In Nomine SJG deals with celestials (angels & demons) and there's Celestial Song of Form to shapechange. Changing genders is just one of many things you can do with the temporary shapechange. In fact, by canon, it (and Song of Possession) is one of the few ways a celestial can "have a child" with a human as they are purposely given infertile vessels ever since the Nephilim issue. You shapechange into a woman, have sex with a fertile man, collect their "seed" inside you, shapechange back into a man, use the borrowed "seed" to fertilize a fertile woman. Song of Possession is a bit more direct... but you could always Celestial Song of Form the borrowed body into looking like your familiar form to your lover.

There is also rumor of a lesser known Celestial Song of Form variant among Lust, just in case you want to put more genitalia of whatever sort about your and your lover/s vessels (or bodies).

But then you also have extra vessels in suspension waiting to be swapped out, or outright possession going on, so swapping genders is the least of your nifty functions.

I've seen the girdle of MF used in multiple games.  In every instance it has been used as a mean spirited prank meant to hurt a player (exclusively male) who is strongly invested in their character image.  If the player tries to brush off the prank, the DM and other players arrange a scenario where the newly female character is raped by orcs, brigands, and/or other party members.

I strongly feel the item is despicable, and was written exclusively for the kind of use I've seen it put to.  

Moving on...

I've seen B/G guns used in TFOS a bit.  They're common items, and their function is repeatable.  Reversing the gender switch is easy if not trivial.  They are definitely used to unwillingly change someone's gender and cause embarrassment, but the character thus changed can easily haul out their own B/G gun and change back or zap the other character too.  So, unlike the girdle of MF, it isn't a one directional middle finger with no recourse for the victim.

There's also the fact that TFOS is known going in as a comedy game, so a level of hijinks and embarrassment is asumed.  When it happens it's just comedy, as opposed to "teaching a player a lesson" as it typically is in D&D.

After the initial novelty of the item wears off, it becomes a standard tool in the TFOS arsenal, like a dagger in D&D.  It's arguably better than the zap gun.  It becomes something that people will sometimes use willingly on themselves.

The big question which occurs is what hapens to the character's stats and characteristics once gender changed?  Does the supremely masculine Bobby of the football team with a Looks of 6 become the ultra feminine Bonnie also with a looks of 6?  Does the character's size change?  Is the gender swapped character recognizable as their previous self?  I believe the book says everything stays identical, but that quickly goes out the window as straining verisimilitude even in a game as ludicrous as TFOS.

Quote from: Gabriel2;1042736If the player tries to brush off the prank, the DM and other players arrange a scenario where the newly female character is raped by orcs, brigands, and/or other party members.

That's a dick move and I would pack my books and walk out the door if something like that happened. But I would be grateful that the DM outed himself as an asshole sooner than later.

Quote from: Krimson;1042738That's a dick move and I would pack my books and walk out the door if something like that happened. But I would be grateful that the DM outed himself as an asshole sooner than later.

Indeed. Not even remotely cool.

The girdle of F/M did feature once in a game I ran. (Randomly generated treasure) The curse could have caused serious political problems, as the affected PC was also a newly-married domain ruler. But he was able to keep his altered condition secret long enough to obtain a magical fix before anything too serious occurred. Some odd rumors spread about him for a bit. And his companions got a chuckle out of the affair, even as they were sworn to secrecy.

I've done it to a player recently. They haven't bothered trying to fix the "issue" but they haven't made it clear if they are ok with it.

Which it's a minor side quest to fix but I think the player is overwhelmed with everything his character is responsible for let alone addressing something as like gender which has no meaningful effect on his/her story in this campaign.

Quote from: Krimson;1042738That's a dick move and I would pack my books and walk out the door if something like that happened. But I would be grateful that the DM outed himself as an asshole sooner than later.

Dick move doesn't quite capture it. Gabriel2's post is one of those things you find scattered across these boards that make you realize a slice of our hobby is an absolute horror show of virulent sexism. It obviously isn't everyone, and I like to imagine its a small minority. But it seems to always show up in any discussion of gender.

Quote from: Larsdangly;1042763Dick move doesn't quite capture it. Gabriel2's post is one of those things you find scattered across these boards that make you realize a slice of our hobby is an absolute horror show of virulent sexism. It obviously isn't everyone, and I like to imagine its a small minority. But it seems to always show up in any discussion of gender.

A campaign I was playing in back in the 90s had a player like this. The DM kindly allowed me to physically eject said neckbeard from the house, which was not an easy task given his size.

Quote from: jhkim;1042616Yes, obviously, how the players take it is important.

Your comment naturally makes me curious about what the campaign where things like this were the focus of the campaign.  What was that like?  What was the setting, and how did the players take it in practice?

In one campaign it was a tactic used by one of the various empires in combination with an extensive slave trade. The subjects were mostly war prisoners and political malcontents, criminals and the like. If I recall correctly it was four magic users of what Id guess were around level 12, processing something like 16 people a day from what our PCs heard. This was AD&D so Polymorph other was a potentially damn potent spell. It also had a chance to flat out kill the subject. TWICE! So anyone slated for change was told flat out this little fact and pretty much no one who was not adventurer caliber wanted to risk death a second time after surviving the first. On the other hand the crime rate was really low! :rolleyes:

In a Gamma World campaign one of the PCs got ahold of a superscience device that could reshape the subject and used it extensively to explore into some of the more restricted lands undetected.

