Quote from: everloss;692672When I started playing RPGs as a teenager, I gamed with a group of DnD dudes and chicks and several of the guys played female characters. As such, they played them as over-sexed bimbos. It's actually one of the reasons I never took to DnD.

Since then, I banned gender crossing in my own games. I've never seen any dude play a female character well or even tastefully. Now that I and my players are in our early thirties, I don't even have to ban it; maturity has caught up to us, and it's a moot issue.

Sure you might see a rare player that roleplays that way, but its far from the norm.

I have seen many players play characters of various genders play in a mature fashion.

Is a dm immature when they roleplay npc's of various gender?

Quote from: Bill;692876Sure you might see a rare player that roleplays that way, but its far from the norm.

Except that's been my experience too.  I've had problems with women doing the same when they played male characters.  Given that pretty much any character can be played in either gender, I don't see the point of someone playing cross-gendered except in specific circumstances (like women who want to play a space marine, or a guy who wants to play a Vodacce fate witch).  Given that it potentially offers problems and offers no benefits, I don't see what is to be gained by allowing it, and so I generally don't.

and I don't really understand the drive from those who do allow it in pushing those who do not to change their stance.  You run your way, I'll run mine.  If you don't like the way I run my games, then just don't play.  Simple, right?  Live and let live.

Quote from: everloss;692672Since then, I banned gender crossing in my own games.

So your NPCs are all male?

What is the in-game explanation for this exclusively male world?

Quote from: everlossI've never seen any dude play a female character well or even tastefully.

So you can only play things you can play well? Please tell me how I can portray a cleric of a definitely imaginary god convincingly? How might I play the warrior of a martial art which I know nothing about, and which no-one knows anything about given that people have not been in swordfights for a couple of centuries? Given that magic does not exist, how may I play a wizard "properly"? How about half-orcs?

What level of portrayal is required, do I have to be a Sir Lawrence Olivier, or will a Nicholas Cage level of acting do? Can I just be all Brian Blessed and shout a lot? Is this a fantasy adventure game, or some form of high dramatic art?

Are we only allowed to play ourselves as characters?

Quote from: Kyle Aaron;692883So your NPCs are all male?

What is the in-game explanation for this exclusively male world?


So you can only play things you can play well? Please tell me how I can portray a cleric of a definitely imaginary god convincingly? How might I play the warrior of a martial art which I know nothing about, and which no-one knows anything about given that people have not been in swordfights for a couple of centuries? Given that magic does not exist, how may I play a wizard "properly"? How about half-orcs?

What level of portrayal is required, do I have to be a Sir Lawrence Olivier, or will a Nicholas Cage level of acting do? Can I just be all Brian Blessed and shout a lot? Is this a fantasy adventure game, or some form of high dramatic art?

Are we only allowed to play ourselves as characters?

Its strange how some believe that we can portray bug-eyed 4 armed aliens without blinking an eye, but the game falls apart playing a female of your own race. It truly boggles the mind.

Quote from: Exploderwizard;692887Its strange how some believe that we can portray bug-eyed 4 armed aliens without blinking an eye, but the game falls apart playing a female of your own race. It truly boggles the mind.

If I play a known ethnicity in an offensive manner, that might offend real people.  If I played a four-armed bug-monster to the hilt with 1950s alien clichés, I know of very few real four-armed bug-monsters who will be offended.

In fact, I see tons of strawmen in this thread, and all of them are regarding fantasy notions.  I notice, however, very few people claiming that it's totally okay to play greedy, hook-nosed, conspiring jews, or thieving, lying gypsies, or stupid and lecherous black men.  So, obviously, it's absolutely possible to play a particular thing "wrong."

And even if you're not trying to be offensive, people might fail to understand, say, the culture and language/accent of the Frenchman they're playing, or the Russian, or the Chinese fellow, or the Japanese fellow.  This is especially true if you know these cultures.  The flaws stand starkly out and ruin your suspension of disbelief.

Is it possible for a guy to be horribly offensive when playing a woman? Yeah, absolutely.  And I'd rather not see that in my game, and the easiest way to avoid that is a blanket "No." Is it possible for well-meaning guys to play unbelievable female NPCs?  Again, yeah, absolutely, and since most of us KNOW women, it's completely possible that this will destroy suspense of disbelief.

Quote from: Kyle AaronSo your NPCs are all male?

Got me there!  I'm a hypocrite.

Now that we've got that out of the way, let's actually look at this honestly.  First, the GM is an entirely different role than a PC.  For one thing, the GM is generally given more trust than most PCs.  For example, when a GM makes a ruling, in most groups, this is accepted, and it's accepted because they know the GM is looking out for the game.  Where this trust is violated, the game rapidly disintegrates.  Thus, most GMs who consistently run tend to be worthy of that trust, and most GMs who are not worthy of that trust don't consistently run.

