangite" data-source="post: 2877032" data-attributes="member: 7240">That's kind of weird. If a DM hands you setting material that mentions there is more than one race in society, do you interpret that as him pushing an agenda for racial equality? If the setting material mentions that there is more than one language and culture within the society, does that mean he's arguing in favour of multiculturalism? I think the original poster was pretty clear on why he was including people who engage in same-sex relations: realism.I'm inclined to agree here. But because our society handles sexual orientation so differently than pre-modern societies have, I think that there is value in mentioning how homosexuality is handled in a general way, when the subject comes up.I'm recalling, for instance, how our GM in a recent campaign, did have to give us an extemporaneous lecture on how our characters' society handled war captives because our characters were acting way too modern in our treatment of defeated populations. I can see this kind of clarification having to be issued regarding gay NPCs, should the players make the wrong guess about the mores of their characters' society.Bravo! Ancient Greece and the Carolingian civilization seem to have taken this approach. And it is another great example of understanding homosexuality without creating sexual orientation as an identity category. Here, the act of penetration signifies rank within a patron-client structure. Rather than being represented in the matrix of gender, here it is represented with the matrix of clientage and rank.Agback also raises an excellent point in that the closer your in-game society is to an agreed-upon historical or sociological reality, the more people's political views on debates about homosexuality in the real world are cast aside in favour of being immersed in a society other than their own.Eloquently put!Great rule. One I live by, myself.I think you have answered the question yourself then. As I said, the best way to deal with the second type of player is to make your society believable based on historical precedent or clear anthropological or sociological reasoning.If you describe the setting, we might be able to offer you some advice on how the society you have constructed would conceptualize and regulate same-sex relations.I'm seeing a bit of tension between this assertion and your opening assertion that you want human NPCs to have the same rate of homosexuality as they do in this society in order to be believable. If your in-game society's assumptions are really so different, why is the inclusion of homosexuality so important for developing a sense of realism?I think the OP is worried that the players might find something surprising that their characters do not.How are they supposed to know it's normal when the setting materials make no mention of it and the GM never brings it up in briefing the players (as you recommend)? It seems to me that you can't have it both ways.But given that no cultures have conceptualized sexual orientation the way ours has, it may be that what is surprising is how homosexuality fits into cultural institutions rather than the mere fact that it does.Because in present-day America, homosexuality is a controversial issue. I think the GM's concerns are about how the players' views as contemporary Americans may interact with their characters' views.Maybe you do. Some of us do it because making game world societies that are different than the one we live in constitutes a big chunk of the fun of playing RPGs. If you don't like slavery in your games because you think it's wrong in the present-day world, I guess your games feature a lot of mutlicultural representative democracies and other anachronisms. While that is one way to play D&D, it's certainly not the only one.</blockquote>

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