And in a recent try at a d20 GW campaign we ran into a community that was taking people and changing them into women as part of a repopulation project. That included mental adjustments that proved really hard to undo. But hey its a White Wolf game so we kinda expected things to be even more fucked up than usual. That one ended on a rather bleak note by the way...

And another d20 GW one off where a player decided to make one of the, ahem, sexually transmitted PCs from one of the expansion books... No. I am not joking. How this worked was anyone she slept with was turned into an exact copy of her. Yeah things got really weird really fast. By the end of it my PC was the only person in town not the other PC...

Wherever it had occurred the players have overall taken it in stride and handled it according to their PC and the situation. Either try to get rid of it or make the best of the situation if it was not their choice. (curse/poly) or to find some way to apply this to a problem if it was their choice. And that could take a long time, or be relatively short depending also on the situation.

And as noted in an older thread. This was how I effectively lost one of my higher level MUs without them actually getting killed. Villain polymorphed him into a horse and just sold the mare. Jerk! The rest of the group escaped but had no clue this had happened and thought my character had been killed. Which just about happened as only just barely made the system shock roll. And they later walked right past the mare at the market and never knew. Jerks!

Quote from: Gabriel2;1042736I've seen the girdle of MF used in multiple games.  In every instance it has been used as a mean spirited prank meant to hurt a player (exclusively male) who is strongly invested in their character image.  If the player tries to brush off the prank, the DM and other players arrange a scenario where the newly female character is raped by orcs, brigands, and/or other party members.

I strongly feel the item is despicable, and was written exclusively for the kind of use I've seen it put to.  

I would posit that that's a problem. But it's not a problem with the item;).

Quote from: Gabriel2;1042736I've seen the girdle of MF used in multiple games.  In every instance it has been used as a mean spirited prank meant to hurt a player (exclusively male) who is strongly invested in their character image.  If the player tries to brush off the prank, the DM and other players arrange a scenario where the newly female character is raped by orcs, brigands, and/or other party members.

I strongly feel the item is despicable, and was written exclusively for the kind of use I've seen it put to.

The item isn't despicable, the players are.

Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;1042804The item isn't despicable, the players are.

As usual. anything in the wrong hands can make for a poor gaming experience via DM or players. The average player though is not a jackass.

In the late 70s we thought ourselves very clever for planning to seek out transsexuals who would want to test unknown girdles, on the condition that they had to return them if they just gave giant strength. It came up once that I knew of, and it was in fact giant strength.

Recently, a character in Tomb of Annihilation drank from a fountain that changed him to female (the fountain killed another character after that, which was probably more the reason that nobody wanted to experiment further with it); since he was the brother of a previously deceased female character, the character was maybe more annoyed with being mistaken for the sister, but then druids are used to changing their physical form.

The girdle of femininity/masculinity was first in Greyhawk, along with "a room which causes a sex to change" (among other heavy handed things to mess with characters) in the tricks and traps section; otherwise, the only things close to that level of arbitrary character altering was in the board game Talisman and in Munchkin. I don't recall anyone changing gender in that game, but one of my characters went from lawful to chaotic as a result of that sort of room, and a Magic-User got turned into an Illusionist. Usually players who were interested in the role-playing were unhappy with that sort of thing, and rooms like that disappeared quickly. Probably DMs stopped using that item for the same reason.

I don't want to drift this fine thread off-topic, but I DO want to tell you all that it has inspired me to fashion the Gauntlet of Dick-Having for use in future games.

Gauntlet of Dick-Having
Did you seriously put this thing on before the wizard was done inspecting it? Well, it looks like today is your lucky day, because now your character is the recipient of an enormous, inhumanly veiny man-hammer. What's that? you already had one? Well now you have another, much better one! In case you blow a flat, or for whatever use your depraved mind can concoct. Break down a door? No problem with this beef rod! Cross a formidable Chasm? You'll have no difficulty pole-vaulting on this magnificent member!

Cursed? How can you see this blessing of abundant trouser meat as a curse?! You ingrate! Of course you can remove the gauntlet; why would you want to?! Look at that thing! It's like an ugly baby!

...

You really don't want to know what lonesome wizard made this thing. For use in any game and game-related activity. You're welcome

Quote from: Azraele;1042834Gauntlet of Dick-Having
Did you seriously put this thing on before the wizard was done inspecting it?

I loled.

But I also have to add that everyone I've ever played with who used cursed items applied the rules for cursed scrolls to all cursed items.  These rules state:

"It is incumbent upon the Dungeon Master to do his utmost to convince players that a cursed scroll should be read.  This is to be accomplished through duplicity, coercion and threat, etc"

So Identify always returned that cursed items were a beneficial item of the same type.  Because the DM was supposed to lie about it anyway, so why not lie about what the item type was?