Part of that trust will involve how he handles NPCs.  This is why he's "allowed to play" high level characters, like the king or the lich in your D&D game, because you're pretty sure he's not going to just lord it over you (and if he does, you'll walk).  By the same token, we can trust the GM to be respectful and realistic with his female NPCs.  And where they are not, I notice, the GM tends to treat them distantly, or treats all NPCs distantly ("Yes, the waitress who takes your order is a female,"  but there's no deep characterization there, anymore than he might deeply characterize the orc represented by a token during one of your many D&D battles).

The real strawman is that you're suggesting that just because we don't allow cross-gender play is that we don't believe men can POSSIBLY play women, or that women can POSSIBLY play men.  I happen to play excellent women. I know several male players who play excellent women, and I've seen women who play excellent male characters.  I've even been romanced by a female PC played by a male character, while I played a male character.  It was very nice.  But it's another thing to say that all people can do this: Many cannot.  They lack the maturity, insight or empathy to do with well and respectfully, because they're not depicting alien creatures that don't exist, but real people with a real history, who are really there, sitting at your table, or that the GM is really married to, or what have you.  And people have opinions about them.

So I say avoid the whole can of worms and just lay down a blanket "You play your own gender," and if we play in a historical setting or in another, real-world culture, I expect it to be treated respectfully and reasonably accurately.

You don't agree?  Fine.  I know plenty of people who don't agree with my policies, or how I give out experience, or which rulesets I think are best, or how I chose to handle that one rule question that one time.  It's alright to disagree with me.  The world is a rainbow of differing opinions.

What I really don't understand is why you feel the need to argue with us about it.  What do you want from us?  An apology? An acknowledgement that your way is the one true way?  You don't seem to want to understand why we do it, as you're very, very dismissive, and you don't seem to want to discuss the particulars.  Mostly, I just see mocking of the other side.  Do you think that will change our minds?  Or is it merely for your own amusement?  That seems small, but if that's the only thing you have to do with your time, well... feel free to laugh at me for allowing human men to play elven men, but not elven women.

You make some good points Mailanka but just out of curiosity, what would you view as an offensively played female character, and do you ban people from playing Jews, black folk and gypsies too?

Quote from: The Traveller;692908You make some good points Mailanka but just out of curiosity, what would you view as an offensively played female character, and do you ban people from playing Jews, black folk and gypsies too?

Other races and cultures are slightly trickier.  First, you're less likely to know someone of another culture than you are to know someone of another gender.  An American man almost certainly knows plenty of American women, but probably knows few Japanese men.  Thus, you're less likely to create a suspension of disbelief issue by playing a Japanese character poorly than you are by playing a woman poorly.  Secondly, certain concepts are deeply tied to a culture.  You cannot play an American samurai.  If you want to play a historical samurai, he needs to be Japanese.  So just like a game of Space Marines involves all male PCs (even if some of the players are female) then all the samurai PCs will be Japanese, even if most of the players are not.

But if I know the culture and you play it badly, you can bet it's going to impact my SoD.  There's an episode of Samurai Champloo where they're talking to a Dutch guy and I actually know dutch, and when he speaks dutch (at the very end) I'm pretty sure that's a German guy hacking his way through dutch dialog, and it absolutely ruins the scene for me.  If you have a choice between playing an American or a Dutch character, and you know you're going to just ruin the Dutch character, then yes, absolutely, please play the American.

As for your question about Jews, blacks and gypsies, if you're going to play bad racial stereotypes, then yeah, I'm not going to let you play as them.  In fact, if I even see questionable concepts, I'm going to ban it.  Now, I haven't actually run into too many people who play these out in a hateful manner, but you can bet that if I ran into it again and again, I would ban it, because there are a million character concepts that you can play, so not much is lost if I throw a few good concepts out with the many bad, unless they were played by someone who was actually from that ethnicity.

But men playing women and women playing men has an even greater cultural and biological weight than race or culture, which are largely constructs (What is an African-American?  Is he "black?" Or is he "american?" Well, that depends on your context, doesn't it? In a game about inner-city vs suburb classism, he's black.  In a game about American soldiers vs Afghani terrorists, he's American) but gender tends to be always vivid in our minds, because a man realizing that someone is a woman, or a woman realizing that someone is a man, is very very useful evolutionarily speaking.  That means everyone has Opinions (with a capital O!) on the subject.  Some people think gender is really, really engrained and that gender-roles are biologically pre-ordained and that people who don't buy into them are just fooling themselves.  Some people believe that gender is almost entirely a social construct, and any notion that, say, men are more aggressive than women is complete hogwash, and that men and women are pretty much exactly the same.  Who's right?  Who's wrong?  Have a guy play a woman one way, the other guy loses his SoD.

Who's right?  Who cares.  It still causes an argument at my table.  And for what?  Why couldn't that particular concept just have been played as a dude, or why not just have a different concept entirely?  Unless you're in a game that necessitates it, I find there's little to gain by walking out in the weeds of potential misogyny/misandry and the various clashing opinions have on gender and what X is really like when we can just as easily say "Bob, I'm pretty sure you can play your pirate queen as a pirate captain instead."

Some others here have talked about maturity, and one thing that you need to understand about my table is that it's very, very varied.  I often run one-shots for a large RPG association (over 100 people), and I can easily have completely different people sitting at my table from one-shot to one-shot.  In such circumstances, when I don't know the politics or the beliefs of the people involved, I find it best to just avoid controversy, and cross-gender play can create controversy.

But I do have a few more established groups, one of which are people mainly in their 30s, who are unlikely to get into arguments with one another, would never want to play a sexual-fantasy-stripper-ninjas, or Going-out-of-their-way-to-make-people-uncomfortable-Yaoi-bois, have a solid grasp of the differences between boys and girls and can play them in a respectful manner, and are generally pretty believable.  So I'd have no problem with them cross-gender playing.


But they don't.  You know why?  Because there's nothing to be gained by it.  Because there's nothing you can do with a guy that you can't do with a girl, or vice versa.  So I have the rule and nobody ever challenges it, because it's never an issue.  I might be missing out on some things as a result, but the small, meager things I'm missing out on are compensated for by the small, meager things I gain, so I figure it's worth it.

I understand why some people don't have the rule (they just kick out the people who play creepy LSNs, because if they play creepy LSNs, they'll play creepy dudes too, which is TOTALLY TRUE!) and thus see the rule as largely redundant, but I see no harm in keeping mine.  I don't think this is a case of "right or wrong" just "different paths, different traditions."

Quote from: Mailanka;692907In fact, I see tons of strawmen in this thread, and all of them are regarding fantasy notions.  I notice, however, very few people claiming that it's totally okay to play greedy, hook-nosed, conspiring jews, or thieving, lying gypsies, or stupid and lecherous black men.  So, obviously, it's absolutely possible to play a particular thing "wrong."

Whats wrong with those? Portraying an individual will vary from one to the next, thats kind of the definition of individual. Playing an entire group as if it were an individual is where the problem lies.  

Quote from: Mailanka;692907Now that we've got that out of the way, let's actually look at this honestly.  First, the GM is an entirely different role than a PC.  For one thing, the GM is generally given more trust than most PCs.  For example, when a GM makes a ruling, in most groups, this is accepted, and it's accepted because they know the GM is looking out for the game.  Where this trust is violated, the game rapidly disintegrates.  Thus, most GMs who consistently run tend to be worthy of that trust, and most GMs who are not worthy of that trust don't consistently run.

Part of that trust will involve how he handles NPCs.  This is why he's "allowed to play" high level characters, like the king or the lich in your D&D game, because you're pretty sure he's not going to just lord it over you (and if he does, you'll walk).  By the same token, we can trust the GM to be respectful and realistic with his female NPCs.  And where they are not, I notice, the GM tends to treat them distantly, or treats all NPCs distantly ("Yes, the waitress who takes your order is a female,"  but there's no deep characterization there, anymore than he might deeply characterize the orc represented by a token during one of your many D&D battles).

So the DM is automatically assumed to be the most mature, well adjusted person of every group? Talk about assumptions.

Quote from: Mailanka;692907So I say avoid the whole can of worms and just lay down a blanket "You play your own gender," and if we play in a historical setting or in another, real-world culture, I expect it to be treated respectfully and reasonably accurately.

So if I'm hearing this right, average Joe gamer cannot play a female character properly without offending women so it is forbidden, yet a player playing a character in a historical civil war  setting would have to refer to his friend's character with a racial epithet because his friend (and the character) happen to be black, cause accuracy?

One more question. What are you smoking?

Quote from: everloss;692672When I started playing RPGs as a teenager, I gamed with a group of DnD dudes and chicks and several of the guys played female characters. As such, they played them as over-sexed bimbos. It's actually one of the reasons I never took to DnD.

Since then, I banned gender crossing in my own games. I've never seen any dude play a female character well or even tastefully. Now that I and my players are in our early thirties, I don't even have to ban it; maturity has caught up to us, and it's a moot issue.

So, a mature man is one who realizes he's incapable of role playing a woman as anything but an oversexed bimbo?

Quote from: Exploderwizard;692920So the DM is automatically assumed to be the most mature, well adjusted person of every group? Talk about assumptions.

Let's be honest: When you're talking to me about how I run a game, you're talking about how I am as a GM.  Yes, I think I'm mature enough to handle these sorts of issues.

QuoteSo if I'm hearing this right, average Joe gamer cannot play a female character properly without offending women so it is forbidden, yet a player playing a character in a historical civil war  setting would have to refer to his friend's character with a racial epithet because his friend (and the character) happen to be black, cause accuracy?

First: I don't know what Average Joe Gamer can  handle, because he is, by definition, unknown.  But I do know that problematic portrayals of a female character by a male player will cause a problem at the table.  If he's mature, he can handle a male character with equal aplomb, thus I lose nothing by asking him to restrict himself to male characters.

As for the latter: No, I would not allow that sort of talk at the table, unless (perhaps) everyone at the table was okay with it.  In this particular case, I am not okay with it.

(This sort of thing actually came up in my samurai game, because many samurai practiced pedarasty.  I thought about introducing it for accuracy, and it would fit well into a particular relationship, but decided it was almost certainly a bridge too far and discarded it.  News of this decision came out, and the group said they would have been fine by it, but I feel I still made the right decision)

QuoteOne more question. What are you smoking?

Why does it matter so much to you?  Why the insults, the attacks and the strawmen?  You're not in my game.  I'm not telling you that you can't play female characters.  Is it that someone on the internet has an opinion that's different than yours?  Because there are, like, tons.  People who think you vote like an idiot, or that your faith (or lack thereof) is foolish, or just think you listen to terrible music. Do you question their sanity with equal vigor?  And my opinion isn't even that your opinion is wrong.  I just have a different one.  Does that bother you so much that you have to stamp it out?

I don't really understand this.  My opinion hurts you not one whit.  It doesn't even harm you ego, as I'm not insulting or attacking you.  So why waste calories flicking keys to say things like "You're crazy."  I think I already get that my opinion isn't universal. What else are you hoping to accomplish?

Quote from: Mailanka;692915But they don't.  You know why?  Because there's nothing to be gained by it.  Because there's nothing you can do with a guy that you can't do with a girl, or vice versa.

I don't agree with this opinion. I play some female characters and I do it because the character's background, personality, nature and other aspects worked more for a woman or because I wanted to deal with aspects of the setting that a female would have do deal with, etc. Pretty much the same reasons I decide to make a character male or female when I write a story.

Men and women do experience the world differently, have different expectations and outlooks, etc. Neither is superior but I find it interesting to explore those differences in role playing. It also helps maintain a certain degree of separation that keeps the character from becoming too much of a personal avatar, basically Me but in a different setting. I play different ethnic backgrounds, races and cultures for much the same reason.

I'd say you and your fellow players don't think there's anything to be gained but its a subjective matter.

Quote from: Mailanka;692926I don't really understand this.  My opinion hurts you not one whit.  It doesn't even harm you ego, as I'm not insulting or attacking you.  So why waste calories flicking keys to say things like "You're crazy."  I think I already get that my opinion isn't universal. What else are you hoping to accomplish?

Funny thing to me is I can remember when it was people that played characters of a different gender were mocked pretty badly or at least assumed to be acting some sexual fantasies and not "really" role playing.

Its fine to disagree with someone and to try and discuss that disagreement but still...

It does not make sense to claim that, on one hand, genders are immediately noticed and ingrained in our identities and perceptions at a biological level, which makes it much more important than race and therefore that much more important to control at a game table, to then, on the other hand, turn around and say to a player that he can't play his pirate queen and it'll have to be a pirate captain instead because there is no difference at all between men and women and whatever the pirate queen could do, so would the pirate captain.

Does not compute. If these things are so ingrained into our biological builds and processes, then certainly it can matter tremendously to a particular player to designate his or her own character as male or female, depending on what particular character concept and/or mental image s/he has in mind.

It's hypocritical to pretend otherwise. At best.

Well, in my perspective, the pirate queen, for examples, is going to provide a different experience than the pirate captain especially in a historical or pseudo historical setting. She's going to have different challenges, different issues and more than likely have to take a different approach. She's also going to have different advantages to exploit than a man in some circumstances (for example, some real female pirates escaped the noose due to be being or claiming to be pregnant "pleading their bellies"). So I really can't agree that a character being male or female is no different in most settings. It might not be a difference the players consider worth the potential hassle though.

I agree. If the mental image and concept you have of your own character as a player changes depending on its gender, and that the events and character interactions in game play are likely to vary based on this initial concept and mental image you have of your character, the argument that it doesn't matter whether you play the pirate captain instead of the pirate queen is HUGELY hypocritical, and completely falls apart as a result.

Trust goes both ways. If I trust you to run the game competently, trust me to run my character likewise. Otherwise, I'll just play elsewhere, thank you very much.